Page 27 of Take The Risk

​“Ty said he would!” Scarlette dismissed him, dragging him down the back steps of Louise’s back porch, no doubt heading for the shed full of sports equipment, leaving Phoebe and me alone.

​“Ty,” she began, turning to face me.

​“Hang on.” I held up a finger, almost laying it on her mouth. I really wanted to feel her lips, I realized, my attention focused on the way her bottom lip was a little fuller than the top and the shade of pink deeper than the blush she wore earlier. “Before you say no, you need to know that I wouldn’t charge you—”

​“That’s insane! Of course you should! I won’t accept that—!”

​I forced myself not to touch her, no matter how badly I wanted to know if the feeling I’d had earlier when I held her hand was only my protective instincts flaring, or if it was the same thing that had her slipping into my dreams at night.

​Her green eyes widened, and I forced my hand down before I gave in. It didn’t help that I saw what looked like a flash of disappointment in her pretty eyes. Did she want me to touch her?

​Move it along, Ty, I thought, hearing my mother in the front of the house talking to someone.

​“I won’t be charging you to do something I’d already planned on doing.” I hadn’t really made a decision yet, but I wasn’t telling her that. “The team’s coach asked me if I would be the assistant coach this year.” He asked me every year. “I wanted to get your urgent renos done before I agreed, which they all will be, except the back deck, by the end of next week.” And she could move back into the house while I finished. “So, no arguing.” Her nostrils flared at that, and I bit back a grin. So, she didn’t like being told what to do. And then I did it. I slipped. “I’m happy to give Lock a little extra help to get him up to speed.”

​It was true. I would gladly help him, even if he wasn’t responsible for the change in my sister. There was just something about him that I connected with. Maybe it was because he was going through what my siblings went through when their dad left abruptly. Also, over another woman. I’d been desperate for a way to help them but felt like I failed. Even if Lock didn’t impress the hell out of me, I wanted to help him.

​“Lock?”

​Well, fuck.

Chapter 11

​“You look like you could use a nap.” Cady-Jo came to a halt beside me where I stood looking at paint samples in the town’s one and only hardware store.

​I laughed because she wasn’t wrong. “It’s been a long few days.”

​Was there another word for understatement that meant understatement but worse? ‘Cause if there was, you’d find my life in pictures right beside it in the dictionary. It didn’t mean everything that happened was bad. In fact, a lot of it was startlingly good, which made me wary. It was just a lot.

​Ty dropping the surprise of coaching on me wasn’t so much the issue as the fact that, apparently, at some point, my son had confided in him that he didn’t like being called Lachlan. No, he tolerated it for my sake. After having a little heart-to-heart with my wayward child when I tucked him into bed, which again was something he tolerated for me, I had decided to give in. I wasn’t upset he wanted to be called Lock. Thanks, Alex. It was the reason he told Ty, a man he’d only known for the better part of two weeks, instead of me. And okay, it had been a pretty crazy two weeks with Ty being shockingly good about chatting with Lock whenever he wanted. Still, I was his mom.

​Clearly, I had some work to do if my son thought he had to keep things a secret from me to make me happy. He’d told me he did it because he wanted me to be happy and I’d been sad for so long.

​I cursed Jeremy to hell and back for that and then myself for good measure.

​I’d thought I’d had a pretty good handle on how I was feeling, but I needed to remember that Lock wasn’t a normal kid. I had to do better. And I would.

​Then there was the phone call from Wade, who shocked the hell out of me by telling me one set of prints on the cocaine belonged to Jerome. As in city inspector Jerome. There was currently a warrant out for his arrest, but he’d fled town already. They still hadn’t identified the person who the other prints belonged to. However, they had eliminated a whole bunch of people, including Rowdy.

​I wasn’t actually worried about Rowdy’s prints being on the drugs. He’d worked on my roof and hadn’t even asked to see the basement, let alone done anything weird. I’d been the one to show him when I asked if he could give me a quote for the renovations I wanted.

​Scarlette had dropped the information that I’d asked Rowdy for a quote for my larger renovations, having learned it from Lock.

Silence had descended until you could hear dust fall at her announcement. Ty was the first one to speak, almost demanding—or maybe I’d just imagined that—to know if I was going with Denton Renovation and why I wouldn’t go with Brockmann Construction?

​I pointed out he hadn’t given me a quote, and I thought they only had time for my urgent issues, which I knew full well they were doing as a favor to Cady-Jo. I already felt guilty that I’d gummed up his time off; now, with the baseball coaching…I wasn’t going to impose anymore.

​“It’s not an imposition.” Ty crossed his large arms over his chest. “I’ll have a quote to you by the end of tomorrow.”

​When I went to argue, Scarlette just shook her head, swallowing the spaghetti I’d made for dinner. “Don’t bother. Ty has his ‘I’m serious’ face on. You won’t win.” She twirled more spaghetti on her fork, shoving it into her mouth. “Anyway, Rowdy is okay for a grown-up…mainly because he can play ball—” Did I mention pretty much everything came down to baseball with this kid? “—still, he bailed on Mrs. Jenkin’s last month, and I heard him say he hates doing renos.”

​She then relayed a whole bunch of things none of the adults knew.

​The Maplehurst gossip mill had nothing on this kid.

​By the time I crawled into bed, I had a good cry because there was only so much peopling I could handle and I’d had to keep it together with a lot of people for most of the day. Okay, so I may have had an extended bathroom break for ten minutes when we’d gotten home from my house to wait for the chief of police. Helen showed up (the Maplehurst gossip train had been speeding down the track) and drove me while Ty and everyone else stayed at the Drugged-Out Murder Manor. I only emerged once I could stand without feeling like I was going to pass out.

​Everything went at warp speed after that. Ty gave me a quote, which was light-years better than Rowdy’s. Rowdy confessed he was glad Brockmann Construction was willing to do the work. Scarlette was right; he didn’t want to do renos anymore. Still, I found I liked the young man, and given he’d gone to the trouble to do the drawings I asked for, I insisted on buying him lunch.