“I don’t want nuffink for dinner.” Grady pouted, stubbornly crossing his arms.
The little boy was having a hard time Saturday. Fresh out of bed this morning he’d asked when his mom and dad were coming home. Dani had had to remind him again that they wouldn’t be. He’d been acting out ever since, which meant stubbornness and picking fights with Evie, who had become oversensitive about everything after the conversation, too.
It hadn’t made the trip to the Butterfly Pavilion pleasant and even getting ice-cream cones when they were finished with the bugs had been more of an ordeal than a good time.
Now Dani, Liam and the twins were at the apartment that Dani ordinarily shared with Bryan, invited for dinner by Bryan and his boyfriend, Adam.
“Dinner is a little while off anyway. Why don’t Liam and I take you two over to the park across the street and maybe we can work on your appetite?” Adam suggested. Then to Liam—with a nod toward Dani and Bryan—he said, “These two are going to want to chat so we might as well get out of here and let them.”
“Is that okay?” Liam asked Dani.
“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you. You know how things are going today,” she answered, both because the twins were not being cooperative and because Liam hadn’t yet been alone with them even under the best of conditions. She wasn’t sure whether he was up for that.
But he surprised her by saying, “I think I can handle it.”
Adam was a former air force pilot so the two of them had found common ground talking about the military. Dani turned her attention to the kids, urging them to go to the park.
Neither child was eager, but it helped when Bryan enticed them with the possibility of a small gift if they went, played hard and then came home hungry for the salmon he was making especially for them.
When they’d left, Dani went into the small kitchen with Bryan to help with dinner.
“You let him take the kids?” her friend observed.
“I’m practicing today,” she informed Bryan. “There’s a good chance that he’s their dad and that we’ll all find out very soon. If it’s true, they’ll be a family that I’m not a part of. So I thought it might be a good idea to start letting Liam get a feel for that. I’ve been hanging back all day.”
Bryan chuckled. “And you picked a day when the kids are being difficult?”
Dani laughed. “Not purposely, but if he’s their father he’ll have those days to deal with, too. I’m letting him get that experience in the mix. I’m actually glad Adam wanted to take them all to the park. It’ll give Liam a real taste of things without me.”
“And how are you doing with it—the hanging back and watching Evie and Grady go off without you?”
“Okay,” she said tentatively. “I’ve been with those kids since they were barely a year old. I know they aren’t mine and I’ve always known that the time would come when I’d say goodbye to them. It won’t be easy. But...”
Okay, it really wasn’t going to be easy because there was suddenly a lump in her throat that she had to swallow before she could go on.
“But the more time I spend with Liam and get to know him, the more I hope that he is their father because it helps to at least be able to picture who I’ll be handing them over to. From the start of this I’ve dreaded the idea that I might just have to pass them off to the unknown of the courts and foster care, and believe me, this is not as hard as that.”
“If he isn’t the dad maybe you and I will have to get married and try to adopt them,” Bryan said with half humor, half seriousness. “I don’t think I can stand to see them disappear into the system either.”
“Let’s just hope we don’t get there.”
Bryan gave her the ingredients to make herbed butter for him while he prepped the salmon. “And how are you doing with the idea of watching Liam go away?” he asked in a lighter vein.
“It’ll be a relief—my eyes will get a rest!” she joked.
But she’d realized today she wasn’t particularly thrilled with that prospect either.
She’d refused to analyze it, though, and had merely taken it as a warning and forced herself to hang back even more. And while she was hanging back she’d gone over and over in her mind exactly why she should be perfectly fine with Liam riding off into the sunset. The sooner the better.
She’d actually thought she had herself convinced and her attraction to him reined in until they’d gone home between having ice cream and coming to dinner.
Then, as if she couldn’t contain herself, she’d changed out of her kid-friendly clothes, putting on her best butt-hugging jeans and a lightweight, black wrap sweater that she ordinarily wore a tank top under for modesty’s sake. And tonight she hadn’t.
She had tied the sweater tighter at the side of her waist so the resulting V neckline was higher than when she had something underneath it. But still, there was slightly more enticement without the underneath layer.
She’d also taken her hair out of the ponytail she’d had for the day and used the curling iron before brushing it and leaving it loose.
Then she’d added a hint of eye shadow, a second application of mascara, and blush and highlighter, too.
And not only hadn’t she been able to resist dressing for him, but trying to rein in her attraction to him hadn’t been too successful when Liam had come down from the guest suite after having showered and shaved, and bowled her over once again. Tonight he was wearing a pair of jeans that fit jaw-droppingly well and a white crew-neck sweater just tight enough over those broad shoulders and every muscle of his massive chest and flat stomach to tease her.
But still, she’d spent the drive over here swearing last night’s kissing was the last time she was going to let that happen, and that she was going to put more distance between them from here on. She was going to do it or die trying!
“I can understand your eyes needing a rest,” Bryan said with another laugh. “I thought you were exaggerating about how great-looking he is, but you weren’t!”
“Told you so,” Dani said with a laugh.
Despite talking on the phone every day, they’d both been too busy to get together since Bryan had delivered the papers for her grandmother’s trust on Tuesday morning. He’d suggested this dinner so he could meet Liam because Dani had confided that her resistance to Liam’s appeal was eroding. It had made Bryan all the more determined to meet him.
“I thought you were crushing on him and that’s why you made him sound so good,” Bryan added. “But, sweetheart, how is your tongue not hanging out all the time?”
“I told you what’s going on so you would talk me out of it,” she reminded him. “Gushing over him doesn’t help.”
“I don’t want to talk you out of it,” Bryan said matter-of-factly.
“Bryan...” she chastised with her tone.
“I don’t,” he said, standing his ground firmly. “Until he came around, if you weren’t worrying about one thing, you were worrying about another. What to do with Gramma’s house. Whether to keep the restaurant and give up nannying, or sell the restaurant. The twins and what’s going to happen to them—”
“I’m still worried about all of that. I still have to make decisions about the house and the restaurant and my own future. I still don’t know what’s going to happen to Evie and Grady—”
“But the thing is, even though all that stuff is weighing on you, since that guy has been there I think he’s kind of balanced out some of the bad. He’s lifted you out of the thick of it. And I think that’s just what you need right now.”
She couldn’t deny that Liam had become some sort of counterweight. That it was not only nice to have him around so she didn’t always have to be a mock single parent, but also so she could talk to him about even her own problems. Nice to have their evenings alone after the kids were in bed...
But she also couldn’t deny that shouldn’t be the case. Or at the very least that she couldn’t let that become something bigger than it was. That she couldn’t come to expect or rely on him to the point where she felt any kind of loss when this was over.
“So last night...” Bryan was saying into her wandering thoughts. “Kiss or no kiss?”
She’d told him yesterday about the brief one on Thursday night, lamenting that it had happened and why she shouldn’t let it happen again. She’d sworn to him that there was absolutely, positively not going to be another kiss.
Now her only answer was a grimace that made Bryan laugh yet again. “How was it?”
“Ohhh...incredible,” she complained.
“Was it only kissing?”
“Yes. But a lot of it. And—”
“Hot?”
She shrugged.
Bryan laughed again. “Better still!”
“It’s not,” she insisted. “It’s bad and stupid and I don’t know why I keep letting it happen!”
“Because you like him. Don’t you?” her friend challenged.
“I don’t dislike him.” It was the most she would admit to.
But there was more she could have admitted to.
Not that it was anything serious—how could it be when they’d really only just met?
But still, something odd was going on with her. In the mornings when she got up she kept watch on the clock, literally counting how long she thought it might be before he’d be there. More eager than she wanted to be for him to show up.
And when he did? There was the weirdest warm rush that went through her the minute she set eyes on him. A warm rush that didn’t even have anything to do with those blazing good looks of his. A warm rush that was like...
She didn’t want to think this, but it was like something was missing until he walked in and then all was right again.
It really was nuts. She’d never felt that about anyone. Not even Garrett, who had been a huge part of her life for a long time. Who she could have married.
But maybe it was just that counterweight thing, she told herself. Liam gave her the sense that everything was going to be all right.
“I know why you’re letting it happen,” Bryan said in answer to her comment. “It feels good and it’s fun. And I think that’s why he was sent to you—like the donuts that appear every Friday in the break room at work. I have no idea where they come from or who goes to the trouble or pays for them. It’s just a little job benefit that I gladly accept.”
Dani laughed again but with some confusion. “Liam wasn’t ‘sent to me.’ I had to have the marine corps track him down. And that was for the sake of Grady and Evie.”
“So it was the marine corps that sent him to you,” Bryan concluded neatly. “They’ve sent in the troops—that’s why you should go for it.”
“Simple as that?” she said.
“Yes. A little simple, no ties, no expectations, purely biological release. With one of the hottest men I’ve ever seen. Something to ease all the stress you’re under and put a smile on your face, so when you’re old and think back on it, you can have one sweet memory of an otherwise awful time.”
Dani laughed again. “Wow.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m betting there will be a lot of wow,” Bryan said.
“You know that some kind of fling is not me,” she countered.
“I know it hasn’t been. And it won’t be after this. But this one time? Let it be you.”
“Bryan...” she chastised again.
“I’m serious! You like him. You’ve earned it. What harm is there? Unless...” He paused to look at her just as he was about to put the salmon under the broiler. “Do you more than like him? Is this something that could end up hurting you?”
She didn’t think so...
But what she said was, “He’s a marine like my dad was. And he has a mind-set that isn’t much different than Garrett’s—”
“I know he had a bad day when he saw his twin for the first time, but I thought you were leaning away from the idea of PTSD.”
“I am. But still...when you come from that world anything could happen to cause it anytime.”
“But it’s not there now. And the mind-set thing? You know Adam can be a little like Garrett, too, when he’s in military mode and he’s all earnest and conservative and straitlaced. But he isn’t always in military mode the way Garrett is always a cop, policing everything and everybody. From what you’ve said about Liam he’s more like Adam with that stuff than like Garrett.”
Dani didn’t refute that but she also couldn’t be completely sure it was and would always be true. Instead she said, “And there’s the fact that I did only break up with Garrett three months ago and am not ready for anything else yet—especially with the house and the restaurant and my career future all waiting for a decision. Until I’ve sorted out what I’m doing all the way around, I can’t be starting something new.”
“Donuts on Fridays is not ‘starting something new,’” he pointed out. “It’s just a job benefit. It doesn’t happen every day. It could end and we’d all just go on the same. But we enjoy it now, when it’s happening...” he finished in a singsong voice.
He seemed to give her a moment to be tantalized by the idea before he said, “And what if you could enjoy a little job benefit in the form of Liam but you don’t? You’ll always wonder what it might have been like. You’ll build it up in your mind to something that nothing else and no other man might ever live up to. Think of it as doing a service for the Mr. Right you finally do end up with. And for yourself so you don’t spend the rest of your life disappointed with him.”
“What if I did it and no one for the rest of my life can live up to him?” she said, as if this was a purely academic debate even though she thought there was a chance that Liam might always be in a class by himself.
“Or maybe he’ll be so bad at it that he’ll cure you of lusting after him the way you are now.”
Dani laughed. “I am not lusting after him.”
“Oh, you sooo are. So just take care of it. You take care of everything else for everybody else. No matter what reason convinces you, do this for you. Trust me—and I know you do—you will regret it if you don’t, not if you do.”
Dani just shook her head at that notion as if her friend was out of his mind.
But secretly she wasn’t convinced that he didn’t have a point.
* * *
“Oh, you didn’t go to bed. Or run away from home,” Dani said.
After getting the twins to sleep Saturday night there had been no sign of Liam. The day and evening with Evie and Grady were so fraught with four-year-old melodrama that she’d thought he might have just retreated. But when she’d gone to the front door to activate the security system she’d spotted him in the formal living room off the entry, in the direction opposite the dance studio and workout room.
He was lying flat on his back on the floor underneath the enormous skylight in the ceiling. The only illumination in the room came from the moon overhead and the glow of the exterior lighting coming in through the two walls that were completely glass. But everything in and about the space was white—the walls, the leather sofas, the molded coffee and end tables, the unlit lamps, the white-on-white artwork—so everything was fairly visible, including Liam even though his white sweater blended in.
His hands were on his ultra-flat stomach but he took one away to pat the white shag carpet beside him. “Felt like I spent most of the day hunched over. I needed to stretch out,” he explained. “Try it. Puts everything in line again.”
She wasn’t sure what it put in line again, but it was quiet now that the twins were asleep, and peaceful there in that big open room with so much of the outdoors coming in through all the glass. And despite knowing that the best way to fight Liam’s appeal would be to simply say good-night and go to bed with a good book, Dani looked forward to this time with him too much to deny herself. Especially after a day with pitifully unhappy kids.
So once the alarm was set she joined him.
But she didn’t lie down the way he was. She sat near his upper half, resting her weight on one hip and hand, and curling her legs under the other hip.
He rolled to his side to face her, propping himself on his left elbow and forearm. “I’ve had days in combat that were easier than today. And I’ve run into insurgents more agreeable than those two downstairs,” he said.
Dani laughed. “Kids are entitled to bad days, too.” But she’d been happy to see that, through even the worst of it, Liam had been steady and calm and patient; he’d never lost his temper.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine what must go through their little minds,” he agreed. “It’s lucky they were used to round-the-clock nannies so maybe it’s not so unusual for them to go a long time without thinking about their parents. And lucky that they live in the moment. But when whatever brings it up for them that Audrey and her husband aren’t coming back...that’s gotta scare and confuse them.”
“Definitely living in the moment is a plus. They don’t know yet that their own lives won’t go on the way they always have, the way they are. So far they’ve taken in stride that I’m their only nanny now, and it hasn’t occurred to them that it might not just go on forever.”
“They don’t need to be prepared for it not to?”
“Sure. But until I know what to prepare them for, there’s no sense in worrying them with the possibilities.” As much as it was worrying her that she might have to hand them over to the system. “I want them to have whatever sense of security they have with me for as long as they can. I want to protect them as long as I can.”
Liam smiled and made a small sort-of-chuckling sound. “I don’t know if it was the court or Audrey who picked you out of the nanny pool to be the primary caretaker now, but whoever did it was smart.”
“It was Audrey first—right after the accident she asked me not to leave them with anyone else. Since she was still alive they didn’t need a guardian, just a round-the-clock nanny. Technically it was the court who formally named me guardian. But it helped convince the judge that I should have guardianship because I’d been Audrey’s choice as round-the-clock nanny to begin with.”
Audrey was not a subject they’d talked about beyond the current situation. It was slightly strange to Dani that he’d been involved with someone she knew. But it wasn’t as if she and Audrey had been close. Dani had been told to call both Audrey and Owen by their first names but, beyond that familiarity, Dani’s relationship with them had been strictly as their employee.
But talking about Audrey now brought it home to Dani that Liam had had a relationship with the other woman and made her wonder about it.
“How did you and Audrey meet?” she ventured.
“At a wedding,” he said without seeming to have any reservations about telling her. “My sister was living here then, too—that was before she went back to Northbridge for a year to take care of Mom until she died—and I came to Denver for a training and to see her. Kinsey’s boss was getting married, she needed a plus-one, and I was it. Audrey was a bridesmaid.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t have me contact your sister about the twins or about getting hold of you.”
“Kinsey worked with the groom. She didn’t even know the bride. She met Audrey through me and only at the wedding when I introduced them after I’d met her. Usually Kinsey took time off work if one of us came to see her but she couldn’t for that one and, since she was on overnight shifts, I spent days with Kinsey and evenings with Audrey without any overlap.”
Dani was reasonably sure he meant that he’d spent nights with Audrey but appreciated that he was downplaying that aspect. Although rather than feeling any kind of jealousy, she had difficulty actually imagining them together. In her mind, Audrey went with Owen.
“After that,” he was saying, “Audrey and I stayed in touch for about eight months long distance. But there was no reason for her and Kinsey to see each other or talk. Kinsey didn’t even know I’d kept in contact with Audrey, and Audrey was a little scattered—I doubt she remembered my sister’s name. They definitely didn’t run in the same circles. Audrey was a trust fund baby and my family is anything but.”
“I wouldn’t have expected Audrey to want a long-distance relationship,” Dani said with some surprise. The Audrey she’d known had required a great deal of attention from her husband, to the point of competing with Grady and Evie if Owen showed much interest in them.
“I don’t know if you’d call it a relationship so much as acting out a fantasy,” he said with what sounded like reluctance. “The uniform can inspire that in some women. I’ve always avoided them and since I met her when I was in civvies, it didn’t occur to me at first that that was part of it with Audrey. I guess that was dumb because she said she could tell I was military the minute she laid eyes on me, even in a suit.”
“You do have that air about you. I think it’s in the posture.”
“Well, by the time I realized that was the draw, we’d hit it off. And she was fun, she had the money and the desire to travel to wherever in the world she could meet me when I had leave, so I just kind of went with it. I figured that the most it would amount to was having a little company on leave and that’s always nice. We did a week in China, ten days in Japan, then the last time it was a week in Spain. It was after Spain when things changed.”
“Because she was pregnant. But she really didn’t give you any idea that she was?”
“None—even thinking back on it there was nothing. It was just a Dear John call. I’d had them before.”
“Were you brokenhearted when she called it off with you?”
“No,” he answered without having to think about it. “I liked Audrey. But it was just fun and games with us. That’s all either one of us was interested in. And I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. I didn’t have any illusions. I knew the odds of Audrey falling into something with someone else when she hadn’t even heard from me in months on end was pretty high. That just goes with the territory.”
“So you weren’t in love with her?” Dani knew she probably had no business asking but for some reason it made it easier for her to keep her perspective—that the love of Audrey’s life had been Owen, and that Liam’s time with her late employer was little more than a lark. A long-ago lark.
Not that it should matter one way or another, she was quick to remind herself.
“I wasn’t in love with her, no,” he said, again without having to think about it. “And she wasn’t in love with me either. From the start we agreed to no strings attached. So when she called things off it wasn’t a huge surprise and I wished her well—and meant it—and just went back to business as usual.”
Then he switched gears and Dani thought it was a signal that he didn’t want to talk about his relationship with Audrey anymore.
“What about you?” he asked. “Were you and Audrey friends—”
“I was just the help. She was friendly and pleasant to me, but we didn’t talk about anything except the kids. It was only at the end when she told me about you—or anything personal—and that was out of necessity.”
He nodded as if that made sense to him.
There didn’t seem to be more to say about their mutual acquaintance but Dani was still curious about his past. She said, “You’ve had a lot of Dear John calls?”
“I didn’t say ‘a lot,’” he amended with a laugh. “I haven’t had a lot of relationships. The longest one was with my high school girlfriend—Kristi Williams—before we went our separate ways for college and lost touch—”
“That easy? Your first love and you just ‘lost touch’?”
“No, there was some teenage angst and heartbreak, but that’s what first loves are for, aren’t they?” he said with a smile that spoke of a tender spot for that memory and made Dani like him all the more for it.
“And between your first love and Audrey? Since Audrey?”
He grinned. “I don’t have a Garrett story,” he said. “I’ve never been engaged or even come close. I haven’t ever even had the exclusive talk. There have just been women I’ve connected with the way I did with Audrey. I’d see them before and then again after a few mission gaps until something made things fizzle. But I’m not sure those count as full-blown relationships.”
“Do you juggle women?”
“No!” he scoffed, again without hesitation. “I’ve had runs with one woman at a time while they last, until something happens to change things.”
“Such as?”
“There was a warrant officer in another unit who reached the end of her tour and went home. There was a navy nurse restationed to Africa. A couple of civilians who met other guys while I was away—one of them had even gotten married during the ten months I was unavailable. There was a photographer with a news crew who was just long gone when I got back from a mission.” He shrugged. “No matter what’s going on on the personal side, I get my orders, disappear for two days or two months or—”
“Ten months,” she recalled.
“And when I come out from under, things can be the same or anything can have changed. That’s just how it goes.”
But suddenly she was thinking about him being Grady and Evie’s dad again. “Ten months,” she repeated. “That’s not only long enough for one of your civilians to meet and marry someone else, it’s a long time in the life of little kids.”
He sobered, frowning. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that.”
“You’re career military.”
He nodded slowly. “Have been...”
“Will that change if the kids are yours?”
He took a deep breath and shrugged. “I’m not really sure. But it is why I want to do tomorrow’s family day at rehab. Conor and Kinsey are going. Kinsey wants to talk about her wedding. And the Camdens, I’m sure. But I was thinking maybe I should talk to her and Conor about the twins, too.”
“In case they are yours.”
“Actually, even if they aren’t,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been thinking about what to do with them if the DNA comes back and says I am their father, about taking them to live on bases overseas, about babysitters and nannies, missions I can’t control the length of... I don’t know that that would be the best thing for them and I think maybe I need to talk to my brother and sister about leaving the kids here with them, about having one or both of them be guardians while I’m deployed... If I stay in the corps or until I can transition out...”
“Is that something your family would do?”
“Honest to god, I don’t know. This is nothing any of us has ever dealt with before. I’m just going to feel them out about it. I can’t really make the decision about whether or not to stay in unless I know if I’ll have help. And while I’m feeling them out about what happens if I am the dad...” He hesitated before he said, “Today I thought that maybe we should also talk about taking them on even if I’m not the dad.”
“In what way?” Dani asked.
“I don’t know, I’m just throwing ideas out there,” he admitted. “All I know is that when I came here I was figuring that I’d do what I could for them, even if I’m not their father, because I knew Audrey and wanted to help the kids she left behind. Maybe because I was a kid who got help from someone who wasn’t related to me and I owe a little payback for that. But somewhere along the way the little buggers got under my skin all on their own and made that a bigger deal to me.”
“And that occurred to you today? When they were at their worst?”
“Yeah,” he answered with a wry laugh. “Today especially, I guess, because I saw them upset about Audrey and her husband being gone. Saw them kind of scared, and...” He shook his head. “I have to fix that for them, whether they’re mine or not.”
“How?”
“I don’t have a clear picture. But I just got to thinking that if I am their dad I’m gonna need help. If I’m not, they need help. Kinsey is looking for more family. She’ll be married next month. There’s Conor and Maicy... I know couples have to be attractive volunteers to take in kids. Add me to the mix—a friend of their mother and the person she picked to give them to—toss in a couple lawyers lobbying for it and maybe we could persuade the courts to let us be joint guardians or an extended foster family or whatever it might take so that all together we could look after them. I don’t know. I’m just hoping we can maybe take the first step to putting our heads together to work something out.”
“It would be great if you could...” Dani said, unsure if what he was suggesting was possible. But unconventional or not, it was still the best solution she’d heard for the twins if Liam didn’t turn out to be their biological father. And just the fact that he was willing to try made her feel as if there was hope for Grady and Evie avoiding the system.
He had no idea how much that meant to her. So much that she got excited enough to say, “I’d help! Regardless of where I end up going from here, I’d actually like the chance to stay in contact with them.”
It made her feel worlds better to think that might be possible after having been so close to the twins for the last three years. To think that she might not have to merely hand them off and never see them again.
“That’d be good, too. You’re important to them. We’ll just all have to see what we can do—the takes-a-village thing,” he concluded.
But coming from him Dani had faith. And she just wanted to throw her arms around him and kiss him and show him how much she appreciated just what a good man he kept proving to be.
Which she knew she couldn’t do.
So she got a grip on herself and decided it was better to return to the lighter topic of the evening—his love life.
To that end, she said, “So, you know not to get too attached to any woman. Audrey wasn’t alone in that.”
“What I know is to enjoy the moment and everything in and about the moment,” he said, taking the hand she wasn’t leaning on and holding it cradled in his, rubbing his thumb in circles on the back of it. “I guess I have to have a four-year-old’s mentality for that.”
“And when that moment is over you’re not sorry? You’ve never tried to hang on or asked a woman to wait for you?”
“There have been one or two I’ve been a little sorry not to see again. But no, I’ve never asked anyone to wait for me.”
“Because there’s never been anyone you care enough for to try to tie up, or because you don’t think it’s fair to ask that of them?”
His gaze was on their connected hands. “Both, maybe,” he answered. “I know plenty of guys in Special Forces who are married or engaged or have girlfriends. But I’ve just kind of always played it by ear. Like with Audrey. When I came up for air on a mission I’d contact her. If she still seemed on board, great—”
“But when she wasn’t, that was okay, too.”
He answered that with another shrug.
“Have there been some women you don’t contact when you come up for air?”
He grinned. “Haven’t you had guys you don’t want to see again after a date or two?”
She laughed. “Sure.”
“Me, too,” he said with a laugh of his own.
There was something that gave Dani the distinct impression she’d reached the end of his tolerance for talking about his past, though.
Proving that she was right he suddenly acquired a more playful air. He used that hand he was holding to pull her down to him as he raised up on his elbow enough to meet her halfway and give her a sweet, savoring kiss before he ended it and said, “Last night got to me kind of bad.”
“Too much soup?”
He laughed a throaty, sexy laugh. “No, not too much soup. You. Wanting you got to me kind of bad...” He shook his head and his expression showed some amazement at just how much before he said, “It started me thinking that being here right now with you and not making the most of it might be the worst thing I ever let happen...”
“‘Making the most of it...’”
He grinned crookedly and an even greater sparkle came into those already sparkling blue eyes of his before he kissed her again. And, in the midst of it, let go of her hand to wrap both arms around her and pull her to lie on the floor with him.
She could have protested but between what Bryan had said to her earlier and what Liam had just said about getting the most out of the moment she didn’t force herself to. And it would have taken some superhuman force because kissing him was exactly what she wanted to be doing.
So kiss him she did, lying there on the floor with him, her arms around him, too, and her tongue answering the call of his with the same fervor it had the night before, thinking that maybe sometimes there didn’t need to be a tomorrow because today—tonight—was too good to pass up.
And kissing him was too good to pass up because the man could kiss better than anyone. His tongue was perfect and adept and knew all the right things to do.
His body against hers was also sublime—all rock-solid muscle and strength and power, pliable under fingers that pressed into his back and palms that rode expansive shoulders in a massage that had him writhing ever so slightly.
Her breasts against that hard chest made her nipples strain for more as he rolled just enough to put her flat on her back, coming partway over her.
His mouth opened even wider then and his tongue played a more forceful game with hers as one of his hands found the tie at her waist, pulling it free so that her top fell open, exposing her lacy bra.
Still, she wasn’t inclined to put up any opposition. Or close her top. Instead she adopted a little boldness of her own and slipped her hands under his sweater to touch that smooth skin she’d ogled at the swimming pool.
His hand sluiced slowly away from her waist where the tie had been knotted, stealing his way up inch by inch until it was just to the side of her breast.
Was he waiting for encouragement or torturing her?
Dani knew only that it was definitely torture to have his hand so close to where she wanted it without him finishing the trip.
She arched her spine just enough to relay the message but all he did was curl his fingers into the side of her bra and slide them to the outer swell of her breast.
Oh, he was torturing her all right!
So she took a deep enough breath to expand into the cups, her taut nipples poking into the lace.
He seemed to know exactly what she was doing because he chuckled faintly, deep in his barrel chest, and brought the backs of his fingers forward to catch one of her hardened nipples between them, squeezing gently but enticingly but still not giving her what she wanted.
Damn him!
She raised a knee and let it fall to his thigh to do a little more enticing of her own. That did it—he took his fingers out of the cup of her bra, pulled it below her breast and replaced the cup with the most wonderful palm to nestle into.
And regardless of how cool he’d been playing it, that first contact of his full hand to her breast evoked a guttural groan from his throat as his mouth and tongue turned that kiss into something too erotic to bear.
All while his big hand showed her some other tricks he knew and left her nearly quivering in all the best ways.
She suddenly became aware that her leg had somehow wrapped around him and brought him tight up against her, where she could feel the substantial proof that he was as worked up as she was.
And, oh, did her hand itch to reach down and learn all there was to know about that part of him, too!
But then she realized that she had to call her brain back from the brink and put it in charge again before this went completely out of control.
She had kids only a few rooms away that she was responsible for. Kids who could wake up and come looking for her at any moment.
She couldn’t risk them finding her like that. Finding her and Liam like that. Let alone doing more than that—which was where this was headed. Where everything in her was crying out for it to head.
And when he reached to unhook her bra she knew it had to stop.
So as much as she didn’t want to, she ended that all-consuming kiss and whispered a raspy, “No, we can’t. The kids...”
Liam’s hand halted its journey and he plunked his forehead to hers, sighing a heavy sigh of resignation. “Like I said, I want you, Dani...”
He laid his hand on her side again but for a time he stayed where he was, as if it was no easy task to bring himself back from the same brink she’d been on.
Then he let her go and fell back to lie on the floor the way he had been when she’d joined him, his eyes pinched shut in misery.
It gave Dani the opportunity to sit up, fix her bra and retie her top. She stood, taking one long look at that incredible male body she’d just been up against and wanted so badly still.
Liam did a sit-up and got to his feet, too, sighing resignedly as he faced her, rested his forearms on her shoulders and again put his head to hers.
“The kids have a sleepover tomorrow night,” he said quietly.
“The Tyler twins’ birthday,” Dani confirmed.
“That starts at four in the afternoon,” he said, repeating what she’d told him on the way home from dinner with Bryan and Adam. “And I’ll be gone all day before that. But I was going to see if you’d let me take you to dinner after my day with my family and the kids are gone—a grown-ups only dinner, just you and me...”
“You were?” But was he still?
“Will you go?” he asked more clearly.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“But I’m gonna be straight with you...lay my cards on the table...” He paused. “If, after dinner, I’m in this house with you and there aren’t any kids...”
He took yet another deep breath and exhaled before he confessed, “The only chance I have of keeping myself in check is if I take you to a nice dinner, bring you home, kiss you at the front door and go to my brother’s.” Another pause. “So I’m leaving it completely up to you. And I want you to think about it in the cold light of day,” he commanded, putting so much weight on that that it made her laugh.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “I don’t know where anything is going from here. You don’t either. And I don’t want you to be sorry—”
“I’ll think about it,” she told him.
He took his forehead from hers, tipped her face up with a gentle nudge of one knuckle under her chin and then kissed her like there was no tomorrow, nearly making her knees buckle right out from under her.
Before he stopped and stepped away.
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” he said wryly, that mouth she was still starving for crooked up at only one corner.
Once more she wasn’t sure what he meant—if he intended to get ready somewhere other than here and then arrive to take her to dinner as if it was an ordinary date, or if he would only descend from the guest suite and pretend to pick her up.
But either way she got the idea and said, “I’ll be ready.”
With that settled and her instructions to consider whether or not to let him stay tomorrow night, Dani left him in that starlit living room, stealing one last glance at him before she went.
But even without his instructions, she knew there wasn’t much that was going to be on her mind other than whether or not to finish what they started tonight.
And right then, with every inch of her body shrieking to be back in his arms, she wasn’t sure exactly how she was going to make a rational decision.
Cold light of day or not.
Because it still wasn’t her brain in charge.