of her pale robe, only to jerk away before he met her eyes.
She’d barely realized he looked nearly as tense as he had when she’d left him last night before he dragged the sweater over his head and tugged it down. “I’ll check the transfer switch. Then I’ll get a fire going.
“I just need this.” He took the flashlight from her. “Give me a minute and you’ll have enough light to do whatever you need to do up here. The hall light won’t work, but the bathroom lights will. Did he explain how the standby works?”
A transfer switch sounded familiar. The guy who’d inspected the building a couple of weeks ago had pointed it out. It was in one of the electrical panel boxes in the basement.
“I think so. I don’t remember everything he told me,” she admitted. “We looked at a lot around here that day.” There’d also been Tyler to calm. He hadn’t liked the huge, shadowy space. “There was a lot to take in.”
Something shifted in Erik’s expression. She knew he’d been aware of how overwhelmed she’d been by Cornelia’s intervention, and by how suddenly she’d found herself in a place she’d known nothing about at all. It stood to reason there were a few things she might have missed, or had forgotten. As it was, she could have managed on her own to start a fire to keep Tyler warm. She just had no idea what to do about the generator—which meant, right now, she couldn’t fix this particular problem without him.
She didn’t doubt that he knew that, too, as he followed the beam of light down the stairs, pulled on the heavy boots he’d left at the bottom and disappeared into the dark.
Feeling at a distinct disadvantage where he was concerned, and hating it, she turned in the dark herself, working her way first to Tyler’s bathroom, then back to his room. She’d just started to put on the clothes she’d left on his play table last night when she heard his bedclothes rustle.
“Mom? I’m a-scared.”
“It’s okay, honey. I’m right here. The power went out,” she explained, her voice soft, “but it’ll be back on in a minute.” Leaving her robe on, she found her way to him, hugged his warm little body to hers. “You don’t need to be afraid.” Forcing a smile into her voice, she murmured, “You know what?”
His response was the negative shake of his head against her neck.
“I have a big surprise for you.”
“Is the tree all done?”
“It is. But that’s not the surprise.”
She felt him pull back. “Is he here?”
He. Erik.
The man’s presence was not at all the news she’d hoped would get his morning off to a better start.
“He’s downstairs,” she told him, and felt certain he’d have scooted off the bed that very moment had he been able to see where he was going.
She’d thought to tell him her surprise was the big adventure the day might be, since making an adventure of uncertainties, for the most part, had taken his mind off his fears and insecurities before. Since Erik had unknowingly just accomplished that for her, she told him they’d just wait right where they were while his idol turned the lights back on.
Instead of electric lights, however, it was the beam of the flashlight that illuminated the hall outside the open door.
The beam swung inward, causing Tyler to bury his head in her chest at the momentary brightness and her to block the sudden flash with her hand.
“Sorry,” Erik muttered. He aimed the beam at the rumpled bedding on the trundle. “It’s not the switch. I’ll have to wait until it’s light out to see what the problem is.”
The circle of light bouncing off the cerulean sheets filled the room with shades of pale blue. Along the far wall, he watched Rory cuddling her son on the higher bed, her hair tousled, her hand slowly soothing the child’s flannel-covered back as Tyler turned to smile at him.
It hit him then, as they sat huddled in the semi-dark, that all they really had was each other. He’d realized that on some level last night when he’d prodded her about where they’d spend Christmas. But seeing them now, realizing how much she’d lost and how vulnerable she could easily feel being that alone here, drove that reality home.
The troubling protectiveness he felt for her slid back into place. That same protectiveness had been there last night, protecting her from him.
He’d had no business touching her last night. All he’d wanted when he’d met them at the tree lot yesterday was to make sure she could give her little boy the Christmas she wanted for him.
All he’d wanted last night was her.
There hadn’t been a trace of defense in her pretty face when he’d touched her. Nothing that even remotely suggested she would have stopped him if he’d pulled her to him. He’d known when he’d left there a few days ago that distance was his best defense against complications with her. Especially since the not-so-subtle needs she aroused in him simply by her presence had a definite tendency to sabotage objectivity where she was concerned.
Having sabotaged the distance angle himself simply by showing up, it seemed like some perverted form of justice that distance was going to be deprived him for a while.
“Do you have another flashlight up here?” Objectivity now appeared to be his only defense. And objectively, she truly needed far more help from him than a little tutoring with the store. “Something stronger than this?”
“The only other I have is just like that one. It’s in the kitchen in the phone desk drawer.”
“You need something brighter. I’ll get one of the camp lamps from the store and bring it back for you to use up here.”
She didn’t know she had camp lamps. But then, she hadn’t finished her inventory, either.
“We’ll wait,” she told him, then watched him leave them, literally, in the dark.
There was something he wasn’t telling her. She would have bet her silk long underwear on that, had she not needed to wear it under her favorite gray fleece sweats to keep warm.
She couldn’t believe how quickly the house had cooled. She turned the thermostat down every night, but without the furnace running at all, the temperature inside had dropped ten degrees within the hour.
She’d compensated by bundling Tyler in long johns, fleece pants, heavy socks, slippers, an undershirt, thermal shirt and sweatshirt and parking him under a blanket in front of the blaze Erik had built in the fireplace.
The only layer Erik had added was his jacket when he’d gone out a few minutes ago. He’d already left it in the mudroom when the thud of his heavy-treaded work boots announced his return.
“This is the last of the wood you brought in yesterday. I’ll get more from the shed in a while.”
The drapes were still closed, but the edges of the room were no longer dark. The fire had grown to throw flickering light
