Page 39 of Dangerous Command
Maddie kissed his forehead, then turned to a woman with gray hair in the corner. I hadn’t noticed her at first.
“I’m dying to hear what happened,” Maddie said, turning back to the boy. “Lucy said you were quite the adventurer.”
“Well,” the boy started, then used his good arm to push himself up, “we went to the ten and up jungle gym.”
Maddie furrowed her brows. “Did you age four years since I left you with Lucy?” A playful grin danced on her face. “Must be all of those cookies she’s feeding you.”
“Mom,” he said, somehow stretching the word into two syllables.
Mom?
“So go on,” she said. “You climbed to the top of it?”
He gave a bashful smile. “I just figured, you know? They were jumping off the top, spinning as they went. And it didn’t look that hard. I wanted to prove I could do it too. And I did! Three times.” He looked back at the woman in the corner, Lucy, seeking confirmation. Lucy nodded. He turned back to Maddie. “But I caught myself wrong and—” he gave a long, dramatic sigh, “—here we are.”
“Waiting to get a cast,” Maddie said. She grabbed an ice pack off of the table next to him and put it on his wrist. He shivered. “It’ll help the swelling.” He relented, then looked away. “Was it worth it?”
He nodded eagerly. “I won’t land the wrong way next time.” He gazed up at his mother, a smile mixed with adoration and love. His mother. Maddie.
Maddie had a kid. A boy.
Maddie ruffled her hand through his hair, then let out a long breath. “I’m just glad you’re okay. And no more being a cool guy! There’s no reason to put yourself in danger like that, okay?”
The boy sighed again. “Yes, Mom.”
“And Lucy?”
Lucy shrugged. “Kids will be kids.”
“He was on top of a jungle gym.”
“It wasn’t that high, Mama. He just landed wrong,” she said.
Lucy’s eyes crossed over to me, and for the first time since Maddie had gotten the phone call, Maddie smiled, then turned to me. “Don’t tell me you were jumping off of jungle gyms too when you were a kid.”
The sad part was that I remembered exactly one time that I had been to a jungle gym with our old nanny. There were no jungle gyms or running through fields. We had target practice in the woods with tin cans or corpses. We played hide and seek between the trees to learn how to be stealthy. And once my father started shepherding me into the role of the boss, I didn’t have time for any of that.
“Jumped out of plenty of trees,” I said, nodding at the boy. “You’re what, six?”
“How’d you know?” he asked.
I smiled. I had listened to his mother. “You look pretty tough for a six-year-old. Bet it didn’t hurt.”
“Well,” the boy looked down at his iced wrist. “Itdidhurt. But I didn’t cry.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. The boy beamed with pride.
“Mack, this is Derek, the man I work for in Sage City.” Maddie nodded to me. “Derek, this is my son, Mack.”
I held out a hand, shaking Mack’s. He was small, but he still gripped my hand tight.
“I would have jumped off,” I said. “I broke my arm like that too.”
“You did?” he asked.
“Like I said, it was from a tree, but yeah. I should have been more careful about it.”
“How long did you have a cast?”
