Julia tugged on her sleeve. “What should I do?”
Her dark braids were plastered to the sides of her head. She’d gamely tried to bike up the hill to the house, but had given up halfway. Kelsey was proud of her for getting that far. It was pushing ninety degrees outside, and the park had offered little in the way of shade—not to mention that Julia had ridden hard for nearly an hour, and it was late afternoon, and everyone probably needed a nap. Kelsey had hoped to get out in the morning, but she had discovered that every single task—from making breakfast, to packing a lunch, to applying sunscreen—took ten times as long when you had to do it with a collection of unruly kids.
Kelsey handed Julia the second bottle of water. “First, drink some of this. Then you can go upstairs to read.” She indicated a stack of picture books, which Marie had taken out from the library and delivered to Kelsey at the park. “You can take these up with you to your room.”
She was more than ready to have a break. The battle with Luke had started raging the moment she mentioned the bikes. Still smarting from Ross’s concern about her taking the kids on something as simple as a bike ride, she’d called the kids together and suggested they go to the park as soon as Ross disappeared into his office. Matt and Julia had been thrilled.
Luke, not so much. Once they started out, she realized exactly why he dreaded riding his bike. Luke rode like he was terrified that he’d fall down at any moment. He wove back and forth on the sidewalk, stopped abruptly at curbs, and had a hard time starting on an incline because he was so tentative. He banged his shins on the pedals, scraped his leg on the chain, and even fell over onto the grass once when he slipped off the concrete.
She’d convinced him to come with them only by promising that he could play his video game for an extra half hour when they got home. Once at the park, he’d done nothing but complain about being hot and bored, and hating Colorado.
Marie had suggested she treat Luke as she did members of her climbing teams when they became oxygen-deprived and hostile: give him clear commands, brook no argument, and expect him to comply. It had worked, but it certainly hadn’t endeared her to the boy.
And now she was dreaming of ways to kill his father, who could have warned her that Luke had the bike-handling skills of a two-year-old, and that their outing to the park was practically guaranteed to result in a fight.
“Can I take my grapes up to my room?” Matt asked. He held up the bowl of fruit and the climbing magazine Kelsey had snagged for him from her car. He had started begging her to take him out as soon as he’d heard that she was a climber. She’d told him she didn’t have equipment that would fit him, knowing full well she could have taken them to a rock gym and rented equipment if she thought their father would approve. But she was pretty sure the guy who didn’t trust her to teach his kid to do cartwheels wouldn’t want her to take his kids climbing.
“Sure,” she replied, not even caring if they had some kind of “no food upstairs” rule, because it was late and she was hot, and having the kids upstairs would make it less likely that they’d hear her screaming at Ross. “But take this with you, too.” She handed him the last bottle of water.
He sucked down a mouthful off the top and headed up the stairs. As soon as she heard his door close, she marched over to Ross’s office and knocked on the door.
“What?” he barked.
He sounded tense. Kelsey momentarily considered retreating to the kitchen. Then she remembered that she’d been left to squirm in the hot sun with an incredibly annoying child who hated biking. And she wasn’t even supposed to be doing this. She was supposed to be carefree and unattached, doing her own thing on her own time. She was not supposed to be taking care of grumpy kids for an ungrateful jerk of a man.
Her hand, through some incredible force of will, turned the knob.
“Ross?”
He spun around on the leather chair from his contemplation of the computer screen. “What?” He wore his usual faded T-shirt and jeans, his hair rumpled as she now knew it always was by the end of the day. The shadow on his chin set off the bright blue of his eyes in a way that was as sexy as it was disarming.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” When he didn’t immediately say no, she stepped inside the room and turned the lock on the doorknob.
He narrowed his gaze. “Do I have a choice?”
“No, actually, you don’t.”
“I had that feeling.” He laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair. The movement momentarily gave her pause, as it emphasized the width of his shoulders and the narrow taper of his waist. “So go ahead. What did you want to say?”