The Game Plan (Neighbor from Hell #5)(22)

When nobody spoke, she took it as her cue to make her escape back into her apartment. She rushed into her kitchen, grabbed the basket of biscuits, turned around and nearly tripped over her own two feet when she spotted Danny sitting at her kitchen table, digging into his food and groaning in rapture.

“This is so good,” he said, around a large bite of meatloaf.

A little more than stunned, she opened her mouth to ask him if he wanted a biscuit when the banging started.

“You selfish bastard!” vaguely familiar man yelled as the pounding on the door continued.

“Just ignore him,” Danny said, reaching for a biscuit. “He’ll eventually go away.”

“Alright then,” she said, because really, what else was there to say?

Chapter 10

“You’re pink,” Matthew said, studying her with a tilt of his head as he placed the lollipop back in his mouth.

“And you found my stash,” she said with a mock glare and a growl as she reached up and grabbed the large bag of lollipops by his side, pausing with the bag long enough for the boy to grab a few more lollipops before she carried it around her desk to put it back in the-

“Your checkbook is unbalanced,” Matthew announced with a bored sigh as he raised his legs and swirled around so that he was facing her with his feet on her desk. “I balanced it for you,” he said with a shrug as he focused back on his lollipop.

“You went through my purse?” she asked, although really, by this point nothing this kid said or did or any of the Bradford children did for that matter, should really surprise her. She narrowed her eyes on Trevor’s youngest son as she asked, “Did you break into my computer again?”

“Yup,” he said, letting the word pop around his lollipop. “And you still haven’t told me why you’re pink.”

“That’s because you never asked,” she muttered absently as she dropped her lunch bag on the desk and the bag of lollipops back in the bottom desk drawer. She picked up her checkbook only to bite back a groan.

“You’re off by sixty-two dollars. You might want to transfer some money into that account before it bounces,” Matthew said conversationally as he leaned forward and pointed at the column that he’d fixed.

“You do realize that you’re only six, right?” she pointed out instead of admitting that there wasn’t any money to transfer. This was it, which was pretty sad because it wasn’t a hell of a lot.

She was going to have to run across the street during her lunch break and see if Mary could cut her a check a few days early. She’d planned on working through her lunch break to get things settled for the renovation, but now it looked like she was going to be spending it standing in line at City Hall and then at the bank. It also meant that she was going to have to stay an hour extra tonight to make up for the loss.

“You gonna tell me why you’re covered with pink streaks?” Matthew asked, studying her curiously.

“I’m part alien,” she said with a sigh, trying not to think about the twenty-five dollar overdraft fee that she was going to have to pay now.

“I see,” Matthew murmured thoughtfully, studying her for a moment longer before he abruptly nodded and turned around on the counter and jumped off.

“Where are you going?” she asked, looking up in time to see the precocious little boy who was secretly one of her favorites, head for the children’s section, which instantly put her on alert.

“To play with the other kids,” Matthew said with another one of those careless shrugs that made her nervous and for good reason. “And to tell them that you’re an alien out to steal their brains.”

“Wait? What?” she asked, the sad state of her finances instantly forgotten as she rushed to go after the little boy before it was too late.

*-*-*-*

“What the hell happened to your hands?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, reaching over the passenger seat of his truck and grabbing his bag.

“Don’t worry about it?” Trevor repeated with a snort of disbelief as he gestured down at his hands. “It looks like you shoved your hands in acid!”

Danny couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison. “Close enough.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Trevor asked, keeping pace with him as he made his way to the old library that he personally believed should have been torn down years ago.

“It means that you might want to find another place to dump your wife’s science experiments,” he said, glad that Zoe wasn’t around for this conversation.

She was a really sweet woman and it would kill her to know that her food had actually harmed someone. He’d rather die than hurt her. She’d been there for him during his recovery, sat with him and held his hand when the painkillers stopped working, read to him, and kept his family from aggravating the shit out of him with their constant worrying.

“Zoe’s lasagna did this?” Trevor asked, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him to a stop so that he could look over Danny’s damaged hands.

For a moment, Danny could only stare at his cousin in horror. “That was lasagna?”

“Yeah,” Trevor said, sighing heavily as he continued to look his hand over. “Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” he said with a worried frown, the same one that everyone in his family got whenever he so much as sneezed.