Page 41 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

"Yes," he says. His voice has gone low. "Yes. I would. I'd like that very much."

He's out of the chair before I finish blinking. He's on his knees in front of the cabinet with the doors flung wide and the toolbox dragged out, and he looks up at me with his eyes lit and his hair already coming undone and says, with the greatest solemnity, "Flashlight."

I hand it to him. He puts it between his teeth, folds his long body into the cabinet and disappears to the waist, and I stand at the counter with my hands over my mouth, shaking with laughter, watching his legs.

"It'th the theat wather," he reports around the flashlight.

"I know. I did it."

"It'th a very clean thwap. Thurgical."

"I had a good teacher."

I hear him laugh, muffled, in the dark of the cabinet. A hand comes out of it, finds my ankle, closes on it warm and rough, his thumb tracing the bone.

"Roman—"

"Thorry."

"You're not."

"No."

"Not in front of the sink." But I'm laughing and his hand is sliding up my calf and the morning light is a long gold bar across the linoleum, and I have a husband on my kitchen floor who is a very good man and an even better fixer.

Overhead the fourth stair creaks.

I know that creak the way I know my own pulse. I've stepped around it in the dark more times than I can count. I snatch my leg back and Roman's head hits the underside of the sink with a thunk, and the flashlight rolls out onto the floor.

He lies there in a perfect silence of guilt as the slap of bare feet comes down the stairs and across the hall, and I get to the table and into my chair and pick up my tea at the exact moment the kitchen door swings open.

Charlotte stands in the doorway in a mill sweatshirt that comes to her knees, her hair in a lopsided bun and the flash of purple rubber bands over her braces when she yawns.

She's twelve and half a head taller than she was in the spring, and she's looking at the cabinet with exactly the expression her grandmother used on the pie table the year someone brought store-bought.

"Why is there a man in the cupboard?"

"Your mother broke the sink," says Roman from inside it.

"On purpose?"

"A little."

"Why?"

"He was bored," I say.

"I wasn't bored. I was between projects."

"He was labeling the fuse box, Charlotte."

"I like the fuse box," says the cupboard with dignity.

She looks at me, at the legs, at me again, and her mouth twitches in a way she'd deny under oath. Then she shuffles to the pantry, takes down a box of cereal, and pours it into a mixing bowl because every proper bowl in the house is in the dishwasher.

She eats standing up, leaning on the counter, with her eyes on the middle distance and the full, ancient weariness of a girl who's discovered her parents are people.

"You guys are so weird."