Yours, Mine & Ours

building up a good serious brood.

The whole evening had exemplified-painfully-why she had to quit playing attraction games with her next-door neighbor. The divorce was still fresh for her daughter. Molly had to be her one hundred percent primary concern. And just as relevant, Amanda knew perfectly well that her marriage, and divorce, established her stupid judgment about men.

There was no trusting her feelings for Mike. The magic, the pull, the wonder…that was the fairy tale. The wanting to believe there was a hero, a knight, a good man just for her. The wanting to believe in “in love.”

The feeling that she was already in love with the damn man.

This was all exactly why she’d given up sex. Because she couldn’t trust herself. Because she wanted her daughter to grow up seeing a strong, self-reliant mother…not a dependent female who couldn’t get along without a man.

She had to show her daughter that she was strong, not just tell her.

Which meant she needed to just cool it with Mike. At least, for a much longer period of time.

That all settled in her mind, Amanda started turning out lights, closing up, locking the doors. When she climbed the stairs for bed, at the top stair she glanced out the window.

Night had fallen in a whisper of dew and stardust. Mike was upstairs, in his second-story window. He’d turned off his lights, too. He was probably enjoying just a few moments of peace and silence, probably no different than she was…but then he spotted her.

She could have moved. Could have waved. Could have…done pretty much anything.

But somehow heat transmitted across the driveways, through the closed windows, somehow past all the reasons she needed to get a serious brain.

She didn’t just feel a pull toward him. She felt a force field.

He put a hand on his window.

Like a damn fool romantic idiot, she put a hand on her window.

And then, before she could do anything more stupid, she whipped around and headed straight, no talking, no thinking, no deterrents, to her bed. Alone. The way she needed to be.

Chapter Seven

Rain shivered down the windows, starting at daybreak. Clouds bunched and punched, building into a dark gloomy morning even before breakfast. As Mike poured coffee, he studied his son.

Teddy had come home yesterday in a rare silent mood. He’d been contentious, crabby, couldn’t settle in to play anything, wouldn’t talk. Mike hadn’t pushed him. Hell, the kid was as male as he was. Neither of them wanted to talk about feelings…but Mike figured a good night’s sleep might help clear the air.

He’d set up the playing field to make talk easier. Let Teddy turn on cartoons-which Mike hated; he didn’t like kids doing the whole veg-out-in-frontof-the-TV thing. But cartoons and scrambled eggs invariably brought out conversation, particularly when Teddy was allowed to eat in the living room.

His tough guy was curled up on the couch, still wearing his dinosaur pj’s, Slugger glued to his side-a sure sign that Teddy was upset. Still, the kid had the remote. And a deep bowl of the scrambled eggs-this, because Mike had learned early on that the deeper the bowl, the less chance of spilled eggs all over the house.

Mike took the recliner with his plate and a mug of coffee. “So, hey. You never said anything about the zoo yesterday. You did go, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So, was it as fun as you thought it’d be?”

“It was fun for one whole second. Until George started sneezing and sneezing.” Teddy, who rarely had power over the remote, was channel surfing at dizzying speeds. “He was the one who said he wanted to go. That was the thing. He kept saying we’d have fun. Only, he already knew he was ’lergic to animals.”

Mike was already forming a wincer of a picture. “Okay. Then what happened?”

“We had to leave. That’s what happened. Because he couldn’t stop sneezing. But he said he’d make it up to me. We’d go to a nice place for lunch.” Teddy froze on a different cartoon, then hit the trigger again.

“And?”

“And I thought he meant McDonald’s. Chuck E. Cheese. Burger King. Someplace good. Instead it was this place where you had to wait and wait and wait. It had a tablecloth, and I didn’t mean to pull it, but it was itching at my knees. So his drink got acc’dentally spilled. It wasn’t my fault.”

“What else happened?”

“We went back to their place. Mom played cards with me. Go Fish. Crazy Eights. Then I said, ‘You wanna go swimming?’ She said, ‘Maybe another time.’ I said, ‘You wanna do a movie or something?’ She said, ‘Sure.’ Only, she just turned on the TV. Not like going to a movie. And when she got a movie on, then she just left, started doing things. Talking on the phone. Talking to him. Cooking. Junk like that. Dad?”

When Teddy left the trigger at a news channel, Mike knew exactly how upset his tough guy was. “What, sport?”

“Mom doesn’t want to be with me. She doesn’t even like me. I want to be here. With you. All the time. I don’t want to go with her anymore. And you know what else?”

“Tell me.”

“George said I was rude. And he said I wasn’t ’siplined.”

’Siplined? Mike thought. “Disciplined?”

“That’s what I said,” Teddy said crossly. “And I said to mom on the way back, ‘I don’t get it. Why you’re with him when you could be with Dad.’ That’s when he said I was rude.”

Mike winced. “You asked your mom while he was right there in the car, huh?”

“Well, yeah. I didn’t ask before. I wasn’t thinking about it before. I asked her when I was thinking about it.” Teddy put the bowl on the floor, then burrowed deeper into the cushions. Slugger burrowed after him. Cat suddenly leaped on the couch, looking fierce and lionlike. “This is how I like it, Dad. Us guys together. No more girls.”

Mike remembered last night…whenever it was…when his house and Amanda’s house were both closed down for the night, and he’d just stood at the window for a moment, inhaling the quiet…and there she was.

He wasn’t touching her. Wasn’t thinking about her. He’d been thinking about his kid. And her kid. And what divorces did to kids, and why he needed to get back to the Celibacy Principle. But then he’d looked at her and felt that…yearning.

Yearning to be with her.

To talk to her. To touch her. To hold her and be held.

This morning, of course, turned into another wake-up call. Yearning was just yearning. Sex was just sex. It wasn’t the time. Period.

“Did you hear that?” Teddy grumbled.

“Yeah.” Mike bounced up from the recliner, not certain if the sound was an actual knock on the back door-but something had provoked Slugger into going into his nose-to-the-sky warning bay. Of course, some days, a purr of a breeze could do that.

In this case, though, a pint-size rock star stood at the back door-at least Mike thought Molly’s getup was about that. The sunglasses were unnecessary for a stormy morning, but the little shirt was full of glistening stars. Her red hair was all braided and pinned up with sequins or jewels or something. Her nails were painted like rainbows and her shoes had flashing lights.

At four years old, she had a petrifying amount of estrogen.

She might even be as bad as her mother in a few years.

Right then, though, he figured they had a more immediate problem on their plate. Molly was out of breath from running. Her lower lip was trembling, her big eyes spattering tears. “Mr. Mike. I need a punger. Right now. Right right now. For my mom!”

“A punger,” Mike said blankly.