Some Sort of Love (Happy Crazy Love #3)(9)
He exhaled, and some of the worry lines on his face disappeared. “Yes. Scotty’s finally asleep. For now.”
“He doesn’t sleep well?”
“Not really.”
“Have you tried melatonin?”
“Yes. With mixed results.” He hesitated before going on. “Scotty has autism, and routine is really important to him. He can be difficult at bedtime if the littlest thing is different.”
As a doctor, I could’ve asked a bunch of questions and offered some more advice, but based on the conversation I’d just overheard, he wasn’t looking for that. And I didn’t want to be Dr. Nixon tonight. I just wanted to be Jillian.
And Jillian found it hotter than f*ck that he was raising a child with autism on his own and was so devoted to him.
“So,” he said, coming so near to me that the toes of his shoes met mine.
“So.”
He glanced out the windows to the patio. “You want to go back out there?”
“Not really,” I said, my pulse quickening.
A hint of a smile appeared as he met my eyes again. “You want to get out of here?”
My toes tingled. “Yeah. I do.”
I watched her rush up the stairs to get her things, and as soon as she was out of sight, I adjusted myself in my pants. My dick had jumped to life the second she said yeah, I do, as if the question had been you want to get naked and f*ck? rather than something much less suggestive. Not that I didn’t want to get naked and f*ck—hopefully I’d last a little longer than I had in the broom closet eleven years ago—but I didn’t want to make her feel like that’s what I expected. She wasn’t a horny nineteen-year-old college student anymore; she was a doctor, for f*ck’s sake. She was beautiful and smart and mature and sophisticated, and a woman like her did not want some Neanderthal who probably needed a haircut and a new pair of shoes to throw her up against a wall for a five-minute f*ck.
A woman like that deserved attention all night long. She deserved someone who would undress her slowly and delight in each new inch of her skin as it was revealed. Someone who would run his hands all over her body and find out where she liked to be touched, how she liked to be touched, what she wanted to hear whispered to her in the dark. Someone who would wrap those gloriously long legs around his neck and use his tongue until she begged for his cock, then use his cock until she begged for mercy.
Fuck. I could be that guy.
Except I couldn’t be. Not tonight. Because I wasn’t a horny college student anymore either—I was just a horny single dad who didn’t have the luxury of taking a woman home and lavishing all my time and attention on her the way I wanted to.
As soon as I had the thought, I felt guilty. Scotty was the love of my life and always would be, and whenever I felt the slightest bit resentful about something I couldn’t do because of him, that resentment was immediately crushed by shame. He didn’t ask to be born wired differently, into a terrible relationship, to a mother who would decide she couldn’t handle being a parent, to a father who wasn’t prepared for any of it. He was completely innocent, and he needed me to be a better man.
You’re spoiling him, Monica had scolded me tonight, as usual. She’d tried to make him wash and comb his hair before bed, which had resulted in a meltdown. Granted, the kid’s hair was dirty and disheveled, but washing it was such a battle I permitted him to wash it only once a week, on Sunday nights. She’d also wanted him to change his pajama top, since he’d gotten chocolate milk on the front of the one he was wearing. But in Scotty’s world, there is no pairing the dinosaur pajama bottoms with a plaid pajama top. There is also no changing into the plaid pajama bottoms, because he’d already planned on wearing the dinosaurs. Plaid was for school nights.
You let him run the house. He’s the child; you’re the adult. He’s manipulating you.
I’d heard it from everyone in my family, which was a huge part of the reason Scotty and I had moved away. They meant well, but they didn’t understand that Scotty’s inflexibility wasn’t just him being a brat—he experienced physical pain when something felt “wrong” for him. I wasn’t letting him get away with things; I was making compromises the way all parents do, trying to find the right balance between being strict and being compassionate. Why couldn’t they understand that?
Running a hand through my hair, I exhaled and wondered if I should ask Jillian for a rain check on a night when Scotty’s usual sitter could be there. If he woke up again and I wasn’t home yet, he might never get back to sleep. We’d be up all night, tomorrow would be miserable, and the whole start to the week would be off.
But she was so beautiful. And I hadn’t been this attracted to someone in so long.
“Fuck,” I muttered, checking my watch. What was the right thing to do? If she were a different sort of woman, if her brother-in-law weren’t my friend and client, if we lived three states apart…if any number of circumstances were changed, I’d grab her hand, drag her out to my car, and spend the next thirty minutes f*cking her brains out in the back seat. It would feel so good to take control that way, to lose control that way, to release some of this f*cking tension. But was that fair to her?
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
“Hello?”
“He’s up again.” Monica’s voice was strained, and in the background I heard the familiar keening of a nighttime meltdown. My chest hurt, the way it always did when Scotty was upset.