order, but Marcy didn’t have to know every little thing.
“You think you have a fever? From just talking about…fudge?”
Lily rolled her eyes. Marcy’s kids must still be there. They left for school about fifteen minutes later than Lily’s.
“No, not from just talking about it. I just felt…warm, that’s all.”
“You’re not telling me something,” Marcy insisted.
“There’s a lot I don’t tell you or anyone else,” Lily admitted, leaning every so slightly to the left, so she could see out the kitchen window again.
And there he was, unloading a kitchen chair.
Lily sighed heavily, unable to help herself.
“I knew it!” Marcy pounced on the sound. “What’s going on? Do you have a man there?”
“No, I do not have a man here, and I don’t want a man here. I just got rid of one, and he was enough trouble to last me a lifetime,” she insisted.
“Honey, we just talked about this. You are not off men for a lifetime. You think you are, but I promise you, you’re not. You’re just in deep freeze right now.”
“Deep freeze?”
“Yes. Where men are concerned. But you won’t always be there. One day, some man will come along and bam! No more deep freeze on your…fudge life.”
“Aunt Lily has a fudge life?” she heard Marcy’s youngest ask through the phone.
Lily started laughing.
“What’s a fudge life?” Stacy asked. “Do you just eat it and eat it and eat it all day?”
“No,” Marcy insisted.
“’Cause I like fudge. Could I have a fudge life?”
“No. No one spends her life eating fudge,” Marcy said, then hissed at her sister, “Fudge life? I will never hear the end of this. She’ll probably tell the other kids at school, and I’ll be getting calls from the other moms. All their kids will want a fudge life, and the moms will want to know what I’m doing, telling kids they can just eat fudge all the time. How am I ever going to explain this?”
“Sorry. Gotta go,” Lily said, hearing her sister growl at her before she hung up the phone.
A fudge life?
Lily laughed again.
At least she could do that now. Laugh at times.
She hadn’t for a while. It had been too hard, too scary, too overwhelming, to think of being mostly alone in the world except for two little girls depending on her for just about everything.
But it was getting less overwhelming as time went on.
She was down, but she wasn’t beaten.
Lily peeked out the window again, and he was still there, a big box perched on one shoulder, the muscles in his arm looking long and sleek and glistening with sweat.
Had to be a mover, she reassured herself.
Something looking that good would never move in next door to her.
And it was getting hot out.
They probably didn’t have anything cold to drink in that house, which had been empty for three months, since the Sanders got transferred to San Diego.
It would be neighborly to drop by and offer them a little something, and maybe the owners would show up while she was there. Or she could pump the moving men for information on the new family.
Her girls were always eager to have more friends to play with. The first thing they’d ask when they walked in the door after school would be whether the new neighbors had girls their age, and a good mother should be ready to provide the answers for her children, shouldn’t she?
Lily opened the refrigerator door, thinking…a pitcher of iced tea?
Yes, she had one, very nearly full.
And some cookies?
She checked the cabinets. No cookie mix. Lily dug a little deeper, then sucked in a breath, feeling uneasy once again.
No, she didn’t have any cookie mix.
But she had what she needed to make a batch of fudge.
Neighborly, she muttered to herself, as she marched across the yard with the pitcher of tea, four plastic glasses tucked under her arm, and a batch of still-warm fudge.
Just be neighborly.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
She made it to the back of the truck and could hear someone swearing softly from inside the enclosed space, and when she paused right behind the truck and looked in, she found him, eyes narrowed in concentration, right shoulder pressed up against a huge box that had snagged on the corner of another one and then didn’t want to budge.
Up close, in his face she saw a toughness and a certain strength, eyes so dark they were almost black and flashing with irritation at the moment. He had an ultra-firm jaw, a head full of thick, dark brown hair that he wore a little too long, and what seemed like miles and miles of bare, brown skin.
It was all that skin and muscles that did it to her.
She started to feel hot all over again and thought about cooling her forehead with the tea pitcher, which was already sweating with condensation from the heat.
She’d be taking her temperature again when she got home, just to make sure. Because something wasn’t right here.
“Hi. Can I help you, ma’am?” a deep voice said from behind her.
“Oh!” She startled, nearly spilling the tea before the nearly grown teenager, all arms and legs and hair, grabbed it and saved it.
“Jake!” the man who had made her feverish called out from behind her.
“Sorry,” the kid, Jake, said. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
“Oh. No. It’s all right. I just…didn’t hear you.” I was too busy becoming feverish, possibly over your father.
How embarrassing.
Did the kid know women reacted this way to his father?
Did his gorgeous dad know?
Lily wanted to sink into the rhododendron behind her.
“It’s okay.” The kid pointed to the plate of hot fudge in her hand. “Is that for us?”
“Jake!” The man, standing at the edge of the truck bed and looking down at them both, made the name sound like an order, not to be ignored.
A
