“I know.”
“Forever and ever. Always.” She moved her palms to his cheek. “You’re a good boy”—she smiled into his upturned face—“with dirty hands. Wash them when you go inside.”
Tucker looked at her slim hands on the boy’s cheeks and temples, cupping his ears. Her nails were red and her skin looked soft. A thin blue vein lined her wrist and disappeared beneath the cuff of her red wool coat. The chilly air in his lungs burned. “Go inside or you’ll freeze your ears off.”
“My nuts.”
Uh-oh.
“What?”
“I’ll freeze my nuts off.” He glanced behind his shoulder and laughed. “Tucker said it’s so cold out here I’ll freeze my nuts off.”
Her gaze cut to his and one brow rose up her forehead. “Charming.” She ran her fingers through her son’s short hair. “Go eat before your waffles are as cold as your . . . ears.” The kid took off and she folded her arms across her chest. The curlers in her hair should have made her look ridiculous. They didn’t. They made him want to watch her take them out. It was silly, and he dribbled the ball instead of thinking about her hair. “You must be the new neighbor.”
“Tucker Matthews.” He stuck the ball under one arm and offered his free hand. She looked at it for several heartbeats then shook it. Her skin was as warm and soft as it looked; he wondered what her palm would feel like on the side of his face. Then he wondered why he was wondering about her at all.
“Lily Darlington.” Her blue eyes stared into his, and she obviously didn’t recognize him from the night before. She took her hand back and slid it into her pocket. “I’m sure you’re perfectly nice, but I’m very protective and I don’t let just any man around my son.”
That was wise, he supposed. “Are you worried about me doing something to your kid?”
She shook her head. “Not worried. Just letting you know that I protect Pip.”
Then maybe she shouldn’t have named him Pip because that was just a guaranteed ass-kicking. Then again, this was Texas. The rule for names in Texas was different from the rest of the country. A guy named Guppy couldn’t exactly beat the crap out of a Pip. “I’m not going to hurt your kid.” He folded his arms and rocked back on his heels.
“Just so we’re clear, if you even think about hurting one hair on his head, I’ll kill you and not lose a wink of sleep over it.”
For some perverse reason, the threat made him like her. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know that you’re playing basketball with a ten-year-old at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said, her accent thick with warning. “It’s about thirty-two degrees, and you’re talking about your freezing nuts with my son. That’s not exactly normal behavior for an adult man.”
Since she obviously lived alone, he had to wonder if she knew anything about normal behavior for an adult man. “I’m playing basketball and freezing my nuts off so I can get some sleep. I just got off work and your kid’s basketball keeps me awake. I thought if I played a game of H
-
O
-
R
-
S
-
E, he’d cut me a break.” That was close enough to the truth.
She blinked. “Oh.” She tilted her head to one side and a wrinkle pulled her brows as if she were suddenly trying to place him in her memory. “You work the night shift at the meat packing plant? I worked there for a few weeks about five years ago.”
“No.” He dribbled the ball a few times and waited.
“Hmm.” Her brow smoothed and she turned to go. “I’ve got to see to Pip. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Matthews.”
“We met last night.”
She turned back and once again her brows were drawn.
“I pulled you over for inattentive driving.”
Her lips parted. “That was you?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “You’re a shitty driver, Lily.”
“You’re a sheriff?”
“Deputy.”
“That explains the tragic pants.”
He looked down at his dark brown trousers with the beige stipe up the outside legs. “You don’t think they’re hot.”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
He tossed her the ball and she caught it. “Tell Pippen that if he cuts me a break tomorrow morning, I’ll teach him how to slam dunk tomorrow afternoon around four.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“You’re not afraid I’m a pervert?”
“Pippen knows he can’t leave the yard without telling me or his grandma.” She shrugged. “And you already know I’m licensed to carry concealed. I’ve got a Beretta 9mm subcompact.” She stuck the ball under one arm. “Just so you know.”
“Nice.” He managed not to laugh. “But are you bragging or threatening a law officer?”
“Pippen’s daddy isn’t really in the picture. I’m all he’s got and it’s my job to make sure he’s safe and happy.”
“He’s lucky to have you.”
“I’m lucky to have him.”
Tucker watched her go, then turned and walked back to his house. Only one person in his entire life had made sure he was safe. His grandmother Betty. If he thought hard, he could recall the touch of her soft hand on his head and back. But Betty had died three days after Tucker turned five.
He moved into his kitchen and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. His mother had split when he was a baby and he had no memory of her. Just photographs. He didn’t know who his father was and doubted his mother had
ever
known. She’d finally killed herself with a drug cocktail when Tucker was three. As a kid, he’d wondered about her; wondered what his life would have been like if she hadn’t been an addict. As an adult, he just felt disgust—disgust for a woman who cared more about drugs than her son.
He turned off the television on his way to his bedroom and kicked off his shoes. After Betty’s death, he’d been shipped off to aunts who didn’t want or care about him; and by the time he turned ten, he was turned over to the state of Michigan and shuffled through the foster care system.
He took off his pants and tossed them into the hamper he used for dry cleaning. No one had wanted to adopt a ten-year-old with his history and bad attitude. He’d spent most of the years between the ages of ten and sixteen in and out of foster homes and juvenile court, which finally landed him in a halfway house run by a retired Vietnam vet. Elias Peirce had been a no-bullshit hard-ass with strict rules. But he’d been fair. The first time Tucker had given him lip, he gave Tucker an old cane-back chair and a pack of sandpaper. “Make it as smooth as a baby’s backside,” he’d barked. It had taken him a week, but after his daily homework and chores were done, Tucker sanded until the chair felt like silk beneath his hands. Following the chair, he’d made a bookcase and a small table.
Tucker couldn’t say that he and Elias Peirce had been as close as father and son, but he changed Tucker’s life and never treated him like a throwaway kid. Elias made him work out the pent-up anger and aggression just below his skin in a constructive way.
Tucker didn’t like to talk about his past—didn’t really talk about his life. During the course of normal conversation, whenever anyone asked about his life, he just said he didn’t have much family and changed the subject.
He thought of Lily Darlington and the way she touched Pippen. The way she looked into his eyes and touched his cheek and told him she loved him bigger than the stars. Tucker was sure his grandmother had loved him, but he was equally sure she’d never threatened to kick ass on his behalf. He’d had to kick ass on his own behalf. He’d always had to take care of himself.
He was a man now—thirty years old—and he was the man he was because of the life he’d been dealt. He knew a lot of guys who’d come back from Iraq or Afghanistan and had a hard time adjusting to life outside of the military. Not Tucker. At least not as much. He’d learned long ago how to deal with shit thrown at him. How to cope with trauma and how to let it go. Oh, he had some really dark memories, but he didn’t live with them. He’d worked them out and moved on.
He stripped to his gray boxers and climbed into bed. Everything he had, he’d earned. No one had given him anything and he was a content man. He fell asleep within minutes of his head hitting the pillow, and at some point, when he was warm and comfy and deep into REM, Lily Darlington entered his dreams. She wore red silk and her hands touched his face and neck. She looked into his eyes and smiled as she cupped his cheek. “You’re cold, Tucker,” she said. “You need to warm up.” The dream started nice and innocent but quickly turned hot and dirty. Her hands slid across his chest as she lowered her mouth to the side of his neck, and the things she whispered against his throat weren’t in the least innocent.
“I want you,” she whispered as her palm moved over his chest, down the side of his waist, then back up again. “Do you want me?” Her touch was soft and slow, frustrating, sliding back and forth and driving him mad.
“Yes. God, yes.” He ran his fingers through her hair, bunching it in his hands as she kissed his neck and inched her hot palm lower—lower, down his stomach and belly until her fingernails scraped his skin just above the elastic of his underwear.
Her fingers slide beneath the elastic waistband and she wrapped her soft warm hand around his extremely tight erection. “You’re a good boy with dirty hands.”
His heart pounded in his chest as he shoved her against the wall and into her. All caveman aggression and hunger. In his dream she loved every second of it. She met every hard plunge of his hard dick with insatiable greed, shoving her hips into his, begging for more and moaning his name. “Tucker!” she screamed in his head—and his eyes flew open. He sat up in bed, his lungs pulling oxygen into his chest and his pulse pounding in his ears.
A sliver of light sneaked beneath his blackout blinds and streaked across the dark room. The sound of his heavy breathing filled the space around him. He’d just had a wild sex dream about Lily Darlington. Obviously he’d gone without for too long, and he’d lost his mind. He didn’t know her. She was a single mother. He felt like a pervert.
A pervert who needed to get laid before he lost his mind again.
T
rue to his word, that Sunday afternoon at around four
P.M.,
Deputy Tucker Matthews knocked on Lily’s front door. She opened it and stood in stunned silence, like she’d suffered a blow to the head.
“Is Pippen around?” He had a new basketball tucked under one arm and a pair of silver aviators covered his eyes—eyes that were a warm brown and creased at the corners when he was amused, like when she’d threated to shoot him the other morning.
Lily was so shocked stupid that he’d kept his word that all she could utter was “Ahhh, yeah.” Her shock couldn’t have anything to do with him looking so good. She’d seen him yesterday, knew he was good-looking. A scar creased his forehead from the middle of his right brow to the line of his short brown hair. This, along with his rough, masculine edges, kept him from being a pretty boy, but allowed him enough intrigue to give a girl bad thoughts about body searches. So why did she feel so rattled today? He was wearing that same hideous gray Army sweatshirt he’d had on yesterday, with frayed sleeves, a torn neck—and he looked like he’d just dragged himself out of bed. He was all rough and scruffy and definitely needed to shave. “You’re here,” she managed.
“I told you I would be.”
Lily was five feet six inches tall and she noticed he was just a few inches taller—perhaps five ten. What he lacked in height, he made up for in pure, unadulterated hotness. So much hotness that it lit a little fire in her stomach and heated up her pulse. She held the door open for him and shocked herself further by wondering what he’d look like with that horribly ratty sweatshirt ripped off and his wrist cuffed to something. “Come in and I’ll get him.”
He took a step back instead. She couldn’t see his eyes but color crept up his neck to his cheeks as if he’d read her mind. “Tell him I’ll be in the driveway warming up,” he said and turned to go.
No doubt, her inappropriate thoughts were written on her face and scared him. They scared her too. “Pippen,” she called out over her shoulder, “Deputy Matthews is here for you.”
He stopped a few steps down and glanced back at her. “You can call me Tucker.”
No. No, she couldn’t. The guy was probably all of twenty-five, and she was thinking of him shirtless and cuffed to a bedpost. It made her feel a bit pervy. Although, to be fair to herself, she’d never had such a good-looking guy show up on her porch before. Not even when she’d been twenty-five. Not even the rat bastard she’d married, Ronnie. And even though she hated to admit it now, Ronnie had been damn fine.
“I’m coming,” Pippen hollered as he raced past his mother, shoving his arms into his jacket.
Lily shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Well, that had been weird and awkward. Yesterday she’d been fine. She’d seen him, seen that he looked much more like a faux cop from a
Playgirl
magazine than a real one. She’d acknowledged his good looks to herself, thought about body searches,
and
managed to speak like an intelligent woman. At least today she didn’t have rollers in her hair and half her makeup on her face.
Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a white cable knit sweater, jeans, and a brown woven belt around her hips. If she’d known company would appear on her porch, she would have done her hair and put on some lipstick.
She pushed away from the door and moved across the living room to the couch. On the top of the oak coffee table and across the back of the red sofa sat little teal bags with the logo of Lily’s spa embossed in white in each center. Several rolls of teal-and-white cellophane and bags of trail-size beauty products lay on the couch cushions. She moved the rolls aside and sat.
Tucker Matthews wasn’t company. He was the next door neighbor who was playing basketball with Pippen in the afternoon so he could sleep in the morning. He’d given Pip his word and he’d kept it, which was more than she could say for her son’s father, who didn’t pay attention to trivial things like court orders and visitation and keeping his word. He worked on Ronnie-time, which usually depended on the latest slootie pants he’d hooked up with.
Yesterday, when Lily had walked outside and seen a stranger in her driveway playing ball with her son, she’d been a bit freaked out. Today she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Pip wanted a father so desperately. He loved any male attention, and would be crushed when the deputy tired of playing, took his ball and went home for good.
Lily rose from the couch and moved into her shiny white kitchen with yellow cupboards. She’d deal with that when it happened. God knew Pippen needed some testosterone around him, if only for a few hours. He spent most of his time with her and his grandmother. Occasionally, he spent time with her sister Daisy’s husband, Jack, and their son, Nathan, when he was home from college. Daisy and Jack had a six-year-old daughter and another one on the way.
Lily went to the kitchen sink and leaned across as far as she could. She pushed aside a bamboo plant, a pinch pot, and one side of her daisy-print curtains. She could see just a sliver of the driveway with the basketball hoop. The ball hit the backboard and bounced off.
She could clearly hear the steady bounce of the ball and then a shot that was nothing but net. Clearly, the shot was not made by her son, who hadn’t grown into himself yet.
Her cell phone on the counter rang and she glanced down at it. Ronnie. Great. He was probably calling to say he couldn’t take Pippen next weekend.
“You better not be calling just to piss me off,” she answered.
“Ha-ha-ha,” he chuckled in that stupid Ronnie way that she used to think was so cool but now was like nails on a chalkboard. “I need to talk to Pip.”
“Not if you’re going to back out on next weekend, you don’t.”
“I’m not backin’ out. I thought he might want to go see my parents in Odessa, is all.”
Pip hadn’t seen his grandparents in at least a year. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
Ronnie was a deadbeat. No doubt. But Pippen thought the sun rose and sat on that rat bastard’s ass. She could stand on her head and juggle cupcakes to make Pippen happy, and all his daddy had to do was pull up in his latest monster truck and Pip was in heaven.
“I’m sure he’ll like that,” she said as she moved out the garage door and hit a switch on the wall. “You better not back out.”
“I ain’t gonna back out.”
“That’s what you said the last time you backed out.” The door slid up and she ducked beneath it and walked out onto the driveway. Her son and the deputy stood near an imaginary free throw line. “If you do, it’ll be the last time, Ronnie.”
“He’s my son.”
“Yeah. You might try and remember that on a somewhat consistent basis.” The cool air touched her face and neck, and the heels of her boots tap-tapped across the concrete. “Pip. Your daddy’s on the phone.” She handed her son the cell and watched his little face light up.
“Tucker’s winning,” Pippen said, excited as a monkey on a peanut farm as he took the phone from her. “One more basket and I’m toast.”
She looked toward the man standing in the middle of the driveway slowly dribbling the ball. Sunlight reflected off the lenses of his glasses and shined in his rich brown hair. “I got your back,” she told her son and moved to stand in front of the deputy.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure you don’t score while Pip’s on the phone.” She raised her arms over her head for added measure.
“We’re playing H
-
O
-
R
-
S
-
E
.”
She had a vague memory of H
-
O
-
R
-
S
-
E from grammar school. It had something to do with the first player to spell horse winning. She’d never played. As a Texan and a girl, she’d played volleyball. She’d been one hell of a spiker.
“There’s no man-to-man in horse.”
She dropped her arms. “What?”
He said it again, only this time really slow. “There’s . . . no . . . man . . . to . . . man . . . in . . . H
-
O
-
R
-
S
-
E
.”
She still wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “Are you being condescending?”
He bounced the ball and moved a few inches closer. Close enough that she had to tip her head back to look up. Close enough that she could smell sweat and clean Texas air. “No. You told me I talk fast.”
“I did?” She swallowed and felt a sudden urge to take a step back. Back to a safer distance. “When?”
“The other night when I pulled you over.”
She didn’t remember saying that, but it was true. “Where are you from, Deputy?”
“Originally Detroit.”
“Long way from home.”
“For the past eleven years, I’ve lived at Fort Bliss, then El Paso and Houston.”
“Army?”
“Staff Sergeant, Second Battalion, Third Field Artillery.”
He was in the Army and now the police force? “How long were you in the military?”
“Ten years.” He slowly bounced the ball. “If you want to play man-on-man, we can.”
Ten years?
He had to be older than he looked.
“Or man-on-woman.” One dark brow rose up his forehead and his voice got kind of low and husky. “You wanna play a little man-on-woman, Lily?”
She blinked. She wasn’t sure what he meant. Was he joking or was that a real position or play or whatever in basketball? “Do I have to sweat?” She didn’t like to sweat in her good clothes.
“It’s not good if at least one person doesn’t work up a sweat.”
Okay, she was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about basketball. She glanced over at Pippen standing at the edge of the driveway listening to his daddy. She looked back at Tucker, at her reflection in his glasses. If she leaned forward just a bit, she could put her face in the crook of his neck just above the torn collar of his sweatshirt. Where his skin would be cool and smell like a warm man.
“You’re blushing.”
In his glasses, she could see the pink creeping to her cheeks. Could feel it heating her chest. He was young and attractive, and she wasn’t used to men flirting with her. At least men she hadn’t known most of her life. “Are you hitting on me?”
“If you have to ask, then I’m not as smooth as I think I am.”
He
was
hitting on her! “But I’m a lot older than you,” she blurted.
“Eight years isn’t a lot.”
Eight years.
He knew her age. No doubt from her driver’s license. She was so flustered, she could hardly do simple math. He was thirty. That was still young, but not as young as she’d thought. Not so young that thinking about him as a faux cop in
Playgirl
was perverted. Well, not all that perverted. It wasn’t illegal anyway.
“Your cheeks are getting really red.”
“It’s chilly out here.” She turned toward the house but his hand on her arm stopped her. She looked down at his long fingers on the forearm of her white sweater. She ran her gaze up the frayed wrist of his sleeve, up his arm and shoulder to the scruffy growth on his square jaw. He had the kind of mouth that would feel good sliding across her skin.
“What are you thinking, Lily?”
She looked up into this mirrored glasses. “Pure thoughts.”
A deep chuckle spilled from his lips. “That makes one of us.”
For the second time in less than an hour, Deputy Tucker Matthews stunned her into silence.
“Momma!” Pippen called out as he headed toward her. “Daddy and me are going to Odessa next weekend to see Memaw and Papaw.”
She tore her gaze from Tucker’s face. “I know, sugar.” She took her cell phone from her son. “We’ll pack lots of road snacks.”
Pippen turned to the deputy. “Is it my shot?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I gotta go take a shower before work.” A slight smile curved his lips. “I worked up a sweat.”
“Not me,” Pippen told him. “I don’t sweat. I’m too little. Momma doesn’t sweat either.”
He raised his brows above the gold frame of his sunglasses. “That’s a shame. She should do something about that.”
Lily’s own brows knitted and her mouth parted. Was he hitting on her in front of her son? And was she so out of practice she didn’t know?
Tucker laughed and looked down at the young boy in front of him. “But I have tomorrow and Tuesday off. We can finish then.”
“Okay.”
He shifted the ball from one arm to the other. “See ya later, Lily.”
No way could she call him Tucker. He might not be as young as she’d first thought, but he still was young and hot and an outrageous flirt. He was dangerous for a single mother in a small town. A big old hunk of hot flaming danger for a woman who’d finally lived down her wild reputation. “Deputy Matthews.”