Shiver

Marco. He leaned on his crutches just inside the kitchen doorway watching her. Her stomach instantly tightened, and her heart quickened its beat.
    Oh, no. After a lifetime’s worth of making bad choices where men were concerned, was she really still this stupid?
    He was clad in loose gray sweatpants and another of the house-favorite ubiquitous white T-shirts, plus his own sneakers. She was wearing one of those white T-shirts herself, along with a pair of too-big black gym shorts that she’d found among other garments folded in the drawers of the dresser in the master bedroom. The shorts hung past her knees, and the only way she was keeping them up was by the drawstring, which she had cinched supertight around her waist; since her boots were the only shoes she had, she wore them as well. With no makeup—whoever had stocked the town house apparently hadn’t thought of that—and her hair twisted into a loose knot on the top of her head, she was not feeling particularly attractive, which didn’t make her any happier to see Marco standing there.
    “Hey, Mom.” Tyler stood right in front of Marco, and it didn’t require much imagination to guess where he’d run off to when he had disappeared from the kitchen as she had started pouring the pancake batter into the skillet. What was it they said about hindsight? She would have stopped him if she had realized. The more distance she kept between herself and Tyler and Marco, the better. She couldn’t have felt much warier of a snake—unless, she thought with an inner grimace, she was sexually attracted to the snake, too. “It smells good.”
    Tyler wore another of the white T-shirts. Adult size, it was as big on him as a dress and completely hid his short pajama pants, which he had on beneath. As he’d brought no shoes, he was barefoot. Clothing, or rather her and Tyler’s lack of it, was an issue that Sam knew she was going to have to address withsomebody, but that was added to the discussion-to-be-had-later list and consigned to after breakfast.
    Right at the moment, she had Marco to deal with. Even stooped over the crutches as he was, he was physically imposing, tall and wide shouldered, with muscular arms, big hands curled around the handles, and an athlete’s body complete with long, strong legs, the foot of one of which was barely touching the floor. His black hair was unruly and he badly needed a shave. Her eyes collided with his, and to her dismay instant electricity blazed between them. As the memory of their last, charged encounter sizzled in the air like a heat shimmer—his hand on her breast being the crowning moment—Sam felt a wave of embarrassment. Luckily, she wasn’t prone to blushing, or she probably would have turned the color of a ripe tomato. As it was, biting down on her lower lip was the only outward sign of discomfiture she gave, and as soon as she realized she was doing it she stopped.
    “I told Trey breakfast was almost ready.” Tyler glanced over his shoulder at Marco as he spoke. “He’s hungry just like us.”
    “Only if there’s enough.” The smile Marco gave her made her heart skip a beat. As a result, her brows snapped together in a quick frown. God, had she really kissed him like that last night? What had she been thinking?
    Obvious answer: thinking was not what she had been doing.
    “He wants to try your pancakes. I told him you make the best pancakes ever.”
    “Thank you, sir.” Getting a grip, Sam managed a smile for her son. Tyler’s answering smile as he headed toward the tablewas so sunny that Sam didn’t have the heart to do or say anything that would dim it. He had been through enough trauma over the last thirty-six hours or so to last several lifetimes. Keeping things as normal and unterrifying as possible had to be a top priority for her now. At least, for as long as she could manage it. But whatever the day, or the coming days, might bring, there was nothing she could do to change any of it at the moment, so she tried to push from her mind the gnawing fear that had been threatening to consume her ever since she had woken up and realized where she and Tyler were.
    “There’s plenty,” she told Marco. Okay, so maybe her tone was a little short. Acute anxiety coupled with an attraction to a man she absolutely should not be feeling attracted to tended to make her cross, she was discovering. When Tyler glanced at her, looking faintly curious, she tried to compensate for her tone with a brief and very