Alex (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 3) Read online

  Alex

  Hope Hitchens

  Copyright © 2018 by Hope Hitchens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events & incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, incidents or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you so much for checking out the latest (as I type!) novel in my new romance series Heartbreakers & Troublemakers. As with all my books, this story was a labor of love for me. I’ve poured my heart and soul into polishing it to perfection. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

  - Hope xx

  Contents

  1. Olivia

  2. Alexander

  3. Olivia

  4. Alexander

  5. Alexander

  6. Olivia

  7. Alexander

  8. Olivia

  9. Alexander

  10. Olivia

  11. Olivia

  12. Alexander

  13. Olivia

  14. Alexander

  15. Olivia

  16. Alexander

  17. Alexander

  18. Olivia

  19. Alexander

  20. Olivia

  21. Alexander

  22. Olivia

  23. Alexander

  24. Olivia

  Epilogue

  Newsletter

  Introducing… Levi

  About the Author

  1

  Olivia

  I looked over the sea of sleeping children.

  Seventeen still, serene sleeping babies.

  I gingerly popped the top of my can of Red Bull and heard the small sound the gas made as it escaped. I looked over the sleeping bodies again. It didn’t seem to have woken any of them. I sighed, relieved and took my first gracious sip. The tall coffee I had every morning only lasted me so long. With a crowd of almost twenty toddlers to deal with, I needed to re-up on the caffeine about halfway through.

  Naptime sounds like it should be the easiest time of your day as a preschool teacher. I mean, it was when the children were asleep. It was essentially an hour or so after lunch that you just had off. But no. If only that were true. I sipped my drink and waited for it because it was coming.

  It came every day.

  The little boy’s name was Francis, and he was by far the worst napper I had ever encountered in my short career. He would settle onto his nap mat like the other kids and would stay there approximately five to ten minutes. Nine and a half minutes was his current record of being still before he inevitably woke up.

  The things he would do next were simply baffling to me. I would always watch for a few minutes before I asked him what he was doing and whether he could please settle down. Parents made a lot of requests when dropping their kids off in the morning and the one I heard the most was to please make sure their kid had a nap. The thing they maybe didn’t understand was that forcing a child to nap is literally impossible. If they weren’t tired, they just weren’t, and they were not going to bed down. That was just that.

  Francis—or Frankie—would do this thing where he would get up off his nap mat, walk carefully and quietly around all the other kids to the other side of the room where the toys are kept and begin transporting them back to his mat. He would start with a handful of Legos, the table and sitting room furniture from a dollhouse, a stuffed bunny and basically go on until I stopped him.

  Today, he was taking his time before he got up. Ten whole minutes passed, and he hadn’t gotten up once. He hadn’t even tossed about on his mat trying to get comfortable. I sipped my energy drink and wondered whether this was the moment that would go down in history as the day Frankie made it through an entire naptime actually asleep.

  Just as if he had heard me, the little boy roused himself and got up to his feet. He looked around the room and saw me looking at him. He seemed to pause and think about what it was that he wanted to do before he settled on coming up to the desk.

  I turned my attention away from him and pretended to be doing something at my desk. It was naptime. He wasn’t supposed to be awake to ask me for things. Paying attention to him would just reinforce the behavior. When he got to the desk, he just stood there and watched me drinking my Red Bull. He was the sort of kid that parents put in commercials because he fit the toddler ideal of beauty. It was fucked up that there was one, but it was true. It wasn’t everyone’s kid who was cute enough to be in an Apple Jacks commercial.

  Frankie had big round blue eyes that he didn’t seem to need to blink that often. After nearly a full minute of silent staring, I finally caved.

  “What’s the matter Frankie; why are all your friends asleep and you are still awake?” I asked him.

  “I can’t find my sleepy today,” he said.

  He couldn’t find his sleepy today. He couldn’t find it any day. At times like this, it was my job to see what the kid would need to get them to fall asleep. Some kids needed to feel a little weight on them to fall asleep, more than the light blankets we gave them, so more than once I had had to sit on the floor during naptime, resting a hand on one of my student’s backs so they could finally go to sleep. I sighed.

  “What should we do about that Frankie? If you don’t nap now, nap time will be over soon, and you’ll be tired.”

  “Can I color?”

  This request was one that he made nearly every day. It was all my fault, really. It had been a standard naptime, and he had gone on his toy collection quest, and I had tried to get him to simmer down or at the very least to stop moving around so much, in case he woke the other kids up. All suggestions had been rejected. I needed him to stay in one place quietly, and that was why, defeated, I had asked if he wanted to color. He had.

  A couple of weeks later when that incentive had lost its novelty, I had sweetened the deal, letting him use the fun glitter gel pens that were reserved for their more special projects. That was what he asked to use today. I let him because naptime was only so long. I wanted every moment of quiet before the ordeal of waking up began.

  “I want to sit with you,” he said, holding the coloring sheet and as many gel pens as he could in his hands. Usually, I would hit him with a ‘not today,’ but today, I got up and dragged my TA’s chair from his desk to mine so Frankie could hop up into it and color his sheet.

  Frankie was engrossed in his coloring, getting glitter gel all over his hands. I finished my drink and quietly left the room to check my messages. This was something I was allowed to do as parents often called and texted throughout the day because a bunch of strangers were taking care of their kids. I got it. It was annoying, and they really didn’t have anything to worry about, but try telling them that. I saw a text message reminding me to make sure Ayden didn’t play in the sand because she had a cast on. I received this message literally every day. There was another saying Tiger’s mom would be about ten or so minutes late picking him up.

  The usual. Worried parents being worried. I saw a missed call from my sister Iris and remembered that I was going shopping that evening for her baby shower. She was nearly six months along. She knew I was at work, so there was no reason why she would have been calling me during the day. There was no text message from her, so I supposed it wasn’t that serious. Since it was still naptime, though I
went ahead and called her.

  “Hello, Iris?” I said when she picked up.

  “Ollie, I’m so sorry for calling you at work,” she said. The thought struck me that maybe there was something wrong with the baby, and I panicked a little. Iris had been pregnant before. This was going to be her second child, and I had a perfect four-year-old nephew whom I loved—her firstborn son, Hayden.

  “Uh, don’t worry about it. Is something wrong?” I left out the ‘with the baby’ part because I didn’t want to get myself stressed out, as well as her.

  “Nope. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to ask you a favor.”

  “What do you need?” I asked. She was asking me for help, and since that was the case, I was inclined to believe that she really needed it. She was and wasn’t a single mom. She had been single when she had Hayden, but the father of this new kid was her current fiancé. His name was Rick, and he was the kind of stable, ambitious, handsome and kind man that we should all be so lucky to get. I guess that if she really needed me for something, it meant Rick for whatever reason, couldn’t.

  “I have an appointment today, and this is going to be the first time that Rick gets to see the baby. I wanted to know whether you could pick Hayden up from school and bring him home.”

  I couldn’t wait to be pregnant too so people wouldn’t be able to say no to me when I asked them for stuff. Maybe if we didn’t still live together, I would be able to say no to some of these things. She had moved out and gotten her own house with the help of my parents after Hayden had been born. Our parents were willing to help her under the condition that she didn’t live under their roof with the child. I had ended up as babysitter for a long time when I moved in with her during the summers off from college, and that sort of became my ‘rent.’

  Since I had graduated, I moved back in with her instead of our parents and was saving up to move out on my own. While I had been at school, she had met and started dating Rick and was sort of living out of both his house and hers but since the baby was coming, they had made the decision to move into hers since it was a house and Rick had been living in an apartment.

  The hunt for a house for myself had been going alright, which meant I hadn’t found a place to live yet, but there was nothing really urgent about the search just yet. Iris and Rick weren’t exactly kicking me out. I just wanted to give them space. It was weird living with them because I was still single and they were on their way to starting a family together. I wasn’t at the point where I would have to start asking my parents for help yet, and I had options.

  There was always the roommate thing. I could move in with someone who was renting out their extra room. Besides going shopping for something to buy her newborn, I wasn’t doing anything, and yes, I could pick Hayden up from school. I told her I would and went back into the classroom. It was nearly time to wake the kids up. Naptime was the calm before the storm.

  Some of them woke up really fast and with little to no fuss. Some of the others got up, and you could see them process that they weren’t actually at home waking up where they thought they were and it was still going to be a little while before their parents came to get them. More often than not, this would result in tears.

  My TA—James—a guy, had already begun the process. He smiled at me when I walked into the room. There weren’t a lot of guys working in early childhood development. He was the first one I had actually encountered. He was great, though. We were about the same age, and I knew it wasn’t his only job. He had gone to school for it, however, so it wasn’t like this was just something to bide the time till he got the job he actually wanted. Did he tell women he was a preschool teacher’s assistant? There was nothing wrong with that, but it was like being a male nanny or nurse. It wasn’t the most typically masculine job you could have.

  “Did you let Frankie use the glitter pens?” he asked me.

  “I did. He wouldn’t go to sleep.” I gently patted a sleeping three-year-old on the back to wake her up. She sat up and looked around before saying she was hungry.

  “Do you want to get Esme today or should I?” he asked. Esme was notoriously uncooperative. Preschool isn’t like school school because everyone is still a baby and there is only so much you can expect from them. It is more to socialize kids and really just a more expensive alternative to hiring a nanny; kids didn’t get expelled or anything for underperforming. Esme was the closest we had gotten to actually asking a parent to take their child to another school. She woke up screaming and flailing. She was very bad at sharing and had hurt other kids before.

  As far as we knew she wasn’t on the autism spectrum and she had normalized a little since she had been enrolled, but she was still a little risky to have around the other kids when she was waking up. That was why we did her last.

  “I will,” I said, sighing. I walked up to the sleeping child and gently pulled her blanket down. I whispered that it was time to wake up with gentle pats on her back. She rolled onto her stomach, face down.

  “No,” she said, grabbing the blanket and pulling it over her head. James got the children split into groups around their work desks for arts and crafts while I tried to coax Esme into cooperating as she screamed. Esme eventually had to sit out till she calmed down enough to work with the other kids. Kids like her were the reason why I didn’t wear any jewelry to work and always had my hair tied back. Those little hands were lethal.

  It shocked me how much the children differed in personality. I had known Hayden, my nephew, all his life, and he hadn’t had a tantrum once. He was so sweet and good-natured. All kids were. I didn’t think kids like Esme were inherently bad; it just surprised me sometimes that such little people could be so strong-willed.

  Our afternoon sessions were always shorter than the morning ones, and soon, it was time for the kids to go home. Watching them reunite with their parents, you would think they had been gone six years and not six hours. It was cute, though. The affection children had was so pure. James was outside in the playground watching the kids as they waited to be picked up—where I was supposed to be but had to get out of so I could go pick Hayden up. I grabbed my stuff and went up to him.

  What was the male equivalent of ‘matronly’? Whatever it was, he wasn’t that. He didn’t really look like he was a preschool teaching assistant. He was tall and looked like he worked out. His hair was brown and short. He was always shaven and clean looking but looked like an athlete. Not in a field sport, but like, a swimmer or something. I walked up to him. He must have noticed my purse and jacket with me.

  “Ditching work?” he asked good-naturedly.

  “James, can I ask you a favor please?”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “Is there any way you could cover my watch, just for today. I have to collect my nephew from his school. His mom has a doctor’s appointment.”

  “If I do this for you, you owe me one,” he said.

  “Anything you want.”

  “Anything?” he asked flirtatiously. He was a young single guy, and I was a young single girl, but it took more than that for sparks to fly. He was cute, but I wasn’t looking.

  “Anything within reason, you lech,” I teased back. He laughed and let me leave. I walked past my friend Robbi picking her son Dylan up. I hurriedly told her I would call her later. Hayden’s school was letting out soon, and I wanted to beat the traffic there. I was with a child or children nearly all hours of the day. I didn’t mind it that much, but I liked that I had the option of handing them back over to their parents. Did I want my own? Maybe one day.

  Definitely not now. Definitely not soon.

  2

  Alexander

  It was days like this that I was glad I rode a motorcycle and didn’t drive. I was supposed to get out of work at four, but I had been held up by my latest clients. It was a man and a woman, so I supposed they were a couple. They were older and looked like their clothes were expensive. It was the woman who held me up, not really the guy. He seemed like he was just there for the r
ide, just there to hear the price I would quote for them by himself instead of letting his wife come home and report it to him.

  It was probably all for her anyway because she did all the talking. She wanted chandeliers, a pretty normal request. She, however, wanted them to incorporate medieval design elements somehow, but still be able to hold modern light bulb fixtures. She had pulled out an iPad that she hadn’t known how to use and shown me what she meant. She wanted something ridiculous like five of them, and they all needed to be different sizes. Who put five chandeliers in their house?

  At some point, I had just kept agreeing with them so that they could leave. The man had said that if they liked the chandeliers, they would ask for more things. I think they might have mentioned how they were building their home and they had an entire aesthetic they were going for or something. I checked out at some point because I didn’t need to hear it. I was their blacksmith, not their interior designer.

  I had told them that I would begin the next day and after distractedly watching my buddy pouring metal over the anvil for a bit; they had finally left. It wasn’t just them. Most people were fascinated by the way metal looked when it wasn’t solid, but I wasn’t in the right mood to entertain them just then.

  I had shit to do.

  The facility was staffed twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t like I was fighting the clock, trying to get to the place before visiting hours ended, but I always went in at fifteen minutes past five, Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays. Always. It had to be like that because routine was key. I was sure I was breaking more than a few traffic rules trying to get home as fast as I was but fuck it.