Actually, there was no seeming about that one. It was true.
“She’s not working tonight, Benji. She can’t always be with us,” Slider said, patting the boy’s feet, propped on Slider’s lap while they sat on the couch together watching TV.
Footsteps padded down the hall, and Sam entered the family room only far enough to lean against the door, his arms crossed. “Why not?” he asked.
Slider frowned. “Why not what?”
Sam licked his lips and looked at Ben, and Slider caught some sort of silent exchange between them. “Why can’t Cora always be with us?”
“Yeah,” Ben said.
Talk about an ambush. How long had they been thinking about this? And what the hell was he supposed to say in response? After the night Slider and Cora spent together in that tiny bed in Ben’s hospital room, no way was Slider allowing this question inside the weakened defenses of his imagination. Because when he’d awakened to find Cora’s gaze sliding over his body like maybe she wanted to hold him down and ride him, he’d been tempted to invite her to do it. Right then and there. Nurses, doctors, and inappropriate time and place be damned.
And that lust-drunk, throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude where Cora was concerned was a problem he neither wanted nor needed. Starting with a father who left and a mother who didn’t stay sober, the past had taught him too damn many times that people didn’t stick around—at least for him—that they couldn’t be trusted, and maybe even that he could never really know anyone else, even those he loved. Hell, maybe even especially those he loved.
Kim’s betrayal and loss had left Slider wrecked enough. No way he was risking what was left of him. Because that belonged entirely to his boys. It had to. They already didn’t get everything they deserved from him as it was.
The reality of that thought crept uncomfortably under Slider’s skin. Ben was going to be fine, but for a few minutes the morning he’d been hurt, Slider didn’t know what’d happened to him or how bad it was. Terror had flooded him at the possibility that he could lose Ben, just as he’d lost so much else. Given all that, shouldn’t Slider be doing more with the time he had? Shouldn’t he be doing more to pull himself the fuck together? If not for himself, then sure as hell for them.
“She just can’t,” Slider said lamely, moving Ben’s feet off his lap so he could get up. The turn in his thoughts had him feeling like shit and craving a moment of solitude, so he made his way to the kitchen and got a drink of water. But the boys weren’t having it, and there was no missing the fact that two pairs of eyes had followed him and were burning holes in his back.
“That’s not an answer,” Ben said. “Why can’t she?”
Slider turned to find them standing shoulder to shoulder, a united front in their effort to demand this answer from him. Little carbon copies of him, the both of them, though they had pieces of Kim, too. Sam’s brown eyes and darker brown hair. The shape of Ben’s mouth and the freckles across his cheeks. Of course, the boys picked now to get along, and about something that made no fucking sense. “We can’t just ask Cora to move in with us.”
“Still not an answer,” Sam said, brow arched.
“Okay, first off,” Slider said, “she has her own place to live. Second, a babysitter is a part-time job, and we can’t expect Cora to give up her whole life for it, and it would be weird to even ask. And finally,” he said, his brain scrambling for more ammunition, “she’s not family. The three of us, we’re family.”
A long moment passed, and then they were talking over each other as they fired off counterarguments. “Dad,” Sam said, “Cora lives at the clubhouse. That’s not really her own place. Do you even know how she came to be there?”
Slider blinked, because what the hell did his ten-year-old know about Cora’s past? And why did he seem to know more about it than Slider?
“Yeah, but Cora was here a lot more than usual this week,” Ben was saying in a tumble of words, “and I know she didn’t mind because she told me she was happy to do it because she didn’t have anywhere else she had to be.”
Sam nodded and crossed his arms. “Besides, you’re not related to anyone in the Raven Riders, yet you always call them brothers. So I think people you’re not related to can be family if you want them to be.”
Ben tried to mirror the tough-guy pose, but the cast on his elbow wouldn’t quite allow him to pull it off. “I agree with Sam.”
Jesus. He was totally outnumbered here, wasn’t he? “You two practicing for your future careers as prosecutors, or what?”