Ignite (15 page)

“Are you going to tell us what’s going on?” Jenny asked, leaning against the bannister with her own bag in hand.

“Like I said, it’s a surprise,” Dean answered, ushering us all out the door and into the car. We all piled into the Range Rover. I was in the front, and the four kids were in the back, with Jenny and Callie sharing a seatbelt.

“Jed’s going to be mad,” I said under my breath as I gave Dean a look.

“You don’t even know where we’re going,” he countered. “Besides, if he wants you to be their guardian, he’s going to have to start trusting you with them, right?”

I nodded and put my head back against the seat. He had a point.

“Can we guess where we’re going?” Chase asked.

“Sure, go for it,” Dean said, adjusting his mirror so he could see them in the back.

“McDonald’s!” Emma said excitedly before any of us could guess.

Callie looked disgusted.

“Ew, Emma.”

“Callie,” I said, giving her a warning look.

“Well we packed clothes,” Callie countered. “We’re not going to have a sleepover at McDonalds or something.” She crossed her arms and looked out the window.

“Somewhere in California,” Jenny said next.

“Jenny!” Dean eyed her in the backseat. “How did you know?”

She shrugged.

“I still have your email password.”

He beat his hand lightly on the steering wheel.

“That’s cheating.”

“Hey, not my fault you don’t know how to change passwords.”

California. That meant we would be getting on a plane, unless Dean expected the four of them to be squished in the back like that for twelve hours.

“When I asked if we could go somewhere, I meant Chuck E. Cheese’s or something,” Chase said in a tone that made us all laugh.

“Where we’re going is so much better than Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Dean said, smiling his half grin that made my stomach flip.

“Promise?” Emma asked.

“Promise. Now, before we go on this adventure, can we please make a pact?” he glanced in the rearview mirror to find four expectant faces.

“What?” Callie spat, looking out the window. Jenny nudged her and gave her a look.

Dean sighed. “Can we all just try to get along? Or, I don’t know, maybe even try to like each other?”

“I like everyone in this car,” Chase announced.

“I love everyone in this car!” Emma shouted gleefully, throwing her hands in the air.

I glanced at Dean, who couldn’t help but hide his smile. I was with Emma. I was starting to feel the same way. Leaving the kids was going to be a lot harder than I originally planned, and I wasn’t sure I could go through with it anymore, not after they had all worked themselves into my heart.

When we arrived at the airport, Dean parked the car in one of the garages and we made our way to the terminal. None of us had bags that were big enough to be checked, and Jenny made Callie throw away her hairspray so she could carry her bag on, much to her dismay.

“You can buy more hairspray when we get there,” Jenny told her, rolling her eyes. Emma was gripping my arms so tightly I felt like they were going to lose feeling and fall off at any moment.

“What’s security?” she whispered in my ear.

“They just need to make sure we are who they say we are,” I told her. “They’re going to check our I.D.’s and they’ll see our pictures. Then they are going to check our bags and put it through an X-ray machine. You know, like the time that you broke your arm? It takes pictures of things so they can see the inside.”

“What are those people doing then?” Emma pointed at the people walking through the metal detectors.

“They’re being checked too. Just to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?”

“That you’re safe, that’s all.” I smiled reassuringly at her, and she slowly smiled back.

“Okay.” Then her brow furrowed. “I don’t have an I.D.”

“That’s okay silly,” I told her. “You’re with me, so you don’t need one.”

She seemed to like that answer and smiled again. “And Dean.”

“And Dean.”

At the mention of his name, he turned and tapped her playfully on the nose.

“We’re almost there,” he told her, smiling at me.

I bit my lip. I thought it was all a little bit strange that we were getting on a plane together already. In reality, I barely knew him, or the kids. I rarely even traveled with my friends or my family, let alone people I’d known for a couple of weeks. I felt like I had known Dean for far longer than that, and I started to wonder if this was how people felt when they said cheesy things like that.

Callie, Jenny, and Chase went first. Dean had given them their individual plane tickets, and one by one, each of them were checked through. Chase proudly displayed his school ID when the TSA agent asked for it, and I was glad that she was friendly enough to humor him and make a big deal out of the fact that he had his own card. He followed Jenny and Callie to the bag check, beaming with pride.

“Good thing we both have excellent new license photos,” Dean whispered in my ear as he took my bag from me so I could hold Emma.

I couldn’t help but laugh softly as I realized that’s how all of this began.

The woman called us forward and checked my ticket off first. Emma was holding my I.D., since she was taking up my arms and I wouldn’t be able to reach for it later.

“Thank you,” she said, taking it from Emma. The agent must have been in her late sixties, and I was fascinated by how shockingly white her hair was against her dark skin. She checked my license and handed it back to Emma.

“Beautiful girls,” she said with a kind smile. “Of course the two of you would have beautiful children.” She nodded at Dean, wiggling her eyebrows and looking him up and down mock-suggestively in a way that an older woman would.

The heat in my cheeks was instant. I glanced at Dean out of the corner of my eye, and it looked like he was doing his best to hold back peals of laughter.

“Oh no,” I quickly corrected her. “She’s my sister.” I didn’t know what else to tell her that wouldn’t raise suspicions, so I decided it was best.

“Ah,” the woman said, still looking from me, to Emma, to Dean. “Still beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I managed, still blushing.

She took Dean’s license next and told us to have a good trip.

The second we were out of earshot, he burst out laughing. I wasn’t sure what to say. It was funny, but I thought it was more embarrassing than comical. Did I really look old enough to be Emma’s mom?

He was still stifling laughter when we caught up to Chase, Callie, and Jenny.

“What’s so funny?” Jenny asked, shoving her bag into a bucket.

“Nothing,” Dean said, placing tubs on the conveyor belt for the three of us.

Callie narrowed her eyes and looked to Jenny, who shrugged.

“No seriously, what happened?”

“You’re so nosy,” Jenny hissed, clearly trying to get her to leave it alone.

“Oh nothing,” Dean said casually as he placed the bags in the plastic tubs. “The TSA agent thought Emma was our child.”

I gave her a look, and she blushed instantly, looking between us.

I set Emma down and pushed our bags along.

“Exactly,” I muttered under my breath.

After the excitement that was the underground train that took us to our terminal, Emma decided to fall asleep on Dean. I tried to take her once so he could carry our bags, but she was having none of it. Neither of us really wanted to be responsible for a screaming child in the airport, so I decided to carry my bag, plus Emma’s Tinker Bell backpack and Dean’s duffel. I was pretty sure my arms were going to be aching later because I didn’t quite have the muscle set that he did, considering he made it look easy to carry all of it.

Jenny, Chase, and Callie watched a movie on her computer while we waited for the plane. I was glad they were occupied. Although I still had to deal with her gum smacking, I didn’t have to deal with her shrill voice. We still hadn’t reconciled from our little blowout over the fact that she wanted me to leave, yet she needed me if she didn’t want to be sent to foster care and split up from her siblings.

From my boarding pass and our gate, I’d deduced that we were going somewhere in Southern California by the fact that it read we were flying into the Orange County airport.

“Dean, please tell me,” I whispered as I leaned over, trying not to wake Emma. There were tons of sounds at the gate, but I’m sure my voice would be the one to wake her.

He shook his head and smiled.

“Nope.”

“You promised me a secret,” I said.

His brow burrowed and his eyes went up as if he were trying to remember something.

“When did I say that?”

I sighed.

“When we were at the hospital, you told me you would tell me a secret if I stayed awake.”

He laughed softly.

“You remember that?”

I nodded.

“Yep. So you better pay up.”

He adjusted Emma slightly.

“So,” he said, half smiling again. “I guess that means you also remember my rugged sexuality.”

I blushed immediately and swatted him on the arm.

“Oh please. I was medicated.”

“You just keep telling yourself that.”

“Oh I will.”

I was still brooding as we sat in silence for a few minutes until a woman came over the P.A. system to tell us we were boarding.

“First class passengers only.”

I glanced at my ticket. I wasn’t really sure what the jumble of numbers were, but I yawned and waited for regular boarding when Dean nudged me.

“We’re boarding,” he said, moving Emma to his other side.

I looked down at my ticket again.

“She said first class, so not yet,” I told him, pointing at it.

He leaned down and put his finger on the corner of the pass that was emblazoned with a gold holograph.

“See that? It means we’re boarding.”

I narrowed my eyes and tilted the piece of paper around so I could see the eagle as it appeared and disappeared on the gold material. Clearly, I had never flown this airline or first class, so I had absolutely no idea what it was.

I shrugged in awe and followed Dean as he rounded up Callie, Chase, and Jenny.