Expired Getaway (Last Chance County #7) - Lisa Phillips Page 0,3
little redhead missed nothing. “I can do it.”
“And I’ll be right here while you do.” Aiden walked with her to the ramp that’d been dragged over. All she had to do was push the ball and watch it sail down the alley.
She hefted the ball onto the ramp that was little more than three bars of metal welded into a frame. The ball started to roll, so he put out his hand. It didn’t need to go down before she had the chance to push it.
He lifted his gaze to the face of his six year old. “Ready, Beautiful?”
“Ms. Maggie said you’d like my dress.” Her fingers lifted off the ball, and it started to roll toward his hand. “We got the blue one because it’s your favorite color.”
“That it is.” Aiden grinned and saw the next kid waiting. “Ready?”
She nodded. He moved his hand and Sydney pushed the ball, her tongue stuck out from between her teeth in concentration. Aiden didn’t watch the ball. He watched her face, garnering enough information from that as to what was happening down the alley.
Tomorrow he would be back on swing shift for the next four nights before he got two days off. That meant Sydney would be with the sitter after she got out of holiday kids club and in bed before he was home.
But he got breakfast, and they tried to live it up with the time they had. Aiden was a pancake artist using squirt bottles and food coloring. He could make a rainbow, and he was working on perfecting a unicorn, though it wasn’t going well.
“I knocked down three!”
Aiden picked her up and spun her, even though she said she was too big for that. Sydney slapped his cheeks and blew a raspberry on his forehead.
He set her down, grinning.
“Cake!” Sydney ran off to her friends, and he wandered back to where he’d left his water cup. The mom with her beer watched him. The look on her face wasn’t one he wanted to entertain.
Still, as he moved toward the table of kids all eating a slice of pizza before their cake, she also moved. When he reached the edge of the birthday party, she was beside him.
“You’re a pretty good dad.”
He glanced aside to see her eyeing him over her beer again. “And that’s a surprise?”
The woman shrugged a slender shoulder. Too slender, by his estimation. “Single dad, right?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Usually dads aren’t all that interested is all.”
Aiden watched Sydney reach for her cup. He winced as she nearly knocked over another kid’s soda.
“It’s nice. That’s what I’m saying.”
He turned. “Which one is yours?”
“Oh. None.” She motioned with her head toward the bar. “I just hang out here.”
Aiden’s stomach turned over.
“They’re so cute at this age, aren’t they? Then they turn into unholy terrors at the drop of a hat if they don’t get what they want. Am I right?”
“Not in my experience.”
He wanted to walk away. To stand closer to Sydney like a helicopter dad. Which he pretty much was, but only because he was the only person in the world there to watch her back. The sitter was amazing and he didn’t know how he would do it without her and his army of church ladies to help, but at the end of the day, Aiden was alone in this.
“Huh.” The woman blinked over her beer.
As a father and also a police officer, he needed to stick near this woman and try to get her to open up about her intentions here.
“It’s more like, sometimes, she’s not a kid at all. She’s a tiny teenager.” Aiden smiled, though the precise teenager Sydney reminded him of flashed in his mind.
There hadn’t been much of a relationship between the two of them, and they’d been barely out of high school. A summer romance gone wrong, if they could even say it had gone anywhere in the first place. Months later he’d found out she’d died in childbirth. That he was a father. Social services had asked him first if he wanted to raise the baby. As the father listed, he’d have had to give up his parental rights otherwise.
Give up the chance to pour love into a beautiful, innocent child of his own?
No way.
The woman barked out a rusty laugh. “Welp, I see my friends. I hate to love you and leave you, but I gotta go, gorgeous.”
Aiden didn’t even know what to say. He kept his mouth shut. He had no intention