He always had.
Even so, or perhaps because it was so, he shook his head, brushing off her generous suggestion. “No, that’s okay. You’re busy.”
She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. “And you’re not?”
He wasn’t clear on what one thing had to do with the other. After all, this wasn’t a competition where the loser would wait on the winner. “Well, yeah, I am, but—”
“No buts,” she informed him. “You’re coming with us to the kitchen.”
“Yeah!” Ricky added his minuscule weight to the argument.
Then, to ensure that Shane would indeed comply with his and his mother’s wishes, Ricky once again slipped his small hand into the contractor’s callused one. Holding on with all his might, Ricky gave Shane’s hand as hard a tug as he could manage.
“Wow.” Shane lunged just enough to make it seem he’d been thrown off balance by the boy. “You sure are strong.” He pretended to eye the boy suspiciously. “You work out?”
Ricky giggled and shook his head, obviously pleased with the evaluation. “No. I’m strong ’cause Mama feeds me good.”
“I bet she does,” Shane agreed, glancing in Cris’s direction, a trace of his admiration showing through. “But just so you get it right the next time, what you should say is Mama feeds me well,” Shane explained, gently correcting the little boy’s grammar.
Her momentary connection with Shane’s intense dark blue eyes instantly quickened Cris’s pulse at the same time that his thoughtful method of correcting her son’s grammar gladdened her heart. She was always partial to people who were nice to Ricky.
“She feeds you good, too?” Ricky asked, surprised.
Cris did her best to stifle the laugh that rose to her lips, but Shane, she noticed, didn’t attempt to hide his reaction.
Instead, he laughed. “You’re going to be a challenge, I can see. Tell you what, maybe after I knock off for the day, you and I can find some time for a little grammar lesson.”
Excitement all but radiating from him, Ricky asked as he continued to tug the man to the kitchen, “Who are you gonna knock off?”
“No, not who,” Shane corrected. “What.”
That threw Ricky back into confusion. “You’re gonna knock off a what?” he asked, his thin, wheat-colored eyebrows knotting; he was clearly perplexed.
Shane laughed, charmed and delighted. “You are definitely going to be a challenge,” he told the boy as they crossed the kitchen threshold. “But it’ll give me a chance to practice my skills.”
“Practice what skills?” Cris inquired as she crossed to the refrigerator with the picture Ricky had drawn.
“Teaching skills,” Shane replied. When she looked at him quizzically, he explained, “I’ve got a teaching degree, and I majored in English.”
“I didn’t know that.” Something didn’t make sense. “So why aren’t you teaching?”
That was easy enough to explain. “Jobs aren’t exactly plentiful these days, even for teachers. And there’s no reason for you to know that I got a degree in teaching. You and I kind of lost touch after high school,” he reminded her.
They had at that. By then, she’d been going with Mike, and Shane had just been the older brother of one of her girlfriends, a guy she’d dated a couple of times before Mike had come into her life and swept her off her feet.
Seeing Shane again after all this time, she fleetingly wondered how things would have turned out if he had swept her off her feet instead. Burying the question that could never really be answered, Cris forced a smile to her lips as she opened the refrigerator and cheerfully asked, “Okay, men, what’ll it be?”
CHAPTER THREE
RICKY SCRAMBLED UP onto one of the stools that stood against the long stainless-steel service table where Cris did most of her food preparations. Rather than sit, he knelt on the stool so that he appeared bigger to his new friend, who took the stool next to his.
“You know what I like, Mama,” Ricky piped up in response to her question.
Like everyone else in the family, she indulged her son, but not when it came to his nutrition. “Yes, I do, and you know what I say to that.”
“What?” Shane asked, the exchange arousing his curiosity. He glanced from Cris to her son. “What is it you like, Rick?”
“Hot dogs!” the boy declared, his high-pitched voice all but vibrating with enthusiasm. Cris had a strong feeling that if she allowed it, the boy would eat hot dogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I love ’em best of all!”
“I like them myself,” Shane told Ricky, getting a big grin from the boy and a reproving glare from his somewhat frustrated mother. “But you know,” he continued without missing a beat, taking his cue from the expression on Cris’s face, “they’re really not very good for your insides. That’s why they should only be eaten on very, very special occasions. Right, Rick?”
The boy appeared torn between siding with his newfound friend, whom he wanted to impress, and campaigning for his beloved meal of choice. When Shane continued eyeing him as if waiting for backup from an equal, Ricky finally capitulated, shrugging his small, thin shoulders as he did so.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You know what else I like, Ricky?” Shane asked the boy.
There was a wary look in the child’s eyes as he inquired, “What?”
Shane leaned in closer and ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. “Vegetables.”
Ricky appeared horrified at the mere thought. “Oh, yuck.” The response rose to his lips automatically.
Shane pretended to consider what he’d said. “Well, maybe they don’t taste quite as good as hot dogs,” he allowed, “but they do taste pretty good. I like them mashed in with potatoes, or fried with a little oil and bread crumbs. And not only do they taste good,” he continued, focusing exclusively on Ricky rather than on his mother, “but they help make your insides healthy and they make you strong. Pretty cool, huh?”
Ricky regarded him with eyes beyond huge. “They really make you strong?”
“They really make you strong,” Shane echoed. He gazed at Ricky solemnly and drew his thumb across his chest in the form of an X. “Cross my heart,” he told the boy.
Ricky shifted on the stool, planting his seat on the plastic cushion, and looked up at his mother. “Can we have that, Mama? Can we have vegeta-bib-bles with mashed potatoes and bread crumbs?”
“No,” Shane said, laughing and jumping in to correct him, “it’s either with mashed potatoes or fried with bread crumbs.” It occurred to him that maybe he had overstepped his boundaries. Turning to Cris, Shane tendered a veiled apology. “I didn’t mean to put you out.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him quickly. “Trust me, any suggestion that’ll get this one—” she nodded at Ricky “—to eat his vegetables is greatly appreciated. Any particular vegetable I should be using?”
Shane thought only a moment, remembering the combination his mother used to make to get his elder brother and him to eat their vegetables. “Well, how about spinach? That goes pretty well with mashed potatoes.”
“Spinach?” Ricky cried, clutching his throat and pretending to fall over, poisoned, while emitting a rasping noise that, Shane assumed, was supposed to be a death rattle.
Shane laughed at the impromptu performance. “Oh, most definitely spinach,” he told Ricky with certainty. “That makes you really