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And thinking about how she just cut loose during dance parties with the kids—all while her hair was in the state it was in tonight—was a little disheartening and a whole lot embarrassing.
But she decided against saying anything and only said good-night.
Then she watched him walk out to his rental, unable not to notice that his backside was as good as his front.
But it didn’t matter. The guy had a lot to deal with, and she was only there to care for, advocate for and protect the twins.
And once that was taken care of, she had decisions of her own to make. Big ones.
So the way he looked didn’t make any difference.
Chapter Two (#u18eff249-c4e2-5a45-b6ef-da25cd10e5bb)
“That was some hard-core sack time—eleven hours straight. You must have been beat.”
“I was coming off about thirty-six hours without, so yeah,” Liam confirmed to his older brother, Conor, on Monday morning over coffee and the bacon and eggs Conor had made. “Sorry, though, for being the lousy houseguest who comes in the door and just crashes.”
“No problem, I understand. And so did Maicy.”
Liam had barely said hello to the woman his brother was now engaged to and shared a house with—Maicy Clark. They’d grown up with Maicy in the small Montana town of Northbridge. Conor and Maicy had only recently met up again, resolved old issues and rekindled their romance.
But after a brief greeting when Liam had arrived from the Freelander place the night before, he’d begged off to get much-needed sleep.
“I was just glad to hit the rack,” he said. “But now that I have, the first thing I need to hear about is Declan.”
Liam hadn’t known anything unusual had been going on with his twin until a week ago when he’d returned from his latest mission—the same time he’d received the message from Dani Cooper about Audrey. The message waiting from Conor had been old and it had only relayed that Declan had been wounded in action.
After receiving the two communications, Liam had immediately called Conor. But even then his older brother had said only that Declan was all right. Liam could tell Conor had been holding something back but he hadn’t been able to get him to say more. Because their phone time had been limited, Liam had needed to move on to the other news that had rocked him. Since then Liam had been in transit and unable to make more contact.
Last night Conor had only repeated that Declan was okay, but now Liam wanted to hear the details.
“It happened two days after Mom passed—after I’d called you about that. But when I tried to get hold of you to tell you about Declan, you were already out of reach,” Conor began.
Their mother had died in October. It hadn’t come as a surprise. She’d been in a steep decline physically and mentally for over a year by then. In some ways it had been a relief to Liam to hear it on the eve of his mission because at least he’d left knowing she wasn’t suffering any longer.
“Mom died, I left, Declan got hurt—all in three days?” Liam said, giving a succinct timeline.
“Yeah, it was a helluva three days,” Conor said, showing some of the strain it had put on him.
“So what happened?” Liam prompted.
“Declan and Topher were in a Humvee when they drove over a buried IED.”
Topher was Topher Samms. Like Maicy, Topher had grown up in the same small town with the Madisons. Both Liam and his twin brother, Declan, had considered Topher their best friend. The three of them had even gone through Annapolis and joined the marines together.
“Is Topher okay, too?” Liam asked, suspicious that this was the first he’d heard his friend’s name mentioned in the incident that had injured Declan.
“I’m sorry, Liam,” Conor said, his words, tone and expression enough to convey that Topher hadn’t made it.
That news was another blow to Liam, who closed his eyes and leaned on forearms he set on the table on either side of his breakfast. He let his head fall between his shoulders and took a steeling breath that he held until his lungs burned, all while Conor gave him that moment.
It was a lengthy one as he tried to digest that his and Declan’s old friend was gone.
When he could, he exhaled, sat up straight and opened his eyes again.
“Tell me about Declan,” he said curtly because it was the only way he could keep emotions in check.
“It’s been rough,” Conor finally admitted. “There was more than once that we came near to losing him—”
“But we didn’t. You didn’t let that happen.”
Conor was a navy doctor and navy doctors treated marines.
“He’s family so I couldn’t take an active part in his care, but I took all the leave I’d accumulated so I could go with him from hospital to hospital, to make sure nothing was overlooked—he was in bad shape at the start. But yeah, he pulled through and even kept the leg I wasn’t sure was going to make it with him. I did some shuffling and he’s on his way here for rehab, so I can keep track of that, too. You’ll be able to see him.”
“So he really will be okay?” Liam said, still needing some reassurance.
“His body’s healing,” Conor seemed to hedge. “I’m a little worried about his head—”
“Brain injury?” Liam asked.
“No, thank god there wasn’t that. But I think he’s carrying a lot of baggage about Topher. Declan was driving the Humvee. As bad as he was hurt himself he did everything to try to save Topher. He even carried him away from the burning Humvee—although seeing Declan and how bad he was, I can’t begin to guess how he did that.”
“He’d have done anything to help Topher,” Liam said, knowing his twin, knowing it was what he himself would have done.
“But Topher took the brunt of the explosion. He died before anybody could get to them. Declan won’t talk about it—not to me, not to the counselors I’ve sent in. I’m afraid we’re still facing some rough waters there. But physically... He has some scars, he may have a limp, but yeah, he’s gonna be okay.”
Liam was grateful for that at least. “I do want to see him. As soon as he gets here. But in the meantime, can I call him?”
“Sure, I got him a cell phone. I’ll get you the number when you’re ready.”
“Yeah, I’m ready now,” Liam said. “I’m not going to be staying here...”
He explained the arrangement he’d made to move into the Freelander place.
“You’re gonna start playing dad even before you know for sure?”
He told his brother his reasons for that.
“Did you see the kids?” Conor asked.
“For a few minutes. The nanny—that’s the Dani Cooper who sent me the message—told them I was a friend of their mother’s. They weren’t too interested.”
“And what did you think? Did you feel any kind of instinctive connection?”
“Uh, no, I didn’t even know what to say to them. I was just glad I wasn’t alone with them and that the nanny is pretty smooth.”
And even though he meant Dani Cooper was smooth in her dealings with the kids and the awkwardness of him showing up the way he had, it was suddenly the nanny’s skin he was thinking about—flawless peaches-and-cream skin so smooth he’d wanted to run the back of his hand over it to see if it felt like it looked...
He reined in the odd wandering of his mind and said, “They’re cute kids, I guess... They have dark hair like ours. Blue eyes—”
“Like ours? The color Kinsey thinks ties us to the Camdens?”
“No, theirs are more the light blue that Audrey’s eyes were. There might be a little resemblance between the girl and Kinsey when she was a kid, though—I kind of thought I might have seen that.”
“So they really could be yours.”
“I told you that anyway. That week with Audrey before I deployed was a wild one. Audrey was a partyer and we were drinking like there was no tomorrow. And not always being safe...stupid as that is.”
“But that was five years ago and she never came after you for child support, for anything. Seems like if the kids were yours she would have at least wanted you to pitch in with some money.”
Liam repeated what the nanny had told him about Owen Freelander and described the house that made it obvious there hadn’t been a need for more money.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Audrey would have gone with somebody who was offering what this guy was,” Liam said. “Marriage, money, to take care of her and claim her kids as his own to provide for, too. And actually, the more I think about it the more sense it makes that the guy was so much older than she was—”
“She had daddy issues?”
“Maybe. She saw herself as a helpless kitten, I know that. She was raised by older parents with money. There were nannies and people paid to take care of her every need. Her parents spoiled her rotten and I had the impression that when they died she started searching for replacements to take care of her and spoil her the way she was used to. Finding herself pregnant? With twins?” He shook his head. “There’s no way she would have wanted to do that by herself. I’m kind of surprised that she didn’t terminate the pregnancy at the get-go.”
“Never an easy thing to do.”
Liam conceded to that. “And I don’t think she really understood what it is I do—we met when I was here, doing that training. That lasted two months, looked more like a normal job—”
“But then you deployed...”
“Right. And even though I’d warned her how it would be when I did, I don’t think it really sank in with her until she actually experienced it a few times. I know when I finally did call her that last time—the call that, according to the nanny, was when Audrey made the decision to take this Owen guy up on his offer—she was pretty upset that there hadn’t been one word from me in a long while.” He tried to get some breakfast down but the appetite he’d woken up with had disappeared, so he just pushed his plate away.
“Sooo...how are you doing with the idea that these kids could be yours?” Conor asked.
Liam shook his head. “I’m just kind of in a daze,” he admitted. “Like your message about Declan, the one from the nanny—now guardian—only caught up to me a week ago. I almost thought it was some kind of bad joke. Audrey was dead? She’d left twins that are mine? The kids have no one else and now need me to step in or risk being separated and put into the foster care system?”
He shook his head again. “It sure as hell seemed like it must be a joke. But then I got to a computer and found an obituary for Audrey that didn’t say how she died but said she was survived by four-year-old twins. Four years plus however many months since they turned four, add nine more—that puts it somewhere in that five-years-ago time slot that I spent with Audrey. And here I am.”
“Still, you just said yourself that Audrey was a partyer... You are going to test the DNA the way the lawyer told you to, right?”
“Oh, yeah. This afternoon. I got a text from the nanny saying she scheduled an appointment with the pediatrician to do it.”
“And what about the nanny?” his brother asked.
Yeah, what about the nanny...
That mere mention of Dani Cooper brought the image of her into his head again.
Not only did she have great skin, she was something to look at all the way around. Exquisite caramel-colored eyes. High cheekbones, a straight nose. Pretty, luscious lips. And a delicate bone structure that gave her a kind of sophisticated, unapproachable beauty.
Or at least it would have seemed sophisticated and unapproachable if her long, dark brown hair with its rich reddish cast hadn’t been in some kind of weird style that he couldn’t imagine she’d done on purpose. But the style was so weird—and silly—that it had softened the distant, classy beauty.
And she had one damn fine body to go with it—trim without being too skinny, not tall, curves in all the right places.
One damn fine body that she’d been using to gyrate like a crazy woman with as much abandon as the kids when he’d first pulled up to the house and could see what was going on inside.
And yeah, he had to admit that even though the kids had been the reason he was there, even though he’d been sleep deprived and freaked out at the thought that the kids might actually prove to be his, it was still the nanny who had caught his attention. And held it for a while, sitting in his rented SUV, unable to take his eyes off her.
But what about the nanny—that’s what his brother had asked.
“What do you mean?” he answered with a question of his own because all he could think about was the way she looked and he didn’t think Conor was asking about that.
“You said she was the guardian now,” Conor reminded him.
“Right. I guess she’s been their nanny for a few years, and when Audrey and her husband died she had Audrey’s husband’s attorney go to court to have her named as the kids’ temporary guardian so they could stay in their own home for now.”
“That’s nice of her. That’s got to mean she went from taking care of them as just her job to being completely responsible for them and playing single parent 24-7?”
“Yeah, that’s the way I’m understanding it.”
“That’s above and beyond the call of duty.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, realizing that he’d been so busy thinking about how she looked that he hadn’t given her credit for that. And he should have.
“Are you going to start trading shifts with her?” Conor asked then. “Taking care of the kids part of the time so she can get away?”
“Oh, god no!” Liam said, feeling a rise in his stress level at that idea. “I figure if the court appointed her as their guardian she has to stick around, right? And she needs to—I don’t have a clue what to do with them. I mean, I said I want to get to know them, that I thought it would be good for them to get to know me, in case I am their father. That it would be good for me to learn the ropes. And that if by some chance I’m not their father, I want to make sure they get well taken care of for Audrey’s sake. But I can’t be left alone with them.”
His brother’s expression was amused and sympathetic at once. “Okay. But you know that if you are their father eventually that could happen?”
“I... Yeah... But that isn’t right now. Right now the nanny will be there and I’m just planning to lend a hand. To follow her lead. I can’t be left alone with them,” he repeated.
His brother grinned. “So you’re really terrified of them?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“I had to do a rotation in pediatrics so I’ve had a little experience,” Conor said of his training as a doctor.
Liam got up from the kitchen table and took his plate to the sink to rinse it and do what he could to calm his nerves over a prospect he hadn’t considered before this: being left alone with twin four-year-olds.
Once he felt as if he had some control, he turned back to his brother and said, “I just have to do what I have to do. Whatever that is.”
“Sure,” Conor agreed. “And I’m here for you, if there’s anything I can do.”
“You can take me shopping for some clothes,” Liam said. “I don’t have any civvies with me—I pretty much just threw what I needed to travel in a duffel and took off. And I think the uniform makes me a little intimidating to the kids.”
“Whose names are?”
“Oh, yeah, they have names,” Liam said, sounding overwhelmed and at sea. “The girl is Evie. The boy is Grady.”
“Evie Madison. Grady Madison. I guess that works,” Conor mused.
“Yeah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Liam cautioned, thinking that he could only handle so much at a time.
