Erin Kern - Along Came Trouble

Oh, the restaurant. He was supposed to be concerned with saving the place, and all he could think about was mermaids and Elisa’s hair. He was in trouble.

“Yeah,” he muttered like an idiot. “But I think tomorrow is too soon. I’d like Anthony to work in a kitchen a bit more before I dump this on him. Let’s shoot for next week.”

And that will give me plenty of time to be around you and hear your beautiful voice. You know, basically be obsessive.

“Dad…” Tyler’s once-patient voice had taken on the quality of a four-year-old’s whine.

Brody glanced at Tyler over his shoulder. “I’m coming. Thanks again,” he said to Elisa.

“My pleasure,” she said in a low voice. Her tongue swiped across her lower lip, leaving it sinfully moist and kissable.

This time he gave in to his urge to touch her. Her smooth skin had been calling out to him all day. Would it be as soft as it looked? To answer those burning questions, Brody skimmed the back of his index finger just along the edge of her jaw. His suspicions were right. He hadn’t felt anything that soft since Tyler was born. His satisfaction piqued when her teeth stabbed into her lower lip. To get even more of a reaction out of her, his finger journeyed up her cheek then tucked some hair behind her ear. If her skin had been soft, then her hair was even softer. Like spun silk sifting through his fingers.

Intensely aware of his son marching toward the car only several feet behind him, Brody dropped his hand and walked away without saying a word to her. Maybe tonight her dreams would be just as torturous as his had been since he’d met her.

Even after ten minutes and after putting considerable distance between him and the forbidden fruit, Brody still couldn’t calm his raging hard-on. What’s worse is that he was trying to adjust himself while his son sat, without the faintest clue, in the car seat next to him. This was definitely a new low.

He might as well come out and say “Hey, son, I want to screw your babysitter.”

His knuckles ached and turned white as he wrapped his hand tighter around the leather steering wheel. Brody came to a stop at a red light and glanced at Tyler. The boy sat quietly in his seat, staring out the window. He reminded Brody so much of himself at that age; the similarities almost frightened him.

Tyler was a quiet boy but also a deep thinker. He’d never been one to rush a decision or fly by the seat of his pants. Even selecting a candy bar at the store took him longer than a typical person. Those qualities ran strong in Brody. Take his divorce, for example. It had taken him over a year to decide he’d wanted to end his marriage.

All the time he’d been spending at work was having a negative effect on their relationship. Was that why Brody always felt a strange void between them? He hoped to God his only child didn’t resent him. Living with the knowledge that Kelly had resented him all those years was bad enough. He’d moved her far away from her family, to a town she’d never been to, and in return he’d drowned himself in work and hadn’t been a good enough husband. She’d given up a lot for him so he could work, and he’d been emotionally distant.

Brody eased off the brake when the light turned green. He glanced at Tyler again. “What did you do at school today?” Is that the best you can come up with? Why don’t you ask him about the weather next time?

Tyler’s gaze remained fixed out the window. “The same thing we always do, Dad.”

O-kay. And what was that? Was it the same things Brody used to do as a kid? How did he not know this stuff? He suppressed a sigh. “Can you be more specific? Did you learn anything new?”

Tyler shifted his legs in the seat. “We learned about more fractions. Those are so boring and I’ll probably never use them.”

Ain’t that the truth? Tyler clammed up after that and returned his attention to the window. Brody steered his truck through the town and toward his neighborhood.

After the divorce, Brody gave Kelly the house, and he moved to a newer one in a nearby neighborhood. They wanted to stay close to each other for Tyler’s sake. It had been imperative for them to keep things as normal as possible. Then Kelly married Colin, who moved into the house Brody had once lived in. Tyler spent the majority of his time in the house he grew up in, with the exception of every other weekend with Brody. He hadn’t wanted to take every single weekend away from Kelly, so the two of them agreed to two weekends a month.

Even with that, seeing his son only four days a month was hardly satisfying. The boy’s absence during the week had carved a gaping hole inside Brody’s chest that nothing else could fill. The weekends they had together went by far too fast for Brody’s liking. Sunday nights always ended with an empty house and an even emptier heart.

He turned the truck into his neighborhood. “So you really enjoyed taking those pictures today? You did a great job with them.”

“Thanks,” the boy muttered. “I miss Mom. I wish she was coming back soon.”

Kelly had only been gone for a week, and Tyler was already asking for her. Brody didn’t want to know the answer to whether Tyler asked for him after a week too.

Why is this hitting me now? You’d think four years would be enough time to get used to this.

“To be honest, buddy, she’s taking care of a lot right now, and I’m not sure exactly when she’ll be back. And we’re having fun, right?”

Tyler turned in his seat to face Brody. “Yeah, sure, Dad. But can we go back to the park this weekend? To take more pictures?”

The question threw Brody off guard. Well, he’d watch paint dry if it meant spending uninterrupted time with Tyler. “I don’t have a sophisticated camera like Elisa does.” He glanced at Tyler. “But I suppose we can make do.”

Tyler grinned. “Maybe Elisa can come with us. She’s really good at taking pictures. And she has a cool camera.”

That wasn’t the only reason that Brody got so excited. He’d take any excuse to be near her, smell her, hear her soft voice. He turned the truck onto the driveway, cut the engine, and faced his son. “You like Elisa, don’t you?”

Tyler nodded. “She’s really nice. And she has pictures of herself in her house. She’s wearing a funny-looking dress in one of them. She told me the dress was uncomfortable but she looks pretty in it.”

That was just about the strangest thing Brody had ever heard. Why would Elisa have pictures of herself? “What kind of pictures?” he asked.

The boy shrugged both his shoulders. “I dunno. She’s wearing a bathing suit in one of them and has sand all over her skin.”

Brody just about went into apoplectic shock at the image his brain generated. Hmm, pictures with a funny-looking dress and swimsuit with sand all over her? Something told Brody there was a lot more to Senorita Cardoso than he originally thought.

“Where’s Mongolia?” Tyler asked.

Brody blinked at his son. “Mongolia? Did you learn about it in school?”

“No. Elisa was helping me with some geography homework and she was showing me all the countries she’s been to. Then she said she’s going to Mongolia. But I couldn’t find it on my map.”

Mongolia? Surely Tyler heard her wrong. “Do you mean she went to Mongolia in the past?”

Tyler shook his head, adamant he had the correct information. “No, she said she’s going there in a few months to take pictures. She said she’ll be gone a long time and that she might have to sell her house.”

What the hell? True, the two of them had just met, but he’d already started to feel things for Elisa he hadn’t felt for other women before. Unless he was completely on another planet, he was pretty sure she felt the same things for him. When he’d kissed her the other day, she’d definitely reacted. Traveling to the other side of the planet for a considerable amount of time seemed like a pretty important piece of information.

Why hadn’t she said anything? Just the other day they’d spent a good amount of time discussing her career and what she had hoped for her future. Had Brody completely misread the signals from her?

YOU NEED A HAIRCUT, HENRY Cavill.”

Courtney Devlin, Brody’s outspoken and vivacious stepsister and Carol’s daughter, walked through the doors of the Golden Glove with a purposeful stride and yet another wild shade of hair. Normally she kept her hair short, probably because she didn’t want to bother styling it. Or she thought the cuts were edgy. Knowing his sister, it was the latter.

Today she’d changed things up by adding some kind of extensions that had some weird fading going on. The top of her head was almost black, then slowly transitioned to hot pink. Personally Brody thought it looked like she’d dipped the ends of her hair in a pitcher of Kool-Aid.

“I’ve asked you before not to call me that,” he warned her as her gaze continued to scrutinize his locks. The two-tone princess was really going to criticize his style?

Courtney elbowed her friend Rebecca, who’d accompanied his sister into the restaurant. Although Rebecca had yet to look up from her phone, where she’d been texting… or something.

“Don’t you think Brody looks like him?” she asked her friend.

“I don’t even know who that is,” Rebecca said without looking up from her cell.

Court rolled her eyes. “Hello? Man of Steel?” She tossed a look between him and Rebecca. “The Tudors?”

Rebecca shook her head, sending her red curls flying. “Nah, I got nothin’.”

“You’re both lame.” Court took her patchwork-quilt sling-style purse off her shoulder and set it on the bar top. Lately she’d been going through some weird hippie phase, and Brody could only guess she was having some kind of identity crisis.