A noise pulled Iris from her dreams, so faint and muffled that for a moment she dozed on, thinking she’d imagined it. Until she heard it again. Her eyes popped open.

Someone was throwing up in the bus bathroom, and that someone sounded an awful lot like Dylan. Throwing back her covers, Iris nearly banged her head crawling from her bunk, muttering a curse that rarely left her lips. The sound of retching reached her again as she bumped from wall to wall on wobbly legs that hadn’t yet caught up with the rest of her body.

She found the poor thing hunched over the toilet. “What’s the deal, banana peel?” she asked, as he was always one to giggle at her silly rhymes. This time he only lifted his head to look up at her, cheeks flushed, eyes too glassy.

“I want my mom,” he said, sounding tiny and pitiful. A single tear slid down one fever-bright cheek.

“Oh, baby.” Iris knelt down and rubbed his back, trying to comfort him as he turned back and brought up more, his little body shaking with the effort. “I know you do,” she said once he was done. “But I’m here and your dad’s here, and you probably just have a little stomach bug, or you ate something that didn’t agree with you. You’re fine, okay? In fact, you’ll probably feel better now.”

Hopefully it was nothing more, but with all of his allergies, she could never be too cautious. She would need to keep an eye on him for a while.

Dylan took several deep breaths and calmed, then sat back on his heels, wiping his eyes. “Don’t tell Seger that I cried,” he whispered, as if that were the most important thing right now. He was always so pitiful when he was sick.

“Hey, you know I wouldn’t do that.” Getting to her feet, Iris found a washcloth and wet it, thanking God that he’d made it to the bathroom. She smoothed back his tousled hair and gently wiped his face with the cool cloth, then touched the tip of his nose hoping to get a giggle. It didn’t work this time. “Think you can get back to bed?”

“I think so.”

She was helping him to his feet when she heard a footstep outside. Eli stuck his head around the door, features clouded with sleep, but alert. His brow was crinkled with concern. “Is he all right?”

“He’s throwing up, but I think he’ll be fine once he gets through it. I’ll keep an eye on him, though.”

He pulled his son into his arms, dropping a kiss on the top of his head. “You’re all right. Come crash with me. I bet you’ll feel better in the morning.”

Iris opened her mouth to protest, but clamped it shut again. Heidi would’ve exclaimed, “Nooo, I can’t handle vomit!” and run away, leaving Iris to deal with it for the duration of the night. She had seen Heidi gag and dash from the room when confronted with the mere sight before; she’d often wondered how the woman had ever handled diaper changes or spit-up (if she even had). Eli must be made of sterner stuff.

That should make her happy, but it didn’t, not really. These boys had felt like “hers” for so long . . . how bizarre was that? It must be what sharing custody felt like. Sort of. She wanted to tell Eli no, she had this, and he could go back to bed and not worry about it. But this would be one of those things he would fight her on. No need to even make the suggestion.

She couldn’t help it. “I can watch him,” she said tentatively.

Eli had already turned to lead Dylan to the back, ruffling his hair, but he looked back and frowned at her. “I got it.”

“The last thing you need is to get sick on the road, right? If he has a virus?” She’d seen these bugs burn through the entire house in a matter of days. In close confines like this, though, if anyone was going to get sick, they probably already had it. Only a matter of time.

Great.

“If I get it, I get it,” Eli said with a shrug of his naked shoulders, again steering Dylan toward the back. Iris stood chewing her bottom lip, feeling useless and unneeded, but not so much that she couldn’t take a moment to admire the way the thin fabric of Elijah’s black pajama pants hugged the curve of his butt.

Dylan didn’t feel better in the morning, but by then she doubted it was anything more severe than a stomach virus. The rocking of the bus probably didn’t help matters, either—it had made her a little queasy too at times. He’d made several dashes to the bathroom. She’d heard him every time and run after him to make sure he was okay.

“Iris, go to sleep,” Elijah had ordered her after the third time, when it was almost seven a.m. and they were pulling into the next venue.

She ignored the command. “He would rest better if we had a hotel room.”

“He rests fine. We’re stopping now and we’ll send someone after Gatorade or something.”

“Pedialyte is better. Gatorade has too much sugar. It might prolong things.”

He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Pedialyte then, goddamn. Put a list together and I’ll send someone—”

“Give me access to a car and I’ll go get what he needs myself.”

“He needs to puke his guts out and then he’ll be over it.”

“Not necessarily. It’s easy to relapse with this stuff. You want him to feel better as soon as possible, right? Let me handle it. Go do your rock star stuff.”

“What rock star stuff? I’ll be fucking around here until ten o’clock tonight.”

“I know you’ll have press and meet-and-greets—”

“All of which I can skip out on and let the rest of the guys handle. My kid is sick. They’ll be fine with it. Everyone else will be too or they can kiss my fucking ass.”

Iris had put both hands up, palms out toward him, staring him in the eyes. “I realize neither of us has gotten any sleep and we’re ready to take each other’s heads off, but how about you stop for a minute, quit arguing for the sake of arguing with every word that comes out of my mouth, and let me do what I’m asking to do? Which is simply what’s best for Dylan?”

Eli had taken a breath, dialed back his ire, and finally nodded. She’d watched the green fire in his eyes go from blazing to mere embers. Why did she rub him so wrong when it came to these things? She was only trying to help. He’d relented and gotten a driver to take her to the nearest 24-hour pharmacy.

Now it was early afternoon, and she sat with Dylan in the back bedroom, making sure he took a few sips every fifteen minutes he was awake to keep from getting dehydrated. He lay curled in a fetal position, sleeping when he could, having complained of stomach cramps and a headache. Poor miserable baby.

Elijah paced like a caged animal. Up the hall, down the hall, constantly checking on Dylan and looking like he wanted to put his fist through something . . . hopefully not her. Then he would prowl outside into the warm sun, only to start the cycle all over again in a matter of minutes. He was driving her insane.

And of course, there was the question of whether she should call Heidi. That would certainly set him off again, especially after Iris had dropped her bomb on him the other night. Heidi would want to know her kid was sick even when there was literally nothing she could—or would be willing—to do. Despite everything, Iris knew she loved her boys dearly, but she simply didn’t handle these things well. It might make Dylan feel better to talk to her, but Iris was inclined to let him sleep while he could.

The kids didn’t make this job hard. Their freaking parents did.

Distantly, she heard Elijah’s feet clomp up the bus steps again and sighed, waiting grimly for his appearance in the doorway. She even had a smart remark ready about Dylan’s condition having not changed in the past three minutes, but after one look at his face, she bit down on it.

Something seemed to have . . . broken over him. He came around the bed to where she sat and settled beside her. “I need to apologize to you. Again.”

She didn’t need to ask what for. “It’s okay.”

“I know you are legitimately trying to help. You didn’t have to do anything, you could’ve gone back to bed, but you’ve been up with him all night.” Mm-hmm. She held her tongue, watching him. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, sighing. “There isn’t a more helpless feeling than when your kids are sick.”

She felt the same when one of these boys was hurting. “I get that. He’ll be fine, though. Probably one of those 24-hour things.”

“I know. Still sucks.”

Dylan took that moment to shift restlessly, groaning a little in his sleep, his pale face pulled into a grimace. Eli sat up to watch him. Iris’s heart softened at the concern in his eyes, the true yearning of a father to take away every bad thing that might threaten his baby. “I’ll bring out everything in my bag of tricks to help him feel better,” she promised. When she’d gone to the store, she’d stocked the bus well with everything in the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, bread for toast. Saltine crackers. Ginger ale was in the refrigerator. Right now, though, she thought it best to keep Dylan’s tummy empty except for the frequent sips of Pedialyte.

Eli’s eyes shifted from his son to Iris’s face. He seemed to take in every inch of it, making her breath hitch. “Thank you. I damn sure don’t know what to do for him. I’d probably make him worse. So I’m glad you’re here.”

As usual, she found it hard to look away from him. Beyond the walls of the bus, there were muffled voices and shouts and laughter, all the hustle and bustle of concert production. In here, with him, spellbound by the green of his eyes, time seemed to have stopped.

Until Dylan lurched up and ran across the bed in a mad scramble for the bathroom. Eli cursed, collapsing back across the mattress. There wasn’t much either of them could do for the boy now except let this thing run its course, and he was probably tired of them hovering over him. “Poor baby,” Iris said, trying not to notice how Eli’s T-shirt had ridden a little up his abdomen as he lay back, revealing a thin strip of hair that disappeared into his jeans. If he could quit flashing glimpses of his exceptional body at her, that would be great. “He’ll be over it soon,” she assured him. “You know I’ll stay with him while you go do the show.”

That might be a good time to let Dylan talk to Heidi, too, without Eli looming over the conversation.

She knew one thing: she was definitely asking for a raise when this was over.