Page 44 of Smitten with the Single Dad

Technically, he could just put her on a prep station chopping vegetables andsuch. All he really needed in the kitchen was an extra set of hands that knew how to hold a knife and dice onions.

“I’m getting pretty restless, Wyatt. We could help each other out here. I help you in the kitchen, you help me by getting me out of the house and making me feel useful. I feel like a sitting chicken right now. Just waiting for slaughter.”

“A sitting duck?”

“Does the bird really matter? And besides, ducks can fly. They have a better chance at escaping. It should be a chicken.”

He couldn’t argue with her reasoning.

“Please?” She blinked those beautiful, soulful, brown eyes at him and in that moment, he would have given her anything in the world. A job, a ring, a kidney.

Finally, he nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

“I am the one that should be thanking you.” She bounced on her toes. “I am excited to be useful. You will see, I am very good with a knife.” Her wink made his dick twitch before she bounded out of the kitchen and upstairs. “I need to change.”

He really shouldn’t be having such inappropriate thoughts about Vica, but the longer she stayed with them, the harder and harder that became. He’d already woken up twice with painful erections because his dreams about her had been downright filthy. Then it was impossible to look her in the eye in the morning over the breakfast table. Particularly because in one of those dreams, her mouth had been wrapped around his cock and the eye contact she made, glancing up at him from her knees, nearly made him wake up in a sticky mess.

He finished packing the boys’ lunches, then went about making pancakes since the guilt of lashing out at his kids gnawed away at him like a beaver on a tree trunk. He was just flipping the first batch on the griddle when the kids and Vica came back downstairs. She wore all black now. Black leggings that made her ass scream at him to bite it, and a black T-shirt that hugged her curves and made him groan.

“Are you making pancakes, Dad?” Jake asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry I snapped at you guys. I was stressed because Rico fell off his bike and broke his leg.”

“Oh no!” Griffon said. “Did it fall off?”

Wyatt gave his youngest son a heavy eye roll. “No. It didn’t breakoff, it just broke on the inside.”

“Like Talia broke her arm,” Jake said.

“Exactly. Anyway, Justine put a cast on him, but he’s going to be out of work for a bit and Killian is on vacation until Tuesday. So we’re short staffed. I was just stressed, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I’m sorry.”

“So what are you going to do?” Jake asked, reclaiming his seat at the table and grabbing a small bunch of freshly washed green grapes from the bowl.

“Luckily, Vica has offered to help out in the kitchen.”

“You can cook?” Griffon asked her with genuine surprise.

“I can. I used to work in a kitchen back in Italy. And I cooked a lot with my dad and brother.”

“What’s your brother’s name?” Griffon asked. The kid had the attention span of a fruit fly and switched topics quicker than a Formula One driver changed gears.

“His name was Lorenzo, but he has passed away.”

“How’d he die?” Griffon asked.

“Griff,” Wyatt warned.

“What?” his youngest challenged. “Is that a bad thing to ask?”

“It’s okay,” Vica said. “He was a professional parachuter with the Italian military. He was on a training jump, neither of his chutes deployed and—”

“That’s awful,” Griffon said, his little mouth hanging open. “I would never want to die that way.”

Yeah, it definitely wasn’t how Wyatt wanted to go, knowing you were falling to your death when neither chute opened and there wasn’t anything you could do to stop it. When he went, he wanted it to be either quick and painless where he didn’t even see it coming. Or where he knew it was happening and had doneall he could to fight it and was surrounded by those he loved, with all his affairs in order and a heavy dose of pain meds flowing through his veins.

“Pancakes are up,” Wyatt said, plunking the flapjacks into the middle of the table. “I expect fruit to be consumed, please. Not just carbs and sugar.”

“But carbs are so delicious,” Griffon chimed as he speared a pancake with his fork and brought it onto his plate. “Why are they called carbs?”

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