Shiver

interpreted as don’t blame me, which he immediately spoiled by grinning at her.
    “What happened to Witch Mountain ?” Determined not to overreact, Sam sat down beside Tyler and frowned at the TV.
    “There were too many commercials. I found this. Trey told me it’s Bruce Lee.” Tyler sounded distracted, and Sam realized that it was because he was focusing so keenly on the action in front of him. On Tyler’s other side, “Trey” was shaking his head at her and mouthing I had nothing to do with this when Tyler added, “Trey says that some of his nephews take karate. Do you think I could take karate, Mom?”
    “Trey” dropped his head in shame.
    “We’ll see.” A mom’s stock response, which she followed up with a dirty look shot over Tyler’s head at Marco.
    Before Sam could decide whether watching men hack and kick each other into cowering bundles of submission was unsuitable enough for a four-year-old to be worth the howl of protest Tyler would undoubtedly send up if she turned it off, the movie ended. As the credits rolled, Tyler said, “I loved that!” and then leaned over to whisper something in her ear. As Sam nodded, he leaped up and ran from the room.
    “He needed to go potty,” Sam explained in response to Marco’s questioning look. Then she gave him a dark look. “Bruce Lee?”
    “It wasn’t my fault, I swear. He was already watching it when I got in here.”
    She eyed him suspiciously. “And did he already know that your nephews take karate lessons?”
    He looked a little sheepish. “I might have told him that.”
    “Yeah.” Sam’s response was dry.
    Marco looked at her. “Jesus, Sam, he’s a boy. He’s going to like stuff like that. We’re hardwired that way, all of us. Playing games like Halo and watching Bruce Lee—that’s normal boy stuff. Ask his dad.”
    That was a sore point. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to, which I don’t,” she said.
    “Oh, yeah?” Marco raised his eyebrows at her, inviting a reply.
    Sam sighed. She didn’t talk about her circumstances very often, because it was personal and it felt like whining and because she’d learned from a young age that the only thing to do when something bad happened to you was suck it up and go on. But she suddenly found herself wanting Marco to know the truth.
    “Like I said, he’s out of the picture. I’ve seen him like twice since Tyler was born. I’m fairly certain he couldn’t pick Tyler out of a lineup, and the only reason Tyler would recognize him is because I’ve got a picture of him in Tyler’s baby book that Tyler likes to look at.” Actually, every time she found Tyler looking at that picture it broke her heart a little, but she had thought it was important for the little boy to know he did have a father so she had put it in there and kept it in there.
    “So what happened between you?”
    Sam shrugged. “I was stupid, what can I say? I started seeing him when I was a senior in high school. He was in my class, popular, good-looking, big party guy. Well, I was into having fun then, too. I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me.Then I found out I was pregnant. It was about a month and a half after I graduated from high school. To make a long story short, turned out he did not want to know. He still doesn’t. As far as I’m concerned, if I never saw him again in my life it would be too soon, but I hate it for Tyler.”
    The look she gave him must have had more emotion in it than she knew, because his brows contracted and he reached over and picked up her hand.
    “The guy’s a jerk. And an idiot.”
    His fingers twined with hers. They were warm and strong and gorgeously masculine, she thought as she glanced down at their joined hands. With self-preservation in mind, maybe she should have pulled away, but she didn’t. All he was doing was holding her hand, after all, but the comfort it gave her was enormous. The worst thing about it was, she had never, until right this very second, realized how much Tyler’s father’s abandonment of her and their son had hurt.
    “Yeah, he is,” she said over the sudden lump in her throat. “He’s missing out on Tyler.”
    “And you.” His fingers tightened on hers, and for a moment there she felt a terrifying prickling at the backs of her eyes. She never cried—another thing she’d learned early on was that all crying got you was a stopped-up nose—but all at once she feared she might as he continued with, “You’re something special, you