“Yup,” he said, letting the word pop around his lollipop. “And you still haven’t told me why you’re pink.”
“That’s because you never asked,” she muttered absently as she dropped her lunch bag on the desk and the bag of lollipops back in the bottom desk drawer. She picked up her checkbook only to bite back a groan.
“You’re off by sixty-two dollars. You might want to transfer some money into that account before it bounces,” Matthew said conversationally as he leaned forward and pointed at the column that he’d fixed.
“You do realize that you’re only six, right?” she pointed out instead of admitting that there wasn’t any money to transfer. This was it, which was pretty sad because it wasn’t a hell of a lot.
She was going to have to run across the street during her lunch break and see if Mary could cut her a check a few days early. She’d planned on working through her lunch break to get things settled for the renovation, but now it looked like she was going to be spending it standing in line at City Hall and then at the bank. It also meant that she was going to have to stay an hour extra tonight to make up for the loss.
“You gonna tell me why you’re covered with pink streaks?” Matthew asked, studying her curiously.
“I’m part alien,” she said with a sigh, trying not to think about the twenty-five dollar overdraft fee that she was going to have to pay now.
“I see,” Matthew murmured thoughtfully, studying her for a moment longer before he abruptly nodded and turned around on the counter and jumped off.
“Where are you going?” she asked, looking up in time to see the precocious little boy who was secretly one of her favorites, head for the children’s section, which instantly put her on alert.
“To play with the other kids,” Matthew said with another one of those careless shrugs that made her nervous and for good reason. “And to tell them that you’re an alien out to steal their brains.”
“Wait? What?” she asked, the sad state of her finances instantly forgotten as she rushed to go after the little boy before it was too late.
*-*-*-*
“What the hell happened to your hands?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, reaching over the passenger seat of his truck and grabbing his bag.
“Don’t worry about it?” Trevor repeated with a snort of disbelief as he gestured down at his hands. “It looks like you shoved your hands in acid!”
Danny couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison. “Close enough.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Trevor asked, keeping pace with him as he made his way to the old library that he personally believed should have been torn down years ago.
“It means that you might want to find another place to dump your wife’s science experiments,” he said, glad that Zoe wasn’t around for this conversation.
She was a really sweet woman and it would kill her to know that her food had actually harmed someone. He’d rather die than hurt her. She’d been there for him during his recovery, sat with him and held his hand when the painkillers stopped working, read to him, and kept his family from aggravating the shit out of him with their constant worrying.
“Zoe’s lasagna did this?” Trevor asked, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him to a stop so that he could look over Danny’s damaged hands.
For a moment, Danny could only stare at his cousin in horror. “That was lasagna?”
“Yeah,” Trevor said, sighing heavily as he continued to look his hand over. “Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” he said with a worried frown, the same one that everyone in his family got whenever he so much as sneezed.
“Aidan already took care of it,” he said, pulling his arm away. “It will clear up in a few days.”
“Did anyone else get hurt?” Trevor asked, once again keeping pace with him.
“Some of it got on Jodi,” he said, deciding that using his nickname for his little neighbor would only encourage more bullshit, bullshit that he wasn’t in the mood for, not after last night.
“Shit,” Trevor muttered, looking truly upset. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, but if I were you, I would probably give her a month or two of free rent,” he said, wondering what he was going to do about Tinkerbelle.
The only thing he knew for sure was that he wanted her.
He wanted to be with her, to hold her, to bury himself to the hilt inside her and stay there while the rest of the world disappeared, but he wasn’t sure that he could be what she wanted. The only relationships that he’d ever been in were in high school and those had been with teenage girls who thought a romantic night consisted of a movie, pizza and sneaking him into their room later when their parents fell asleep. Although he’d slept with more than his fair share of women over the years, he’d never dated any of them.
At least not seriously.
He’d taken plenty of women out when he had downtime, but he’d never had to put much effort into getting them into his bed. He’d never had to and most importantly, he’d never wanted to put in the effort. If he came across a woman that wasn’t interested in wasting a little time between the sheets, he’d moved on without a second thought. He hadn’t had time for anything more when he was a Marine. Now….
Now he’d really like to see if there was anything behind this overwhelming attraction and obsession he was feeling for his little neighbor. He wished his attraction to her was simple, something that he could work through by taking her to bed, but he instinctively knew that things with Tink would never be that simple. To be honest, he didn’t want simple.
He wanted something more, something better, he wanted Tinkerbelle and he would have had her too if it hadn’t been for that bastard Aidan. He’d been working up his nerve to ask Tink out, fortifying himself on his second helping of that incredible meal when the shameless bastard started to pout and whine. He’d tried to tell Tink to just ignore him, but she apparently she had a soft spot for whiny bastards.
For the rest of the meal he’d sat there, glaring at the smug bastard. Several times he’d dropped hints for the bastard to leave, but Aidan just sat there as content as could be while Danny had tried to look for an opening to ask his little neighbor out. Even that awkward moment when Aidan realized that he’d left his date in the hall hadn’t been enough to get him to leave. He’d simply shrugged, grabbed the bowl of mashed potatoes and finished them off while Danny had sat there, contemplating beating the shit out of his brother with the gravy boat.