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“Holy shit,” Jackie repeated, sounding positively gleeful. “Finally! Good job, old man! Wait, you’re not calling me to ask for sex advice, are you?”
“Hardly,” I said dryly. “Besides, sex isn’t an issue.” At least, not yet. “I’m in San Francisco.”
“Uh, what? So, where’s the boy?”
“In my apartment back in New York,” I said, quickly filling Jackie in on the day’s events.
“Do you really think leaving a stranger all alone, with no direction and no supervision, is smart, Uncle Cal?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
When he put it like that, no. But the simple truth was that I couldn’t have left him anywhere else. I don’t think I could have left him, period.
“I need to take care of him,” I admitted to my nephew, not sure I understood that myself. “I don’t know the whole story, but I need him to be there. And…” I blew out an explosive breath, pinching the bridge of my nose. “He’s expecting me to give him some sort of ‘duties’ as my house sitter, but what do I tell him? I already have a service for the cleaning, and the building is secure enough as it is. The doormen will handle any deliveries, Andrea will take care of anything unexpected that comes up, so…”
“So basically, you don’t need him.”
“I do,” I snapped, which made Jackie laugh hard enough that I seriously considered hanging up on him.
“Okay, okay,” he said once he calmed down enough to talk. “Sorry, but man, this is priceless. You’re back on Friday?”
“Right.”
“Okay, don’t worry. I’ll help you out with this. I’ll go talk to the boy and sort something out.”
I vividly remembered the last time Jackie had talked to Dashiell. “I don’t know if having you get involved is a good idea.”
“Well, too late now,” the little shit said gleefully. “So suck it up, buttercup! You’re out of town anyway, and can’t stop me!”
“Jackie…” I started, a warning growl in my voice. Then I gave in, surrendering to the inevitable and admitting, albeit silently and only in the privacy of my own mind, that maybe that really had been why I’d called. “Fine. I can forward you his schedule from La Vigneta, but I believe he’s off work tomorrow. Just… please don’t scare him away.”
“You like him,” Jackie said, a softer note in his voice.
My knee-jerk reaction was to deny it. But instead, I went with the truth. “I shouldn’t.”
Jackie snorted. “Fuck that. There’s no ‘should’ involved here. You do, Uncle Cal. Own it. And since you’ve already managed to get him in your bed, the next step is figuring out how to keep him there.”
That definitely wasn’t the next step. There were many, many steps in between; steps that my nephew was blithely skimming right over with the willful ignorance of the young and impetuous.
But I wanted it anyway. Maybe it was easier to admit with three thousand miles between us, but I wanted Dashiell to be mine.
Still, I made myself say, “I believe all I asked you for was help figuring out his house-sitting duties.”
Jackie laughed. “Then isn’t it lucky for you that I know what you really want.”
And then the little shit hung up on me… and I realized I was grinning again, because Jackie was right. He did know what I wanted.
And maybe it was time to finally go after it.
Chapter 6
Dash
* * *
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey,” someone sang out, whipping the cozy thick blanket off me right when the dream I’d been having of Hot Daddy Callum had been about to get good.
I jackknifed upright, coming wide awake with my heart in my throat in an instant thanks to all those years of living with my mom’s unpredictable boyfriends.
“Whoa, little guy,” the man standing over me said, backing off with his hands held up in a calming gesture. “You’re fine.”
