The King Next Door. Maureen Child

with interest and humor as Connor prattled, half coherent, half in some weird baby speak that Nicole seemed to understand. Morning sunlight lay across the table and shone in her hair and something hot and hard settled in the pit of his stomach—then dropped lower. Any woman who could affect him like this first thing in the morning was dangerous.

      Oh, yeah. Them living here together was going to work out great, he told himself with a heavy sigh.

      He needed to make that call to King Construction fast. The quicker he got Nicole out of arm’s reach, the better it would be.

      For all of them.

      Three

      “Man, you did a number on this place.” Lucas King moved through Nicole’s kitchen later that afternoon, noting every bit of damage with a practiced eye, missing nothing. In minutes he had examined the room, checking every outlet, every piece of missing plaster. The power was still off, of course, but Lucas had checked that as well, not trusting anyone else’s word for it.

      “I didn’t exactly put a torch to it,” Griffin argued, leaning back against the ruined kitchen counter.

      “Might as well have.” Lucas’s voice was muffled. Standing on a metal ladder, he had his head poked through the hole in the ceiling while he shifted the beam of his flashlight across the area.

      Griffin thought about giving the ladder a shove, just on principle. But, since his cousin was actually using a stable ladder rather than the one Griffin had toppled off, it probably wouldn’t do any good.

      “You did all this by falling off a ladder?”

      “Yeah,” Griffin said tightly. He heard the amusement in his cousin’s voice and knew damn well that Lucas would be telling this story to the rest of the family. “I grabbed the light fixture, hoping to steady myself, and instead …”

      Lucas snorted. “Ripped it right out of the wall, didn’t you?”

      “Seriously?” Scowling at his cousin’s back, Griffin added, “I didn’t bring you here to rag on me. Just to look at the kitchen.”

      “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said, voice still muffled as he continued his examination. “The ragging on you is the fun part of all this.”

      “Happy to help,” Griffin said in a tone that made it plain he wasn’t happy. “How bad is it?”

      “Like a bad horror movie up here. The wiring is antique,” Lucas muttered. “Even from a distance I can see spots that are frayed. It’s a wonder the place didn’t catch fire years ago.”

      That thought gave Griffin cold chills. He thought of Nicole and her son living here alone. What if there’d been an electrical fire in the middle of the night? Even with the smoke alarms, there was no guarantee Nicole and Connor would have gotten out. He scraped one hand across his face as a sense of uneasiness rolled through the pit of his stomach.

      “Guess we can’t lay this one all on you,” Lucas commented as he came down the ladder, metal groaning and creaking with his every step, to stand in the center of the devastated kitchen.

      He squinted into the sunlight streaming through the window over the sink. “The wiring in the whole damn house is about a breath away from whoosh.”

      Griffin shook his head. “Whoosh?”

      “That’s a technical term.” Lucas grinned. “The sound a fire makes when it whooshes into life.”

      “Great. Disaster humor.” Griffin didn’t think it was funny. He’d actually heard that sound, right after the series of pops when the wiring burst into flame. He remembered the smell of the smoke, too, and tried to push those memories out of his mind. The kitchen was wrecked, but they’d all gotten out in one piece. That was the important part. And from what Lucas was saying, they were lucky the whole house hadn’t been turned into a pile of rubble.

      Griffin pushed away from the counter and tucked his hands into his pockets. He took a quick look around the room and saw things he hadn’t noticed when he’d been here before—pictures of Connor on the fridge. A teakettle in the shape of a rooster on the soot-covered stove. Small green glass vases, knocked off the windowsill, now shattered on the scarred countertop, the flowers they’d held lying wilted and dead beside them.

      It wasn’t just a room, he thought, it was Nicole’s home, and more of a home than he had. Visions of his condo leaped into his mind. Hell, all he ever used the place for was to store his clothes, to sleep and occasionally to nuke a takeout dinner. He frowned to himself as a nibble of guilt chewed at him. She’d lost so much, and he had more than he needed or used.

      Didn’t seem to matter that Lucas had told him the wiring was ready to blow at any time. The plain truth was, Griffin had pulled those wires loose. Griffin had caused the damn fire that had put Nicole and her son out of their house. And Griffin was the one who had to make it right.

      Whether Nicole liked it or not.

      “So what do you want to do?” Lucas asked, making notes on a computer tablet.

      “I want her place fixed.”

      “We can do that,” his cousin assured him. “I’m assuming she’s got insurance?”

      “She says so,” Griffin told him. “But I’m guessing she’s got a big deductible, too.”

      “Probably.” Lucas nodded thoughtfully. “Single moms don’t usually have a hell of a lot of extra cash lying around.”

      “That’s what I think, too.” Griffin glanced over at the house next door, where Nicole was working in the dining room with her laptop—thankfully undamaged by either the fire or water. She knew Lucas was here, but she hadn’t been in a hurry to walk back through the destruction, so she had stayed where she was, waiting to talk to Lucas when the inspection was over.

      Turning back to his cousin, he said, “I’ll take care of the deductible and any extra it runs.”

      Lucas’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that right?”

      Griffin saw the interested look in his cousin’s eyes and sneered. “Don’t get any ideas. There’s nothing going on between me and Nicole. But I caused this. The least I can do is fix it.”

      “She won’t like it.”

      “She doesn’t have to know.”

      Lucas laughed shortly. “Dude, you are out of your mind if you really think Nicole won’t find out what you’re up to.”

      “Please.” Griffin tugged his hands from his pockets and folded his arms over his chest. “I’m in the security business, remember? We know how to keep secrets.”

      “Not from women you don’t.” Lucas shook his head. “It’s spooky, I swear. Every time I think I put one over on Rose, she nails me with it. It’s like female radar or something. Built into the whole double X chromosome or whatever.”

      Griffin just stared at him. “You’re delusional.”

      “No, I’m married.”

      “Same thing.”

      “You’re a sad, sad man,” Lucas said, shaking his head and grinning.

      “Yeah,” Griffin shot back, his smile wide and self-satisfied. “Poor me. Different woman every week. Nobody making demands on my time. Sex whenever I want it.”

      “Uh, hello?” Lucas scowled at him. “I get sex whenever I want it, too, you know. And I don’t have to leave home to get it.”

      “Yeah?” Griffin laughed. “How’s the sex life these days?”

      Lucas’s wife was pregnant with their second child. Just like most of the King family, Lucas had turned from a player into a husband and father. The Kings were falling, one by one, like a row of dominoes bowing to gravity. Pitiful. Just pitiful.

      “You