Stolen Kiss with the Single Mom Read online

  For the second time that day time stood still for him—except that this time, instead of a nightmare, it had felt more like a dream come true.

  But nothing could happen between him and Lacey. He’d promised her husband that he would take care of her and Alston and that promise had never included anything but friendship. A friend didn’t make moves on his dead friend’s wife. That was just not done.

  He turned east and watched the sun as it rose across the sky, creating a work of art with its blend of pinks, purples and blues that no human artist could ever truly copy. The night was over and a new day was beginning. Each day was as unique as its sunrise, and he’d learned the hard way that no one knew when a day began how it would end.

  He lived his life with the motto that you had to live each day as if it was your last. There were no promises of tomorrow. You had to make the life you wanted now, because today was all you could count on till the sun began to rise again.

  Only sometimes life came with unexpected complications that you weren’t prepared for—and the kiss he had just shared with Lacey was one big complication.

  He headed back to the ER. Maybe he should have fought off the need he’d had to kiss Lacey, but he’d needed to reassure himself that she was alive and with him at that moment.

  He’d explain it to her. They’d been friends for a long time and he would never have purposely done anything to threaten that friendship. Surely she wouldn’t let one kiss in the heat of the moment ruin what they had between the two of them? They were both adults and it had only been one kiss. Just one kiss.

  But what a kiss it had been.

  * * *

  Lacey tried to pay attention to the convoluted story her eight-year-old was telling her, but her mind kept wandering back to the last shift she’d worked. She’d been able to throw off the fear that had seized her the night before after she’d gotten some sleep, thank goodness. And she’d mostly managed to file the experience with the intoxicated patient in the back of her mind, with all the other memories she hoped to forget someday.

  Now she found that it wasn’t the fact that she had been held hostage with a cold scalpel against her neck that occupied her mind. Instead it was what had happened later, between her and Scott. What had he...she...they been thinking?

  They’d both been recovering from a flood of adrenaline. They’d both been scared and had needed reassurance that the two of them were safe. She could even have pushed the line a little, with the two of them sharing a hug, a kiss on the cheek, but that kiss...

  That hadn’t been the kiss of two friends, sharing their fear of what might have been. No, that kiss had definitely not been a kiss between two friends.

  The feel of her fingers against her lips broke through her daydreaming and she jerked them away. Scott would be here at any minute, to take Alston to soccer practice, and she didn’t need him to think she was obsessing over a kiss that had meant nothing to either one of them.

  “And then Ms. Little told me to leave the class and never come back,” Alston said.

  “What?” she said.

  She caught the glass of milk her hand had hit before it toppled over, then sent her son her most intimidating Mommy stare.

  “Alston Benjamin Miller—what did you say?” She watched as Alston’s face broke out into a grin.

  “Gotcha!” he said, then jumped down from his seat and began dancing around in a circle, making sounds that reminded her of an injured cow.

  Marching around the corner of the counter, she grabbed her son up in her arms and squeezed. He was her life, her everything. If anything ever happened to him...

  She squeezed him tighter as he made fake choking sounds. He looked up at her and she thought her heart would stop. He’d been born with her red hair and green eyes, but that mischievous smile with its pair of dimples had come straight from Ben. He was growing up so fast and there was nothing she could do to slow the time down.

  She gave him another squeeze, then put him back down. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I should have been paying more attention.”

  “It’s okay,” Alston said.

  “Tonight we’ll order pizza and you can tell me the whole story again.”

  The doorbell rang, which sent him running for the door.

  “Slow down!” she called after him.

  She caught herself questioning her choice of shorts and an old hospital T-shirt. What was wrong with her? One kiss with a man and all of a sudden she was making a fool of herself. This had to stop now. She’d been kissed many times before she’d met Ben.

  But you’ve haven’t been kissed since Ben.

  Her mind froze on that thought. Was the problem she was having with the memory of kissing Scott as simple as that? If so, then this strange quiver she had in her stomach at the thought of seeing him would surely go away soon.

  She had just loaded the last glass into the dishwasher when Alston and Scott came into the room.

  “Hurry and grab your shoes,” she said to her son. “You don’t want to keep Scott waiting.”

  She tried to make her eyes look up at Scott, but instead she busied herself wiping down the counters. She turned her back to him to clean the stove top, and then stopped. She was acting like an immature teenager instead of the mature single mom that she was.

  Turning around to face Scott, she pasted her most friendly smile on her face—the one she used when a patient was really annoying, but she knew she had to play nice.

  “You okay? I’m sorry that happened yesterday,” Scott said as he moved over to where Alston had dropped his soccer bag. He grabbed the bag, then moved to the counter. “I started to call last night, to check on you, but I didn’t want to wake you. I figured you’d have had a hard time sleeping. I know I did.”

  Did he really want to talk about this now? Where did they start?

  You shouldn’t have kissed me?

  I shouldn’t have kissed you back?

  What did he mean, he’d had a hard time sleeping? Had thinking of that kiss kept him awake like it had her? Did he have the same strange quiver in his stomach that she had? And he wanted to talk about it now? No, that couldn’t be what he meant. They had to put that kiss behind them. They had a great relationship and they couldn’t afford to lose it.

  “We can’t do that again,” she said, then squeezed her eyes shut. Why couldn’t her mouth get on track with her mind? She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes. “What I meant to say is that I think it would be best if you didn’t kiss me again.”

  “Um... Lacey, I was talking about that patient grabbing you and trying to take you hostage,” Scott said, his eyes now looking away from her.

  Of course he was talking about the patient with the scalpel. He probably hadn’t given the kiss they’d shared another thought. The man probably went around kissing women all the time. What would one kiss shared with a friend mean to him?

  They both looked up as Alston came back into the room.

  “Why’d someone grab you?” Alston asked, hands on his hips as if he was preparing to interrogate her.

  Scott gave her a guilty smile, then ran his hand over her son’s ginger hair. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he told the boy, who was now making a show of studying the two of them.

  “If someone hurt my mom I’ll punch them in the nose,” Alston said, and he brought his small fist up and shook it.

  She watched as Scott’s lips twitched and they both held back laughter.

  “Mikey said his big brother punched his sister’s boyfriend in the nose. He said there was blood everywhere. Mikey’s mom got mad about the blood and made his brother apologize to the jerk.”

  “Jerk?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what Mikey called him. Was it a jerk that grabbed you?” he asked her.

  “It was definitely a jerk,” Scott said. “But the cops took care of him so you don’
t need to punch him.”

  She could see that her son was ready to argue the point and she wasn’t prepared for that now.

  Alston took his position as the “man” of the house very seriously. He’d begun by taking out the garbage, though at first that had been more of a mess than if she had done it herself, but she’d known it made him feel like he was helping out so she’d watched him drag the trash bag out through the back door and then hurried to clean up the mess he’d left on the floor before he could return and see it.

  “Y’all better get going or you’re going to be late for practice,” she reminded the two of them.

  “Let’s go,” Scott said, and he wrapped his arm around her son’s shoulder as they headed for the door.

  “Oh, and about that other thing... If you want to talk about it later we can,” Scott said, though from the tight expression on his face she knew he would prefer not to talk about it.

  “There’s nothing to talk about. Everything’s good. We’re good, right?” she asked, and held her breath waiting for his answer.

  “Yeah, sure. We’re good,” Scott said, and he hurried out the door with her son without looking back at her.

  She took in a deep breath as the front door shut. The man was certainly not going to make this easy for her. And it was entirely that kiss’s fault.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WITHOUT THE BUFFER of Alston between the two of them Lacey and Scott had fallen into an awkward pattern of nods and one-word comments, which were not making their work situation a good one.

  She looked over at him now, as he carefully numbed her patient’s arm. While most teenagers would have been looking away or turning pale on seeing the long needle, this kid was totally enthralled by the scene.

  Scott reached for the suture she had prepared for him just as she reached for a four-by-four, and their hands touched for a second before they both pulled back as if burnt, the motion sending the tray stand rocking precariously.

  Grabbing the stand support, she steadied the tray, then looked over at Scott. “Sorry, I’m a bit clumsy today,” she said, as she tried to cover the new self-consciousness she felt when they were this close.

  Scott acknowledged her comment with another of his nods before he reached again for the suture and carefully sewed the cut closed.

  “Wow! Mom, are you watching this?” asked Kevin, their patient. “This is sick.”

  “No, Kevin. I do not want to watch,” the boy’s mother answered back “And you’re right. Anyone who’d want to watch is sick.”

  Lacey looked over to where the woman sat on an old plastic chair that had been pushed into the corner when she had brought the tray stand into the room. The woman, who had been handling her son’s skateboard wreck well enough when they had first arrived, was now pale and diaphoretic.

  Lacey felt like kicking herself. If she hadn’t been so absorbed in her own feelings she would have seen this coming sooner.

  Leaving the boy’s side, she went over to where the woman was now hunched over with her head down between her legs. Kneeling beside her, Lacey ripped open an alcohol swab package and handed it to her.

  “This will help some. I’ll get you a washcloth. Dr. Boudreaux is almost finished,” Lacey said.

  The woman looked up and gave her a weak smile. “I’m sorry about this. I’ve never had a problem before,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, but don’t tell any of the other staff members,” Lacey said as she moved closer to the woman. “I can handle the most gory trauma patients that come in here, but if my son gets a cut I have to call Dr. Boudreaux to handle it every time. It’s just different when it’s your kid that’s hurt.”

  “Yeah, it is,” the woman said.

  Lacey noticed that some of her color was back and she had started to sit up now.

  “Okay, I’m finished,” Scott said. “Kevin, you are one tough kid. Maybe you should think about being a surgeon when you grow up.”

  “Maybe,” Kevin said. “It would be real cool to be able to sew people up. But I’m more interested in electronics. Especially robots.”

  “They are pretty cool. Did you know they’re using them in surgery now?” Scott said. “Someday it might be a robot stitching you up.”

  The boy’s eyes grew big and his mother rolled her eyes.

  “Let’s not plan on getting any more stitches,” she mother said as she moved from the chair to the exam table.

  She thanked Scott, then turned to Lacey when he’d left the room.

  “He’s a very nice man,” she said to Lacey, “and good with kids.”

  “Yes, he is,” Lacey said.

  “And he’s hot, too,” the woman said.

  Lacey laughed as Kevin moaned at his mother’s comment, and then excused herself so that she could get the necessary discharge paperwork. As she walked back to the nurses’ station she saw one of the security guards heading her way.

  “Hey, Lacey!” Karen called to her. “We need some help.”

  “What’s up?” Lacey asked, as she signed on to her computer.

  “There’s an elderly man in the lobby who insists his wife works here, but I’ve called all the units and all the offices are closed,” the guard stated.

  “He doesn’t know where his wife works?” Lacey asked as she worked to finish up Kevin’s paperwork.

  “That’s it—he seems very confused and I don’t know what to do with him,” Karen said. “He can’t give me an address or a phone number so that I can call his family. I’d feel better if you could check him out for me.”

  Lacey looked up at the large screen hanging over the station. They were busy, but there were still a few open rooms.

  “Take him to Fifteen and I’ll come by as soon as I get this discharge done,” she said.

  Lacey finished the discharge, then headed to Room Fifteen. She’d worked with Karen long enough to know she wouldn’t have asked for help unless she had legitimate concerns.

  An elderly man with mocha skin and snow-white hair sat in the chair next to where Karen stood. He was dressed in gray striped dress pants and a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. The fact that he was clean and well-dressed told her that the man was not homeless—or at least hadn’t been homeless for very long.

  “Lacey, this is Mr. Myers,” Karen said. “Mr. Myers, this is Lacey. She’s the charge nurse on duty right now.”

  The man stood and offered Lacey his hand.

  “Can you help me find my Janie?” the man asked after they shook hands.

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll try,” Lacey said. “Karen says that your wife works here at the hospital. Do you know what she does here?”

  Lacey found it hard to believe that this man’s wife would still be working, if she was near his age, but they did have some older volunteers who worked at the hospital. She watched as the man tried to work through her question. She could see his frustration and understood why Karen had brought him to her.

  “I tell you what, let’s work through this another way. If you can give me your first name and your date of birth I can go check our records. Maybe then I can get a phone number, and we can call her and let her know you’re here to see her.”

  To her relief the man rattled off his birthdate without any trouble.

  “And your first name?”

  “Pop,” the man said.

  “Pop?” she asked.

  “Yes, they call me Pop,” he said.

  “I’m going to go see what I can find out. Can you wait here for me? I’ll try not to be long.”

  The man agreed, then sat down in the chair. She noticed for the first time the small bouquet of daisies held in the man’s hand. Hoping she’d be able to pull up his information in the hospital data bank, she went back to the nurses’ station.

  She caught herself looking over at Scott, where
he sat across from her, working on his own computer. She thought about what the woman had said before she’d left and she had to agree. Scott was hot.

  He’d let his hair grow out since he’d come home from Afghanistan, and he’d pulled it back today into a stubby ponytail. She’d joked with him last week about him growing out a man bun, pulling it back from his face to show him that he was close to having enough hair to put it up. But that had been before the kiss that had made things awkward between the two of them. Somehow that now seemed too intimate.

  She was letting that stupid kiss, that hot and toe-curling kiss, ruin everything. All she wanted was for things to go back to the way they had been before they’d muddled things up.

  Using the frustration that filled her, she hammered the keys of her keyboard. Right now she needed to be more concerned with finding information on Mr. Myers than how she was going to work things out between her and Scott.

  “What’s wrong?” Scott said from behind her.

  Jumping, Lacey swore, and then turned her chair around to face him.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  She heard the anger in her voice and stopped. This was not the way to fix things between the two of them.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated,” she said. “I’m trying to find some information so I can call this man’s family, but he can’t tell me his phone number or where he lives. He says his name is Pop, which has to be a nickname. It’s probably what his grandkids call him. Not surprisingly, I can’t find anything under the name Pop Myers.”

  “Pop Myers? The Pop Myers?” Scott said, and smiled for the first time that day.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  “I know of him,” Scott said. “He’s an amazing blues and jazz piano player.”

  “That’s great, but what I need right now is a number or an address for where he lives. His wife is probably out looking for him,” Lacey said as she turned back to her computer screen.

  “Hold on,” Scott said. “I think I know someone who can help.”