His First Choice. Tara Quinn Taylor

have typed something about those striking blue eyes—both pairs—looking at her so solemnly.

      She’d wanted to trust them.

      She still felt that way as she led the duo back to her office, Levi’s strides as long as his little legs could make them, attempting to synchronize with his father’s.

      “You want to see my playroom?” she asked the little boy just before they reached her office.

      With a glance at his father, who nodded, Levi said, “Sure!” She held out her hand. He took it.

      “You can wait in my office,” she told his father, pointing toward the door. All case files, including his, were locked in her file drawer. Her computer was off and couldn’t be accessed without her password, anyway. But there were magazines for him to read.

      “We won’t be long.” Why she felt the need to reassure him, she didn’t know. Her concern was Levi. And the possibility that someone was abusing him.

      At the moment, nothing else could matter to her.

      * * *

      JEM PLAYED A trivia game on his phone while he waited. It was either that or think about his insides eating him up. He probably should have had some breakfast. Levi had offered to share the scrambled eggs and toast he’d had waiting for him when he’d shown up in the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and hair tussled, early that morning.

      Jem was a fix-it kind of guy.

      Kind of hard to fix what you didn’t know was broken.

      He had six trivia games going—all with guys on his crews. He generally won, but now answered six questions wrong in a row. When he missed one about the pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, he closed the game. Having been on the farm team when the pitcher in question had been pitching, having had beers with him and some of the other guys during a road trip, he knew the guy’s name.

      But he just wasn’t in the game, so no point in wasting turns.

      Hands in his pockets, he walked around the small office. It was as neat as a pin. No personal pictures on the desk.

      But he took note of a message scrawled on a little sheet stuck to the side of the computer monitor. She needed a hero and so she became one.

      Something about that note eased his tension and made him feel kind of sorry for the social worker who’d interrupted his life so abruptly.

      Reminding him, as it did, that everyone was human.

      And no one’s life was perfect.

      * * *

      “DO I SCARE YOU, Levi?” The minute the little boy had realized that she was going to stay with him in the playroom—and that his father wasn’t going to be there—Levi had begun to shrink in on himself.

      There was no other way for her to describe the reaction. His shoulders hunched slightly as he kept his cast close to his stomach. “No. ’Course not,” the little boy said, that softened r grabbing at her.

      It was okay for her to care about the children. They could never have too much love. Or so she’d told herself on those times when the professional boundaries she had to keep didn’t quite diminish those occasional heart tugs.

      “You want to put this together with me?” The twenty-five-piece teddy bear puzzle was probably too easy for him, judging not only by what Mara, his preschool teacher, had relayed about him, but by the activities she’d observed in his room the night before.

      She sat on the floor with him while he worked silently on the puzzle by himself, putting each piece in place without hesitation.

      When he’d finished, she handed him another equally easy puzzle. She wanted his concentration.

      “I need the box,” he said.

      “What box?”

      “For the other puzzle.” That r again. He was pointing to the teddy bear puzzle he’d just completed. She’d expected him to leave that and do the second one. Instead, he cleaned up the first one before moving to the next. “Miss Mara says you have to pick up one before you can bring out a other,” he told her.

      “You do a lot of puzzles at school?”

      “Uh-uh.” He shook his head, not looking up from his task.

      “Where’d you learn to do them so well, then?”

      “Daddy and I got lots of ’em.”

      “What about your mommy—does she do puzzles with you, too?”

      “Uh-uh.”

      Lacey had stopped to see Tressa Bridges on her way to work that morning, but there’d been no answer at the door. Such was sometimes the case when you made unannounced house calls.

      He was turning a piece around the wrong way. She wanted to help him, but got the distinct feeling that he didn’t want her to.

      “Where were you when you fell and broke your arm?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Of course you know, silly,” she teased. “You were there at the time, weren’t you?”

      She was grinning at him. And earned herself a confused frown as well as a quick glance from those striking blue eyes. Then a shrug.

      “Well, your arm didn’t run away from your body, did it?” she asked, her tone playful.

      “Noooo.” He giggled and put the piece he’d been struggling with in place.

      “So why don’t you tell me what happened. You aren’t going to be in any trouble. I just want to know.”

      “I fell.” Another piece slid into place. His upper torso was bent completely over the puzzle.

      “From where?”

      “Mommy’s bookshelf.”

      Relief flooded her so thickly Lacey sat back. She grinned for real. Then it occurred to her that his father could have told him to say that, could even have rehearsed it with him this morning on their way to see her.

      “Was she in the room?”

      He shrugged again, and she realized her question could be confusing. In the room when he first misbehaved by climbing where he’d been told not to go? Or when he fell?

      “Before you started to climb, I meant.”

      He shrugged again. And rather than upset him, she let the matter drop.

      Levi finished the puzzle. At her invitation he wandered around the room, touching things. A plastic tic-tac-toe board. A car track with little cars—not as elaborate as the one he had in his room at home, but still worth a little boy’s notice.

      Lacey put the puzzles back on their shelf, washed her hands in the sink and sat at a pint-size plastic picnic table. “You want a snack?” she asked, holding out a shortbread cookie she’d just taken from the cupboard.

      He looked at the cookie, shrugged and pushed a car on the track.

      “What kind of ice cream did you get last night?” His father had told him that they’d have some.

      “Chocolate. I get chocolate. Daddy gets ’nilla.”

      Leaving the cookie on the table, she sat down on the floor with him. “In a cone or a bowl?”

      He shrugged again.

      “Do you ever eat so much it hurts your stomach?”

      Another shrug.

      There were games she could play with him, activities designed to give her insights into his psyche. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to resort to something that formal. But...

      “Let’s play a little game,” she said, leaning back against the wall. He seemed happier when she gave him his space.