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I shrugged. “I don’t completely agree with that statement but you have redeeming qualities.” I winked at her before I turned to the living room, ready to turn this perfectly normal family room into a fantasy playground.
10
MACKENZIE
Thesituationwasasfollows: we had no power, no phones, and no internet.
Keeping three kids busy without those three things proved to be a hell of a lot harder than I’d thought it would be at first. We had no TV time, no oven to bake cookies, nothing that I usually did with them to keep them busy.
What made it even harder was the fact that I didn’t know how long it was going to last—when something was tough, I always told myself, “You’ve come this far, only this much further,” but there was no indication.
If it hadn’t been for Troy and the way he managed to handle the kids, I wouldn’t have known what I would have done.
It turned out that Troy had been serious when he’d said he was the king of building blanket forts. In no time at all, rope was strung all over the room, with blankets and sheets back and forth, creating canopies and little rooms. The kids all loved it, claiming rooms for themselves.
When lunch rolled around, we made sandwiches and had a picnic in the blanket fort rather than in the kitchen.
After lunch, we did macaroni art in the blanket fort—it was the new playhouse, and the kids didn’t want to be anywhere else. They hadn’t even noticed it was still raining, and they couldn’t play outside, something they would have nagged me about all day.
“Thank you for helping me with them,” I said after supper time when they were all passed out in their beds. They’d advocated to sleep in the blanket fort, too, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
“What else was I going to do?” Troy asked with a grin. “My laptop died, so work was off the table.”
I snorted. “Good thing we had the kids here as a backup, huh?”
Troy chuckled. “I would have been so bored. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Wine,” I said. “It doesn’t require power.”
“Yeah, because that’s the only reason you’re opting for wine,” Troy said with a laugh.
I shrugged. I just needed a moment to breathe. The day had been fun, but keeping the kids busy was exhausting, and I was dead on my feet.
Troy walked to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. I wasn’t sure where he’d found either of those things, but I didn’t mind. He’d made himself at home in the house over the weekend, and I didn’t mind that, either. I was glad I wasn’t here alone, even if it was Troy Larson here with me. When it wasn’t about work, he could be pretty fun to be around. When we just hung out together, he was funny and easy-going—it was when work came up that he became cut-throat and competitive, with a do-or-die attitude that irritated me.
“Care to share a room in the blanket fort?” Troy asked.
I laughed. “Since we can’t use the couches, we might as well.”
We crawled into the fort and made ourselves comfortable on the pile of pillows in the largest part. The sheets drooped low so that we had to lounge back, but it was strangely cozy.
I sipped my wine.
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
“God, no,” Troy said.
“You’re really good with them.”
He shrugged. “They’re just tiny humans, and we all want to be entertained, right? We just break down real life and remove the ugly bits, and boom—kiddies’ world.”
I laughed. “That’s very wise for someone who has such a strong reaction to the question about having kids. Would you ever want kids?”
Troy shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Too much can go wrong. Kids are a magnet for trouble, in every way possible. Do you have any idea what a fucked-up world we live in? We can’t control a lot of the hell that’s all around us each day, but wecanprevent bringing more kids into this world to go through that hell.”
