Page 24 of Can't Help Falling

CHAPTER SIX

AFTERDROPPING KYLIEat her counselor a few days later and returning home to get some writing done, Tyler’s first hint that something was amiss was the fact that his doorman was bright pink and blushing like a tulip. His second hint was that as he walked through the lobby of his building, all the hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up.

There was only one phenomenon that made that happen.

The Fin Phenomenon.

Tyler turned, hoping he wasn’t about to find spooky, sexy Fin sitting in one of the visitor’s chairs in the lobby.

His skin tightened when he saw her lounging there, sparkly silver rings on the one hand she held under her chin. Her face was carved with shadows and gorgeous, her clothes ridiculously ugly yet somehow still alluring. Her legs were crossed, one foot bouncing, and, dammit...she wore her hair down.

In general, he had a weakness for ponytails. The high, swinging ones that women wore to Pilates classes. But there was something about Fin’s inky dark hair in a solid sheet against her back that made Tyler think of getting into bed with her after a long day.

He frowned.

“What are you doing here?”

“I didn’t let her upstairs, sir.”

Tyler turned halfway back around to his doorman. “Thanks, Benjy. That’s a good thing. I wasn’t expecting her.”

“I might not be a guest of yours,” Fin said in that accent of hers. Smoky Louisiana sage that made Tyler have to clear his throat, no matter if he was over her or not. “But I might be a guest of Benjy’s from now on. We’ve become great friends.”

It figured she’d plant herself in his lobby and charm the crap out of his doorman. Based on the bubblegum pink of Benjy’s twenty-two-year-old cheeks, Tyler considered it a holy miracle that the kid hadn’t let Fin charm her way all the way upstairs. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Benjy had made her a copy of Tyler’s key. But apparently the kid was made of stronger stuff. Tyler made an internal note to tip him even more than usual for the holiday season.

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least, Serafine.”

Something flared in her eyes at his use of her full name. “Where’s Kylie?”

“I just dropped her off at her weekly court-ordered counseling session.” He considered withholding information just for the hell of it, but that sounded like a hell of a lot of work. His shoulders sagged a bit. “Her case worker is coming to meet with her right after that. So, I don’t go back to get her for another three hours.”

“You’re picking her up in a cab?”

“No, we’ll take the train home together.”

“Has she tried to do the trains by herself yet?”

He shook his head. “No. She’s definitely nervous about getting lost in the city. I’ve been riding with her until she gets used to it.”

Fin rose up from the chair, and Tyler resented it.

Stay over there!he wanted to shout at her. He was being too nice, volunteering too much information. He was giving her an opening, dammit!

He imagined himself with a chair and a whip. In his head, Fin wasn’t a lion, but that same bejeweled tiger he’d pictured her as before. Stunning and deadly.

When he’d been into her, looking at her had been difficult. Every glance in her direction had been like trying to make out an airplane that was about to fly across the corona of the sun. She’d been too alluring to him. She’d burned herself into his consciousness. But now that that was in the past, he found that he was actually able to watch her walk across the lobby toward him.

Stay back!

There was something equally fluid and threatening in the way she moved toward him. She was still that bejeweled tiger, but suddenly his chair and whip had lost air, deflating comically. He could almost picture himself as a meme, the words womp womp plastered underneath him.

When she was just three feet from him, she stopped and crossed her arms under her breasts. “How’s she doing? Adjusting to the city?”

“Hell if I know.” It had been a week since Thanksgiving, and Christmas was already looming over Tyler, jamming itself down his throat on every billboard and jingle on the radio. He’d never realized how personal Christmas gifts were before. He’d also never felt more pressure to show someone how he felt with a gift. He desperately wanted to find Kylie a gift that said she was welcome and that everything would be okay and that maybe he didn’t know her that well yet, but he was trying his best.

Kylie, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care to know him in the least. She locked herself in her bedroom every single moment she wasn’t using the bathroom. Tyler had made up a story about cockroaches in New York City to scare her into eating her meals in the kitchen, which she did. But she didn’t speak. And their train rides together were marked by the same unfailing silence. It made things...slow. The pace of his life could have easily been outstripped by an inchworm.

His only respite came when she was at school and he could lose himself in his work. He’d convinced his editor that he could still write his sports column watching the games from home and he knew enough of the players personally to be able to get quotes from them over the phone or over text or email. At some point, he was going to have to start attending the games again, hounding the guys at the press conferences after and getting home at half past two. Tyler internally groaned when he thought about how much a babysitter would cost him for a night like that. But his column desperately needed it. Lately, he’d veered from his usual witty analysis of each player and their notable plays to waxing poetic about the nature of sports in general. He was doing it to reach his word counts, and his editor was not going to continue swallowing it for long.

---