“Dani! Where’d you go?”
“We were s’posa go to the restaurant afer our movie was over but you were gone!”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Dani apologized to Evie and Grady when they ran to her the minute she went in the Freelander front door.
“You din’t even tell us you were goin’ somewhere,” Grady accused.
Under her breath, in a near whisper, Evie rolled her eyes toward Liam standing nearby and said, “Li’mum said we couldn’t do nothin’ wissout you.”
Dani smiled slightly at the four-year-old’s mispronunciations, especially Liam’s name.
Before she could comment, Bryan came in behind her. Surprised to see him, they immediately forgot their peeves with Dani and went into their usual greeting of him—demanding to see his socks.
“You guys are gonna love them,” he assured. “But let’s go down to your playroom before I show you. I really need to do some puzzles today.”
“We got a new one!” Evie announced as she and her brother took off like a shot, leaving Bryan a moment to greet Liam with nothing more than a raise of his chin in acknowledgment before he followed them.
And suddenly Dani was alone in the entryway with the big, broad-shouldered man standing like a sentry. He was expressionless but still looked fantastic in a short-sleeved, black T-shirt that stretched tight around the massive biceps that bulged from his arms crossed over his chest.
Just being near him—even when the tension between them was palpable—was enough to make her pulse race. And for a moment the power of the feelings she had for him seemed almost overwhelming.
But she didn’t know what to say, where to start.
Liam took care of that by nodding in the direction Bryan had just gone and saying, “You needed backup? Is Bryan here to evict me or pack your bags?”
“Neither,” she said. “I went to the apartment. I’ve been there talking to Bryan. He just came to occupy the kids so we could talk.”
But she knew that Liam had said all he wanted to earlier today and, since her reaction hadn’t been good, it was up to her to talk now as she faced the man who stood like a big wall of steel.
“I’m sorry for reacting the way I did and then disappearing,” she said with a sincerity that hadn’t been in her more casual apology to the kids.
“I just don’t know what I said that scared you. Believe me, that wasn’t what I was going for.”
“It wasn’t what you said,” she assured. “What you said was…wonderful. And none of it should have affected me the way it did. It just got filtered through my own issues.”
She went on to explain to him what Bryan had helped her realize.
When she’d finished Liam said, “I don’t know anything about Garrett so I can’t say if Bryan is right about him. But I think if you thought I’m anything like him, I’m insulted.”
He didn’t sound as if he’d suffered any injury from her misguided comparison, though, so that helped.
But then, in a very somber, serious tone, he added, “But I don’t have PTSD, Dani.”
“I don’t think so either. Now,” she said. “I guess maybe I have a little of it…after my dad.”
“Ah… I could see that,” he said as if that shined a light on things for him. “You saw some tough stuff as a little kid. That had to leave a mark. Then along comes another marine…” He shook his so-handsome head. “But we don’t all have it just by virtue of being marines.”
“I know. And if you don’t want to get mixed up with someone who maybe has some fallout from being close to someone who did—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But maybe you should think about it, because I can’t promise that every time you get into a bad mood I won’t worry that you’re developing problems.”
He smiled a small, soft smile. “You’re giving us a future tense? That’s something…” he mused to himself, as if it gave him some hope. Then he said, “I already told you that you’re the first person I want to tell everything to—that means you’d be the first person I’d tell if I ever start feeling anything bothering me. So you can relax. A bad mood is just a bad mood unless I’ve told you otherwise.”
There was only the hint of a lighter tone in his voice but, like his remark about being insulted to be compared to Garrett, it helped ease some more of Dani’s stress.
Still, she needed a bit of reassurance. “Will you guarantee that you’ll go for help before it can get out of hand?”
“I’ll put it in writing if it makes you feel better,” he offered. “But wanting you and everything I want us to have together, a future together, isn’t about me using you for my own mental health. Is that how I made it sound?”
She shook her head. “I think it was more that it was my takeaway when you said you feel good when you’re with me, that you need that…”
“I do feel better when I’m with you but that doesn’t mean I feel bad when I’m not. Being with you is just like… I don’t know… Everything settles for me and just feels…right. It feels great. And yeah, I want that in my life. I need that now that I’ve found it. But only because it’s so damn good. Not because without it I’m messed up.”
“I know that now.” And hearing him say the words again fueled her. Made her feel what she should have felt the first time.
“So we’re okay on that part?” he asked cautiously.
“Better than okay,” she confessed.
“And the part where you thought I only want you for your nanny abilities with the kids?”
“It isn’t as if that’s a reach,” she defended herself.
“And it didn’t occur to you that if that’s all I wanted I could have just asked you to stay on the job?” he countered. “Do you really think that I’d make a commitment like I’m trying to make here for any reason except that it’s you I want?”
She raised her eyebrows at him in question.
But apparently she’d lessened some of his stress, too, because he laughed.
“You’ve knocked me for a loop, lady,” he claimed, uncrossing his arms and sliding his hands partway into his jeans pockets as he took a step closer to her in the entry. “I told you, if there hadn’t been any kids, I’d have still been where I was this afternoon, wanting to be a part of your life, wanting us to make a life together. I know it’s weird that it’s happened so fast, but when it’s right, it’s right.”
“That’s what Bryan said.”
“Then thank you, Bryan!” Liam said despite the fact that Bryan wouldn’t hear it. “Sure, there’s Evie and Grady, but I’m finding my way and I’ll go on finding my way. And yes, this last week, no matter how you cut it, the four of us together has been like a really nice family. A family that I don’t think should be broken up. But that isn’t what’s gotten me out of bed excited to face every day. It’s been the thought that I get to spend that day with you. It’s been the thought that after the twins go to sleep at night I get you all to myself. And then there was last night…”
There was amazement in the way he inclined his head, in the arch of his eyebrows. “Come on, after last night you can’t for a minute ignore what we had—what we can have—together. You and I together is like nothing I’ve ever found before.”
“I know,” she whispered, certainly not trying to deny it. Any more than she tried to deny feeling the same way getting up every morning for another day with him. Looking forward to the end of every evening, just the two of them.
He closed the distance between them, lowered his voice and said what she’d cut him off from saying that afternoon. “I love you, Dani. That’s the explanation for it all. Not anything else. I love you and I want to be with you. Kids. No kids. More kids. Restaurant. No restaurant. Good times. Bad times. No matter what. I love you from the inside out, and it isn’t because my life has just gotten complicated, and of all the things I’ve been trained for, being a single parent isn’t one of them. It’s only because of what I feel for you.”
“And you would be okay with me keeping the restaurant?”
“I’m hoping you will. I’m hoping that you’ll keep ties with what’s made you who you are. But—”
“I do think I’m going to keep it,” she said before he finished, knowing he was going to tell her it was all right if she didn’t. “There’s something about it that’s just in my bones, and I don’t think I can let it go. I don’t want to let it go. I want it to be a part of Grady’s and Evie’s lives, a part of the lives of any other kids. I want to feel like my grandparents are still going, just a little.”
He smiled again. “Great, because that soup is the real reason I asked you to marry me.”
“Oh, I forgot to worry about that,” she joked, finally feeling as if she were standing on firm enough ground to venture it.
“How about you just stop worrying about everything and go with it,” he advised.
It hadn’t been easy for her to get there but as she looked up into those beautiful blue eyes, as her whole body ached for him to touch her, to take her into his arms, she suddenly knew without question that was exactly what she wanted to do—just go with it. Just go with what her heart was telling her to do, despite the arguments her head had mounted.
“I do love you, Liam,” she whispered.
“That better not have a but coming after it,” he warned.
“It doesn’t. It’s just an I love you, Liam. More than I can say.”
“And you want to marry me and raise my kids with me and run your grandparents’ restaurant and add more kids to the mix,” he coached.
“I do,” she answered simply. “I really do.”
Then she got her wish and he took his hands out of his pockets to pull her into his arms, against that incredible body, just holding her for a long minute as if he needed the feel of her to bring home that this was actually happening.
He buried his face in the top of her head, and she could feel the heat of his breath in her hair just before he kissed her there.
Then he sighed and reared back enough to look into her eyes, to let her see the vulnerability he felt when he admitted, “You scared the hell out of me.”
She laughed. “I thought it was me who was scared.”
“When you left you scared the hell out of me,” he amended. “I was afraid you really meant all those noes you were shooting at me and that you wouldn’t come back. Nothing has ever shaken me that much. I was thinking that my next mission was going to have to be to track you down and try to fix this somehow. Or take you captive and hold you prisoner. Who knew I’d get rescued by Bryan? Maybe we should enlist him in Special Forces.”
“About that…”
“Bryan in Special Forces?”
“About you leaving the marines. Are you sure about that? It seems like that decision might have come out of the blue.”
“A little, I guess,” he admitted. “But I’ve never been absolutely sure that I’d be in the corps forever—it’s why I have another job on the hook. And when I thought about leaving you or Evie and Grady behind, or dragging you to military bases to live while I’m gone on missions, I knew that wasn’t what was best for any of us. And somehow it just followed that I needed to start a new chapter all the way around.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“I’m okay with anything that gets me into your bed every night and lets you be the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning,” he assured with a wicked one-sided smile on his supple lips. Until his expression altered to look slightly perplexed and he said, “But do we have to live in this house?”
Dani laughed. “I’d rather not,” she confessed. “It belongs to the kids and once everything is finalized in court we can sell it and put the money away for them.”
“And get our own place.”
“Something cozier,” she agreed, thinking of her grandparents’ house and how she just might want to bring her own family to it. “In fact I have one we can look at…” she said.
“As long as I don’t feel like I should be wearing a space suit to live in it.”
She laughed again. “Definitely no space suits. But a great big garden in the backyard that my grandfather loved…”
He grinned, then something in his eyes softened and he said, “I do love you, Dani Cooper. Will you marry me?”
“I will,” she said simply in answer to the question he’d asked hours ago that had set her off.
He smiled another warm smile and then kissed her, a deep, deep kiss that reclaimed her, reconnected them and reunited them for the future they’d already begun to plan together.
And in that moment, in that kiss, Dani suddenly knew this was the way things were meant to play out—for her and Liam, for the twins, even for the house she’d grown up in and the restaurant and the family she had there—because everything settled for her, too, and just felt right.
So right that even though her grandmother had encouraged her to leave the family business, every step had really only put her on track to returning to it.
With kids who would become her own.
With more kids she would have.
But most especially with Liam.
Who was, without a doubt, the one and only man she wanted to spend her life with.
* * * * *