It turned out to be one of those days where I couldn’t complain much about being isolated, because a half an hour before dinner, Spencer came to talk to me in my room. I scooted over so that he’d have more space to sit at the foot of the bed and then made sure my loose, stretchy dress was covering everything it was supposed to.
“I wanted to talk to you about tomorrow night,” he said after we exchanged greetings.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got a PTA thing at school, so I won’t be home until after the twins are in bed. That would be fine, but Raphael and I got our dates mixed up, and he’s got something tomorrow, too. It’s some kind of special event with guest lecturers and a series of demonstrations for his Aikido students.”
“Ah. That’s a problem—one I wish I could help with.”
“Me too. Normally, I wouldn’t have a problem leaving the kids with you if you were willing, but all things being equal, I prefer a babysitter who can fight off marauders, put an alligator in a chokehold, or, you know, be able to stand for more than a few minutes at a time.”
“So that’s definitely a no for me.” Personally, I was flattered that he thought that I’d be able to handle the twins if I were at full strength. “Do you have a regular babysitter?”
He sighed. “Yeah, I do. He does an okay job, and he doesn’t charge much, but he can be rather immature at times.”
I grinned. “I take it you’re talking about Flynn?”
“Yep. And actually, he’s great with the twins, and he could probably fight off marauders and alligators while delivering a premature calf, but he’s not really good with the other side of things.”
“What other side?”
“Like remembering to tell them when it’s time for bath and for bed. Or warming up their dinner in the oven for twenty minutes.”
“If I tried to bend over to put something in the oven, I might fall in, Hansel and Gretel style.”
“You don’t have to do it yourself, you just have to make Flynn do it.”
“Oh.” To be honest, that sounded equally hard.
“Do you think you can do that?”
“Maybe?”
Spencer laughed. “Are you at least willing to try?”
“Sure.”
“Great. Thank you. Dinner’s in about twenty minutes.”
I sighed, glancing at my crutches. “I’d better start making my way there now.”
The next evening, I made my debut as Assistant Babysitter. It actually went pretty well. Flynn was the fun one—or at least he was with the kids. He was still a bit grumpy with me. And I was the orderly one who supervised heating up dinner, bath time, and bedtime. Oh, and story time. That was the part I was most used to, but it had a different feel to it with Flynn in the room.
He'd commandeered a recliner in the living room that normally Spencer used, and he listened to every word of the two chapters I read to the kids. At least I think he did. He had his forearm over his eyes as he lay back in the recliner, but he didn’t appear to be asleep. Plus, Lucas kept pestering him with questions, so I didn’t see how he could sleep.
Flynn didn’t participate much until it was time for us to talk about our dream treehouse. Then, prompted by Lucas’s super long commentary about how awesome our treehouse was, he came over to take a look at the sketchpad he’d gotten me.
“That’s really good.” When he leaned over, I noticed his fresh, masculine scent. He smelled like the outdoors—and also like a shower product or two. “You really drew those floorplans?”
“I am but a humble scribe,” I said with a wink at the twins. “These two are the genius architects.”
“Not bad at all.” He gave each twin a high five.
His admiration for the sketches made me feel good. However, he didn’t say anything else about it, not that the twins gave him much of a chance toas they eagerly shared all the latest details. By this time, our dream treehouse—treamhouse?—had four secret rooms, a restaurant, a shopping mall, a video arcade, a bowling alley and, for some reason, a coal mine at the base of the trunk.
Getting the kids ready for bed wasn’t too difficult. They knew the routine, of course, but like all kids, they used a variety of stalling tactics. Flynn dealt with most of those.
And then it was over. The kids were in their beds, possibly with visions of sugarplums dancing through their heads. Flynn had his leather jacket on when I crutched my way back to the living room. “Can you take it from here?”
“Sure.” As long as those bandits and alligators stayed away.
“Take my number just in case something comes up.”
“Good idea.” I fished my phone out of the pocket of the sweater I was wearing over my dress. Flynn gave me his number and I entered it into my phone. “Thanks.”