On the Fly Read Online Free PDF Page B

laughter at his antics. “Into the bathroom, right
this second. Go clean yourself up. I don’t want any sticky stuff in
my car, you hear?”
    He was still giggling like a loon
while he pranced off to wash. I set to work wiping down the table,
and Maddie took all our trash to throw it away. When Tuck came
back, his hair and shirt were drenched but at least he was
clean.
    “ You’d better zip your coat
up tight before we go outside,” I told him. None of us were used to
the colder weather here yet. In Texas, we were more likely to have
temperatures in the seventies than in the thirties in
December.
    “ Yes, Mommy.” He got his
arms in and was struggling with the zipper, but Maddie helped him
close it.
    I pulled my own coat on and slipped my
purse strap over my head so it hung across my body. “All right.
Ready to go see the new place?”
    “ Are we staying there
tonight?” Maddie asked. She sounded nervous.
    I hated that there’d been so much
change for her, but change was necessary. “Not tonight. We’re just
looking tonight.” That’d give her time to adjust to the idea and me
time to get some furniture in there, some beds to sleep
on.
    “ Okay.”
    A minute later, I’d parked the car and
was leading the kids to the elevator. Our unit was on the twelfth
floor. We got off, and I led them down the hall to our door. I’d
just put the key in the lock when the door to the unit directly
across the hall from ours opened.
    Out of habit, I turned to smile at my
new neighbor, my Texan nature shining through.
    Then I froze.
    Brenden Campbell—the too tall, too
big, and entirely too good-looking hockey player who’d hounded me
for a date earlier—was standing in the hallway between our doors.
He had a wheeled suitcase in his hand and a question in his
eye.
    “ Hi, Rachel,” he
said.
    Shit .
    “ Mommy?” Maddie moved
closer to me and reached up to put her hand in mine.
    She never wanted to hold my hand
anymore.
    I finished unlocking the door and
opened it. “How about y’all go check it out? I’ll be in in a
minute, okay?”
    They went in, and I closed the door
after them. I could hear Tuck’s little feet clomping along as he
raced from room to room. I turned around to find Brenden staring at
me. Hard.
    “ So you live here?” I
finally asked.
    “ Yeah, me and Babs—one of
the other guys on the team. And you’re moving in?”
    I nodded.
    His eyes practically sparkled when he
smiled at me, and my belly flipped with awareness. “Martha told me
you were going to be Jim’s new assistant. And now we’re living
across from each other? Well, that’ll make things nice and
convenient.”
    Convenient? Hardly. Awkward would be a
heck of a lot more like it.
    He rocked on his feet. “Yeah. Well,
I’ve got to go. I’m heading to Seattle for the week. If you need
anything, Babs is a good kid. He’ll help you.”
    “ Yeah. Thanks,” I said. I
had no intention of asking this Babs person for help, or Brenden
Campbell, or anyone else. It had been hard enough to accept the
help Jim Sutter had insisted on giving me.
    Brenden started heading toward the
elevator, but then he stopped and turned around. He was smiling
again, that same smile he’d given me a moment ago that made me
tingle in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. “Just don’t let Babs
cook,” he said. “Unless you want your kids to die of food poisoning
or the place to go up in flames.”
    I was pretty sure he was flirting with
me. How sad was that, that a man might be flirting with me but I
didn’t know for sure? I laughed briefly, but then he got onto the
elevator and was gone.
    A nervous zing raced through me. I
tried to convince myself that it was because of the job, the new
condo, all the changes taking place. Not because of Brenden
Campbell.
    But that was a lie, and I damn well
knew it.

 

     
     

    I unloaded two of the dozen boxes from my trunk and stacked them
one on top of the other. Then I tested their weight. It wasn’t too
bad. These