Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) (7 page)

Right now, next week seemed light-years away. She would have agreed to almost anything just to be able to get her space back. She needed to get this presentation in top condition.

“Sure. Dinner. Next week. See you then, Mom.”

Coming around the desk, Eleanor paused just long enough to press a kiss to her daughter’s forehead. “Don’t work yourself to death, darling. Just remember, you belong to me—until you get married.”

“You make a persuasive argument for marriage,” she quipped before beginning to type. “Goodbye, Mom.” And then Erin glanced up one last time to add, “Sorry about last night.”

Eleanor merely nodded. “You’ll make it up to me,” she said knowingly.

There was a strange promise in her mother’s voice that Erin didn’t catch until she played the words back in her mind a minute later. Erin looked up, but her mother had gone, closing the door behind her again.

Erin shrugged. Maybe it was just her imagination going into overtime. In any case, she didn’t have time to try to figure out which it was and what her mother meant if it
was
some sort of promise. Right now she had a presentation to wrap up and that was all that really mattered.

* * *

It wasn’t until the next day, after she, Rhonda and Mike—with Gypsy in tow for when it came time to display their sales stats—had gone before representatives of The Toy Factory to pitch a number of her best creations, that Erin felt relaxed. The representatives had all been sufficiently impressed and said that they would talk to the board members but that they were very optimistic that they had a deal.

A minor precelebration—she wasn’t about to call it anything else until there was a contract for her to sign—was in swing when she remembered her promise from the day before. Not to her mother but to the man her mother had tried so hard to get her to talk about.

She’d promised Steve Kendall a replica of Tex for his son and she never broke a promise.

At least not intentionally, she amended, thinking of the dinner at her mother’s that she’d forgotten about.

What if Steve had told his son that the stuffed animal was coming in the mail? If she’d mailed it yesterday, then the boy would be anticipating it to arrive today. Even if she expressed it in the next few minutes, there was no way that it would be there in time. Suddenly, she had an image of the slight boy with the curly blond hair standing next to his mailbox, watching as the mailman stuffed only letters into the box before driving off. There were times when there was such a thing as having
too
much imagination.

But that didn’t change the fact that the package wouldn’t get there today. She knew what it felt like to be disappointed. There was no way that she wanted to be the reason that a child experienced that feeling.

Erin made up her mind.

She looked around at the other people in the giant room that served as the area where they brainstormed, created and manufactured the toys that were sold under the Imagine That banner. There were six people here, not counting her. Gypsy, her assistant, was also their go-to IT person. Rhonda and Mike were the ones who did most of the brainstorming with her while Judith, Neal and Christian took the drawings and made them into three-dimensional toys. They had become as much a part of her family as her mother was.

“Guys, I’ve got to go,” she announced, trying to remember where she’d left her oversize purse.

“But you’re the guest of honor—you can’t leave,” Christian protested.

“We’ll have to stop partying,” Gypsy said, pouting.

“No, you won’t. You all worked hard,” Erin told them. “You go right on partying. But I have a promise to keep.”

“Right, dinner with your mother,” Mike said, nodding his head. “You’d better go. You’ve already stood her up once this week.”

Erin stared at him, only slightly dumbfounded. “Does everyone know every detail of my life?” she asked.

“What life, sweetness?” Christian teased. “You live here, remember? With us. All we’d need to do is put in a couple more hours a day and we’d be like that reality show where a whole bunch of people live together.”

“Except that we have more class and we don’t get on each other’s nerves,” Gypsy said brightly.

“Speak for yourself,” Mike deadpanned. “Me, I’d mow the lot of you down in an instant for box seats at a Dodgers game.”

“He’s kidding,” Gypsy said with a nervous laugh, then looked at Erin as the latter began to leave. “He’s kidding, right?”

Despite her uncanny ability when it came to computers, Gypsy had the innocence of a child at times. “Yes, he’s kidding, aren’t you, Mike?” Erin said pointedly.

Rail thin and dark haired, Mike saluted her. “Whatever you say, my liege.”

“Maybe we should keep less long hours,” Erin concluded.

“From your lips to God’s ears, boss,” Mike agreed, calling after her.

Erin merely waved her hand over her head to indicate that she’d heard. But she kept walking, knowing if she stopped even for a moment longer, chances were that she’d never get out.

And there was a little boy out there, waiting for a dinosaur.

Chapter Six

E
rin parked next to the curb, turned off her engine and then took a deep breath as she gathered herself together.

This wasn’t something she normally did, but then, the last couple of days had definitely been spent out of her comfort zone. First addressing a classroom of children, then pitching a partnership with a toy-store chain and now this personalized delivery service. Not exactly on the same level as slaying dragons, but still, for her, not something she was all that accustomed to.

But to not do this would somehow be breaking her word to a child, even if that word had been given through a third person.

Okay, let’s do this and go.

Getting out of her vintage white Civic, Erin rounded the hood and went to the passenger side.

“Let’s go, big fella,” she said to the large stuffed dinosaur that had been riding shotgun over to Jason Kendall’s home.

The plan was simple enough. She was going to put the Tex the T. rex toy on the front doorstep, ring the doorbell and leave. No explanations seemed necessary. All Jason needed to do was take one look at the dinosaur and her presence would have been superfluous.

She managed to get the putting-down part and the ringing-the-doorbell part right, but when she herself turned to quickly leave, the left heel of her stiletto got caught in a minor crack in the cement step that she hadn’t even noticed until it took her shoe prisoner.

So instead of pivoting and going, she pivoted and suddenly found herself lunging forward because her left shoe, which sported laces up past her ankle, didn’t go along with the momentum of the rest of her.

When the front door was opened in response to the doorbell, the person standing in the doorway found her in a crouching position on the front step. For a moment, the cheery-looking green dinosaur in the cowboy hat and holster went completely unnoticed.

“Erin?” Steve said quizzically, trying to make some sense of what he was looking at.

She looked at him over her shoulder. There was a chagrined expression on her face. “Sorry, I was just going to drop Tex off and go, but your front step seemed to have other ideas,” she told him. “I think it wants to keep my shoe for a souvenir.”

“Are you hurt?” was the first thing he asked.

“No, I have very resilient ankles,” she said wryly, wishing there were a way to just make herself disappear.

As if he was suddenly coming to, Steve quickly said, “Here, let me help you up.”

Taking her hands, he drew Erin up to her feet. For a second he was acutely aware that her body seemed to be exceedingly close to his. There wasn’t enough space between them for a vanilla wafer and he could feel a great many emotions he’d thought long dead and buried stirring within him, apparently very much alive.

Forcing himself to focus on
her
problem and not his, he looked down at her captive foot. The shoe still wasn’t budging, so Steve bent down to the shoe’s level to see what he could do. As he took hold of her ankle, he tried to pull her free of the crack.

Belatedly, he glanced up and asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Well, ordinarily I don’t usually let a guy touch my ankle until the third date, but in this case, do what you have to,” she cracked. When he seemed a wee bit puzzled, she shrugged. “Sorry, I tend to make jokes when I’m uncomfortable.”

“Physically or emotionally?”

“Both.” She was still stuck and growing more embarrassed by the second. “Maybe if I stepped out of the shoe,” Erin suggested.

Since the shoes were laced up in the front, she started to bend down to loosen the laces. He beat her to it by undoing the bow at the top.

“I’ll do it,” he volunteered, then realized that she might not want him to. He had no idea what the right or wrong thing in this situation actually was. “Unless you have some objection to that.”

“Why? It’s a shoe, not a dress. Besides, I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to be Cinderella in reverse.”

She saw the question in his eyes. “You know, instead of trying on the glass slipper, the slipper’s being taken off.” Feeling really awkward, Erin blew out a breath. “Maybe I should just keep quiet. Talking isn’t always my forte.”

Steve laughed, shaking his head. “You sure could have fooled me,” he told her. Glancing down at her shoe, he finished untying the laces. “Okay, I’ve taken your foot out of bondage.”

Erin quickly slipped out of the trapped shoe. Standing unevenly on the step with one foot bare while the other was still wearing the four-inch heel, she watched as Steve gently rocked her shoe back and forth until he managed to free the heel out of the crack it’d been stuck in. Miraculously, the heel remained intact. She’d expected it to break in half.

“There you go,” Steve declared, rising to his feet and offering her the shoe. “Good as new.”

One hand on his shoulder to brace herself, Erin slipped her shoe back on. “Too bad the same can’t be said about my pride.”

“Wait,” Steve said as she began to take a step. Crouching again, he started lacing up the shoe. “You don’t want to trip on your laces,” he told her, then got back to what she’d just said. “Why? What’s wrong with your pride?”

He was just being nice, she thought, pretending not to know. “I wasn’t exactly the last word in gracefulness when you opened the door just now.”

Finished, he rose again. “You weren’t? I didn’t notice a thing,” he said, keeping a straight face. “Well, now that you’re no longer a damsel in distress, why don’t you come in for a few minutes?” he proposed, nodding toward the inside of his house.

She just wanted to slink away as fast as possible. “No, that’s all right. I don’t want to impose—”

But as she began to go, Steve caught her wrist, holding it lightly. “There’s no one in the house except for Jason and me—and we’re not imposable.”

Was that even a word? She knew better than to ask. But even so, Erin still just wanted to leave the scene of her less-than-graceful interlude. “I just wanted to drop off Tex, like I promised.”

“When you mentioned giving one to Jason yesterday, I thought you were going to mail it to him, not hand-deliver it.”

“I
was
going to mail it,” she explained. “But then I got caught up in getting ready for the presentation to the toy-store chain and I forgot all about sending a Tex plush toy to Jason,” she admitted.

Frankly, he was surprised that she remembered the promise two minutes after she’d left the café. That she hadn’t forgotten impressed him and had him looking at her in a very different, interested light.

“So you came by to deliver it in person?” he questioned incredulously.

The shrug seemed automatic. “I hate breaking promises to children.”

“I was the one you told,” he reminded her. “Not Jason. Just what exactly is your cutoff point for the term
children?
” he asked, amused.

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to imply that I thought
you
were a child,” she said quickly. As she continued, her momentum picked up with every word she uttered. She was all but breathless by the end. “It’s just that I thought you might have told Jason and then if
he
was expecting to get Tex in the mail and nothing showed up, he’d be disappointed and—”

Now he really
was
impressed. “Wow, you really are one of a kind,” he marveled. Steve picked up the dinosaur that was still standing there on the front step and practically pushed it into her hands. “Now you really have to hand this to Jason in person.” As she began to demur, he told her, “Trust me, this is going to be one of those things that’ll leave a huge impression on him when he looks back. And maybe, just maybe, getting this from you might manage to tear him away from that video game he won’t stop playing.”

Aware only of her parents’ approach to child rearing, Erin asked him a very obvious question. “Have you tried to get him to stop playing?”

Did she think he was that much of a pushover? “I have.”

“And?” she asked, her voice trailing off after uttering the single word.

“And Jason acts as if I’ve literally cut out his heart. He cries—not wild, tantrumlike screams but quiet, heartbreaking sobs.” Steve sighed. Another father might have stuck to his guns, but he wasn’t another father. He was the father of a seven-year-old who’d lost his mother and was trying to find his place in the world. “I wind up handing the game back to him, telling him it was okay. I know I should just put my foot down, but he’s been through so much, I just don’t want to add to that trauma even a little bit.”

Steve shrugged helplessly, looking down at the stuffed animal she now had in her arms. “I guess I’m hoping that Tex can do what I can’t. Separate Jason from his video game.”

Touched, Erin nodded her head. She couldn’t just leave after that. It just wouldn’t be right. “If you put it that way, I guess I really can’t say no—”

Steve grinned broadly. “I was really counting on that—now that you’re here,” he added.

Steve held the door open for her, then closed it behind them.

Erin stood in the foyer and looked around for a moment, getting her bearings. Directly in front of her was a long, winding staircase. On her right was what appeared to be a formal living room while the left led to what she took to be a family room.

She suddenly heard the loud sound of things breaking and falling. She looked toward Steve for some sort of an explanation.

He didn’t have to look to know. The sound was more than familiar to him.

“That would be the latest batch of aliens dying by Jason’s hand. He’s gotten very good at wiping out eight-foot gray aliens. The universe should be safe for another day.”

“I see. I guess I can buy some green bananas, then. They’ll have a chance to ripen,” she explained, flashing a smile at him that he found to be almost electrifying.

“Hey, buddy, there’s someone here to see you,” Steve called out to his son as they entered the family room.

As was his habit, Jason was in the room lying flat on his stomach, every fiber of his being focused on the action on the screen and what he was doing—eliminating the alien threat so that everyone he loved would be safe for another night.

The seven-year-old was so engrossed in the video game he barely grunted an acknowledgment to what his father had just said. It was obvious that he hadn’t heard a single word, just the familiar drone of his father’s voice.

Steve was about to tell Jason to shut off the game—Erin could just tell by his body language.

Instead she surprised him by placing a hand on
his
wrist to keep him from saying anything else or issuing any sort of an ultimatum to the boy.

The next moment, the voice of Tex the T. rex was heard saying, “Whatcha doin’, Jason?”

Stunned, surprised, Jason instantly scrambled up off his stomach and temporarily forgot about his alien-killing mission. His eyes grew as large as the proverbial saucers when his suspicions turned out to be true. Tex was in his house, being held by the lady who had been to his classroom yesterday along with his father.

“You’re the lady with Tex the T. rex,” he cried in disbelief.

Erin grinned as she glanced in Steve’s direction. “Magna cum laude in my graduating class and I’m now ‘the lady with Tex the T. rex,’” she said, shaking her head. But one look at her face told Steve she was both amused and pleased by the label—which, after all, was a kind of fame all its own.

“Yes, I am,” she answered the boy. “I dropped by to bring you Tex Jr.” She nodded at the stuffed toy she was holding.

“There’s a Tex Jr.?” Jason asked her in wide-eyed surprise.

“There is indeed and he’s here to keep you company.” Erin held out the toy to him.

Jason took it rather tentatively. “I thought I was going to get Tex.”

“Jason,” Steve chided, embarrassed. “That’s not what you say.”

“It’s okay,” Erin assured him, then turned toward the boy. “I’m afraid I couldn’t give him away,” she told Jason solemnly. “Tex the T. rex is my very best friend. You wouldn’t want me to give away my best friend, now, would you, Jason?” she asked.

Jason was quiet for a moment, as if he was actually pondering the question she had put to him. Then, with a huge sigh that seemed to reverberate throughout his small body, he said with a touch of resignation, “No, I guess not.” Then he looked down at the stuffed dinosaur he
was
holding. “But it’s okay to give Tex Jr. away?” he asked.

The boy had a sharp mind, she thought. “Well, not just away to anyone, mind you,” she said as seriously as if she were having a conversation with an adult about this. “I mean, it has to be someone special. Someone who’s going to promise not to let Tex Jr. get too lonely and start missing his dad.”

She pretended to regard Jason for a long moment, as if assessing whether or not he could live up to his responsibilities.

“Think you’re up to doing that?” she asked. Jason bobbed his head up and down even as she continued. “That means that you have to be there for him any time he needs you.” When he nodded again, she pretended to cup her ear as if to pick up any stray sound. “I can’t hear you,” she said in her best drill-sergeant voice.

“Yes, I can!” Jason declared with enthusiasm.

Erin nodded, as if he had finally managed to convince her. “Okay, then Tex Jr. is all yours. Remember to always love him and be there for him.”

“I will.” He looked down at the plush toy in his arms. “Hi, I’m Jason. I’m your new friend,” he told the dinosaur. “What do you wanna do first?” When he received no response from the toy, he looked up at Erin, confused. “How come he doesn’t talk?” he asked.

“Well, that’s really all up to you and your imagination,” she told the boy.

“Me?” he asked, puzzled. “How?”

“You’re the one who has to put the words in his mouth. Just like I’m the one who puts words into Tex Sr.’s mouth.”

The revelation seemed to only confuse Jason more.

Steve wanted to step in with an explanation of his own, but he was curious to see how this energetic dynamo was going to handle it, so he kept quiet.

“You make Tex talk?” Jason asked in wonder.

Erin nodded. “Yes, I do.”