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Because being a single mother was a job, probably the hardest one I’d ever had, and by far the least predictable. I didn’t go in at nine or leave at five, and the expectations of the job were never—not once—the same.
But if there was one thing that was a constant with my daughter, it was her inquisitive nature and the questions it produced.
Constant, curious, intelligent questions about anything and everything.
That was all well and good on a normal day, but when you were in college and trying to cram for an exam that would equal fifty percent of your grade, the questions were a little hard to manage.
As the person trying to work and pass her test simultaneously currently, I knew. I really knew.
Lexi moved over to the small leather chair in front of my desk and plopped her little butt down, her legs swinging back and forth underneath it. She scrunched her nose up as she focused, and her fingertips tip-tapped across the keys.
Silence—thank God. I loved the sound of her voice, had waited tirelessly to hear the words every mother dreams of when Lexi was struggling the most with her speech delay, but concentration and chatter, no matter how adorable, didn’t go hand in hand.
Focused again, I carefully described every detail on the report for Harrison’s torn ligament and moved on to the broken vertebrae DeMarcus Bassy had suffered in practice.
I still marveled at the injuries a sport could produce, the overall very real physical roughness of football, and the absolute grit most players displayed when you told them they couldn’t play. There was never relief in their eyes or fear in their hearts—they lived and breathed football, and being told they couldn’t be out there felt like a death of a part of them.
Five minutes later, the words, “Pen and paper, Mommy?” pulled my attention from my laptop and back to my daughter, but five minutes were better than none. Plus, her sweet face was a happy distraction from all of the gruesome details of the end of a man’s dreams—at least for the season. Bassy’s ass would be riding the bench for a good long time.
“Sure, honey.” I grabbed a small notepad and pen from my desk drawer and set them on the edge of my desk.
Her Mary Jane-covered feet ran across the hardwood floor, and she stopped in front my desk, hand already gripping the pen and scribbling something down on the notepad.
As much as I wanted to savor my time with her, drink in her knowledge and learn all the things she surely had it in her to teach me, I didn’t have the luxury. Instead, my eyes went straight back to my laptop, closed out the reports as I typed the final details, and hurriedly tried to finish a few more emails before the six-year-old standing across from me would cause any more distractions.
Mom life, right?
Sometimes, it was real fucking tough to get anything done.
And on top of the obvious time constraints, we were constantly fighting the guilt of feeling bad that we weren’t giving our children all of our time, yet still trying to find the balance of not losing ourselves in just being Mom all day, every day.
It was a struggle every single day.
“Knock knock.”
I glanced up to find Wes standing in the doorway of my office with a soft smile on his face. Everything inside of me woke up at once.
It’d been just over a week since the Halloween party at Brooks Media, and everything about that stretch of time said Wes and I were something.
Not defined in the slightest, but well above nothing, we’d managed to sneak away during work hours for sex four times in the last eight days. And as much as I expected my desire to die, after we were done, the flame always burned that much brighter.
His smiles came more easily and with much higher frequency, and after the first time I’d had to bring Lex to work, he’d even seemed to warm up to her. I’d noticed his discomfort at first, at not knowing how to interact with her without the manipulation he used on so many adults, but it hadn’t taken him long to find a way to talk to her that seemed to put them both at ease.
“Are you stopping by the practice tonight before you head out?” he asked, both hands on the top frame of the door with his body leaning forward.
Good God.
“Probably not.” I motioned toward Lexi and shook my head. “I’ve got a lot of work to finish up and, well, let’s just say some things are very distracting.” And two of my medical aides were on the field. I’d get a phone call if anyone seriously needed me.
Wes chuckled softly and walked toward my desk to stand behind my daughter, peeking over her shoulder. She was still too enthralled in whatever had her mind busy for the moment and hadn’t even noticed his arrival.
His eyebrows rose dramatically at whatever he saw on her notepad. If I had a different kid, I might have feared a dirty drawing or limerick with the way his forehead seemed to disappear, but I didn’t, so instead, I prepared myself to be floored. He must have jerked his head from the paper to me and back again a full three times before finally settling his surprised eyes on mine.
I tilted my head to the side with an indulgent smile and asked the question that was almost always relevant. “What am I missing?”
“Do you see what she’s doing?”
I bit my lip in an effort not to laugh, as the answer, thanks to a good six feet of space and a lack of superhuman eyesight, was blindingly obvious. Still, I pictured her usual work and ventured a guess. “Writing numbers?”
“I’d say it’s a little more complex than that,” he responded, an actual bounce in his demeanor as he smiled bigger than I’d ever seen before. He may have been smiling more frequently, but right then, I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet.
Lexi, as though she could feel the happiness radiating off of him, finally left her little bubble and glanced up at his face. “Wes! Now we’re three.”
“Hi, Lexi.” And the smile deepened even further.
Good Lord, I’m in real trouble here.
“We’re three?” he asked me curiously.
“There are three of us,” I explained.
“Ah,” he breathed, looking back down to Lex just as she moved her eyes to his throat and smiled. She was getting used to him, genuinely happy to see him, but still too overwhelmed by the complexities of his unfamiliar face to look him in the eye.
You’re not alone, sister.
He pointed toward her notepad. “What are you doing there?”
“A linear equation. Each term is either a constant or the product of a constant and a single variable. Example: linear equation with only one variable. Ax plus B equals zero. A and B are the constants, and A does not equal zero.”
Wes’s smile, having barely faded at all, went back to full wattage.
“Mommy, linear equations.”
“Wow, baby.”
Seriously. Wow.
“I wish I could do them with you—”
Not a fucking chance I could do them with her. Watch her maybe.
“But I need to finish up a few things. Maybe we can do some when we get home.”
Disappointment clouded her face instantly, and an arrow of guilt, sharp and unrelenting, stabbed me over and over again in the gut.
“Do you want to come down to the field with me?” Wes asked Lex, squatting down to get on her level, and I could feel my whole face freeze in shock. The skin felt tight, and my eyes rivaled fucking saucers.
“You don’t have to do that—”
He waved me off and pushed to standing.
“No, this is perfect. She can come hang out with me on the field, and if I forget any of my players’ stats, her brilliant little mind will come in handy.”
I stared at him for a long moment, taken aback by the much-needed offer. I was starting to wonder if all of my assumptions about him were true. I felt like maybe there was a whole other side to Wes Lancaster, but trusting it as real seemed like a venture into idiocy.
Lex jumped up from her seat and put her hand in Wes’s, his offer to take her with him as good as an order to her. Her mind worked in absolutes, and it really had never even occurred to her that I might say no.
Wes’s surprised eyes still met mine in question, though.
“Sure. Why not.” I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. “Be on your best behavior for Wes, and I’ll come down to the field and get you in a little bit.”
“How many minutes, Mommy?”
My daughter. The time stickler. The mere idea of her need for structure made me smile.
I glanced at the clock and calculated the time as quickly as I could in my head.
“Forty-nine minutes, baby.”
Lex looked to the clock to do some math of her own. “It’s 5:11 p.m. You’ll come get me at six o’clock.”
I smiled. “That’s right, sweetheart.”
And with that, Wes looked to Lexi’s little hand in his as she led him out of the office, glancing back to me just once before they completely disappeared from sight.
In his eyes? Wonder.
Holy moly, if you’re not careful, you’re going to want a lot more from Wes Lancaster than just hot sex…
At exactly 5:55 p.m., I stood on the field, watching Wes kneel in front of my daughter, holding a football in the kicking position as Lexi stared down at him in absolute fascination.
Even crouched down below her, he looked like a giant compared to my little girl.
A surprisingly gentle giant.
And as I saw the adoration on her face as she continued to listen intently to whatever he was saying, I couldn’t deny that my heart skipped more than a few beats.
