Chapter 1
Athunkwoke Eric Hawke.
Beside him, Vicki moaned and stretched, the sheet slipping below her bare breasts. “He’s awake already?”
As much as Eric would have loved to start his day with a little sex, the toddler was loose in the house again. And that was the irony. The sex act produced children, which, in turn, made it hard to find time to have sex.
Eric glanced at his alarm clock, saw that it was just before six in the morning. “Go back to sleep. I need to get up anyway.”
He didn’t mind being the first one out of bed. He’d worked in search-and-rescue all his adult life and had been fire chief for the past seven years. He was used to odd hours and early mornings, and he loved this time of day. Besides, given how often he was away from home, he enjoyed the time with his son, and Vicki deserved a break.
He kissed her cheek, climbed out of bed, and pulled on a pair of boxer briefs and shorts.
Anotherthunksent him hurrying down the hall to Caden’s room, which he found empty, a wet diaper sitting in the middle of the wooden floor together with a pair of pajama bottoms. It figured. At twenty-three months, Caden was a world-class escape artist and, apparently, a budding nudist, as well.
Eric hurried downstairs past the living room with its big fireplace and cathedral ceiling toward the kitchen, his heart skipping a beat the moment he saw. “Jesus!”
Caden had pushed a chair over to the kitchen counter and now sat on top of the refrigerator, naked from the waist down, a box of graham crackers in his hands. “Tookie.”
“Hey, little man, what are you doing up there?”
No wonder people got gray hair after having kids.
“Tookie,” Caden said again.
“No cookies before breakfast.” Hawke took away the box of graham crackers, lifted his son into his arms, and headed back upstairs. “We need to get you dressed.”
While Caden chattered about Thomas the Tank Engine, Eric dressed him in a pair of dry training pants, shorts, and a little T-shirt that read, “I’m proof my mommy can’t resist firefighters.”
Eric wouldn’t lie. He liked that T-shirt.
“You’re all set.” He tousled his son’s dark hair. “Try to keep your britches on, okay?”
Back in the kitchen, he settled Caden in his high chair with some loose Cheerios and got busy scrambling eggs, making toast and coffee, and washing fruit. He enjoyed this morning routine, his life richer now than he’d imagined it could be. Vicki had entered his world, and everything had changed.
“Want some blueberries?” He put a few berries on Caden’s tray and couldn’t help but smile at the look of concentration on his son’s face as he picked up each berry to put it into his mouth. “You like those, don’t you?”
“He loves them.”
Eric glanced over his shoulder to find Vicki leaning against the door jam in her white bathrobe, her shoulder-length dark hair tangled, a smile on her sweet face. “Do you know where I found him?”
“On the table?”
Eric shook his head. “On top of therefrigerator.”
Vicki’s eyes went wide. “Good grief! We have to do something. He can’t have the run of the house when we’re asleep. If he had fallen…”
Eric had been a paramedic for as long as he’d been a firefighter. He knew what even a short fall could do to a small child. They lived in a huge, two-million-dollar multi-level house—a wedding present from Vicki’s gazillionaire father—and there were so many ways for an unsupervised toddler to hurt himself. They’d tried a dozen different kinds of baby gates, but Caden had climbed them all. They had a baby monitor, of course, but the little stinker was quiet when he got up to things he knew he shouldn’t be doing.
“I’m not sure what to do. Put iron bars over his door? Install a motion detector?”
Why did children gain mobility before they acquired sense?
Vicki’s eyes narrowed. “He takes after you, you know. Robin says you used to climb out of your crib, too. She says you climbed everything.”
Eric’s mother lived in a cabin on their property and watched Caden when he and Vicki were both at work. It was a convenient arrangement for everyone, but his mother talked too much. He opened his mouth to defend himself, but what she’d said was true. “Hey, it’s all good. I turned it into a career, didn’t I?”
His love of climbing had become serious when he was a teenager, landing him a coveted spot on the Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue Team straight out of high school. Rescue work had led him to wildland firefighting and then the Scarlet Springs Fire Department. Eventually, he’d become the youngest fire chief in the history of Scarlet Springs.