Page 21 of Rescued By the Ranger

“Mac and cheese!” she calls out.

Rhodes shrugs, “Sounds good to me.”

“Let’s go find some.” Leesa starts for the kitchen. “Hey, did get my phone charged?”

“Shit, I forgot it out in your car.”

“Dollar,” Jazzy mumbles.

I sigh.

Leesa looks down at her daughter. “Here’s the deal, Jazzy, Rhodes doesn’t have to do the dollar jar. That’s just for people in our family.”

I say it and I see him deflate.

“I’ll go get your phone,” he says, turning on his heels.

Shit.

The front door closes.

“I like Rhodes. He saved me from the lion. It was big.”

“I know. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I think that it was hungry. Can we feed it?”

I search the cabinets and finally find a couple boxes of mac and cheese. “No, honey, we cannot feed the wild animal. It has to find food on its own.”

I start the water to boil and measure out the milk and the butter. It’s been a while since Rhodes went out, but the front door opens and I hear boots on the entryway.

“Did it get some charge?”

“Doesn’t matter, we won’t need a phone.”

I spin to the voice, the move throwing me off balance.

“Daddy!” Jazzy jumps off a stool and runs to her father’s arms.

Kids don’t get manipulation at this point in their lives, but I do and since I’m not seeing Rhodes hot on Cary’s heels, an unease crawls up from the depths of my gut.

“Cary? What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing. You need to tell me when you take our adorable,” he boops her nose and she giggles, “daughter out of the city.”

“No, that only…” I decide not to get into the issue at hand in front of Jazzy, her eyes bouncing back and forth between us. “Hey, honey, can you go in the living room and do some more coloring. I think Rhodes found a new coloring book.”

“Really? I like Rhodes daddy. He saved me from a lion!” She roars.

“Oh, sounds scary.”

“It wasn’t. He’s a soldier. He protected me.”

Cary’s face falls. Even his adorable daughter can’t impress him always, especially when he’ll assume a five-year-old is slighting him.

She’s not.

As soon as Jazzy is out of the room, I motion toward the door. “Cary, you need to go. You cannot be here.”

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