“It’s a good thing I ran an extra mile before I came over,” Liam moaned on Wednesday morning.
“It’s been two years since you’ve had my waffles. Might be another two before you come home and get them again…” his sister tempted good-naturedly—unlike in the past when she would have said it sadly.
Liam was happy for that particular change in her.
It had been hard on Kinsey to have all three of her brothers in the military. On the rare occasions when they’d been able to visit her she’d made the most of it, but their time together had been tinged with the fact that she didn’t know when she would see them again.
Those long absences had also left all the responsibilities for their parents on her—which Liam, Declan and Conor regretted. Coupled with friendships that had been sacrificed to the care of their parents during their declines, Kinsey had been desperate to gather more people, more family into her life. Family that would be accessible to her rather than halfway around the world when she needed them. Liam understood that.
But now she was engaged to Sutter Knightlinger and Liam knew that helped her not feel the loneliness and abandonment she usually did over the looming reality of him—or Declan—returning to duty.
But, according to Conor, neither Kinsey’s engagement nor the ending of Conor’s own military career were enough for her to cancel the quest she’d been on in recent months.
And Kinsey proved that when she pushed her own plate away and said, “Did Conor tell you that the Camdens are asking for DNA from us now?”
The Camdens.
Ten of them, all around the same ages as Kinsey, Liam, Declan and Conor. Raised by a grandmother called GiGi. Running an empire founded by their great-grandfather. An empire continued and expanded by his son and GiGi’s husband, Hank, and then by Hank’s sons, Howard and Mitchum Camden, who had, between them, produced the ten people who oversaw it all now.
Mitchum Camden was also the man Liam, Kinsey, Declan and Conor’s mother had revealed on her deathbed was their father.
It had been a revelation that had sent Kinsey on a path to have herself and her brothers recognized as Camdens and taken into the fold.
Something none of her brothers were enthusiastic about.
“He told me,” Liam answered her question.
“Will you do it?” Kinsey asked.
Liam stood and poured himself another cup of coffee without saying anything.
Then he rejoined his sister at the small kitchen table in the alcove of the apartment that she was beginning to pack up in anticipation of moving in with her fiancé.
He looked squarely at her, sighing heavily. “I don’t know, Kins. Can’t you just let it lay? You’re getting married. You’ll have a mother-in-law. Conor and Maicy live in Denver now. They’ll probably have kids. You’ll probably have kids. I may have kids…” That had come out more ominously than the rest but he went on anyway. “Our own family is growing. Before you know it, you’ll have more than you know what to do with. Why keep on with that other family?”
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You guys,” she complained. “You’re all so stubborn!”
“About this? Yeah!” he confirmed. “Why the hell would we want to be Camdens? Or even acknowledge any link to them? They’ve got money coming out of their ears that they accumulated off the backs of people they basically swindled and conned and ripped off. That’s not what any of us are about.”
The Camden name was now highly respected, redeemed by the current generation. But it had always been widely rumored that the fortune amassed by the predecessors of Camden Superstores had been ruthless, devious and scheming, that there was very little done by any of them to be proud of. Or to be proud to be associated with.
“At least Conor soft-pedaled it a little,” Kinsey complained about Liam’s blunt depiction.
“What’s to soft-pedal? It’s the truth. Robber barons—that’s where H.J. Camden and his son and grandsons have their place in history. And you think I want any part of that? I fight for people not to be trampled over, Kinsey.”
“I know,” she said. “But the Camdens who also came from Mitchum are our half-siblings, the ones who came from Howard are our cousins, GiGi is our grandmother—they haven’t done what the other ones did—”
“But you want to make one of those ‘other ones’ our father.”
“I’m not trying to make him our father. Mom did that.”
Liam sighed again and shook his head. “I don’t know what a father is to you, but to me it isn’t what that guy was. To me it’s what Hugh was. If it was what that guy was I wouldn’t be here now, would I? I’d have just blown off the fact that I might have kids the way he did. Or thrown some money at them and gone on about my business.”
“So this is really striking a chord for you,” Kinsey said quietly.
“How could it not?”
“Okay. But, Liam, take away the father part. The past. That’s over and done with and there’s no one left to answer for it or to punish for it or to hold accountable. And what’s left? We could have half brothers and half sisters. We could have a grandmother. Isn’t that something that we shouldn’t just ignore?”
“It seems like they’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring us.”
“I’m sure they didn’t have a clue that we existed until I brought Mom’s letter to GiGi. If you could have seen the look on her face when she read it and found out about us, you’d know it was a shock.”
“And did she open her arms to you? No, she left you twisting in the wind. Then they had us investigated like the criminals they come from. Now they want DNA proof?”
“You want DNA proof that the Freelander kids are yours.”
“Not the same thing!”
“Exactly the same thing.”
“These kids and I—and the court—need clarification so we all know where to go from here. I don’t need clarification of who my father was—it was Hugh Madison, not the sperm donor. And if these kids are mine then I’ll do whatever it takes for them. What do you think is going to happen if you force the Camdens to know for sure that Mitchum Camden was our father? They probably just want to know what they’re up against to keep us away from their money and their stores. Maybe from them.”
“I made it clear to GiGi when I saw her that we don’t want anything from them—”
“And I’m sure she believed you,” he said facetiously.
“If Audrey’s kids do end up being yours, are you gonna wish you never knew?” Kinsey challenged.
“Would I rather not know that I have kids out in the world? You have to be kidding to even ask me that.”
“And I certainly want to know if they’re my niece and nephew. Mom would have wanted to know she had grandchildren. When I think about it, it’s horrible to me that she didn’t, that she could actually have had three and a half years with them before she died. But you think that we shouldn’t give information like that to the Camdens? That we should just gloss over the fact that they’re our family because it didn’t have such a great start?”
“We’re their dirty little secret. Living, breathing proof of the lowlife things one of them did. My situation is different.”
“You’re already having your DNA tested,” Kinsey reasoned. “All you’d have to do is get a second copy of the results for me to send to them.”
She really wasn’t letting up on this.
“And then what, Kinsey?” Liam asked. “Are you picturing a big family dinner the next time I’m in town?”
“The Camdens have those every Sunday. They’re really nice.”
Liam put his forehead in his hand and shook his head, thinking that he had enough to deal with without this on top of it.
“And if the twins are yours, then they’re Camdens, too. Shouldn’t everyone know that?” Kinsey added.
“Oh, geezez…” was all Liam could say to that because intertwining these two loaded issues just made it worse.
But he knew his sister wasn’t going to let up so he looked at her again and sighed once more. “I’ll think about it. But if I do it, it won’t be because I want to or want any part of that family. It’ll be because you want me to. It’ll be for you.” For all she’d done, she deserved to have what she wanted, even if he thought it was ill-advised.
He stood and took his plate to the sink. “Let’s clean this up. I should get back.”
“To being a dad?” Kinsey taunted, finding some humor in it.
“Yeah, I’m not really being that. I’m just trying to get them not to hate me.”
“They don’t hate you,” Kinsey assured him, bringing her own plate and taking over at the sink. “Why would they hate you?”
“I’m not good with kids.”
She laughed. “What, you? How could that be, Mr. Tact… Mr. Storm Trooper… Mr.—”
“Yeah, I get it. I don’t ‘soft-pedal,’” he said, using her earlier complaint. “I’m trying to, though. With them. But apparently it doesn’t come off that way and I just seem like some kind of tight ass who needs to relax. Today I’m gonna do the boot camp workout with the boy—”
Kinsey laughed. “And that’s your idea of relaxing and getting a four-year-old to like you?”
“We always liked doing that with Hugh,” Liam defended.
“You and Declan and Conor liked doing that with Hugh,” she amended. “Not me.”
“Yeah, I asked the girl to do the workout, too, but she wrinkled her nose at me as if I’d suggested dipping her in dung.”
“Uh-huh. I understand that.”
“Dani says I have to think of something to do with her that she’d like to do. But I don’t have the foggiest idea what that would be.”
“Uh-huh,” Kinsey repeated.
“Hugh never did anything special with you,” Liam said, defensively again.
“No, he didn’t,” Kinsey confirmed pointedly.
And then it struck Liam. “And you didn’t feel about him the way we did, did you?”
The tone in his sister’s voice had caused Liam to recall that and wonder suddenly if the lack of attachment Kinsey had felt to the man who had raised them was part of what made her so determined to connect with the Camdens now.
“I loved Hugh,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say that I felt close to him. He was all about the military and whipping us into shape for that. When I wasn’t interested in being whipped into shape or in going into the military, it seemed like I became incidental. You guys were who was important to him.”
“And you think Dani is right and the girl will feel like that with me if I don’t do something else with her,” Liam said.
Kinsey shrugged. “I think that Dani—that’s the nanny’s name?”
“Nanny and acting guardian.”
“Yes, I think she’s right. If you want Evie to feel closer to you than I felt to Hugh, you’ll have to figure out how to bond with her by doing something other than the boot camp workout.”
Liam just sighed again.
“And this Dani?” his sister said. “You call your potential daughter and son ‘the girl’ and ‘the boy,’ but the nanny is ‘Dani’—like you like her…”
“She’s great,” he said without hesitation, but also without affection, giving credit where credit was due. “She’s great with the kids. She’s going above and beyond the call of duty for them at a time in her own life when things are tough, when someone else would have bailed to deal with her own stuff. And she’s patient with me. She’s not putting any pressure on. She’s trying to help me wade through the waters with the kids.”
“Is she pretty?”
Beautiful.
“It doesn’t matter. I have enough problems. I could be the father of two four-year-olds and I don’t know what the hell I’ll do if I am. You think I’m dumb enough to add to that with some kind of hey-let’s-get-it-on-during-the-short-time-I’m-here hookup?”
His sister grinned at him. “Oh, you’ve thought about it.”
Damn but he had…
Last night, after doing nothing but talking to Dani, folding laundry with her, he’d gone up to that space-age guest room and spent much too much time thinking about her…
But it had been a long time since he’d hooked up with anyone and that was why it was on his mind, he’d decided both last night and again this morning. When it—and she—had still been on his mind.
It was only natural that after a long hiatus from sex, plopped down in shared quarters with someone who looked like Dani did, someone sweet and funny and nice, that the idea of starting something physical with her would occur to him.
But there was no way he would act on it. He was here for one reason and one reason only—to find out if he’d fathered the twins and go from there. If the twins were his, he had a whole can of worms to deal with. If they weren’t, then they were still the kids of someone he once cared for. He had to see what he could do to make sure they were taken care of in the best way by someone else—and he didn’t have any idea how he’d do that either. The last thing he was going to add to this mess was the complication of any kind of personal relationship or hookup.
“I think about a lot of things,” he said in response to his sister’s remark. “But I don’t have anything if I don’t have self-discipline.”
“A direct quote from Hugh,” Kinsey said with a laugh. “If you had self-discipline you wouldn’t possibly have two kids.”
“Oh, that’s low,” he said, laughing himself.
“Is your self-discipline strong enough when you’re staying in a house with a pretty nanny who’s ‘great’?” Kinsey said skeptically.
“Yes,” he answered unequivocally.
Because while Dani Cooper might be beautiful and great, while he might be finding himself looking forward to being with her—with and without the kids—while he might, at that very moment, be champing at the bit to get back to the Freelander house with more thoughts of spending the rest of today with her than with the kids, it didn’t mean a thing.
He’d come here on a mission. And a marine on a mission didn’t let himself be distracted even by flowing dark hair or big toffee-colored eyes or skin like cream or a smile that made something in him heat up the minute he saw it.
A marine on a mission kept to the straight and narrow to complete that mission.
And that’s exactly what he was going to do.
Whether his sister scoffed at his ability to pull it off or not.
* * *
“Now this was a good idea!” Liam said as Dani brought their pizza into the dining room from the wood-burning pizza oven in the kitchen.
“I thought we earned it. Plus sometimes letting the kids cook ruins my appetite and I like to have my own dinner after I’ve put them to bed.”
Which she’d done about an hour earlier, before focusing on the meal for herself and Liam while he went up to the guest room to shower.
He’d come down dressed in jeans and a plain white crew-neck T-shirt that looked better on him than any jeans or T-shirt had ever looked on anyone. At least that’s how it had seemed to Dani when she’d glanced up from preparing a salad to feast her eyes on the T-shirt that hugged broad shoulders, well-defined pecs, bulging biceps and a hard, flat stomach. And jeans that, when he’d gone to the fridge to get himself a beer, had shown her that he also had a derriere to die for.
Plus he was clean-shaven and smelled like a tropical breeze, and suddenly her appetite for food had switched to an appetite for something that involved him instead.
Which she’d curbed the minute she’d realized what she was hankering for.
She’d been reining in a multitude of wayward thoughts about him for the last twenty-four hours, striking her like lightning bolts since that craziness had gone through her mind last night about kissing him.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her but she knew she needed to fight it.
“Heart-shaped pizza and star-shaped pizza with ketchup instead of tomato sauce, ground beef, salami, black olives, slices of orange and yellow cheese?” he was saying as she again thought about how incredible-looking he was while running a pizza cutter through their own pie to slice it. “And they actually ate it.”
“They did,” she said with some horror of her own. “No accounting for a four-year-old’s palate. But they also ate broccoli and sliced tomatoes—”
“Why do they call tomatoes ‘red potatoes’?”
Dani laughed. “I have no idea. They just do. But anyway, they ended up eating a pretty good dinner, so that’s all that counts.”
“But yeah, it was really unappetizing,” he confirmed as she served him a slice of pizza. “But this…this is pizza.”
Homemade dough she’d had rising for hours, sauce, four kinds of Italian cheese, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, olives and red onions, which were not only for flavor but also so she could think about onion breath if kissing came to mind tonight.
“So give me my report card for today,” Liam said after tasting the pie and getting slightly rapturous over it, judging it the best he’d ever eaten.
“You improved,” she said, knowing he was referring to his behavior with the twins.
It had been a full—and rainy—day of entertaining them. By the time Liam had returned from his breakfast with his sister, they’d already used the tubes he’d cut the night before to make dragons and they’d been chasing each other around with them, growling through the tubes that had tissue paper at the opposite ends to billow out like flames.
After lunch and their naps—during which Liam had gone to the workout room beside the ballet studio to lift weights—he’d again invited Evie to do the boot camp workout with him and Grady. She’d declined but he had engaged the little boy in the clearly toned-down exercises they’d done downstairs while Evie had helped Dani make pizza dough.
Dani had been a little worried that the barked-out commands that went with the boot camp workout might put Grady off. But Grady had actually seemed to like the gruff praise and encouragement that went with it, and had, in fact, gone to great lengths to earn it.
“You definitely made some strides with Grady,” Dani informed him. “Plus he liked that you watched their movie with us.” Though Dani had found it difficult to concentrate with Liam sitting just within her peripheral vision.
Liam made a pained face at the mention of the movie. “That was a lot of singing.”
Dani laughed. “That’s what they like best—the animated musicals. And then it was good that you took them outside to splash through puddles when the rain stopped.”
“That was supposed to be close-order drill—to move a unit from one place to another in an orderly manner.”
Dani laughed. “Uh-huh. And Evie wasn’t into that when it sounds like so much fun?” she said facetiously.
“Yeah, she just did the splashing. With her back to us to make sure we knew she wasn’t going to march.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to make a miniature marine out of Evie.”
“She actually kind of seemed mad at me today.”
And he really had tried with both kids.
“She and Grady are close. Sometimes they get a little bent out of shape if the other one plays with someone else. Grady would have done the same thing if you’d been doing stuff with Evie instead of him.”
“But I wasn’t leaving Evie out. I tried to get her to do what we were doing,” he defended.
“I know—”
“Only we weren’t doing anything she wanted to do,” he guessed. “My sister thinks you’re right, that I have to figure out some other girlie way to win her over.”
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘girlie’—although she does convince Grady to play dress-up and dolls and castle with her. But she’s actually a little more of a daredevil than Grady is, too. Remember yesterday it was Evie who was the first of them willing to cross the monkey bars.”
“I should take her bungee jumping?” he joked as he polished off his first slice of pizza and took a second.
“She’d probably like it but I wouldn’t recommend it,” Dani said. “It helps that you made a few strides with Grady, though. That’s kind of broken the ice with them, and it might help bring Evie around a little—”
“An if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em thing?”
“Sometimes it works like that, yes. But I don’t think it will be through your workout or marching drills,” Dani said, barely able to suppress a smile at what he thought might lure a four-year-old girl to participate. “She does always need a prince when she plays castle.” And boy, did his looks qualify him!
“So I should go up to her and say let me be your prince?”
He was joking and Dani did laugh at that. “A little subtlety might work better. When you see her playing with the castle you could just ask her things—what each room is for, who the dolls are, just show an interest. Then maybe kind of slip into the role with the prince doll. The prince doll could ask the princess doll to go to the ball. Evie loves it when there’s a ball.”
Liam made another pained face and frowned at her. “Do you know what I do for a living?” he asked as if she must be clueless to suggest what she was suggesting.
“Not take princesses to balls?” she joked.
“Not hardly.”
“Well, buck up, Marine, because if you want to win Evie over, you might have to.”
He groaned and Dani laughed again.
Then she said, “You talked to your sister about the twins?”
“Some. Kinsey pointed out how she wasn’t as close to our adopted father as my brothers and I were because—like Evie—she wasn’t interested in being turned into a marine. And with Hugh it was that or nothing.”
“You were adopted?” Dani asked, curious about his roots. Well, curious about everything about him, although she was trying to convince herself that was only to evaluate him as the twins’ potential parent.
“We weren’t adopted from out of the system because we were in need of a home or anything. We lived with our mother on a farm in a small town in Montana called Northbridge. The man our mother married adopted us.”
“You mentioned an older brother and your sister—”
“And I have a twin brother, too.”
That surprised her. “You’re a twin?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard they run in families so that probably ups the chances that Grady and Evie are mine.”
That was what she’d been thinking.
“Declan is my twin,” he went on. “We’re in the middle. Conor is the oldest. He was a navy doctor but he just resigned his commission to go civilian after a restart with his high school sweetheart. Kinsey is the baby of the family. She’s a nurse, and she’s getting married in May.”
“Are you and your twin close?”
“Yeah, we’re close.”
“Are you identical?” Could there really be two guys running around looking like he did?
“Identical,” he confirmed. “We got a lot of mileage out of confusing people when we were kids. I think it’s a little easier to tell us apart now.”
Because Liam was a big, muscular marine and maybe his twin wasn’t?
At least that’s what Dani imagined because she couldn’t fathom that even his identical twin would be quite as impressive a specimen as Liam.
But what she said was, “What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a marine,” Liam said as if that should have been a given. “We’ve both been overseas for a while, but in different units. Although right now he’s stateside, too, recovering from what I’m told was a pretty serious injury that he almost didn’t make it through.”
“You were told?”
“Special Forces missions cause me to drop out for periods of time—I can’t be reached, I can’t reach out to anyone else. I heard about my mom dying just before I was set to follow my latest orders. I’ve been underground since then. Declan was hurt in an IED explosion two days after Mom’s death and I was already in the field. I found out about it the same time I heard about Audrey and the twins—when the mission was complete and I came up for air again a week ago.”
“That’s a lot to have waiting for you.”
“A whole lot,” he agreed. “Now Conor and Kinsey have told me what’s been going on and how Declan is, but I haven’t been able to connect with him yet even by phone. I came straight here to deal with this situation when I hit the States, and he’s in transit to Denver for more rehab so we keep playing phone tag. But no matter what, I’m not really going to be able to rest until I can see him for myself.”
“They’re saying that he’s going to be okay, though, right?”
“That’s what they tell me,” Liam answered with some reservation. “But like I said, I need to see him for myself. And, now that we’re talking about this, Conor called while I was showering and left a message that Declan just arrived in Denver. He’ll need to go through admission at the rehab center and they won’t let me see him tonight or I’d go, but… I know I keep bugging out on you in the mornings and I’m sorry about that, but Conor can get me in to see Declan tomorrow morning—”
“Oh, go! For sure,” she said. Not that he was asking permission, but she certainly didn’t expect him to put off seeing his injured twin just so he could help make oatmeal. By moving in and making the effort with Grady and Evie, he was already doing more than she thought most men would before being sure they actually had fathered the twins. Or even just to safeguard the orphaned kids of an old flame. She certainly wasn’t going to condemn him for not being here every minute.
She took another half slice of pizza and let him know that would be her last if he wanted to finish the pie.
“I do,” he said without question, taking his third full slice.
After eating a little more salad Dani got back to the rest of what they’d been discussing, hoping for additional information. “What about your biological father? Did he die and leave your mom with four kids?”
Liam hesitated in answering that and she wondered if he was still thinking about his twin or if she’d just asked a question he didn’t want to answer.
But after a few minutes he said with disgust, “The guy who I guess was my father just left my mom with four kids.”
That didn’t sound good.
Before she could say anything, he sighed and confessed, “That’s not exactly true. He did die—in a plane crash with a bunch of his family. But even before that he left my mother on her own with us. And if he hadn’t died, I’m sure he would have gone on leaving her alone with us, just dropping in when it suited him.”
Liam’s expression was stern and as disapproving as his voice. “Apparently we’re the product of an affair,” he explained. “My mother kept it hidden until she was dying at the end of last year. That was when she told Kinsey that we’re the secret family of Mitchum Camden.”
“Camden? Like the Superstores?”
“Yeah,” he said unhappily.
“Oh,” Dani repeated because that was quite a revelation and she really didn’t know what to say.
But once again she didn’t have to come up with anything before he went on, as if he needed to get it off his chest. The chest her eyes wandered to periodically because it was just so fine…
“In the romantic version,” he was saying, “my mother told my sister that Camden was torn between her and his wife. And even though my mother knew it shouldn’t go on, and so did he, they couldn’t stop themselves. My mother was pregnant with Kinsey when he was killed in the crash. Who knows how many more of us there might have been because she said she didn’t think she would ever have been able to actually end it with him.”
The way Liam said that did not make it sound romantic but Dani refrained from pointing that out and instead said, “And in the unromantic version?”
“I don’t see anything romantic about lying to and cheating on the woman he was married to and had a family with. I don’t see anything romantic about using the feelings my mom had for him to string her along on the side, to get her pregnant three times. I don’t give a damn if he supported her and left us money or not. I don’t see anything romantic about leaving her to answer for four illegitimate kids in a small town that couldn’t have looked kindly on that!”
He definitely needed to vent.
“You said they ‘couldn’t have looked kindly on that.’ That sounds like you didn’t experience it?” she asked.
“Declan and I were two years old when he died, so no, I don’t have any memories of Camden or of anything before Mom married Hugh and he adopted us. To me, we always looked like any other family. But I grew up in that gossipy small town and now that I know the truth I also know a situation like that couldn’t have been good for her until Hugh made an honest woman of her.”
“What did your mom tell you about your biological father when you were growing up?”
“Nothing. She said Hugh supported us, looked after us all and that to talk about another father was disrespectful and hurtful to him. So she wouldn’t do it. She saved it for the end,” he muttered somewhat under his breath. “None of us ever pushed it because there was nothing about Hugh that didn’t make him our father.”
“Except that you call him Hugh,” Dani pointed out.
“Actually we called him Gunny. He retired as a master gunnery sergeant from the marines, the highest rank for enlisted, and Gunny is what he preferred. If we said something about him outside of the family we called him our father, but Mom always just referred to him as Hugh. She never said ‘your dad’ or ‘your father’—maybe she was hanging on to the memory of Camden in that. So whenever Declan or Conor or Kinsey or I had anything to say about him to each other, we called him Hugh, too.”
“But you still thought of him as your dad. You loved him and respected him,” Dani observed, making the assumption from the change in his voice and attitude when he spoke of Hugh as opposed to when he spoke of his biological father.
“I did. He was a good man,” Liam said readily. “Tough and stern—a marine to his core—but kind and fair and decent to my mom and to all of us, too. The same way he would have laid down his life for his country, he would have laid down his life for any of us. Come to think of it, probably everyone in Northbridge knew that, too, and that’s why there were only a few snobs who went on snubbing my mom, while everyone else let go of her past and the fact that we were the products of it.”
Tough and stern, kind and fair and decent—that seemed to describe what Dani knew so far of Liam, too. Now she knew where it came from. And also maybe why he was there to look out for the twins even if they weren’t his—the way his adopted father had looked out for kids he hadn’t biologically fathered.
Liam had polished off what remained of their dinner and even though Dani could have gone on talking to him much longer, she knew that she should put an end to the evening. While she wanted to get to know him well enough to feel confident in handing over Evie and Grady to him should that day arrive, she was finding that the more she learned about the kind of man he was, the more she liked him. And that made things difficult on an entirely different level for her.
So she stood and stacked their plates on the pizza stone to take into the kitchen, saying as she did, “It’s getting late.”
“Yeah, and I want to check in with Conor, make sure Declan got in all right tonight,” Liam concurred, following her with his empty beer bottle and her water glass in hand.
She’d cleaned the kitchen while their pizza cooked so there was very little left to do. She took care of the pizza stone and washed off the dining room table and countertops while Liam put their dinnerware in the dishwasher.
Still, he didn’t seem in any hurry to make his phone call because, rather than leaving her, he instead leaned a hip against the end of the island, effectively cornering her cozily in the L of the surrounding counter she’d just finished sponging off.
“So, what should I do tomorrow after seeing Declan—come home in a horse-drawn carriage like a fairy-tale prince to soften up Evie?” he asked.
“Only if it’s a ‘wipe’ horse,” Dani said with a laugh.
“I don’t know what a ‘wipe’ horse is…”
“That’s how Evie says white. She’s very big into white horses right now. But I don’t think you have to go quite that far.”
“Thank god because I don’t know where I’d get one!” he joked, cracking a smile that put lines at the corners of those amazingly blue eyes and—like the night before—turned that mouth that could be very sober into something so much more appealing…
Then, in a voice that was deeper, quieter, he jokingly confided, “I’m not always such a clod. Sometimes I actually do succeed with girls.”
That had to be an understatement because just looking up into that face made her wobbly inside, and she didn’t have a doubt it did that to everyone. How could it not?
In order not to give herself away, though, she played it cool and said, “Yeah, I kind of figured that.”
But suddenly kissing was on her mind again. More than the night before when it had merely flitted through her brain.
Tonight it took firm enough root for her own lips to go a little slack in anticipation. Or was it invitation?
She wondered if he might have shaved because he’d considered kissing her.
She wanted him to.
In fact she was thinking about it—wanting it—so much that for a moment she wasn’t sure if he was leaning forward just slightly or if she was hallucinating because she wanted to believe he was.
She tilted her chin even as she chanted to herself, Onion breath, onion breath, onion breath…
But the truth was he still only smelled like a tropical breeze…
He had leaned forward but she only knew it for sure when he straightened up again, taking himself out of range.
Which of course was what he should have done, and Dani responded with a higher raise of her chin that she hoped conveyed he’d made the right choice.
Even as something inside her was deflating because he hadn’t gone through with it and kissed her.
Then he turned and went to the far end of the island as he said, “What’s on tomorrow’s agenda?”
Back to business.
“The kids have swimming lessons and sometimes I let them stay to splash around for a while and practice when the lessons are over—it helps wear them out. Then I promised them dinner at Marconi’s afterward. I need to check in, take a few minutes to measure and mix some of the ingredients for a soup I need to make this week. It has a lot of different parts so we only do it once a year and I have to get things started for it. Plus Griff, my manager, called today and said the leak in the pipe downstairs is getting worse and I need to take a look at it.”
Liam nodded. “Italian food again tomorrow night then,” he said.
“Our grill man makes the best rib eye around and a great burger, too, so you don’t have to eat Italian.”
“It wasn’t a complaint, Variety Pack,” he said in a voice that she thought almost sounded affectionate. “I never get my fill of Italian.”
There seemed to be some deeper meaning in that as his gaze stayed steady on her face, drinking it in.
But then—like with that lean in a moment before—he snapped out of it, said he’d see her tomorrow and left.
And alone in the kitchen, Dani took a deep breath and exhaled, telling herself to be glad that he hadn’t kissed her.
Her life was already complicated and unsettled enough.
His life might be on the verge of the massive complication of parenthood coupled with a career in the military that meant his life was always unsettled.
And while they might be together for the time being, it was going to pass fast and they weren’t going to have anything to do with each other once it did.
Which would make kissing a really dumb thing to do.
But he had been about to do it…
Somehow she was sure of it.
And despite knowing it was for the best that he hadn’t, when she turned off the lights and set the security system before heading for bed, she was fighting some heavy-duty disappointment.