Page 35 of The Dating Charade

They had nobody else in the world.

He was their uncle.

Nobody else.

Ten minutes later, he opened the door.

His niece and nephews were safe, and that’s what was important right now.

Well that, and the minor fact that he had no idea what he was doing.

* * *

“You got this, man? Because I’m here for you. I just also gotta get some sleep.”

“Yeah, Sunny, you go on. Sarah will be here any minute.” He checked the clock again, ignoring the stress level rising with each passing second Sarah was not there. Without kids, he would’ve thrown his shoes on and been out the door—sometimes not even worrying about the shoes part. Now, if his neighbor didn’t get here in the next three minutes he would definitely be late.

Jett slapped pickles on five turkey slices. He squirted each with ranch. Dinner a la mode.

The last twenty-four hours had been a marathon. After the surprise visit to Cassie’s house, he’d made the regularly unscheduled visit to Donna Gene’s and worked a 2:00 a.m. wreck. It had been a long night, a particularly bad night. Yet neither he nor Sunny had anticipated coming home to spend the next eleven hours watching the twins bounce on couches, narrowly miss a stabbing after Drew got hold of a knife, and clean up after the successful breaking of a lamp. And a glass. And a plate from Sarah’s cookies with a label on the bottom stating it was fine china.

He had a hundred things on the mental to-do list that took form the moment Trina walked out the door—somewhere before midnight, from what he could gather by the twins’ shaky accounts.

His blood pressure started rising whenever he thought too long about it, knowing how terrified the twins would’ve been watching their mother push away from them, shut the door, and abandon them in the dark. Alone. Eight hours. Ten. However long it had been was long enough to make the twins anxious whenever Jett so much as stood up. Just trying to go to another room was an ordeal, and thanks to today, he could now say he knew what it was like to have two pairs of arms wrapped tight around his legs while in the bathroom. It’d been an eventful day.

Still, nothing was going to stop him from seeing Cassie tonight. Not even this.

The knock on the front door came, and Jett called out before she could knock a second time. “Come on in!”

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Sarah stepped into the kitchen and placed a tote on the counter.

Jett cast a glance over to the breakfast table, where the twins were sliding ice cubes on it until they took the three-foot plunge to the kitchen floor.

He shrugged. “All I know is they have a thing for ice cubes. They’ve been doing that for half an hour.”

Sarah dodged TJ, who was lying on a towel in the middle of the floor. She looked down at the puddle of ice water with bobbing, melting ice cubes. “Now I see why the landlord is just super thrilled about renters with kids. You got a towel?”

Jett took an orange-and-white T-shirt and tossed it to her. “We ran out of towels two days ago. Down to T-shirts now.”

She stretched it out and raised an eyebrow at the college intramural print. “Badminton? Somehow I didn’t see you as a badminton kind of guy.”

Jett grinned as he threw the sandwiches on a plate and set the stack between ice cubes on the table. “Never underestimate the power of a girl’s persuasion. Particularly spicy redheads in Spanish class.”

Dakota and Drew snatched at the sandwiches.

Sarah’s brow raised. “I see. And how did that relationship turn out?”

“I’m using the T-shirt as a floor wipe right now. That just about sums it up.”

Sarah smiled and turned away. “Speaking of your very . . . innovative use of towels, I thought you might want this.” She turned the corner of the kitchen and came back with a large box. On the cover, a baby about TJ’s age was smiling in some sort of reclining contraption, several colorful objects dangling overhead.

Sarah set it on the ground. “Unless you like the towel-in-the-middle-of-the-floor deal. I just thought TJ here would like it.”

Impossible. After a mere eight hours of this parenting thing, he felt a strange stirring as curiosity moved him closer, an unfamiliar enthusiasm toward items devoted to house and home.

A recliner for a baby? A place to set the kid down? The chance for Jett to have his arms all to himself for the span of fifteen minutes? At the moment, it was more beautiful than a Model 70 Super Grade Winchester Magnum.

“Wow, Sarah. TJ will love this. Thank you.” He picked up TJ and smiled gratefully, looking into her eyes. “Thank you so much.”