Ready or Not (The Love Game Book 4) by Elizabeth Hayley (i wanna iguana read aloud txt) 📗

vouched for them with his boss? Who helped them move into a new apartment? Who made time to come to someone’s first night at a new job even though he clearly had somewhere else to be?

Obviously, Ransom did, but why? There had to be a reason, but for the life of me, I couldn’t convince myself it was malicious. After all I’d been through with Brad, it was like I’d learned nothing. I should have been running for the hills from Ransom, but instead, here I was, staring at him when he wasn’t looking.

Oh, shit, now he’s looking.

I averted my eyes quickly and took an inordinate amount of time picking out a bead to add to the bracelet I was making with a few of the girls. We normally didn’t bring arts and crafts items into the gym after the regular Safe Haven hours ended, but the girls had put on their best pouts and totally played me.

It was just after six thirty, so the rest of the extended-day kids would be getting picked up soon. I looked around at everyone’s progress. “We’re going to need to clean up in five minutes. If you’re not going to finish, I can put your projects somewhere safe, and we can finish them tomorrow.”

I received murmured “Okays” in reply, the girls unwilling to take too much attention from their creations.

I chuckled to myself. It was still hard to believe I got paid to play all afternoon. Of course, there’d been a few trying moments since I’d started—a few arguments we’d had to mediate, some tantrums we’d had to quash, some defiant behavior we’d had to have discussions about—but overall, things ran smoothly at Safe Haven.

There was no denying that Ransom was one of the reasons things functioned so well. He was amazing with the kids. He played with them like he was a kid himself, but they also respected him—looked up to him in a way that seemed almost instinctual for the kids. Like they knew they could trust him, that he was on their side without him having to say anything in that regard.

Though I guessed actions spoke louder than words. And Ransom had been there awhile, so maybe he’d laid the foundation with many of the kids before I’d arrived. But even when a new kid started the program, they always seemed to gravitate to Ransom, hiding in his shadow until they felt safe to venture out into the group. There was just something about him that made people feel safe, and I desperately wished I didn’t feel the pull of that. I simply couldn’t trust it, no matter how badly I wanted to or how much my gut told me I could.

“Gina, Gina, bo-bina, banana-fana-fo-fina, mee-mi-mo-mina, Gina!” Ransom bellowed, causing everyone, even Gina, to giggle. “Your mom’s here.”

I smiled at Gina as she put the beads she’d gathered back into the appropriate bins. Cleaning up after themselves had been my stipulation for them bringing the crafts into the gym, and I was thankful they were holding up their end of the bargain.

“You want me to hold it for you?” I asked.

“Yes, please. I’m almost done, but I wanted to add a few more to it.”

I held out my hand, and she placed her necklace into my palm.

“No problem. It looks beautiful.”

Gina smiled. “Thanks. It’s a present for my mom.”

“She’ll love it.”

Her smile grew as she said goodbye to me before grabbing her school bag and hustling toward her mother. Ransom was there, and he and Gina did some kind of complicated handshake before she left. He had some kind of special ritual with almost every kid in the program, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he remembered them all.

Over the next half hour, all the kids had been picked up except one. Cindy was the youngest child we had in the program. As a second grader, she was eligible for the after-school program through her school, but her mother needed the extended time, so Safe Haven arranged for another bus to swing by her school and pick her up every day.

She was absolutely adorable, with blond hair she often wore in pigtails and freckles across her nose. She was very quiet and didn’t usually play with the other kids often, but she loved arts and crafts. She’d been silently building a bracelet for the past hour or so, and with every child who got picked up, her body grew more and more tense.

It wasn’t the first time Cindy had been the last to be picked up. Her mother had rushed in, full of apologies and what seemed to be valid excuses about having been kept late at work three other times since I’d started. Harry had spoken to her about it, and she’d sworn she wouldn’t be late again.

But here we were.

Ransom approached and crouched down on the other side of the table from Cindy. “Hey, Cinnabon, how’s it going?”

Cindy seemed to shrink in on herself and answered with a shrug.

She was probably the only child at Safe Haven who didn’t react positively to Ransom, which was probably why he settled across from her instead of next to her. Ransom tried to connect with her—even nicknaming her Cinnabon because she was sweet—but he also didn’t push her to interact with him. I gave him a lot of respect for that.

His eyes filled with a hint of what looked like sadness as he gazed at Cindy for another second before turning to me. “Do you have to work at the Treehouse tonight? I was going to let Roddie go home, but I can have him stay if you need to leave.”

“No, I can stay,” I replied. It was protocol for there to always be two adults on duty until all the kids were picked up.

“Great,” he replied. “I’ll go let him know.”

I watched him leave because who was I kidding? Watching the back of Ransom was almost as appealing as watching the front. Maybe more so