Bringing Home the Bad Boy (Second Chance #1)(6)

The AC kicked on as he rounded the wall—the only privacy for his open loft bedroom—and took the stairs, laundry basket in hand. Lyon was on the floor in the living room, settled on a rug in front of a twenty-foot stone fireplace likely responsible for keeping this room cooler than the others.

“Laundry, buddy.”

Lyon sighed over the iPad where he played some battling clan game a magazine article recently claimed was “as addictive as meth.” Evan had laughed the claim off at first. Now he was beginning to see the signs.

“In a minute,” Lyon responded in a zombie drone.

He stood over his son and toed his ribs with one shoe. “Bud.”

Lyon frowned up at him, miraculously tearing his eyes away from the game for two seconds to argue, “I’ll lose this battle if I stop now!”

God. The look on his face. Evan’s heart clutched. Pulled brows, set mouth. He looked like Rae whenever he did that. Which was probably why he let the kid get away with murder.

“After this battle. But right after. Do not play another or no more iPad today.”

As a single parent, he’d dealt a lot with the issue of being too soft or too hard. Sometimes it was best for both of them if he rode the middle.

Lyon ignored him, the yells and hollers coming from the game an annoying cacophony.

Evan pushed his foot into Lyon’s side and rolled him over, wiggling his shoe into his son’s belly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Lyon confirmed, smile intact, eyes returning to the screen.

Bleary-eyed from a sleepless, and artless, night, Evan headed to the washer and dryer on the opposite side of the house and loaded in towels, sorting the whites from the colors and pulling the washer button on. Unlike everyone assumed, he didn’t have to learn how to do laundry after Rae died. He’d always done the laundry.

He grunted a dry chuckle as he recalled why: early on, she had dyed every last one of his whites pink. Rae Lynn Downey. Epic in the kitchen, disaster in the laundry room.

The memory of her face, smiling wide as she’d pressed his newly stained T-shirt to his chest, slammed into him, making his next breath impossible to draw.

Last night, a dream, more memory than dream, shook him awake. Rae’s smiling face losing its light, his inability to bring her back. In a habit he wished he could shed, he’d reached for her side of the bed. Empty as expected, but worse because it wasn’t “her” side at all. When he moved, he’d replaced their bed.

He told himself a second chance meant starting over, and bringing history into the new house wasn’t good juju. So, he’d dragged the old pillow-top, queen-size bed he and Rae had conceived their son on out to the curb and ordered a new mattress to be delivered the day after he arrived. And he’d been fine with that.

Until last night.

In the barren emptiness of three a.m., the massive king bed with a black iron headboard and plain white bedding, the bed he’d told himself would be a “blank canvas” for his life in Evergreen Cove, felt… wrong.

Sheets soaked through with sweat, his hands shaking, and Rae’s blank, open eyes flashing in the forefront of his brain, a sick realization washed over him. No longer was she merely missing from his bed. He’d erased her entirely.

Unable to sleep, he’d traipsed down to his studio, knowing what came out of his paintbrush would be the opposite of productive, but at least would get him through to morning.

Demons exorcised, the images he’d created were like the others he painted in the wee hours. Dark, broody, and having no place in a children’s book.

Evan dropped the lid of the washer as Lyon marched into the laundry room, dropped off his clothes, and started out again.

“Bud. Sort.”

“Daaaad.”

His response was to point at the hamper.

Lyon’s shoulders slumped until he resembled a melting Wicked Witch of the West, but at Evan’s silent stare, he finally obeyed and began to sort.

The attitude was something he could live without, but at least the kid was doing his chore.

Good enough.

In the land of single parenthood, it was the national anthem.

“Oatmeal or eggs?”

“Eggs,” Lyon answered, exasperated.

“You got it.” Evan tracked to the kitchen to fix his boy eggs, and reminded himself he was raising an independent man who would eventually care for himself. Since their small family had decreased by one member, it’d been Lyon and Evan as a unit. A team.

Team Downey.

That was how this was gonna work… the only way this was gonna work. Especially as they settled in to a new town, Lyon went to a new school, and Evan adjusted to his new career.

A second chance. A fresh start.

As he put the pan on the burner, Rae’s beautiful face flashed in his memory again. In the light of day it was easier to convince himself a blank canvas wasn’t a bad thing.





CHAPTER THREE




Shit.”

Propping a hand on his thigh, Evan slouched on the wheeled wooden chair in his studio and stared down the fat, blank pad of newsprint. Like the tan, soft paper in front of him might have an answer for what to try next.

Whenever he ran up against the equivalent of writer’s block for painters—artist’s block, if that was a thing—he refused to let it stop him. He drew through it. As a result, the floor was littered with sketches of farm animals. Fifteen, no—wait—sixteen if he counted the one he’d wadded up and tossed to the other side of the room.