A Forever Family: Their Doorstep Delivery

“So I’m a guinea pig?” he teased.

“As a result of your own machinations,” she reminded him.

“I’m here for the company more than the food, anyway.” He looked over her shoulder and into the pot. “Are those parsnips?”

“You don’t like parsnips?” she guessed.

“Actually, I do. And sweet potatoes, too,” he said, chunks of which were also in the pot. “I just didn’t think anyone other than my mother cooked them.”

“How lucky that you decided to invite yourself to dinner tonight,” she said dryly, replacing the lid.

He grinned. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Why don’t you open the wine while I take care of these flowers?”

“Corkscrew?”

She pointed. “Top drawer on the other side of the sink. Glasses are above the refrigerator.”

While he was opening the bottle, she slipped out of the room. The cat stayed with him, winding between his legs and rubbing against him.

He glanced down at the ball of fur and remarked, “Well, at least one of the females here is friendly.”

“She’s an attention whore,” Cassie told him, returning with a clear glass vase.

“Where’s Westley?”

“Probably sleeping by the fireplace—he spends most of his day lazing in his bed until he hears his food being poured into his bowl.” Setting the vase aside, she opened the door of the pantry and pulled out a bag. She carried it to an alcove beside the fridge, where he saw now there were two sets of bowls neatly aligned on mats, and crouched down to pour the food.

As the first pieces of kibble hit the bottom of the bowl, he heard a distant thump of paws hitting the floor then saw a streak of black and white shoot across the kitchen floor. The plaintive meow made Braden realize it wasn’t his bowl that Cassie had filled first. Her attention diverted by her sibling’s call, Buttercup padded over to her bowl and hunkered down to feast on her dinner while Westley waited for his own.

“I’ve never seen a cat reluctant to eat out of another animal’s bowl,” he noted.

“Neither of them does,” she told him. “Which makes it easier for me when I need to put drops or supplements in their food, because I know they’ve each gotten the right amount.”

“Did you train them to do that?”

She smiled at that. “You’ve obviously never tried to train a cat to do anything.”

“I’m guessing the answer to my question is no.”

“No,” she confirmed. “It’s just a lucky quirk of their personalities. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that, as kittens, they were crammed into a boot box with four other siblings. Now they appreciate having their own space—not just their own bowls but their own litter boxes and beds.” Although they usually curled up together in one or the other when it was time to go to sleep, because apparently even feline creatures preferred not to sleep alone.

“Six kittens and you only ended up with two?” he teased.

“I wanted to take them all,” she admitted. “But I’m not yet ready to be known as the crazy old cat lady.”

“You’re too young to be old,” he assured her.

She lifted a brow. “I notice you didn’t dispute the ‘crazy’ part.”

“I don’t really know you well enough to make any assertions about your state of mind,” he pointed out. Then, “So what happened to the other kittens?”

“Tanya—you met her at the Book & Bake Sale—took Fezzik, Mr. and Mrs. Bowman—regular patrons of the library—chose Vizzini, Mr. Osler—the old bachelor who lives across the street—wanted Inigo, and Megan—one of the librarian assistants—took Prince Humperdinck, but she just calls him Prince.”

“You named them all,” he guessed.

“I found them,” she said logically.

“That seems fair,” he agreed, watching as she snipped the stems of the flowers and set them in the vase she’d filled with water. She fussed a little with the colorful blooms, so he knew she liked them. A fact she further confirmed when she set the vase on the windowsill above the sink and said, “Thank you—they’re beautiful.”

“They are beautiful,” he agreed. “That’s why they made me think of you.”

“You always have the right line, don’t you?”

“Do I?” he asked, surprised. “Because I often feel a little tongue-tied around you.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true,” he told her.

While Cassie sliced the meat, Braden set the table, following her directions to locate the plates and cutlery. Then they sat down together to eat the pork roast and vegetables and drink the delicious Pinot Noir he’d brought to go with the meal.

“You’re not going to ask, are you?” Braden said, as he stabbed his fork into a chunk of sweet potato.

She shook her head. “It’s none of my business.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you anyway—Lindsay is Saige’s birth mother.”

“Oh.” Of all the possible explanations he might have given, that one had never occurred to her.

“When Dana and I adopted Saige, we promised Lindsay that we would keep in touch. But not long after the papers were signed, she went to London to do a year of school there, and although I routinely sent photos and emails, I hadn’t actually spoken to her in more than a year.”

“Why was she calling?” Cassie asked curiously.

“Because she’s back in the US and wants to see Saige.”

“Oh,” she said again. “How do you feel about that?”

“Obligated,” he admitted. “We agreed to an open adoption—of course, we would have agreed to almost anything to convince Lindsay to sign the papers—so I can’t really refuse. And I do think it is important for Saige to know the woman who gave birth to her, but I’m a little concerned, too.”

“About?” she prompted gently.

He picked up his glass of wine but didn’t drink; he only stared into it. “Lindsay gave up her baby because she wanted her to be raised in a traditional family with two parents who would love her and care for her. And now that I’m a single parent, I can’t help worrying that Lindsay will decide she wants Saige back.”

She considered that as she sipped her wine. “I don’t know much about adoption laws, but I would think it’s a little late for her to change her mind, isn’t it?”

“Most likely,” he acknowledged. “The first thing I did when I hung up the phone after talking to Lindsay was call my cousin, who’s a lawyer. Jackson assured me that judges generally don’t like to reverse adoptions. But he also warned me that if Lindsay decided to take it to court and got a sympathetic judge, she might be able to claim a material change in circumstances and argue that Saige’s best interests would be served by vacating our contract.”

Cassie immediately shook her head, horrified by the possibility. “There’s no way anybody who has ever seen you with your daughter would believe it’s in her best interests to be anywhere but with you.”

He managed a smile at that. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

His smile did funny things to her insides—or maybe she was hungry. She decided to stop talking and start eating.

Braden’s plate was almost empty before he spoke again. “Tell me something about you,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Have you been dating anyone—other than Darius Richmond—recently?”

She shook her head. “No. In fact, until a few months ago, I hadn’t dated at all in a couple of years.”

“Bad break-up before that?” he asked sympathetically.

But she shook her head. “The break-up was good—the relationship was bad.”

His dark green eyes took on a dangerous gleam. “Was he abusive?”

“No, nothing that dramatic,” she assured him. “I was twenty-six when I met him and eager to move on to the next stage in my life.”

“Marriage,” he guessed.

She nodded. “And kids. I wanted so desperately to get married and start a family that I saw what I wanted to see...right up until the minute the truth slapped me in the face—figuratively speaking.”

“Were you married?”

“No,” she said again. “Just engaged for a few months.”

She thought back to that blissful moment when Joel Langdon proposed. They’d quickly set the date for their wedding and booked the church and the reception venue, and she’d been so excited for their future together, believing they were on their way to happily-ever-after.

“Until I discovered that he was still in love with his ex-wife,” she continued.

Braden winced. “How did that happen?”

“As we talked about the wedding, I realized that Joel had some specific ideas about how he wanted his bride to look. A strapless dress wasn’t appropriate for a church wedding, white satin would make my skin look pasty, and the princess-style ball gown would overwhelm my frame. Instead, he’d suggested a more streamlined style, perhaps ivory in color with long sleeves covered in ecru lace.”

“That’s pretty specific,” he noted.

She nodded. And although she’d been disappointed by her fiancé’s assessment, she’d been pleased he was taking such an interest in the details of their special day.

“He also suggested that I should let my hair grow out, so that I could wear it up under my veil—but I hadn’t planned to wear a veil. And maybe I could consider adding a few blond highlights, to tone down the auburn. The more suggestions he made, the more I realized that he was trying to change who I was—or at least how I looked.”

She shook her head, lamenting her own foolishness for not seeing then what was so obvious to her now. She knew he’d been married before, but Joel hadn’t talked about his ex-wife. He certainly never said or did anything to suggest to Cassie that he was still in love with her.

“It was only after I moved in with him that I found his wedding album with the date engraved on the front—the same month and day he’d chosen to marry me.”

And the date had been his choice. She’d thought that a fall wedding might be nice, but he’d urged her to consider spring, so that she could carry a bouquet of white tulips—her favorite flowers. She hadn’t much thought about what flowers she wanted for the wedding, and while she wouldn’t have said tulips were her favorite, she liked them well enough.

“Then I opened the cover and saw a picture of his ex-wife, in her long-sleeved lace gown with a bouquet of white tulips in her hand.” She’d slowly turned the pages, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “And on the last page, the close-up photo of the bride’s and groom’s hands revealed that my fiancé had proposed to me with his ex-wife’s engagement ring.

“The rest of it I might have been able to ignore,” she admitted. “But when I saw the diamond cluster on her finger—the same diamond cluster that was on my finger—I felt sick to my stomach.

“And when I confronted him about it, he didn’t even try to deny it—he just said he’d paid a lot of money for the ring. So I took it off my finger and told him that I hoped the next woman he gave it to wouldn’t mind being his second choice.”

All of which was why she’d barely dated in the more than two years that had passed since her broken engagement. Because in the space of the few hours that had passed between finding the wedding album hidden in the back of her fiancé’s closet and his return to the apartment, she’d been shocked—and a little scared—by some of the thoughts that had gone through her own mind.

During that time, she’d actually tried to convince herself that she was making the discovery of those photos into more than it needed to be. She’d even considered putting the album back and pretending that she’d never seen it, to let it go so they could move forward with their plans.

Because she’d been desperate to feel connected to someone, desperate to be part of a family again. Even aware that marriage to a man who was still in love with another woman didn’t bode well for their long-term future together, her eagerness to be a wife and then a mother almost made her willing to overlook that fact. Almost.

In the end, it was this desperation to not be alone that made her rethink her plans. Her mother hadn’t ever been able to find happiness or even contentment on her own. Not even her daughters had been enough for her. She’d needed to be with a man; she’d needed his adoration and approval to justify her existence. The possibility that she might be like her mother—that she could make the same destructive choices and ruin not only her own life but that of any children she might have in the future—compelled her to take that step back.

Actually, she’d taken a lot of steps back. For a long time after she’d given Joel back the ring, she’d been afraid to even go out on a date. Her desperation to be a wife and a mother had made her question her own judgment and fear her own motivations. Thankfully, she had her job at the library to give her another focus, and she found both pleasure and fulfillment in working with children and teens.

She’d vowed then not to waste any more time with the wrong men. Unfortunately, the wrong men didn’t always come with a warning label, as her recent experience with Darius Richmond had demonstrated. And if she wanted to find the right man, she had to be open to meeting new people.

Over the past few months, she’d started to do that, but none of the guys she’d gone out with had made her think “maybe this one.” None of their good-night kisses had made her pulse race and her heart pound. In fact, none of their kisses made her want a second date.

No one had made her want anything more—until Braden kissed her.

Chapter Ten

“Cassie?”

She glanced up to find Braden watching her, his expression one of concern. She forced a smile. “Sorry—my mind just wandered off for a moment.”

“How long ago was it that you gave him back the ring?” he wondered.

“Two years.”

He set his cutlery on his empty plate and swallowed the last of the wine in his glass. “Did you live with him here?”

“No,” she said again, smiling a little at this happier memory as she pushed away from the table to begin the cleanup. “I found this place when Stacey and I spent most of a rainy Sunday afternoon going through open houses. I think this was the third—or maybe the fourth—house we saw, and as soon as I saw the den with the fireplace and the built-in bookcases, I wanted it.”

“I think I need to see the den,” he remarked.

So she led the way through the dining room to her favorite room in the house. As he stepped inside, she tried to see it through his eyes. She knew it was modestly sized, as was the rest of the house, but there wasn’t anything else about the room that she would change. Not the hardwood floors or the natural stone fireplace or the trio of tall narrow windows—each with a cushy seat from which she could enjoy the view of her postage-stamp-sized backyard—and especially not the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered most of three walls and were filled with her books.

“Well, it doesn’t look as if you’d ever run out of reading material.” He ventured farther into the room to examine the array of titles that filled her shelves and reflected her eclectic taste. From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to J.R. Ward’s Dark Lover; from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree; from John Douglas’s Mindhunter to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. There were also biographies of historical figures, entrepreneurs and movie stars; books about auto mechanics and dogs and feng shui. “You have almost as many books here as there are at the library.”

“Hardly.”

“How many have you actually read?” he wondered.

“All of them—except for that bottom shelf,” she said, pointing. “Those are new.”

“You’ve read every other book on these shelves?” he asked, incredulous.

“Some of them more than once.” She moved to the other side of the room and reached up to the third shelf. “Do you want to borrow this one?”

He took the book from her hand and glanced at the cover. “The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman.” He frowned. “Who’s the author—Morgenstern or Goldman?”

She just smiled. “Read the book.”

They returned to the kitchen and the task of cleaning up. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for dessert,” she said.

“But you weren’t expecting company,” he said, speaking the words before she could.

“I guess I’ve made the point a few times.”

“A few,” he acknowledged, starting to load the dishwasher while she packed the rest of the meat and vegetables into a plastic container. “I’m still not sorry that I crashed your dinner party for one.”

“I’m not sorry you did, either,” she said, lifting her glass to her lips. “This is good wine.”

He smiled. “I didn’t think you’d admit that.”

“That I like the wine?”

“That you like my company.”

She opened the refrigerator to put the leftovers inside. “I never said that.”

He chuckled as he closed the dishwasher. “I was reading between the lines.”

She put the stoneware from the slow cooker in the sink and filled it with soapy water, then dried her hands on a towel.

When she turned away from the sink, he was right in front of her, trapping her between the counter and his body. Déjà vu, she thought. And in her kitchen, they really were in close quarters.

Braden lowered his head toward her. She went still, completely and perfectly still, as his lips moved closer to her own. Then he shifted direction, his mouth skimming over her jaw instead. The unexpected—and unexpectedly sensual caress—made her breath catch in her throat, then shudder out between her lips.

“Wh-what are you doing?”

“Well—” his mouth moved toward her ear, nibbled on the lobe “—you said there wasn’t anything for dessert, and I was in the mood for something sweet.”

Lust pulsed through her body, a relentless and throbbing ache. “And you think I’m...sweet?”

“I think you are incredibly sweet,” he told her, his mouth skimming leisurely down her throat.

“Um—” she had no idea what to say to that “—thank you?”

She felt him smile, his lips curving against the ultrasensitive spot between her neck and collarbone. “You really have no idea how you affect me, do you?”

“I know how you affect me,” she admitted.

“Tell me,” he suggested, his mouth returning to brush lightly over hers.

“You make me feel things I haven’t felt in a very long time.”

His lips feathered across her cheekbone. “What kind of things?”

Her fingers dug into his shoulders. “Hot. Needy. Weak.”

“You make me feel all of those things, too,” he assured her.

“When you kiss me...when you touch me...you make me forget all the reasons this is a bad idea.”

He put his hands on her hips and lifted her onto the counter so that they were at eye level. He spread her thighs and stepped between them. “So maybe this isn’t such a bad idea,” he suggested, then covered her mouth again.

As if of their own volition, her legs wrapped around him, drawing him closer. So close that she could feel the ridge of his arousal beneath his zipper. She pressed shamelessly against him, wanting to feel his hardness against her. Inside her.

His hands slipped under her top, skimming up her belly to her breasts. She couldn’t remember what kind of underwear she’d put on that morning—whether it was cotton or satin or lace. Lace, she decided, as his thumbs brushed over the nipples through the whisper-thin fabric, sending sharp arrows of sensation from the beaded tips to her core.

He made her want with an intensity and desperation that she’d never experienced before. Even in high school, when many of the other girls were slaves to their hormones, she’d spent most nights at home, alone. She’d been the quiet girl, the geeky girl. Most of the boys hadn’t looked at her twice. She was too smart and flat-chested to warrant their notice. And that was okay—because she didn’t want to be distracted from her plans and she especially didn’t want to be like her mother.

She imagined that Braden had been one of the popular boys. Smart and rich and devastatingly good-looking. He certainly kissed like a man who had a lot of experience. And he knew just where and how to touch her so that her only thoughts were yes and more.

He was the type of guy who’d dated the most popular girls—the cheerleaders or varsity athletes. The type who never would have noticed her. And although they weren’t in high school now, he was the CEO of a national corporation and she was a small-town librarian. In other words, he was still way out of her league.

But somehow, by some twist of fate, he was here with her now. Kissing her and touching her, and she was incredibly, almost unbearably, aroused. “Braden—”

He clamped his hands on the edge of the countertop and drew in a deep breath. “You want me to stop?”

She should say yes. She should shout it at the top of her lungs. What was happening between them was too much, too fast. She hadn’t known him long and she certainly didn’t know him well, but she knew that she wanted him and she hadn’t felt such an immediate and intense attraction to a man in a very long time.

“Cassie?” he prompted.

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want you to stop.”

“Tell me what you do want.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “I want you to take me to bed.”

The library had been Cassie’s absolute favorite room in the house when she bought it, but since she’d converted the attic to a master bedroom suite, that had become a close second. The deeply sloped ceilings and dormer-style windows created a bright and cozy space that was, in her mind, the perfect place to snuggle under the covers.

To Braden, who stood about six inches taller than her, the space probably felt a little cramped. But he didn’t complain when she led him up the narrow stairs and over to the queen-size four-poster bed set up in the middle of the room. Of course, that might have been because his mouth was preoccupied with other matters—namely kissing her senseless.

And his hands, those wide and strong hands, were touching her in all the right places, further heating the blood that coursed through her veins. He found the tiny zipper at the back of her skirt with no trouble at all, and then the skirt itself was on the floor at her feet. Less than a minute later, her blouse had joined it, leaving her clad in only a pale pink bra and matching bikini panties.

She wanted to touch him, too, but her fingers fumbled as they attempted to unfasten the buttons of his shirt. She’d only worked her way through half of them when he eased his lips from hers long enough to yank the garment over his head and toss it aside. Then her hands were sliding over warm, taut skin and deliciously sculpted muscles. He was so strong, so male, so perfect.

He hooked his fingers in the straps of her bra and tugged them down her arms as he skimmed kisses down her throat, across her collarbone. Then the front clasp of her bra was undone and he slowly peeled back the cups. She bit down on her tongue to prevent herself from apologizing for the small size of her breasts, because Braden didn’t seem to have any complaints. And when his thumbs scraped over the nipples...ohmy, the frissons that sparked through her body.

Then he lowered his head to continue his exploration, and her own fell back as pleasure coursed through her body. He teased her with his tongue and his teeth, and when he took her breast in his mouth and suckled, her knees almost gave way.

He must have felt her tremble, because he eased her back onto the bed, and she drew him down with her. Though he was still half-dressed, she automatically parted her legs to fit him between them. His arousal was unmistakable and as her hips tilted instinctively to meet his, the glorious friction of the thick denim against the wisp of lace caused a soft, needy moan to escape from between her lips.

He pulled away from her just long enough to shed the rest of his clothes, then yanked her panties over her hips and tossed them aside, too. She wiggled higher up on the mattress, so that her head was cushioned on the mountain of pillows and so that his legs wouldn’t be hanging off the end. He rejoined her on the bed and his mouth came down on hers again. Stealing a kiss. Stealing her breath.