“I like Bryan.”
But not Liam—that seemed to be the unspoken part of the sentiment.
“I think you’re going to like Liam, too. He’s just different from Bryan. Maybe you could watch him and Grady when they do the workout and decide if you want to do the exercises, too.”
Evie put the doll named Baby in a headlock and rolled onto her side without responding to that. Dani didn’t push it; she just smoothed Evie’s hair away from her face and said good-night.
Then she left the four-year-old to sleep and went up to the kitchen to find Liam making a hoagie with some of the groceries he’d bought himself.
It didn’t surprise her. He hadn’t eaten a hearty dinner. But she was glad to see him making himself at home, reasoning that the more comfortable he was with his surroundings, the more comfortable he might become with the kids.
“I make a good sandwich,” he bragged as she joined him. “And there’s plenty. Can I interest you?”
Ohhh...too many things about him had interested her as the day and evening had gone on. Dani had been struggling with it. But at that point he was only talking about the food in front of him.
“No, thanks. But if you’d told me you were hungry when we were at the restaurant, we do a really good Italian sub—mortadella, Genoa salami, capicola and prosciutto with provolone, ricotta salata and roasted red peppers on buns we make ourselves.”
“You’re putting my ham, turkey and Swiss to shame.”
“I’m just saying that I could have saved you the trouble.”
Dani took two knives and two carving boards out of a drawer, handing him one of the boards and a carving knife to cut his sandwich, and keeping the second board and a large knife with a serrated edge for herself.
As he sliced his sandwich and wrapped big, capable-looking hands around one portion of it to take a bite—hands she inexplicably thought were the sexiest hands she’d ever seen—she went to her purse and took a large compressed cardboard tube out of it to set on her own carving board.
Liam was watching her and, after swallowing his bite and washing it down with a swig of the beer he’d opened, he said, “I know you wouldn’t tell the kids what that was for when you took it from the restaurant, but how about letting me in on it? And what is it anyway?”
“It’s just the roll the giant commercial plastic wrap comes on. The staff kept it for me.” She measured its length and made a mark that divided it in half. “It’s for a craft project for Evie and Grady,” she added as she started trying to saw through it with the serrated knife, finding the quarter-inch thickness of its walls as strong as wood and not as easy to cut as she’d expected.
“Hold on,” Liam said to stop her. “You need a saw to do that. Is there one around here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I poked my head into the garage this morning—there’s a worktable out there—let me look and see if there might be a saw,” he offered, taking another bite of his sandwich for the trip.
He disappeared through the door that connected the garage and the kitchen, was gone for a while and then came back with a small handsaw.
“There’s all kinds of tools out there,” he informed her. He didn’t give her the saw, though; he took another bite of his sandwich and reached for the tube and second cutting board. “Let me do it.”
Dani watched as one of those sexy hands gripped the tube and the other wielded the saw, making forearms and biceps alike bulge as he worked.
Her mouth was suddenly a little dry and she didn’t like that she was imagining feeling the strength of those arms around her, those hands on her body, so she went to the refrigerator for a bottle of seltzer water.
In that short time, he’d cut the tube in two—something that she knew she’d have been working on for half an hour to accomplish.
“There,” he said, sliding it back to her and continuing to eat as he stood on one side of the island.
Dani went to the opposite side and sat on a stool despite the fact that she knew she should busy herself elsewhere rather than stay there just to enjoy the view. And the company.
“So how’d I do today, Teach?” he asked then.
“I think you had a couple of wins,” she said without much conviction.
“In other words, not great,” he said with a wry chuckle.
He’d been clean-shaven through the day, but in the last few hours a shadow of beard had begun to appear, and she noticed that now it had turned into very sexy scruff.
She didn’t know why her mind kept going there but she curbed it and forced herself to concentrate on tutoring him.
“You were a little looser but...are you scared of them?” she asked, recalling that he’d thought they might be afraid of him the night before but now wondering if it was the other way around.
“Shhh! Marines aren’t scared of anything,” he barked facetiously.
“So you are!” Dani goaded. “A great big macho marine scared of two munchkins.”
“They’re just not what I’m used to. I’m used to order and discipline and rules and regulations and adults who follow them. But kids...they’re all over the place.”
“But in a fun way,” Dani said.
“Just seems like anarchy to me.”
Dani laughed. “That military stuff again,” she groaned. “You have to switch gears. But you did gain some ground with the monkey bars. They always want to do them and I can’t hold them up like that. And you liked pizzelles—”
“Even though I said it wrong and earned a reprimand.”
“But the fact that Evie was willing to share with you was something.”
“And then I screwed up reading to them tonight—Grady said tomorrow night you need to do it. But I don’t know what I did wrong. I can read,” he ended defensively.
Dani laughed. “Sorry. I do dumb voices that they like. But still, you did better today than yesterday. And you’ll get there.” She hoped.
He sighed. “Guess I’ll keep trying anyway.”
He got points with her for that.
“Now tell me about you and this restaurant,” he said as if that had confused him as much as the kids did. “You’re a nanny named Cooper but it seemed like maybe you own a restaurant called Marconi’s?”
“Yeah...” She steeled herself for talking about this. “My mom was Antoinette Marconi, daughter of Nick and Nell Marconi and a full-blooded Italian, so I’m Italian on her side. I’m French, English, Irish and German on my dad’s. I’m the variety pack.”
“Proved to be a good mix,” he said with approval in his voice and in the blue eyes that were taking her in.
Dani tried not to notice. Or to be pleased. But she was.
She forced herself to move on from it, though.
“When my grandparents got married they used their wedding money to start the restaurant,” she told him. “It’s been our family’s business ever since for the last sixty-two years. My grandfather ran it and my grandmother cooked—right up until the day she died six weeks ago.”
“You just lost her—I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. Me, too. But I’m grateful that she went peacefully, in her sleep. And I keep reminding myself that she had a long life. She was eighty—”
“And still working?”
“Making meatballs right to the end,” Dani said, the humor helping.
“Making meatballs at the restaurant?” he said, getting back to what had started this.
“At the restaurant. My mom grew up there. Worked there. She met my dad there. He was a customer and then he worked there, too, before he did a stint in the marines.”
“Your dad was a marine,” Liam noted with respect and camaraderie.
“He enlisted just before my mom realized she was pregnant with me. He served for four years.”
“Good man.”
“He
was,” Dani said sadly before she returned to the subject. “I basically grew up at the restaurant the same way my mom did. They kept a crib and a playpen in the corner of the kitchen when she was a baby and then again when I was. I had chores there from when I was little. I went straight there after school. I worked in the kitchen cooking with my grandmother. I bused tables, waited on customers. I learned to read from the menus. I learned math running the cash register and at my grandfather’s side doing the books. I earned money for college there. And even ever since, I’ve pitched in when Gramma needed me...”
The enormity of the tradition weighed on her suddenly the way things had that morning, too, and she sighed. “And now I’m all that’s left of the family, so...it’s mine. Lock, stock and barrel. Officially as of this morning.”
“This morning?”
“Gramma and I have been all that’s left of the family for the last fifteen years since my grandfather died. She’d put everything in a trust that left me the restaurant and the house. As of this morning the trust was dissolved and everything was turned over to me for real.”
Her voice had cracked as she’d talked and apparently he’d caught it because he said, “My mom died just a few months ago. It isn’t easy...”
“No, it isn’t. I’m sorry for your loss, too.”
“And now there’s only you? No brothers or sisters? No more parents?” he asked gently.
“Like I said, my dad was a marine. He served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm and came back with some problems.”
“He was wounded?”
“Not physically, but mentally, emotionally... He had really bad PTSD. I know sometimes people don’t think that’s as serious, but they’re wrong. I was the twins’ age when he came back and even I could see how much he was suffering. Sometimes he wouldn’t know where he was. He’d think he was still in combat. And even when it wasn’t the outwardly noticeable stuff, he was so sad... That’s how it seemed to me, but I know it was depression. Bad enough that my mom was afraid to leave him alone.”
“Afraid he’d hurt himself,” Liam said as if she wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. “I’ve seen PTSD in a few of my men. Had to send them home.”
“He didn’t have any family, but my mom and my grandparents did everything to try to help him. He’d have a few good days here and there, but then it would just hit him again, sometimes worse than other times. My mom bought him a boat because he’d always liked to go boating and that did help—there was something about being out on the water that calmed him. So every chance they got, they took the boat to a lake and spent time on it.”
“Here? In Colorado?”
Dani knew what he was thinking. “Yes. And no, it wasn’t a good solution during the winter months when everything around here freezes over. So when Dad got bad and things here were frozen, they hitched up a trailer for the boat and took it somewhere warmer—Arizona or California or Texas—somewhere they could still get out on the water for a while, until he felt better again.”
“What about their jobs?”
“My dad was on disability. He couldn’t be around a lot of people or noise. Sometimes he helped my grandfather with the paperwork or did some maintenance around the restaurant when it was quiet, but that was about it. The restaurant was my mom’s job and my grandparents understood the situation, so they were okay with her taking off when she needed to.”
“Did you go on these trips?”
“No, I stayed with my grandparents. If my dad needed the boat that meant he was in really bad shape, and I think my mom and my grandparents must have agreed that it was better if I wasn’t around him then. It actually saved my life because when I was six my folks were killed in a boating accident.”
Liam’s dark eyebrows arched. “Oh... I didn’t see that coming. You don’t hear about a lot of those.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Although it might as well have been on the road—there was drunk driving on New Year’s Eve involved. The holidays had been particularly rough for my dad that year, so the day after Christmas he and my mom headed for Arizona with the boat. We got the call on New Year’s Day. Some college kids rammed full throttle into my parents’ boat. No one survived.”
“And your grandparents raised you from then on?”
“They did. I was lucky that way. I keep wishing that Evie and Grady were that lucky.”
He didn’t comment on that. Instead he said, “But you didn’t stay at the restaurant like your mother—the restaurant that was going to be yours one day—and you became a nanny?”
“My grandmother wanted me to have a college education. She said there was nothing that said I had to stick with the restaurant, and she knew I loved kids—she liked that I seemed to have a knack for working with them. She thought I should be a teacher. I went with childhood development instead. My degree is in educational psychology. I thought I’d still go into the schools, but I was actually recruited by the nanny service just before I graduated and I kind of liked the idea of working more one-on-one with younger kids, so I signed on.”
Liam had finished his sandwich and begun cleaning up after himself just as the buzzer on the dryer gave the alert that the laundry was done.
“I better get that folded,” she said. “Grady was devastated that his favorite hoodie was in the wash today and I swore it would be ready for him tomorrow.”
Dani went downstairs into the laundry room, took the clothes out of the dryer and then brought them in a laundry basket to the couch in the central open space of the kids’ lower level of the house.
She didn’t expect Liam to follow but not only did he, he also sat on the coffee table and dipped into the basket to help her fold the kids’ clothes.
She almost told him he didn’t have to do that. But then she realized that he might soon be in the position of doing the twins’ laundry, and decided to let him get some experience at that, too.
“And now the restaurant is yours,” he said, picking up their conversation as if there hadn’t been any change of venue. “Does that mean you’re switching careers?”
“I don’t know...” Dani answered with a hint of a groan that relayed only a fraction of her own quandary. “So much has happened... I was still reeling from my grandmother dying when the Freelanders were in the accident. My time with the twins will end when the court decides where they go from here, and I guess I’ll have to decide where I go from here, too.”
“Can you do both—take on a new nanny job and keep the restaurant going? I mean, you went in to check on things tonight and it sounded like you were making plans to go in more this week to do some things, and you’re still taking care of the kids...”
Dani shook her head. “I’m in sort of a grace period. Everyone is going to extra lengths at the restaurant so running it isn’t falling completely on my shoulders at the moment. But for the long haul? The restaurant is a full-time job even with a manager as good as Griff. And there are some issues with the building itself—we’ve known for a while that renovations need to be made and those are definitely outside of Griff’s job description. Plus now I’m the only one who knows a lot of the recipes that have kept us going—Gramma was very protective of her recipes,” Dani said, laughing a little at the memory of just how vigilant her grandmother had been about keeping those recipes their family secret. “There’s just no way I can do both the restaurant and nanny or even work in a school.”
“So you loved working with kids enough that your grandmother pushed you out of the restaurant nest to do it. But now, without you, there won’t be any more of a restaurant that has to mean a lot to you.”
“It does mean a lot to me,” she admitted. “And not only does it mean a lot to me, it means a lot to that whole neighborhood, that whole community. Over the years it’s become the heart of it. Marconi’s is the go-to place for wedding and baby showers, and the weddings and wedding receptions themselves�
��people around there fight for dates to have their events there. You wouldn’t have believed the size of my grandmother’s funeral. It was standing room only—that’s how important she and the restaurant have been to those people. And even since then there’s been an outpouring of sympathy that’s come along with notes and letters and phone calls begging me not to make them lose the restaurant, too.”
“Carries a lot of weight.”
“And that isn’t even the biggest thing,” Dani went on. “I also have to factor in that the restaurant is people’s livelihoods—Griff, a few of the waitstaff and at least half the kitchen staff have been with us literally for decades. They’re like family—”
“And if you close the doors they’re out of work,” Liam finished for her.
The laundry was all folded and Dani set it in piles in the basket to put away, leaving her and Liam merely sitting across from each other without much distance between her on the sofa and him on the coffee table. But he stayed there, looking at her with his full attention.
“So you’re under just a little bit of pressure,” he said with a small sympathetic smile, obviously trying to lighten things up. “On top of stepping up for Grady and Evie,” he added.
It was only then that Dani realized she’d just vented to him in a way she usually only vented to Bryan. And she barely knew Liam.
“Oh, I’m sorry to dump all that on you!”
“It’s okay,” he assured in that strong male voice, laughing a little. “It kept me out of my own head for a while—which, these days, is a good thing because believe it or not there’s a little stress that comes with the idea of becoming a father out of the blue,” he said facetiously.
“No, it was out of line.”
“It really wasn’t. I’m just kind of amazed that you’re in this tough time of your own life and you’re still here doing what you’re doing for the twins.”
“I can take care of myself. They can’t,” she said simply, deflecting the praise that embarrassed her.
Special Forces Father Page 6
