First Comes Love

by Heather Heyford

It struck her: He hadn’t the slightest idea of how overwhelming the start of the new school year was going to be.

  “You’re going to have to take them shopping for clothes and school supplies and get them haircuts and checkups, all of that. And it will get—” Hands jerked her hips into his. “Oooh! Darker,” she gasped, “earlier and earlier.”

  Now he was cupping her bottom.

  But this was important. “Alex.”

  “Mmmm?”

  She leaned back from the waist, her hands on his upper arms. “We’re never going to get the chance to see each other.”

  He frowned. Finally, she had gotten through to him.

  She scrutinized the strong jawline, the guarded gray eyes. After months of him mowing her lawn and bringing pizza, he had become a part of this place. Part of her. She’d thought this over carefully. It had seemed so logical earlier today, before he arrived. Alex’s lease was up at the end of the month. And tonight, the way he’d goofed with the kids was confirmation that the closed-up detective she’d spotted at the Turning Point last spring had opened up in a way she never would have thought possible.

  But now a sudden attack of nerves made it feel like there was a weight on her chest, making it hard to breathe.

  “You’re not . . .” In a heartbeat, his suntanned face had turned ashen.

  She shook her head. Yet more proof that inside the tough guy who fearlessly hunted down dangerous criminals beat a soft heart.

  “No, no. I’m not breaking up with you.”

  He released his held breath.

  “Just the opposite. I love how well you and the girls get along. It’s so special. And making love with you, spending time just talking and hanging out, the way you take care of us . . .”

  “I love taking care of you,” he murmured into her shoulder as his hands roamed over her back.

  “I haven’t been this happy in a long time. Maybe ever.”

  “Me neither,” he said in her hair.

  “I can see us as a family.”

  “A family.” Alex held her at arm’s length and searched her face.

  “So, I was thinking,” said Kerry through swollen lips. “Why don’t you move in with us?”

  For a moment, confusion clouded his eyes. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He turned from her and paced the kitchen, rubbing the back of his neck and then his jaw.

  She flew to him, heart pounding. “I know it’s kind of out of the blue and I’m not expecting an answer anytime soon, but it makes sense, don’t you think?” she pleaded, turning him around to face her again. “We can spend every night together. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She kissed the hollow at the base of his neck.

  His eyes rolled back in pleasure and his lids closed.

  “Alex. We can make this work. I know we can.”

  Still, he hesitated.

  “Are you sure about this? What about the girls? Is it what they want? Getting used to a new man around? Sharing their mom with someone?”

  “It’ll be a huge adjustment. But we’ll talk to them and make them feel like they’re part of the decision. I know they’ll be in agreement. They’ll be thrilled.”

  “What role do you see me filling for them? I mean, do you see me as a father figure, or just a roommate who’s hands off when it comes to the big stuff like grounding them when they come home late from a date and deciding which college to go to?”

  Kerry laughed. “You really think ahead, don’t you?”

  “Seems like you’re the one who’s been thinking ahead.”

  “If you need more time, I understand. It’ll be a big change for someone who’s never had kids. If it’s too much too soon . . .”

  He rubbed her arms with his thumbs. In his eyes was a faraway look. She could almost see the wheels turning in his head. See him dredging up all the reasons why this was a bad idea.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m rushing things.” What was she thinking? It had only been a couple of months, way too soon for such a huge step. “I’m not asking for an answer right now. Think about it. There’s no deadline. No pressure. I just . . . it’s just that you’ve shown me that I could be happy again.”

  He cradled her face in his hands. “Yes.”

  Her pulse leaped. “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll move in here? With me and the girls?”

  “There’s no place I’d rather be.” His mouth came down on hers in a celebratory kiss, and she threw herself into his arms, reveling in the sheer solidity of him.

  Alex was going to be hers. All hers. Together with her in this house, nestled in the valley and her beautiful daughters, her life was finally going to be complete.

  Now his hands on her body were an impatient blur of sensation as he tried to take all of her in at once. He walked her backward until she felt the sink hard against her butt, reached around to the back of her thigh and raised it to his waist. She hooked her leg around his hip, granting his hand access to her most sensitive place.

  “Oh.”

  “Does that feel good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really good?” he murmured into her neck.

  “Yes!” A carousel of angels was lifting her off her feet, making her feel light as air.

  “Should I keep doing it?”

  Bells clanged. “Yessss . . .” Trumpets rang out. “Yes! Yes!”

  * * *

  Kerry had barely caught her breath when Alex took her by the hand and started for the back door. “Let’s go tell the gang the good news.”

  “Wait. Already? Don’t you think—”

  “Wait? For what? Don’t you think the kids are going to be as thrilled as we are that we’re moving in together?”

  “Maybe we should talk first about how we’re going to—”

  But his enthusiasm was bubbling over.

  And after almost giving up on romance, suddenly Kerry was glowing from within. How could she ruin this for him? For those poor boys? For all of them?

  “Kids!” shouted Alex. “Come ’ere! We’ve got a surprise for you!”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Travis came tearing out of his bedroom with his brother on his heels. He grabbed onto the back of Alex’s recliner, where he sat with his laptop, spinning him halfway around.

  Tyler picked up Travis and body-slammed him, then fell on top of him.

  “No!” yelled Travis, laughing and kicking the back of Alex’s chair.

  “Can’t you guys go outside and wrestle?”

  Alex thought wistfully of the days when he could write in quiet solitude as he caught the empty bottle of wine on the end table before it fell over. It was his day off and he’d been struggling for the past hour to put his epiphany into words, but it was hard to concentrate with the TV blaring an action cartoon. Soon, when he moved in with Kerry, his household would double in size.

  “It’s raining,” whined Travis.

  “Come on,” said Tyler, giving his brother a hand up. “It’s not raining that hard.”

  Just before they exited out the back door, Alex caught a wary look in Tyler’s eye, and his father’s words came back to him. “Can’t you find anything constructive to do?” Now, Alex was repeating the cycle.

  Tyler knew he and Travis had dodged a bullet, and even though he no longer carried the burden of seeing that his little brother got enough to eat, he still had to make sure he didn’t blow this new chance—for either of them.

  Alex stuffed a load of dirty socks and underwear into the washer in the hall closet, then sighed and got back to work. Tyler was right. It wouldn’t kill the boys to play in the rain for a while.

  He turned off the TV and settled back into his chair, relieved to finally have some quiet.

  A short time later, he heard the back door open.

  “Travis fell out of a tree,” said Tyler, his hair matted down, wet T-shirt clinging to his shoulders.

  Alex knew he should have been more attentive. He leaped to his feet. “Where is he?” He fol
lowed Tyler back outside.

  “We were trying to hang up the birdhouse to surprise you. Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.” Alex had been expecting to see Travis the moment they went out back. “Where is he?”

  “In the woods,” said Tyler, breaking into a trot.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Alex and the boys were finally getting back to the house, Travis proudly sporting a neon-blue cast on his arm.

  “He’s going to be all right,” said Alex into the phone. “Turns out one out of a hundred kids breaks their forearm. Can you believe that?”

  “I recall Marcus falling down the steps and breaking his arm when we were little,” said Kerry on the other end. “What about foster dad? Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he replied, shutting the door behind the kids.

  “When your child gets hurt, it hurts you, too.”

  “Ew,” said Tyler, balancing on one foot on the carpet. Water dripped from the toe of the sneaker held aloft.

  “All’s well that ends—what the . . . Christ almighty.”

  “What?”

  “The house is flooded.”

  “What?”

  “The washer. I left the washer running when we left. It must have overflowed. Aw, man! First the arm, now this.”

  * * *

  When Kerry had tucked in all three kids and had her own bath, she called Alex back.

  “How goes it at Noah’s Ark?”

  “The landlord brought over a Shop-Vac. I’ll leave the doors and windows open for a couple of days and hope for mild weather and that no mold grows.”

  “I wonder if you should have just bought your own Shop-Vac. Never hurts to have your own, especially in a big old house like mine. I mean, ours.”

  They had chosen the end of August to move in together, to coincide with the ending of Alex’s lease. Alone in her bedroom, she smiled, waiting for him to remark on their upcoming merger. When he didn’t, her smile faded a little. She shrugged it off to exhaustion. He wasn’t used to broken bones and broken washers all in the same day, while he was trying to work on a pet personal project.

  “Boys all tucked in?”

  “Tyler’s asleep. They said Travis might wake up in the night needing more Tylenol.”

  “You sound beat.”

  “Aw, man. I’m dead on my feet.”

  “Alex?”

  There was no reply.

  “Everything okay?”

  The pause lasted a few seconds too long for comfort.

  “I don’t know about this.”

  She froze. “What do you mean?”

  “All I have is two kids and this dinky little house and it’s already way more intense than I could ever have imagined.”

  Kerry lowered herself slowly to the edge of her bed. Moving day was only three weeks away. She had already started cleaning out the extra bedroom she’d been using for storage.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m just a little concerned, that’s all. Maybe I’m too old for all this change.”

  She huffed a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re still young. Plenty of men way older than you father babies every day. There are even studies showing that older parents have advantages. They’re usually making more money and are more emotionally mature.”

  “It’s not just my age. I’ve been rethinking things. The farmhouse . . .”

  “I admit, it could do with a little updating.”

  “Updating? How about a new roof, for starters? And with five kids, a dishwasher is going to be a must.”

  “My mother raised four kids without a dishwasher. I don’t mind a few dirty dishes lying around.”

  “I’m neater than you are. No offense. Just because I’m moving in with you doesn’t mean I can change who I am overnight.”

  “So? We’ll hire roofers. And there’s the Home Depot in Sherwood. What else is bothering you?” She fisted the phone, her trained legal mind racing ahead to defend her point of view.

  “Where do you stand on the subject of air-conditioning? ’Cause if next summer’s anything like this one . . .”

  “What’s with all the reservations all of a sudden? It’s almost like you’re looking for reasons to back out.”

  “I’m not backing out. It’s just that taking on the boys was a huge undertaking. With them, I had no choice. They needed a home. Now you’re going to have to go through the foster parent approval process, too.”

  She snorted. “Do you really think CPS would reject me?”

  “A local attorney whose father is a prominent local judge? Not a chance. You’re like Willamette Valley aristocracy—”

  “Stick with the subject.”

  There was an ominous pause.

  “I’m a stranger in these parts. That’s fine, for a man who has nothing to prove to anyone except to himself. But when it comes to other people . . . I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to be a father to not just two but five kids, plus be a lover to you, all under the watchful eye of your brothers and Rose and the judge.”

  “I got past the fact that you’re a cop.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “Sorry. That didn’t come out like I intended, and you know it.”

  “It just seems like we’re starting out with a lot of strikes against us.”

  “Do you think blending families is ever easy?”

  “That’s just it. I’ve never given it any thought whatsoever.”

  A sinking feeling came over Kerry. “I guess I jumped the gun. I was hoping that because I was ready for this, you were, too.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. This is my fault. I never should have agreed to it so readily.”

  The sinking feeling coalesced into a distinct funnel shape and began slowly turning inside her. “Are you still coming over tomorrow?” she asked, hoping he couldn’t hear the uptick in her breathing over the phone. The kids had begged to get together and they’d said yes, never imagining there’d be a reason not to.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  It was worse than she’d feared. “It’s supposed to be rainy again.”

  “It’s not fair for us to use your house as a refuge from the rain. But in light of how small this place is, and that my carpet will probably still be wet . . . and I don’t want to disappoint the kids—any of the kids . . .”

  Alex adored her girls as much as they worshipped him. Of that, Kerry had no doubt.

  “Then take my advice and don’t share your qualms with them,” she said in a rising pitch. “You might change your mind again, and you can’t be giving them whiplash like that. They’re too young, Alex. They don’t understand what goes into such a big decision. You’d be putting a burden on them.”

  She hadn’t planned to use the kids as leverage, but here she was, doing just that.

  “You’re right. I won’t say anything to the boys. I won’t talk about it at all.”

  “It goes without saying I won’t tell the girls either.”

  Maybe this was just a temporary case of cold feet, she thought after they’d ended their call. She would be able to judge better tomorrow, when she saw Alex’s face and could look in to his eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “Listen,” said Kerry, looking up from her tablet, where she’d been reading the same passage over and over again. On this gray Saturday afternoon, even her favorite author couldn’t distract her from Alex’s misgivings about moving in together.

  “Hear that?”

  She and Alex sat in overstuffed chairs, sharing an ottoman. Alex was on his computer while Ella napped and the kids played in the attic.

  “All I hear is the rain on the roof.”

  “Exactly.” Kerry’s bare feet hit the floorboards and her hands came down on the armrests. “It’s not normal for four kids to be this quiet.”

  “I’m finally making progress on my blog. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? The last I checked, Ty and Shay were drawing and Ch
loé and Travis were trying on clothes from that old trunk.”

  They heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Whelp. You were right. Looks like that’s it for today.” Alex closed his laptop with a snap and turned to see all four kids hurrying over, their faces alight. “There they are. We thought you got lost. Hold it. Where’d you get those?”

  Travis’s hands were cuffed in the front. He grinned. “On the table next to your keys.”

  “Tyler,” he snapped. “Did you do this to him?”

  “He wanted me to,” said Tyler, eyeing Alex uncertainly. “He’s the one who took them.”

  “Don’t you two ever touch these again, do you understand?” he said sharply as he reached up and deposited the cuffs into an old ceramic mixing bowl of Kerry’s mother’s on the top shelf of the buffet.

  Shyly, Ty thrust a piece of paper under Alex’s nose. A ruler stuck out of his back pocket.

  Alex took a cleansing breath and straightened the hem of his shirt. “Now. What’s this we’ve got here?”

  “A plan.”

  Calmer now, Alex turned the paper around, looking at it from different angles. “Plan?”

  “For how me and Shay want to make the attic after we move in here. See? I drew a straight line down the middle with a ruler, the way you taught me.” He came around to Alex’s side and leaned against him familiarly.

  Kerry observed the cozy scene from where she was curled up in her favorite blue chair. When it came to kids, he truly had a gift.

  “Here’s the girls’ side and here’s the boys’ side. And then, this here’s going to be where me and Travis’s fort’s gonna be—”

  “And this is my private area.” From behind the boys, Shay inserted herself, pointing to a small square.

  With some difficulty, Chloé wedged herself in between Shay and Ty. “And here’s where I’m going to put my desk.”

  “Nice,” said Alex.

  From upstairs came a whine.

  “Someone’s up from her nap,” sighed Kerry, rising to get Ella.

  Alex glanced at Kerry’s retreating form on the steps.

  “Looks like you guys have this all figured out.”

  “We do,” said Shay importantly. “Ty and I are going to ride the middle school bus, and Chloé and Travis will both be on the elementary.”