She hadn't dared let it happen. She had already spent entirely too much time thinking about the way he had kissed her last night, reliving the feel and the touch and the taste of him. She'd even dreamed about it during her paltry three and a half hours of sleep.
What utter insanity! A sexual infatuation she did not need! Aside from being shamefully disloyal to poor dear Ian, getting physical with Tyler Tremaine would be sheer folly, not to mention a guarantee of misery.
The man undoubtedly was accustomed to women throwing themselves at him, to doing anything at all to please him. The only reason he was sticking around now was because she did not try to please him and he found it novel. She related to him on a wholly different level than the other women in his life because she was not one of the women in his life. And she fully intended to keep it that way.
"Let's take off these wet suits/' she said briskly to no one in particular, reaching down to strip off Dylan's trunks. He wore a sodden diaper underneath which she removed and tossed into the trash. He took off into the hall, nude and squealing.
"Want to catch him, dry him off and put a diaper on him?" Carrie asked Tyler, who was watching her intently, little Emily still held high in his arms.
"No!"
"Well, if you insist on staying, you're going to have to make yourself useful. Would you please carry Emily and Franklin upstairs so I can change them? I'm going after Dylan."
"You asked so nicely, how can I refuse? Your wish is my command." Tyler executed a deep bow, pausing to scoop up Franklin while still hanging on to Emily.
"Monk-mey," Emily said on their way upstairs. She patted Tyler's cheek with her tiny hand. "Monk-mey."
Tyler was floored. "That's what I called you last night! Emily, you remembered!"
He told Carrie that astonishing fact as she dried off the triplets and taped fresh disposable diapers on them. "Imagine her putting that together, remembering me and the word monkey. Saying it to me—"
"Maybe she thinks it's your name," joked Carrie. "Or your species."
He could not be diverted by humor. "Carrie, she said it to me over twenty-four hours after I first said it to her! And I only said it one time! She is a brilliant child," he added earnestly.
"She isn't stupid," Carrie agreed, "but 'brilliant' is pushing it. Kids learn fast at this age, Tyler, and they learn new things every day." She tilted her head and gazed at him squarely. "It's exciting. It's fun. Watching the three of them learn and grow and do new things is why I don't believe that I lead—how did you put it?—a hellish existence."
"Touche," Tyler conceded. "You can give it right back/' he added with grudging admiration.
"And I can dish it out, too. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to pick a fight with me. n
The triplets were running around the room, flinging toys about. Tyler caught Carrie and grabbed her from behind, stopping her in her tracks. "You're a tough cookie, huh?" He was smiling, his green eyes filled with playful challenge. "A really tough broad."
"Yes." She gazed sidelong at him, her blue eyes gleaming with an age-old challenge of their own. "So don't tangle with me, mister."
"To be forewarned is to be forearmed." His arm snaked out to wrap around her midriff, pulling her back against him. "That's a battle cry we warriors in marketing chant at staff meetings." His fingers, stroking her nape, began a slow, sensuous massage.
For a moment, surprise held Carrie immobile. Then the desire she'd experienced earlier gripped her again, intensifying and overwhelming. Her eyelids snapped closed and she turned her head toward his mouth at the same moment his lips sought hers, in a mutually choreographed move so smooth it was as if they had rehearsed it together many times.
He rubbed his lips softly against her mouth, and her lips parted instantly, encouragingly, at the pressure. His hand splayed over her belly and she laid her hand over his. Their fingers interlaced at the moment their tongues touched.
There was no way he could hide the burgeoning surge of desire at her response and Tyler groaned, opening his mouth wider and harder over hers as his tongue sought an intimate erotic little duel with hers.
Carrie made a soft sound in her throat as the kiss deepened. Her breasts swelled and tightened, as if he had actually touched them. She felt a thick, syrupy warmth pool deeply in her abdomen.
Moving once again in tandem, their movements unspoken but perfectly attuned, she turned in his arms as he turned her toward him. She went on tiptoe, her arms clasped around his neck as he held her tightly pressed against him, his big hands smoothing over the supple curves of her back and buttocks, caressing, squeezing, stroking.
Their mouths impacted for a long, deep, drugging kiss that seemed to go on forever, growing hotter and wilder as they clung together in a private passionate whirlwind of intimacy and desire.
"Mama, mama!" Franklin launched himself against Carrie, fastening his small arms around her legs. "Go, go,
go."
At the same time, Emily squatted down beside Tyler and, fascinated, began to pull at the wiry dark hairs on his legs. "Yikes!" he yelped painfully.
Tyler and Carrie jumped apart so swiftly that they swayed and teetered and almost fell before shakily gaining their balances.
"Yikes!" shrieked Dylan in delight. "Yikes, yikes, yikes!" He clearly loved the sound of the new word.
Tyler ran his hand through his hair. He felt dazed, unreal. Franklin's shouts of "Go" and Dylan's "Yikes" kept echoing in his head.
"Why say something once when you can say it fifty times?" he mumbled grimly. That seemed to be the triplets' motto. Automatically, he stooped to pick up Emily. "Hey, Emily, are you trying out for a position as a torturer's apprentice? That hurt!"
"Yikes," Emily said happily.
Carrie picked up Dylan and Franklin. "Time to eat," she sang out, but her voice was thick and shaky. She caught Tyler's eye and quickly looked away.
Without a word to each other, Carrie and Tyler carried the three children back to the kitchen where she tied full-size
bibs around each small neck before placing each baby in a high chair.
Tyler sank onto a chair at the kitchen table and watched Carrie tear ham and cheese into bite-size pieces and place it on the three high-chair trays.
"Can I have mine in a sandwich?" he asked dryly.
Carrie tossed the packets of ham and cheese at him. "Here's the bread, lettuce and tomatoes, too. You can make the sandwiches while I get out the carrots and grapes." She gave each child a few thin slices of raw carrots and some seedless green grapes.
The triplets attacked their lunch with enthusiasm. Tyler and Carrie watched them silently, he sitting at the table, she standing across from it. Carrie's gaze slid covertly from the babies to Tyler. Inadvertently, she caught him staring at her.
She quickly looked away. "You haven't even started making our sandwiches yet," she said. Her voice was still not as steady as she would've wished.
"I hate to cook." Tyler shoved the food away from him.
"Making two sandwiches hardly falls into the realm of cooking." Carrie began to make the sandwiches herself, spreading mayonnaise, then mustard, on the bread with methodical precision.
"What's the matter?" Tyler watched her, his green eyes intent.
"Nothing," she said quickly—too quickly, she realized. She caught her lower lip between her teeth in a gesture of dismay. "Why?"
"You seem—" he paused and shrugged "—different. Edgy." He leaned forward in his chair. "Yes, very much on edge. A bit high-strung." His eyes blazed with intensity. "Are you thinking about—what happened upstairs?"
Five
"No, of course not!" Carrie insisted.
Tyler's eyes narrowed. "You weren't?"
She shook her head. "It was just a kiss and it—it just sort of happened." Her pulses were jumping, her heart pounding. She felt edgy and high-strung, just as Tyler had observed, but she was determined to project otherwise. "Chalk it up to basic biology. We're both adults. We can deal with it."
"I'm glad you understand," Carrie said quickly. "Because I love Ian and I'm never going to love anyone else."
Tyler nodded his understanding. "I'm glad we can be honest with each other, Carrie. I like you, and your kids are very cute, but I'll never, ever get involved with you. It's out of the question. I don't want an instant family. I've deliberately never even dated a woman with children before be-
cause I'm not interested in the surrogate daddy role, even temporarily."
"Well, I certainly don't want to date you!" Carrie was aghast. "I don't want to date anyone, ever again!"
"Not anyone? Not ever?" he asked, distracted by her vehemence. "Why not?"
"Why would I? People date when they're looking for someone to become involved with, and I'm not looking. That part of my life is over."
"There is a huge difference between dating and involvement," Tyler explained patiently. "I enjoy women's company but I don't want to get seriously involved with anyone, not at this particular point in time. Probably not for years. I told both my father and my brother so, just the other day. For what seemed like the millionth time," he added, sighing.
Carrie pushed a plate with a tall sandwich on it across the table to him. "Are they nagging you to settle down?"
"Lately it seems to be their sole topic of conversation." Tyler frowned. "I'm sick of it."
"Tell them that you don't want to get married—and be firm about it," Carrie advised. "When my family tries to gently hint that I ought to think about looking for a father to help me raise my children, I tell them in no uncertain terms that I have no intention of ever marrying again."
"Why don't you?" Tyler asked curiously. "Practically speaking, marriage could benefit you and the children, certainly in a financial sense."
"You sound like my parents." Carrie grimaced. "But realistically, what man would want to support three children who aren't his? And, anyway, you know what they say about people who marry solely for money."
"Oh, yeah, I'm real familiar with that one. Those who marry for money—"
"—earn it the hard way," Carrie chimed in.
* 'But finances aside, wouldn't it be easier for you if there were another adult around here?" Tyler pressed. "You're very attractive and you're very young, Carrie, There must be some guy out there who wouldn't mind marrying you, kids and all."
"But I don't want my children to be viewed as an obligatory part of a package that comes with me," Carrie said earnestly. "I want them to be valued and wanted for themselves. And what are the chances of that? I mean, you summed it up accurately and honestly when you said that you didn't want an instant family. I'm sure most men feel that way. They wouldn't mind having their own kids, but they don't want someone else's."
Tyler looked at the triplets, who were babbling to one another and grinning happily as they stuffed their lunch into their mouths with their little fingers. They were bright and cute and lovable. Even though he'd never had much interest in children, he could easily see the Wilcox triplets' appeal. It seemed sad to think that no man could want them; in fact, it was downright depressing. So typically, pragmatically, he decided to think something else.
"You know, I believe that there is some great guy out there who would be delighted to raise your kids as his own. In fact, I'm sure there is," Tyler insisted fervently.
"There already was a great guy," Carrie corrected. "His name was Ian Wilcox and he was killed two years ago when a teenage drunk in a pickup truck ran a red light and hit his car head-on."
"Ian was killed in a car accident?" Tyler was taken aback. He stood up and began to restlessly pace the floor. "That's how my mother died. Her car was hit from behind while she was stopped to make a left turn, and the car was thrown into the path of a sixteen-wheeler. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was only twenty-nine years old," he added flatly.
"That's terrible," Carrie said softly. "You must have been very young at the time."
"Five. Well, almost. My fifth birthday was three weeks after her funeral. I still remember blowing out the candles on my birthday cake while everyone told me to make a wish." He shrugged. "Helluva thing to say to a little kid whose mother just died. Of course, I wished that she would come back. And, of course, she didn't."
"Do you have any memories of her?"
"A few. They're mostly fleeting images rather than actual memories. I've looked at her pictures and tried to remember more." He looked at the triplets, then back at Carrie. "Maybe they're luckier not to have known their father at all. At least they didn't have to cope with losing him. Those were bad times for my brothers and me. Really bad times."
"It would be devastating for a child to lose his mother," Carrie said quietly. She thought of the mournful spiritual about the motherless child and the sense of abandonment and despair it evoked. And then she thought of five-year-old Tyler celebrating the first birthday of his life without his mother in it, of his innocent attempt to wish her back.
"Oh, Tyler, I'm so sorry." Impulsively, she put her arms around him and hugged him. It seemed the natural way to offer comfort to the lost, lonely child he had been.
Tyler hesitated for a moment, then wrapped his arms around her. "It's all right," he said quietly. "It happened a long, long time ago and there is no more grief. All I feel now is a vague sense of curiosity about what might have been had the accident not occurred."
"That's probably the way the triplets will feel about Ian," Carrie said sadly. "How could it be otherwise? Poor Ian. He deserved to be known and loved by his children."
"I'm sorry that they'll never know their father," murmured Tyler. His lips brushed the top of her silky blond hair. Once again, his senses began to spin.
Carrie closed her eyes and instinctively snuggled closer. Her motives had been to ease the pain of his inner child, but her body was responding to the man he had become. It felt so good to hold him and be held. Her hands smoothed over the broad bareness of his back, and she felt his arms tighten around her.
"Hi, Carrie! I thought I'd come over and—" Alexa gasped and stopped dead at the threshold of the kitchen.
Carrie and Tyler, who had been so absorbed in each other that they hadn't heard Alexa enter the house, selfconsciously broke apart to face her. Alexa's blue eyes were round as saucers, her mouth comically agape as she stared at the pair.
Carrie blushed scarlet. She was suddenly aware of how skimpily she and Tyler were dressed—she in her swimsuit, he in his cutoff jeans. Through her sister's eyes, she saw the picture she and Tyler had presented, and she winced.
"We—I—didn't hear you come in, Lex," Carrie said weakly.
"Well, that's certainly obvious." Alexa sniffed.
"You didn't see what you thought you did," Tyler added quickly. "That is, what you saw isn't what you think."
He grimaced, feeling unjustly tried and accused. His embrace with Carrie had been perfectly innocent, two friends offering each other comfort and sympathy. But the way Alexa was staring at him made him feel as guilty as an adolescent caught necking in the park by a flashlight-toting cop. "Oh, hell," he muttered.
"Oh, hell!" Baby Dylan broke the silence, imitating Tyler perfectly, right down to the inflection.
"Don't react," Carrie cautioned quickly. "He'll forget it if he doesn't get a reaction. But if we laugh or make a big deal out of it—"
"—they'll all pick it up," Tyler concluded. "This trio loves an audience." He walked over to Dylan's high chair
and swiped a grape from the tray. "Yikes, Dylan!" he said jovially.
"Yikes!" Dylan repeated, popping a grape into his own mouth. He grinned happily at Tyler.
Tyler grinned back. "Kids are so easy, once you get the knack," he said smugly. He saw Carrie and Alexa exchange glances. It was obvious that Alexa was dying to get her sister alone so she could grill her—probably lecture her, too—about wha
t she'd seen when she'd barged in on them.
"Carrie, can I talk to you?" Alexa asked, confirming his supposition.
"I assume that's my cue to leave," Tyler said, deciding then and there that he was not going to be run off. Instead, he sat down at the table and resumed eating his sandwich.
"You missed your cue," Carrie pointed out dryly.
"Yeah, I guess I did." Tyler shrugged. "I don't take direction well. Good thing I'm not an actor."
Carrie and Alexa sat down, too. There seemed no point in hovering over the table while Tyler blithely consumed his lunch.
"I figured that you didn't get much sleep last night with that ungodly racket going on next door, Carrie," Alexa said as she fixed herself a sandwich. "I came over to watch the kids so you could he down and get some rest this afternoon." She reached over and tousled Franklin's blond hair. "Besides, I miss the little devils. I'm used to spending almost every Sunday with them."
"Alexa watches the kids on the weekends I work and stays over during the day so I can sleep between shifts," Carrie explained to Tyler.
"Yeah, you told me that last night," he replied.
"Last night?" Alexa echoed suspiciously.
"I was over here last night, helping Carrie dispose of a body," Tyler whispered confidentially.
"Ignore him/' Carrie advised the visibly flummoxed Al-exa. "You can't take him seriously. He's a big teaser, even worse than Ben."
"Speaking of Ben..." Alexa lowered her voice and leaned forward in her chair. "I called him this morning to ask if he wanted to come over here with me, and he was not alone. It seems he met this woman named Rhandee at your neighbor's party last night." She shot Tyler a baleful look. "And the two of them ended up at his place."
"Ben hooked up with Rhandee? No kidding?" Tyler's curiosity was mildly piqued. Not his jealousy, though.
He frowned. Yesterday he had toyed with the idea of spending the night with Rhandee himself. Therefore, wasn't it reasonable to expect that he'd feel at least a twinge of jealousy at the thought of uninhibited, adventurous Rhandee with another man?
Triple treat Page 7
