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She looked around, her head stopping where her dad leaned his butt against the arm of the couch. “What do you tink, Daddy? CJ says we need a town to pay trucks.”
Kevin focused completely on his daughter as he tapped his finger against his lips. “I think your town needs somewhere to eat.” His gaze moved to the play kitchen. “I know.” He opened the oven doors and took out a miniature blue stock pot. “You can use this to represent the diner in town.”
She turned back to me. “Does tat work, CJ?”
I nodded, stretching out my hand to take it from him. “It sure does. This is exactly what I’m talking about. The room isn’t big enough to put in a real restaurant, so we have to get creative.”
She stared at me, considering, then jumped up. “I know.” She went into the fold of her swinging chair and grabbed an elephant stuffed animal. “My el-phant can be for da zoo.”
“Now you got it,” I said.
She grinned. “What’s next?”
We proceeded to make a pile of her toys and what they could represent in our town. Kevin participated a little, but mostly he sat back worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. I wanted to pull the poor abused flesh into my mouth and suck it, soothing it better, but this wasn’t the time nor the place.
Once we’d added a plastic Paw Patrol figurine to represent the pet store, a tiny carton of plastic eggs for the grocery store, a head with holes on top for Play-Doh fun became our hair salon, several different colored blocks that would be houses in a neighborhood, and Lexi sweet-talked her father into bringing in a chocolate chip cookie on a napkin for our bakery.
“Homemade?” I asked as he handed it to me.
“Yeah. We had a baking adventure this morning.”
“I made it snow,” Lexi yelled. Oh boy, I wondered if she used flour or sugar to make it snow.
Kevin held a finger up to his lips. “Inside voice, Lex-Lex.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she responded without changing her volume…at all.
Kevin and I exchanged a smile. Then he flushed and glanced away. The poor guy. If it had been any other hook-up I’d ever had, I’d probably cut the man a break, and I would’ve left immediately. But there’d been something about Kevin that had grabbed a hold of me and hadn’t let go yet. Something I’d have given anything to explore deeper.
And to find out now that he was a single dad, too? Jesus. It was all I could do not to fan myself watching him with his child. He was patient and kind, and she checked in with him continuously, like she knew that he’d have every answer to every question she might ever have.
I clapped my hands together. “Who’s ready to assemble our town?”
Lexi jumped up and down. “I am. I am. What we do?”
“Yes, show us,” Kevin said, sounding like maybe he was having a little bit of fun, too.
So I did. I asked Lexi where she wanted things, and together, the three of us set up Lexi-town with enough space between items for her to have roads to drive the trucks through. “Tis is awesome, CJ.” She drove the Hess truck all the way through town, parking it behind the gas station where her father had laid a brown piece of construction paper for a parking lot. “I going to park your truck, too.”
As she began to make the vrooming noises, driving down our self-made roads, Kevin said, “Okay, Lex-Lex, CJ and I need to chat.”
“Okay, Daddy, but you stay here?”
Kevin eyed the only couch in the room. There was plenty of space for both of us, but I understood his hesitation. We’d had smokin’ hot sex, and now I was here interviewing to be his daughter’s manny. I didn’t know about him, but it was only her presence that kept me from crowding into his space, craving his touch, and wanting another taste of his delicious mouth. I wanted to celebrate the fortuitousness of running into him again.
“Do you think that hanging chair will hold me, or am I too big?”
“It will!” he half-yelled with relief.
He was so loud it startled Lexi, and she spun her head and glared at him. “Inside voice, Daddy. You said.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled, cheeks flaming brightly again.
Giving him a minute to compose himself, I went to the chair. I gave a test pull on the cord that came out of the top of the material.
“The mount in the ceiling holds up to six hundred pounds.”
“Really?” I asked, tugging a little harder. I hadn’t wanted to make him uncomfortable by sitting next to him on the couch, but now that I knew it was a possibility, I was pretty stoked about swinging in the hanging chair.
