out of it. New tires—ones with actual treads—had just officially been promoted to the top of the priority list. Tires she might’ve had already if that jerk hadn’t—
“I’m gonna wet my pants!”
“Do and you die,” Carrie, ever the diplomat, cooly replied.
“Carrie,” Mala said in her Warning Voice, despite feeling pretty much the same way. “Two more blocks, Luc—cross your legs or something.”
Lucas started to whimper; Carrie started in about wussy, crybaby brothers, and Mala turned on the windshield wipers, thinking of all the joy Scott had missed by walking out of their lives three years ago. Okay, so maybe Mala had given him a push, but still.
She eased the car through a four-way stop, then glided into a parking space in the alley behind the restaurant, casting a brief but appreciative glance at the snow-speckled, pepper-red Camaro parked a few feet in front of her. Lucas was out of the car before she’d turned off the engine, hauling his bony little butt toward the propped open kitchen door.
“Lucas! Don’t run—!”
“I told him to go before we left Grandma’s,” Her Supreme Highness intoned from the back seat, “but would he listen to me? Noooo—”
Splat! went the kid on the icy asphalt.
With a sigh, Mala hauled herself out of the car and toward the heap of now-sobbing-child lying facedown in the alley, her flat-soled boots slipping mercilessly in the quickly accumulating snow. Considering Lucas had on at least four layers of clothes, she doubted he was hurt, but she’d long since learned that the decibel level of his screams was in direct and inverse proportion to the seriousness of the injury. A stranger, however—like the tall man now darting out of the restaurant’s kitchen door, snowflakes clutching his thick, wavy hair and heavy sweater like crystalized burrs—might well think the child had been set upon by ravening wolves.
“You okay, kid?” the man asked as Mala reached them both. In fact, he’d already helped the child to his feet, thereby proving that nothing was broken, although you sure wouldn’t have known that from the Lucy Ricardo wail emanating from her son’s throat.
“Yes, I’m sure he’s fine,” Mala said in the guy’s general direction as she squatted down in front of her howling son. “Lucas! Luc, for heaven’s sake…” She tried to keep her teeth from knocking as she dusted dry snow from the child’s face and spiky hair. At least his glasses hadn’t fallen off, for once. “It’s okay, sweetie—”
“I falled dooooown!”
Mala tilted the child’s face toward the light spearing from the partially open door. Nope. No blood. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Carrie’s approach, the child’s expression even more serious than usual underneath the fake-fur rimmed hood of her coat. Which was done up, surprise, surprise.
“Mama told you not to run, dork-face,” she began, but there was genuine concern threaded through the otherwise imperious tones. Her daughter could be a pain in the patoot at times, but she was a protective pain in the patoot. Especially toward her younger brother, and especially since Scott’s vanishing act. Just ask Josh Morgan, the third-grader who’d gotten Carrie’s loaded backpack in the groin last year when he’d reduced her son to tears by calling him “Lucas Mucus.” Still, the smart-mouth comment earned her Mala’s glare. Carrie sighed. “Is he hurt?”
“Other than his pride, uh-uh,” Mala said, straightening Lucas’s wire-rimmed glasses and planting a quick kiss on his cold little lips before allowing herself the luxury of breathing in the warm, garlic-laced air beckoning from the noisy kitchen. Her stomach rumbled; she’d skipped lunch, and the thought of the canned chili she’d planned for tonight’s dinner made her very depressed.
Lucas glanced up at the man standing silently a few feet away—oh, right, an audience—then back at Mala. “I wet my pants,” he whispered on a sob, and she got more depressed. Especially when Carrie groaned.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Mala whispered back, skimming tears off the mortified little face. “There’s dry clothes in the trunk.” With all the stuff she carted around in that trunk, she could outfit an emergency storm shelter for a month.
She finally hoisted herself upright, fighting the urge to groan as her joints popped—that extra twenty pounds she was still lugging around from Lucas’s pregnancy wasn’t doing her any favors—trying to get a good look at the man who’d come to Lucas’s rescue. Except, between his skulking in the shadows in the darkening alley, as if not quite sure what to make of her kids—an understandable reaction—and the snow pinging into her eyes, all she got was a vague impression of angles and clefts and lashes no man should be allowed to have, dammit.
Along with a subsidiary impression that those angles and clefts and long lashes were somehow familiar.
“Thanks,” she said, guiding the still whimpering Lucas toward the door.
The man nodded, muttering “S’okay” in a soft, Southern accent.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Mala whipped around so fast she nearly knocked Carrie over. Oblivious to her daughter’s affronted “Mama!” she stared at the man, hard, as her heart free-fell straight to her pelvis and her brain warped back twenty years to a time when she could still get into jeans that didn’t have elastic at the waist, a time when nobody knew that Spruce Lake High’s Senior Class President had a secret crush on a bad-ass kid whose ice-chip blue eyes regularly sent chills of forbidden promises down her spine, even though he never—not once—returned her smile.
A boy with sinfully thick, caramel-brown hair and the sharply defined, beard-shadowed face of a man; a boy whose lean, muscled body had filled out his worn, fitted jeans and T-shirts like nobody’s business, whose direct, disquieting gaze spoke of innocence lost but not regretted. He showed up at school every day, yet never spoke to anyone, never carried around any books, neither got involved in any activities nor caused any trouble. Not that Mala knew of, at least. He had appeared out of nowhere, a month into their senior year, only to vanish six weeks before graduation. Mala hadn’t seen him since.
Until today.
She stood there, hugging herself against the cold, barely aware of Lucas’s entreaties to get inside as she let Eddie King once again ensnare her gaze in his.
Then it dropped, unerringly and unapologetically, to her breasts, and she thought, Hold the phone—somebody noticed. Damn, she’d just about forgotten what it felt like to have a man look at her with a little Hmmm in his expression. God knew, Scott sure hadn’t. Not once she’d gotten pregnant with Lucas, at least. Yeah, yeah, so she was a feminist turncoat. Tough. Rushes of sexual awareness didn’t often happen to single mothers with two kids and too many pounds plastered to their butts. It was kinda nice, having her nipples tighten for some other reason than being cold.
Even if it was just a passing thing.
At seventeen, she’d been the quintessential good girl, while Eddie King had been the quintessential good girl’s fantasy. At thirty-seven, not a whole lot had changed on that score.
But she had. At seventeen, she’d still believed in “one day…” At thirty-seven, that day had come and gone. But not before taking a healthy chunk out of her ample butt on its way out the door.
Eddie had no use for memories. The bad ones—and there were plenty of those—he’d
