Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) (8 page)

Convinced that she was teasing him, Jason protested adamantly, “No, you don’t. You’re making that up,” he insisted. “Tex doesn’t sound like you and I don’t see your mouth move when he talks.”

“That’s because she’s a ventriloquist,” Steve told his son, coming to her rescue.

“A what-o-quist?” the boy asked, his small eyebrows puckered into a wavy, quizzical line.

“Ventriloquist,” Erin repeated, then explained, “It means someone who throws their voice.”

Jason looked more confused than ever as he looked from the woman who had given him the very silent Tex Jr. to his father, who had never lied to him before.

“I don’t get it. How can anyone throw a voice?” he asked, and then brightened. “Is it like throwing a ball?”

“Maybe,” she agreed, trying to figure out how to make the analogy work for the boy. “It’s like throwing an invisible ball and making it land right in front of who you
think
you’re talking to.”

Jason frowned. “Prove it,” he said. “Make him say my name, sounding like big Tex,” he requested.

Well, at least that was easy enough, Erin thought.

“Hi, I’m Tex Sr., Jason,” his new stuffed toy said. “And I’m too old for these silly games. I just like smart games—like jumping out airplanes and big, brave stuff like that.”

Erin frowned and gave the dinosaur a long reproving look. She blew out a breath, then asked sternly, “Tex, what did we say?”

The smaller version of her first stuffed dinosaur suddenly hung its head.

“You said not to brag.” And then the toy’s head bobbed up. “But I wasn’t bragging. I was just saying it like it was.”

“Tex.” She drew out his name like a mother calling her child out on the carpet because he’d just told a lie.

There was a loud huff of a sigh. “Okay, okay, I was saying it like it wasn’t. Can’t a guy have a little fun around here? Huh? Can’t he? Can’t he?”

Erin arched one eyebrow as she looked down at the toy. “If you ask me, you’re having a little too much fun, Tex.”

“Ha!” That was when the dinosaur raised his little green chin. “There’s no such thing as too much fun—right, Jason?” he asked, turning toward the boy. “C’mon, boy, back me up here.”

Jason giggled, very pleased to be drawn into this new game. “Right!” he declared with enthusiasm.

“Okay, now you see how it’s done?” Erin asked the little boy as she handed the toy back to him.

Jason inclined his head, willingly conceding the point. But he was also aware of what he viewed as an obvious problem.

“But I can’t do it like you. My lips move when I talk,” Jason protested.

“That’s okay. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that,” Erin assured him. “As long as you hear Tex Jr. saying the words in your imagination, it’s the same thing and that’s really all that counts. You see, the point is to use your imagination, Jason,” she told him with emphasis. To underscore her point, she tapped his forehead lightly with her forefinger.

“Is that where my imagination is?” Jason asked, touching where Tex’s friend had just tapped his forehead. “Right there? Inside my head?” he specified, doing his best to look serious.

“Right there,” she confirmed. “In your mind. All you have to do is tap into it.” Leaning over so that her lips were close to Jason’s ear, she whispered, “Think about it and it will be.”

Erin drew away to see if her words had made the right impression.

The boy’s eyes were sparkling, as if he had just been given the secret of life.

“Really?” he asked in a hushed, almost worshipful voice.

“Really,” she repeated with solemnity.

“Wow.” Jason’s smile was wide, excited and close to heart melting as he hugged his new toy to him and said to Erin, his voice muffled against the green plush material, “Thank you!”

“You are very welcome, Jason,” she responded. “My pleasure entirely.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Steve beaming at her, a father grateful to her for what she’d just done for his son.

Something very warm and enveloping stirred within her.

Chapter Seven

W
atching his son from across the room, Steve’s arms were folded in front of his chest as if that stoic pose could somehow help him absorb what had just transpired before him.

When Erin came to join him, Steve lowered his voice and confided, “You know, this really is somewhat awe-inspiring.”

Erin wasn’t quite sure she was following him. “What is?” she asked in the same low whisper that he’d just used.

He didn’t answer immediately. Just for the slightest moment, with Erin whispering back to him like that, it almost felt as if they were sharing some sort of intimate secret instead of what turned out to be an observation he was making.

The next moment, he pushed the feeling aside.

“I think I’ve just witnessed my first miracle,” Steve told her, silently giving her all the credit for bringing the miracle about. “I didn’t think anything but school and a strictly enforced bedtime could separate Jason from that infernal video game of his.” He shook his head as he glanced toward the frozen screen—Jason had paused the game and the bottom of the monitor appeared to be littered with no-longer-functioning aliens. “He’s been playing it for more than the last eighteen months. I was beginning to hear those aliens making that awful noise as they were being decimated in my sleep.”

She could see that Steve was relieved—but she didn’t want him getting carried away or thinking that the video game’s reign was permanently over. Because it just might not be.

“It’s not exactly a magic solution,” Erin cautioned him, “but maybe it’s actually a good start.”

The woman was definitely a great deal less self-absorbed than any of the women he’d gone out with in the past few months. In his book, that made her far more genuine.

Maybe if one of the women he’d dated had been more like her, he wouldn’t have sworn off dating.

“There’s such a thing as undue modesty,” he told her. “I just want you to know that you and Tex saved not one but two lives today.”

She glanced back at the boy, then looked at Steve, confused. “Two?”

“Yes, my son—and my sanity. Technically, that would mean me, so you saved my life, as well. I really didn’t know how much more I could take,” he admitted now that there had been this breakthrough. “Jason used to be a happy, outgoing kid, but after Julia died—and especially since he started playing that video game—he became very isolated in that world of his.”

She watched the boy as he played with the dinosaur. He was mirroring actions she’d witnessed in the test playgroups she’d conducted. Tex had sparked the boy’s imagination. That was an exceptionally hopeful sign.

“Like I said, it’s a start. I’m not an expert,” Erin prefaced, choosing her words carefully. And then Steve interrupted her.

“You are in my book,” he interjected. “You’ve certainly achieved more in a small space of time than I or Mrs. Malone, his sitter, have in the past eighteen months or so.”

Erin started again. “I’m
not
an expert, but I’m pretty sure there will be some backsliding for Jason, so be prepared for it. That doesn’t mean he’ll go back to wrapping himself up in that video game and being uncommunicative and shutting you out. It just means that he’ll be looking to find just where he belongs in this world where he can no longer see his mother. It’s rough going, but I get the feeling that it’ll wind up being okay.”

Rather than view the possibilities negatively, Steve appeared to be genuinely impressed with what she was telling him.

“So tell me,” he began, “did you take child psychology along with creative toymaking?”

“No, but for a few years back there, I was a child,” she told him brightly. “And fortunately for my target audience, I am blessed with a
very
good memory. I can remember a
lot
of the things I felt back then as if they had all happened yesterday.” Never one to try to call attention to herself or take too much credit, Erin paused and gave him a shy smile. “What that also means is that I would be pretty awful at disciplining kids because I’d remember just how it felt to be in their shoes and that would make me automatically give them a pass.”

Steve read between the lines. “Then you don’t have any kids of your own?”

She shook her head and tried not to visualize her mother’s very disappointed expression as she said, “Nope, I’m afraid that I’ve never been lucky enough to have children.”

He supposed it was wrong to push the envelope a little further, especially considering what she’d just done for his son—and him—but something more than just idle curiosity had him asking Erin, “But you
have
been married.”

Erin shook her head again. “I took a pass on that, too. I was stuck in the hospital for over two years and when one day the doctors pronounced me cured, I couldn’t wait to get back to actually living my life and
doing
things.

“It always felt as if I was running way behind the pack, trying desperately to catch up on everything I’d missed. Trying to make my life count for something.” Erin flushed a little, feeling as if she was talking too much but wanting this man to understand where she was coming from. Understand where she’d been.

“I felt I had to prove to God that He did the right thing saving me. And I guess what happened was that I was so busy trying to amount to something, to make a difference, that I forgot to pay attention to what was an important part of my life—or so my mother keeps telling me,” she concluded with a grin.

“Let me guess. She’s after you to get married, settle down and start a family, right?”

Erin laughed. It was her turn to be impressed. “Good guess. I take it you know my mother?” she asked, only half kidding.

“No, but I’ve got one of those, too. A mother,” he explained in case she’d missed his meaning. “My mother was absolutely thrilled to death when Jason was born and, to give her credit, she was almost as devastated as I was when Julia died.” And then he thought that perhaps he’d failed to tell Erin his wife’s name. “Julia was my—”

“Wife,” Erin supplied nodding her head. “Yes, I picked up on that yesterday,” she told him sympathetically. “So has your mother begun dropping hints that maybe you should get married again?” she asked, fairly certain that she knew the answer to that.

Steve laughed. It was almost as if Erin had been looking into his life through a one-way glass.

“My mother doesn’t really understand the word
hint.
She’s more of the ‘let’s rent a billboard to catch his attention’ type. She definitely does
not
beat around the bush,” he added. “She was very gung ho about my getting back into the dating game.” Now that he thought about it, his mother had been the one to all but talk him into it. She’d thought it was a good idea for Jason’s sake.

“So you’re dating,” Erin concluded.

“No,” he corrected her. “I
was
dating.”

A man stopped dating for one of two reasons. Either he found the whole venture frustrating—and looking at him, she doubted that would have been the outcome—or he’d found someone to get serious about.

“Why the past tense?” she asked, feeling that perhaps he was just waiting for her to give him a verbal nudge so that he would give her the rest of the story.

Steve shrugged carelessly. “I found it just wasn’t for me. I’m not really comfortable with the whole ‘Am I impressing you enough?’ ritual,” he confided. “Besides, I found that the single women I dated weren’t looking to get into a relationship with a man who has a child.”

He knew that there had to be someone out there who would take Jason and him as a set, but for the moment, he’d decided just to take an extended break before getting back into that rat race. A very
long
extended break.

She kept watching Steve with a questioning look in her eyes. “Oh?”

He merely nodded. Truth be told, he was relieved to be taking this hiatus. There was just way too much pressure involved in dating.

“Yeah.”

“And why do you think that is?” Erin asked, curious as to his reasoning as well as just what sort of women he had encountered to sour him this way on the whole concept of dating.

“Well, for one thing, I think the more intelligent ones realized that because I had a son, it meant that they wouldn’t always be first. To be very honest, I don’t mind saying that my son is my first priority.”

“As it should be,” Erin agreed.

Her comment had him pausing for a second, surprised and impressed that she felt that way. He took the remark to be genuine since she apparently had nothing to gain by saying it.

“We’ve both gone through a lot,” he continued, “but for him the impact is almost greater because he lost his mother. Somewhere in that head of his, I think he’s afraid that something might happen to me and then he’ll be all alone. I mean, there’s my mother, but he’s not as close to her as he was to Julia and me—or at least, he
used
to be to me.” Steve looked at her. “With any luck, thanks to you and that dinosaur of yours, I’ve got a really good shot at getting my son back.”

“He’s always been yours, Steve. He just took a short hiatus,” she told him knowingly. “But you know, you have to think ahead, too.”

He wasn’t sure where she was going with this. “What do you mean?”

“Well, right now it’s you and Jason against the world, which is very sweet. But someday, say in about eight, nine years, he’s going to want to break out of that cocooned universe you two have and explore a universe of his own, maybe try it on for size. He might even feel guilty about leaving you behind, but odds are pretty good that it’s going to happen. Then you’ll still be in that universe for two that you two currently have—except that you’ll be the only one in it.”

He looked at her, taken aback by what she was saying. “Wait, are you telling me to date?”

She raised her hand to stop his assumption before he got carried away in the wrong direction. “I’m not advocating it or putting a taboo on it,” she told him. “I’m just saying you should consider all possibilities carefully—and more than once—before discarding them.”

Even as the words came out, Erin realized that she sounded a little preachy. “But hey, what do I know?” she asked, not wanting him to think that she was lecturing him. “I’m a grown woman talking to stuffed green dinosaurs—and answering myself back in high voices.”

That hadn’t come out the way she’d intended. Maybe it was time for her just to leave before she said something else equally inane. The man probably thought she was a little strange at best, she reasoned.

Embarrassed, she felt a quick exit was her best bet. Much as she enjoyed watching the boy play with his new toy, it was time to leave.

“Look,” she began awkwardly, “I’ve taken up your time long enough. I should let you get back to your evening and your son.”

“This
is
my evening,” Steve pointed out. “Until you showed up with Tex Jr. there, my evening was going to be sending out for pizza and then watching Jason slay more aliens and save the world for the umpteenth time. The way I see it,” he told her, “for bringing peace into my world, I at least owe you dinner.”

“Pizza?” she asked skeptically.

“Hey, it doesn’t have to be pizza,” Steve pointed out, warming up to the idea of having her stay a while longer. “There’re a lot of takeout restaurants in the area. You can have your choice of cuisines and cultures—just name it.”

Steve beckoned her over toward his kitchen. Once there he opened his “everything” drawer and began taking out the various folded menus he’d picked up and thrown in there.

“Thai food, Chinese, Mexican, Indian—whatever your pleasure, I most likely have a takeout menu to fit your appetite.”

Erin looked at him, amusement taking hold. “What about home cooked?” she proposed.

“Home cooked,” he repeated, looking through his selection. “That would be Marie Callender’s,” Steve concluded. He opened up another drawer. “Got the menu here somewhere,” he told her, searching.

“No, as in
real
home cooking. From your home,” she emphasized.

He certainly had the kitchen for it, she thought, looking around. It appeared to be the last word in gourmet cooking, from its overhead shiny pots hanging on hooks from the ceiling to its six-burner stove and wide counters.

He laughed and shook his head. “No, I had to take an oath that I would never attempt to do anything that involved an open flame and pots and pans.”

“An oath to who?” she asked, curious as well as more than a little amused by his claim.

“To the fire department and the E.R. staff at the local hospital,” Steve said in a perfectly serious voice.

“You’re that bad, huh?” she asked, trying not to laugh.

There was absolutely no point in denying it. “Actually, I don’t think they’ve invented the words to describe exactly how badly my culinary attempts have turned out. It’s a really dark place. Better not to go there,” he assured her.

“This ban on bringing your stove and the foodstuffs in your refrigerator together—does that just apply to you, or does everyone who comes into your house have to abide by it?”

“Well, a couple of Fridays ago, Cecilia did make dinner for Jason and me,” he said, recalling the way the woman had just taken charge.

“Cecilia,” Erin repeated, trying not to sound disappointed. “Then you are dating.”

He grinned broadly. He wondered if Cecilia would have been insulted or amused if she’d heard what Erin had just said.

“Cecilia owns the house-cleaning company that keeps my house in the orderly condition you see—I’m not exactly much at cleaning, either,” he confided. “Cecilia herself is a wonderful, wonderful woman, but she’s around my mother’s age. I don’t think she’s interested in going out with someone my age.”

Erin felt a wave of relief and tried not to really take note of it. She was offering to cook for the man. It was strictly a harmless endeavor. Didn’t mean anything, she told herself.

“Mind if I take a look in your refrigerator?” she asked him.

“Not much to see,” he warned her even as he waved her over to it.

Erin took her own inventory quickly enough. “Eggs, milk, margarine,” she noted, then opened the freezer door. “Frozen mixed vegetables.” She glanced at him over her shoulder. This wasn’t half-bad. “Not nearly as bare as I thought it would be.”