AS SOON AS Will had scrambled up the hill to let them know about Joseph’s accident and asked them to go back in the house so as not to make a fuss, Jen had retreated to Mari’s room. Archie and Hope were watching anxiously as the little girl cried as if her heart was breaking.
Caught unprepared, Jen immediately knelt in front of Mari. “Joseph is okay, Mari. Luke has him and they’re going to take him to the doctor for a checkup but he’ll be home tonight.” She hoped.
Mari swiped a hand across her eyes and shook her head wildly. Mari might not make much noise, but she cried with as much drama as she did everything else. Her hair was tangled, her eyes were red and Jen had to scramble to find a tissue for a runny nose.
This was why little kids were beyond her. She never had a tissue when she needed one.
But this little girl cried herself into a big mess. In this, she and Jen were kindred spirits.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Jen said in a low voice. “Archie is worried.”
Mari checked to see what the dog thought. Archie wrinkled his brow on cue.
“Joey will be mad. I broke my promise.” Mari’s lower lip trembled and Jen was desperate to avert continued tears.
“Joey will understand.” Jen squeezed Mari’s hands. “You are smarter than I am, Princess Mari. Sometimes we have to make hard decisions to keep the ones we love safe. You did that. You were so brave.” And because of that, Joseph was going to come home instead of being lost overnight.
The frown on Mari’s face suggested she wasn’t convinced, so Jen added, “I bet when you see Joseph again, he gives you a huge thank-you kiss.” Jen wrinkled her nose as if she agreed with Mari that that might be awful, but made a mental note to make sure that Joseph did exactly that.
Mari ruffled Archie’s ears and leaned against the edge of the bed. She wasn’t sure, but she was coming around.
Jen eased over to the massive beanbag that took up the only clear corner of the room and tried not to remember all the clutter surrounding her. “I am going to show you a secret.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Did you know books are magic?”
Mari raised one eyebrow in response.
This kid was hilarious, but laughing wasn’t the best choice at this point.
“It’s true. Find your favorite book—” Jen waved her hand vaguely around the mess “—and let’s read it.” Then she plopped down, startled when two massive purple wings billowed from the sides of the beanbag. Jen squirmed to get a better look. One gigantic butterfly. That’s what the beanbag was. And every shift she made caused a flutter of wings. “That’s awesome.” Maybe she should have had Mari contribute to the decorating of her house. A chair like this might make grading homework fun.
Mari wandered closer and held out a book. Jen tried not to wince at the stickiness of the cover or the way half of the spine had been…chewed off? “All right. Here’s the magic.” Jen patted the bag and before she was prepared, Mari launched herself down to land with a thump right next to Jen. She’d rolled over and rested her head on Jen’s shoulder before Jen had quite adjusted to the fact that it was happening, but it was…okay.
When Hope and Archie arranged themselves carefully along the edge of the beanbag with their chins hanging over Jen’s dangling feet, Jen was pretty sure she’d die in that beanbag without a rescue. There was no way she was going to get herself out, but Mari had stopped crying.
“Now, the magic of a favorite book is that it can make bad days go away,” Jen said as she opened the book. “A princess who drives a tow truck? That is even better than this chair.” She tried to inch to a more comfortable spot, heard both dogs huff and decided she was fine where she was. “And her dog looks like Archie.” The attraction to the dog with one eye made perfect sense. The princess had found her missing piece.
At some point, her entire audience drifted off to sleep and Jen quickly finished the book. It wasn’t every day that she got to read about a princess with a job. She appreciated Mari’s reading choices.
Then she dropped the book behind her head on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, wondering how Joseph was, how Luke was recovering, and whether anyone would ever come to rescue her. Her eyes slowly drifted shut as she realized there were worse things than falling asleep in a magic beanbag under a pile of love.
The sudden absence of Mari’s weight took a minute to register in Jen’s foggy brain, but she was blinking her eyes slowly open when she saw Luke lean carefully over Mari’s bed to deposit her under the covers. Pins and needles in her feet made it impossible to jump up and hit the road before Luke had a chance to corner her, but even if she’d managed to stand, his expression would have frozen her in place.
“Everything okay? How’s Joseph?” Jen asked as she tried to fluff her limp hair and pretend that it was perfectly fine that the butterfly beanbag was going to be her final resting place.
“Bad sprain, but I think…” Luke sighed. “That’s what it took for us to talk. Like you begged me to do. We talked on the way home and everything is so simple now and so important and for the first time I understand what I’m doing here with him, in this place, and it’s just… I had to be scared out of my mind to open my eyes.” He braced his hands on his hips. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like I did. You didn’t have to do this, help me and comfort Mari and call for reinforcements and… It’s all so much.”
Jen nodded. She knew what he meant. “Us independent types, we like to be self-sufficient. That means no one can let us down or surprise us.” She looked around Mari’s room. “I guess we both learned something tonight.”
“What did you learn?” Luke asked as he stepped closer.
“That it’s nice to have the people who love you by your side.” Jen licked her lips. “And that good people deserve more space in my heart than I’ve given them in the past. Sarah came. Rebecca came. Will and Cole and each one of them could have called on more friends and knowing that I wasn’t alone in my worry helped me.”
“And my mother. And Mari.” Luke stared hard at her. “And the dogs were obviously very worried.”
Jen laughed. “They were. I had to read them to sleep, too.”
Luke tilted his head. “All that’s sweet. Doesn’t explain why you’re still here.”
“I couldn’t get out of the beanbag.” Jen held out both hands. “Unless you help, you better be ready to feed me four square meals a day.”
Luke grunted as he lifted her easily to stand.
“Not a flattering sound,” Jen muttered as she yanked her sweater down over her jeans and tried not to grab him as she teetered on top of the leaning tower of toys.
“You could have left all the noise and trouble behind as soon as we carried Joseph back up.” Luke was doing it again, cataloging the details of her face and body language. There was no reason to lie.
“I couldn’t, not while Mari was upset or until I’d seen for myself that Joseph was okay or while your mother might need me.” Jen ran a hand through her hair. All that was true. He would buy it.
“And?” He dipped his chin, the corners of his mouth twitching.
So he wasn’t going to buy it.
“I wanted to see you.” There. It had taken every bit of the bravado she’d learned to pretend she had in high school but she’d said it aloud. “Crazy, right?”
He pretended to think hard on it. “Not when you take into account that I’m a seriously good kisser.”
Jen snorted and then held a finger over her lips as Mari kicked out of the blankets. “So modest, too.”
“And bossy and hardheaded and in serious need of some patience and practice talking to kids.” Luke squeezed his eyes shut. “This turned out well, but what if it hadn’t? My first instinct was to let the kid learn his lesson wherever he was. How would I have lived with myself if I’d done that?”
Jen could hear the guilt and worry in his voice and that was when she realized the key to Luke Hollister. No matter how hard he seemed on the outside, his heart was tender for his family.
If she was a hard shell protecting old soft spots, Luke was, too.
They were doomed.
“You need justice too bad, Officer. You would have rushed after him no matter what.” Jen smiled as he frowned at her. “If only to explain to him how wrong he was.”
He narrowed his eyes. “That does sound like me.”
Jen was still laughing when he pressed his lips against hers. There, in the shadows of Mari’s cluttered, cramped bedroom, it was impossible not to lean closer to enjoy every sweet second of their connection.
When he stepped back, the gleam in his gaze was impossible to ignore. “Think you can forgive me for being wrong, wrong, wrong?”
“This time?” Jen pretended to scoff. “Okay, but don’t press your luck with me again.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah, we both know that I’ll be asking that question again. Soon. Years of experience doesn’t fade.”
Jen sighed. “Luckily for you, I have as many years’ practice putting people in their place. I can show you yours.”
His low laugh filled her with the joyful anticipation that she’d wondered if she’d ever find.
“Gotta go home. Tomorrow is the day we Halloween my house up.” She raised an eyebrow. “Bring your power tools and your entourage. I’ll put you to work.”
“Fine, crazy lady. We’ll enjoy the show you put on tomorrow.” Luke held her hand as she crossed the cluttered floor, Hope trailing behind them.
When she made it out into the hallway, she found that her friends had bailed without saying goodbye.
“No one wanted to wake you.” Connie Hollister was seated on the couch with her arms around Joseph and Renita while Camila, a late arrival, was bustling around to pick up. “You were drooling.” Her smile was cute. Jen would never tell her that.
She shot a glance over her shoulder at Luke, who was communicating deeply with Hope and completely skipping the conversation.
“Joseph, I’m glad you’re home.” Jen gently rested a hand on his shoulder. “Tomorrow, make sure that Mari understands that sometimes promises to keep secrets have to be broken. She’s worried.”
He nodded. “Sure thing. I should never have asked her not to tell. It was dumb, but I wanted that tree house to be our thing, something I could do for her.” He sighed. “Guess I’ll have to tear it down.”
Everyone turned to look at Luke, who frowned. “It’s dangerous to have two kids down there by the creek.”
“Not if they have a sturdy tree house, let people know where they are, always go together and take their favorite adults with them to sit in the chairs that I hauled down there,” his mother said. “Really, Luke, isn’t it about time you got on board with the project?”
Jen raised her eyebrows at him. It looked like his weekends were booked for the foreseeable future. Luke held his hands up. “Fine, but we’ve got to help Jen decorate for this contest thing. I already promised.”
Jen pursed her lips and considered explaining that it wasn’t so much as a promise but a likely excuse now that he needed one.
Joseph straightened in his seat. “Oh, I meant to tell you. I heard some gossip. Some kids were talking about the best house on the map, can’t remember the name, but instead of a witch this year, they’re doing a twisted fairy tale.”
“Oh, no, that’s what we were doing,” Jen told them. She pulled out her phone, checked the time and decided Chloe would still be up. This was an emergency. Her general needed to start thinking. “All those rentals. We’ll have to scramble now.”
“We will be happy to help. We are good in a crisis,” Connie Hollister said with a knowing grin. “I think you will fit in fine.”
Before she could comment, Luke was urging her toward the door. They were silent as they walked up her driveway. “You didn’t have to see me home. I’ve got this dangerous dog for protection.” They both looked down at Hope, who was leaning against Jen’s leg. Her dog did not like the dark.
“Try not to let fitting in keep you up tonight,” Luke said as he pressed another too-brief kiss against her lips. “These Hollisters sneak up on you and before you know it, you can’t imagine life without them.”
Jen stepped inside and turned to watch Luke slowly walk back home, his head tilted up to study the stars.
“Yeah, they already have.” Jen wasn’t certain what the future looked like exactly, but it wasn’t hard to picture Luke in it.