“Don’t worry about it,” he said, reaching over the passenger seat of his truck and grabbing his bag.

“Don’t worry about it?” Trevor repeated with a snort of disbelief as he gestured down at his hands. “It looks like you shoved your hands in acid!”

Danny couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison. “Close enough.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Trevor asked, keeping pace with him as he made his way to the old library that he personally believed should have been torn down years ago.

“It means that you might want to find another place to dump your wife’s science experiments,” he said, glad that Zoe wasn’t around for this conversation.

She was a really sweet woman and it would kill her to know that her food had actually harmed someone. He’d rather die than hurt her. She’d been there for him during his recovery, sat with him and held his hand when the painkillers stopped working, read to him, and kept his family from aggravating the shit out of him with their constant worrying.

“Zoe’s lasagna did this?” Trevor asked, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him to a stop so that he could look over Danny’s damaged hands.

For a moment, Danny could only stare at his cousin in horror. “That was lasagna?”

“Yeah,” Trevor said, sighing heavily as he continued to look his hand over. “Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” he said with a worried frown, the same one that everyone in his family got whenever he so much as sneezed.

“Aidan already took care of it,” he said, pulling his arm away. “It will clear up in a few days.”

“Did anyone else get hurt?” Trevor asked, once again keeping pace with him.

“Some of it got on Jodi,” he said, deciding that using his nickname for his little neighbor would only encourage more bullshit, bullshit that he wasn’t in the mood for, not after last night.

“Shit,” Trevor muttered, looking truly upset. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, but if I were you, I would probably give her a month or two of free rent,” he said, wondering what he was going to do about Tinkerbelle.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he wanted her.

He wanted to be with her, to hold her, to bury himself to the hilt inside her and stay there while the rest of the world disappeared, but he wasn’t sure that he could be what she wanted. The only relationships that he’d ever been in were in high school and those had been with teenage girls who thought a romantic night consisted of a movie, pizza and sneaking him into their room later when their parents fell asleep. Although he’d slept with more than his fair share of women over the years, he’d never dated any of them.

At least not seriously.

He’d taken plenty of women out when he had downtime, but he’d never had to put much effort into getting them into his bed. He’d never had to and most importantly, he’d never wanted to put in the effort. If he came across a woman that wasn’t interested in wasting a little time between the sheets, he’d moved on without a second thought. He hadn’t had time for anything more when he was a Marine. Now….

Now he’d really like to see if there was anything behind this overwhelming attraction and obsession he was feeling for his little neighbor. He wished his attraction to her was simple, something that he could work through by taking her to bed, but he instinctively knew that things with Tink would never be that simple. To be honest, he didn’t want simple.

He wanted something more, something better, he wanted Tinkerbelle and he would have had her too if it hadn’t been for that bastard Aidan. He’d been working up his nerve to ask Tink out, fortifying himself on his second helping of that incredible meal when the shameless bastard started to pout and whine. He’d tried to tell Tink to just ignore him, but she apparently she had a soft spot for whiny bastards.

For the rest of the meal he’d sat there, glaring at the smug bastard. Several times he’d dropped hints for the bastard to leave, but Aidan just sat there as content as could be while Danny had tried to look for an opening to ask his little neighbor out. Even that awkward moment when Aidan realized that he’d left his date in the hall hadn’t been enough to get him to leave. He’d simply shrugged, grabbed the bowl of mashed potatoes and finished them off while Danny had sat there, contemplating beating the shit out of his brother with the gravy boat.

When Danny offered to do the dishes to thank Tink for the incredible meal and to buy himself a little more time, he’d thought for sure that his brother would make a run for it. He’d never expected his brother to join him at the sink with a shit-eating grin. For the next thirty minutes he’d worked beside his brother, jaw tightly clenched until the last pan was placed on the counter to dry. Tink thanked them for doing the dishes and wished them a goodnight around a yawn.

Forced to put off his plans for another night, he’d headed for the door with Aidan trailing behind him whistling a jaunty tune. Once Tink’s door was shut behind them, he’d wished his brother a good night by placing him in a headlock. He’d brought the bastard to the floor where he used Aidan’s shirt to secure his hands behind his back and then dragged the whiny bastard down the hall and shoved him inside the maintenance closet. As he’d walked away he’d tried to figure out a game plan to get Tink to take a chance on him, but so far nothing.

“We’re going to have to replace these doors,” Trevor said when they reached the large, thick doors that made up the entrance to the old library.

Danny had a feeling the City Council wasn’t going to agree to that, especially since the doors were probably the original doors, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he grabbed hold of one of the dull door handles and tried not to cringe when the door slowly swung open on rusty latches, emitting a high pitched noise that was barely noticeable over the sounds of children screaming.

“What the hell…….” Trevor mumbled at his side as they tried to make sense out of what they were seeing.

The large front room where he remembered Mrs. Pattinson, the old librarian who used to smell of butterscotch and dusty books used to reside, was filled with screaming children covered with what appeared to be glue and glitter. Frowning, he watched as the horde of screaming children clambered to get to the desk where-

“Oh, shit,” Trevor muttered just loud enough for him to hear when they both spotted Matthew, Trevor’s youngest son, sitting on the checkout desk with several large bottles of paste on one side and a pile of brown paper bags and baggies filled with cookies, brownies and cupcakes on the other.

While the rest of the kids were flipping out, fighting over small canisters of glitter, Matthew sat there, calmly eating what appeared to be a rather delicious looking sandwich. Danny’s attention shifted to a closed door where he could just barely make out the pounding and the sounds of women demanding that someone open the door. When Matthew spotted them standing there probably looking a little confused and horrified, he took another bite of his sandwich and gestured absently over his shoulder.

Almost too afraid to look, but unable to help himself, he looked past his cousin’s frightening child and nearly swallowed his tongue when he spotted that delectable ass that he’d been fantasizing about for the past two nights wiggling enticingly. This was definitely a pleasant surprise finding her here. He may have groaned. He definitely licked his lips as he watched Tink try to escape the clutches of two seven-year-old girls by climbing on top of a cabinet. Unfortunately for her, she was too short to pull it off and fortunately for him, he now had his game plan solidly in place.