Love Knows No Bounds (7 page)

She stumbled to her feet and raced across the floor to gather him in her arms. “Are you okay?”

He groaned but smiled at her. “Who knew a guy would have to go through Hell to get a date with you?”

“I did try to warn you.” She smoothed back his hair. “I’m surprised you still want one?”

Christopher smiled. “I’ve been trying to work up the nerve for over a year. Do you think I’m going to chicken out now?”

“Why didn’t you ask me before?” Her fingers traced the red marks on his neck. “I would have gone.”

“Time never felt right and I didn’t want to blow it.” He shrugged and winced. “Faye?”

“Huh?”

“I hope this doesn’t freak you out but…”

Her hand stilled. This was it, reality crashing back on her. No love and no Christopher. It would hurt to hear the words, but she’d be okay. She was always okay. She held her breath, waiting for him to announce he no longer liked her in
that
way, and that he only wanted to be friends.

“I really am in love with you.”

Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Had she heard him correctly?

A flush crept up his neck and pronouns tumbled from his mouth. “I, you, we…I mean—I don’t expect you to feel the same way, but I was hoping that maybe we could start by getting coffee and go from there.”

“We’ve already had coffee.” Faye leaned in, her mouth hovering an inch above his. “Besides, how could I not fall for a guy who was willing to go to Hell and back for me?”

Christopher threaded his fingers through her hair and dragged her to him, their mouths connecting in what had to be the kiss of the century. Faye poured hours of pent-up fear and years of loneliness into the kiss and lowered her body beside his. Tongues danced, legs entwined, and much neglected body parts finally got the attention they so sorely yearned for.

Chapter Six

Monday Morning

No doubt about it, a brush with eternal damnation will make you appreciate the little things. Faye stood in her office, staring down at the photos Christopher had taken of her in the chapel. She ran her finger along the halo of light that encircled her head, pondering how he’d captured the woman she never knew was inside her—the woman she’d become.

“Faye.” Pierre Shogun poked his head in her office. “What the hell happened in the warehouse this weekend?”

She closed the portfolio and stepped into the hall. After battling Satan’s minion, they’d left the mess, clean up being the last thing on their minds. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Vandals maybe?”

Weird how the experience had left her with not only confidence, but the ability to tell little white lies sans the guilt. After all, if she didn’t watch out for herself, who would?

A flurry of activity tittered at the end of the hall and suddenly Christopher was there. The women of the office swarmed, fawning over the cast on his left arm. Vern had really done a number on him.

“What has that delicious man done to himself?” Pierre purred. “Probably something rugged and sweaty.”

You have no idea.
Faye bit her lip. Watching Christopher try to extricate himself from his horde of admirers was rather entertaining. Especially since he was hers. After the warehouse, she’d taken him to the hospital and then home. Exhausted, they’d fallen asleep, wrapped in each others arms and fully clothed.

“My, my,” Pierre said, “he looks determined.”

Christopher marched toward them and stopped inches from Faye. His eyes never left her. “Good morning, Mr. Shogun.”

She craned her neck and looked up, giving him a knowing smile. He snaked his arm around her waist, pulled her against him, and kissed her right there in front of God and the entire office.

“Well, your morning is much better than mine,” Pierre muttered.

Titters and gasps filtered through her euphoric haze, but Faye didn’t give a crap. She’d battled Satan and won her man. Her future looked…well…heavenly.

Acknowledgements

I’m so thrilled to be part of this project and would like to acknowledge every parent who gives their all and provides their children with the best opportunities and the kind of love that knows no bounds. Huge kudos goes to Entangled Publishing for giving 100% of the net profits to Autism Speaks and promoting autism awareness.

About the Author

Boone is an award-winning writer, crafting everything from humor to dark fantasy, but has a warm spot in her heart for demons. Her novel, “Shield of Fire”, is out with Entangled Publishing and her stories appear in the ezines Digital Digest and Everything Erotic.

She’s lived in beautiful Alaska for nearly two decades and spent many of those years in the bush, where the internet and flush toilets were a luxury. Now in civilization, she’s a full-time author, spinning tales for us thirsty souls.

Bittersweet

Brooke Moss

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Brooke Moss. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Edited by Libby Murphy

Cover design by Heather Howland

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition April 2012

The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: Star Wars, Transformers, Jaques Torres, Disneyland, Better Homes and Gardens, Top Ramen, Boy Scouts of America, Google, and Bon Appetite Magazine.

For my Sammy.

“The wildest colts make the best horses.” ~Plutarch

Chapter One

“It’s getting worse.” I sighed.

My son’s occupational therapist, Gianna Mancini, looked up from the glob of shaving cream on the short table in front of her and blew a dark lock of her hair out of her eyes. Her hands were gently locked around my son’s wrists as she encouraged him—unsuccessfully—to touch the stack of fragrant white fluff.

“How so?” she asked.

I shifted in the seat, the armrest jabbing me in the rear. “Bowen’s teacher said that he is still disrupting the other students during silent reading time. I just don’t know what to do. I keep going over it with him, but every day it’s the same thing.”

Gianna looked at Bowen, whose white-blond hair positively glowed next to his face, which was now a deep red as he struggled to keep from touching the shaving cream. “Bowen? Are you disturbing the kids during reading time?”

He positioned his eyes on a spot at the corner of the table, muttering, “No.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. I didn’t feel up to prying the facts out of him. This was the routine on most days. He would lie, and I would spend the next fifteen minutes or so encouraging him to confess what’d really happened. I was too tired for it today. “Come on, Bo. Out with it.”

When I opened my eyes, I noticed that he was watching me, his pale blue eyes assessing my defeated posture. “I did it,” he told me. “I scooted my chair.”

“Bowen, you know you aren’t allowed to move your chair back and forth during class.” Gianna manipulated his hand so that it was propped above the cream. “It makes noise and disturbs your friends.”

Bowen’s frown returned, and he looked away. “Don’t have friends.”

His Asperger’s syndrome made it difficult for him to hold eye contact for long, a simple act I missed so deeply, and I was often tempted to take his eight-year-old face in my hands and force him to look at me. His eyes, the same shade as a spring sky void of clouds, were my weakness.

“You do too have friends.” Gianna kindly pried his forefinger out of his clenched fist. “
I’m
your friend.”

I smiled in his direction, hoping he’d see me in his peripheral vision. The fact that Bowen couldn’t tolerate the sound of silence or the soft whir of his teacher’s computer during class time contributed to his place on the outskirts at school. Though his third grade teacher tried encouraging him into the fold, Bowen usually exhausted her by the end of the school day.

“What is the rule when you’re at school?” Gianna asked, taking his finger and dipping it into the cream.

“Don’t!” Bowen’s arm clenched, and he strained to pull it out of her grasp. He grimaced, a portrait of discomfort, as soon as the shaving cream covered his skin.

“It’s okay.” Gianna’s voice was soothing as she squatted down behind him, and she used her spare hand to mimic his. “Look, I’m touching it, too.”

“School is stupid,” Bo muttered. “Can I stop now?”

“We’re going to do five dips, and then you can stop.” Gianna turned to me. “He’s using his words really well today, isn’t he?”

I nodded, noticing how Bo’s legs wiggled underneath the tabletop. “Yes. It doesn’t look like he’s tolerating the shaving cream, though.”

“No. His tactile sensitivity is high.” Gianna took some shaving cream and wiped it on the end of her nose, prompting a nervous giggle to escape Bowen’s mouth. “Is he still refusing to touch food at home?”

I winced. Even after five years, that was still a sore subject with me. At four years old, Bowen stopped eating finger foods like an average child, requiring his father and I spoon-feed every bite of food. And then our family imploded. Six months after receiving Bowen’s diagnosis, my husband, Trevor, moved out. Six months after that, I found myself a divorced single mother. And six months after
that
, Trevor stopped visiting. He’d never witnessed Bowen feeding himself with a fork and spoon, not to mention the other progress he’d made over the years.

“I got him to feed himself a Cheetoh the other night.” Swiping my hand across my tired eyes, I added, “When he realized his finger was orange, he had a meltdown.”

Gianna laughed and handed Bowen a paper towel, and he snatched it out of her hand gratefully. “Three steps forward, and two steps back, huh, Anna?”

I nodded. “Right you are.”

“Bowen, why don’t you clean your finger, and meet your mom and me in the lobby?” Gianna nodded in the direction of the door, and I followed her. Once we’d stepped into the hall, she tilted her head at me. “How are you doing? You seem tense today.”

Gianna had been working with Bowen for the past four years, and she knew our little family inside and out. My son’s Asperger’s made him a hard kid to enjoy. He was often rough without realizing it, sometimes he spoke at the top of his voice without waiting his turn, and he hurt his playmates without intending to. This was all on top of his sensory processing disorder, which made him a social oddity. Bowen’s refusal to touch anything remotely soft and obsession with stroking things that were hard, prickly, or dangerously hot made him a source of curious stares at school. This odd-man-out social status multiplied every day he ate a meal in the school lunchroom. Bowen only ate a handful of foods, most of which were different forms of crackers, but only when they were speared by a fork.

I took a deep breath and fought the tears that stung the back of my eyes. “His teacher removed him from the classroom again,” I said. “They’re saying that if he can’t relax more in class, and stop disrupting the other kids, he is going to have to go to Special Ed.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Would you like to bring Bowen in twice a week? Maybe more sensory therapy would help. Or, we could try some swim therapy in the pool—”

“No.” I looked up at the ceiling, begging my eyes to hold the tears in. If I had a nickel for every tear shed over my son’s problems, I would’ve been driving a Rolls-Royce by now. “I can’t afford any more copayments. I’m still paying off Bowen’s compression vest.”

The last five years of my life had been a flurry of assessments, specialists, therapies, weighted blankets, and Lycra vests specially made to hug Bowen’s wiry frame underneath his clothes for more sensory input. I’d been to more than my fair share of parent-teacher conferences to discuss the peculiar clicking sound he makes in the back of his mouth, and I’d been to the emergency room eight times for burns, scratches, and cuts requiring stitches that had warranted nary a reaction from my son, who claimed that the nearly unintelligible hum of the refrigerator hurt his ears.

The door opened behind us, and Bowen appeared, his blue eyes focused somewhere around my hips. “My hands are clean,” he announced flatly, before loafing toward the lobby.

Gianna smiled wistfully. “Let me do some thinking. Surely there is something we can do to get the stimulation Bowen needs without costing you a fortune.”

Biting my lip, I thought about the meager paycheck my position as a receptionist at a dental office earned me. I worked hard to pay rent at our tiny house on the west side of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and keep food on the table. Bowen required tactile therapy several times a week, as well as speech therapy, and it wasn’t like I had a pool of funds from which to draw.

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said, sighing.

We rounded the corner into the lobby, where Bowen was staring into the oversize fish tank, clicking to himself among a handful of other kids with development mental delays and physical handicaps.

“Listen, I’ll put on my thinking cap, and keep you posted,” Gianna said.

“See you next week.” I bent to speak closely to my son’s ear. “Come on, Bowen. Let’s go home to make dinner.”

He glanced at me. His expression was still flat, but the tiniest spark of joy flashed in his eyes, making my heart jump. It took so much to warrant a tangible reaction from Bowen that when I did I always felt like throwing a party. Cooking was the one thing he and I did together that wasn’t tense or riddled with screams and whines because of the sticky mess on Bowen’s hands. When we cooked dinner together, he acted as close to an average eight-year-old as he ever did.

I grinned and winked at my son. “Okay, let’s go.”

Just as I closed my hand around his stiff fist, a blustery late September breeze blew through the open door, sending papers on the reception desk skittering across the floor, and causing several of the kids to scurry away from the icy air. As the receptionist crossed around the front of the desk to pick up the scattered paperwork, a deep, rumbling voice announced, “It’s cold as a polar bear’s tit out there.”

“Cold as a polar bear’s tit,” Bowen echoed, pulling his jacket around himself.

Frowning disapprovingly, I blew a lock of my brown bob out of my face, and looked up at the door. The guy was wearing faded jeans that hugged every one of his, ahem,
assets
like they were tailor-made, and a worn leather jacket that glistened from the rain. His posture was commanding and demanded respect. The man’s shoulders were back, his legs were wide apart, and a stern frown covered his face, which was partially hidden by mirrored sunglasses.

My stomach knotted around itself, and I was immediately annoyed by my physical reaction. So what if his black hair was slicked back into some sort of new millennium Elvis Presley ’do, and I could see a tattoo of a bright bluebird on the side of his neck? Who cares that a dark five o’clock shadow dusted his face and his full lips that resembled a bow? He’d just walked into a waiting room full of children, bringing the cold fall air in with him, and cursed like a truck driver with a flat tire. What an ass.

Pulling Bowen tightly against my side, I sidestepped the biker, muttering, “Excuse me.” He smelled like exhaust and rain, and as odd as it sounds, it was the sexiest aroma I’d come across in years.

He slid his glasses off as I passed and gave me an assessing once-over. “Yup.”

“Leo?” I heard Gianna’s voice from behind me, and glanced back as Bowen and I headed into the rain.

Young, straitlaced Gianna, in her starched white blouse and khakis, was scooped into a bear hug by the leather-clad man, and spun around. She was dating the bad boy? I hadn’t seen that one coming. Gianna waved at me as the glass door shut between us, her cheeks pinking as I stared. I ignored the odd stab of jealousy in my chest.

What was wrong with me? Sure, it’d been a year since my last date, but was I so desperate that I was lusting after my son’s therapist’s boyfriend? I’d purposefully kept men out of the picture over the past five years, citing that nobody could accept a single mom to a child who demanded as much care as Bowen did. And I’d been pleased with that decision. That is, until I felt that all-to-familiar loneliness set in on occasion. Maybe I needed to reconsider the online dating thing my mom was always harping on me about.

No. Forget it,
I thought. The solitude of single motherhood was finally getting to me. Solitude could make a person crazy.

“Come on, Bo,” I said as we stepped onto the crackling maple leaves covering the sidewalk. “Let’s go home.”