Connor shouted, “Milk! And cookies!”
Nicole laughed. “No cookies for breakfast.”
Griffin looked at the boy. Such a cute kid. Would it be wrong to put tape across his mouth?
Nicole brought Connor some milk, then took eggs from the fridge and a skillet from the cupboard. She was as comfortable in Katie’s kitchen as she was in her own. “Can I make you something?”
“No, I never eat breakfast,” he mumbled, concentrating on the coffee. Caffeine. The secret to survival.
“It’s Connor’s favorite meal,” she said, and started scrambling eggs, setting the skillet on the stove and in general making a clatter of noise that had Griffin clenching his teeth.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to look at this whole situation as a gift,” Nicole said from her place at the stove.
“Is that right?” Griffin reached out and took away the spoon Connor was beating against the tabletop. The little boy’s features screwed up, his bottom lip poked out and a sheen of tears filled small blue eyes. Griffin sighed and handed the spoon back.
Just keep drinking coffee, he told himself and stood up to get a refill.
“Well, like you said,” Nicole continued, “I have to have it fixed anyway, so I’ve decided to try and look at it like redecorating rather than rebuilding.”
“Probably a good idea,” he allowed as he took his seat again. Connor grinned at him and pounded that spoon with all the fervor of a rock-band drummer.
Griffin was not a morning person. He preferred conversations over a late supper with plenty of wine. He never spent the night with any of the women he…dated, so the morning-after chat had never been on his agenda. Now, not only did he have a woman to talk to, but a two-year-old to endure.
Usually he greeted morning with all the enthusiasm of a condemned prisoner facing execution. Today, even more so.
Nicole set scrambled eggs in front of Connor and the little boy used his fingers to eat while he continued to pound the spoon. Griffin sighed, then asked himself just when exactly he’d turned into an old crank.
“Connor has preschool,” Nicole was saying, “so as soon as I drop him off, I’ll be back here to make some phone calls to the insurance company and a contractor…”
Griffin took a sip of coffee. “You take care of calling the insurance company and I’ll call King Construction,” he offered. “They’ll take care of it and give you a better deal than you’d get anywhere else.”
He watched her and saw refusal glint in her eye a moment before she nodded and said, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
She might appreciate it, he told himself, but she also didn’t like having to accept favors. He could understand that even as he would have swept right past her refusal if she had argued with him.
“No problem. What’s the point of having family if you can’t call on them when you need ’em? With Rafe out of town, I’ll talk to Lucas. He can probably come over today for a look around.”
“Okay.” She handed Connor a cup of milk at the same time Griffin slipped the spoon from the boy’s hand.
“Not used to dealing with kids, are you?” she asked with a half smile.
“Not at the crack of dawn,” he admitted, feeling a little guilty now at snatching away Connor’s spoon again. Resigned, he gave it back.
“It’s eight o’clock.”
“My point exactly.” When his world hadn’t been turned upside down, Griffin would just now be sitting down for his first cup of coffee. He’d be on the balcony of his condo, staring out at the water, letting the silence sink into him. Then he’d shower, get dressed and arrive at King Security a little after nine.
Ironic, he thought, that his working schedule suddenly looked so much more relaxing than his vacation.
Shaking her head, Nicole focused on her son. Taking another sip of his coffee, Griffin watched her with the boy, saw her eyes sparkle with interest and humor as Connor prattled, half coherent, half in some weird baby speak that Nicole seemed to understand. Morning sunlight lay across the table and shone in her hair and something hot and hard settled in the pit of his stomach—then dropped lower. Any woman who could affect him like this first thing in the morning was dangerous.
Oh, yeah. Them living here together was going to work out great, he told himself with a heavy sigh.
He needed to make that call to King Construction fast. The quicker he got Nicole out of arm’s reach, the better it would be.
For all of them.
Three
“Man, you did a number on this place.” Lucas King moved through Nicole’s kitchen later that afternoon, noting every bit of damage with a practiced eye, missing nothing. In minutes he had examined the room, checking every outlet, every piece of missing plaster. The power was still off, of course, but Lucas had checked that as well, not trusting anyone else’s word for it.
“I didn’t exactly put a torch to it,” Griffin argued, leaning back against the ruined kitchen counter.
“Might as well have.” Lucas’s voice was muffled. Standing on a metal ladder, he had his head poked through the hole in the ceiling while he shifted the beam of his flashlight across the area.
Griffin thought about giving the ladder a shove, just on principle. But, since his cousin was actually using a stable ladder rather than the one Griffin had toppled off, it probably wouldn’t do any good.
“You did all this by falling off a ladder?”
“Yeah,” Griffin said tightly. He heard the amusement in his cousin’s voice and knew damn well that Lucas would be telling this story to the rest of the family. “I grabbed the light fixture, hoping to steady myself, and instead…”
Lucas snorted. “Ripped it right out of the wall, didn’t you?”
“Seriously?” Scowling at his cousin’s back, Griffin added, “I didn’t bring you here to rag on me. Just to look at the kitchen.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said, voice still muffled as he continued his examination. “The ragging on you is the fun part of all this.”
“Happy to help,” Griffin said in a tone that made it plain he wasn’t happy. “How bad is it?”
“Like a bad horror movie up here. The wiring is antique,” Lucas muttered. “Even from a distance I can see spots that are frayed. It’s a wonder the place didn’t catch fire years ago.”
That thought gave Griffin cold chills. He thought of Nicole and her son living here alone. What if there’d been an electrical fire in the middle of the night? Even with the smoke alarms, there was no guarantee Nicole and Connor would have gotten out. He scraped one hand across his face as a sense of uneasiness rolled through the pit of his stomach.