Special Forces Father

by Victoria Pade

  He smiled again, a small, thoughtful smile that brought something softer to his expression and drew her focus to his mouth. To his oh-so-supple-looking lips. Making her wonder—out of the blue—what it might be like to have him kiss her.

  She didn’t know what had happened to send her thoughts there but she yanked them back into line a split second later and sat up as posture-perfect straight as he was.

  “It’s getting late,” she announced. “I’ve been up since early this morning and you had already made coffee by then, so you had to have been up even earlier. You must be tired.”

  She heard nervousness in her own voice but thinking about kissing him was so out of left field that it had unnerved her.

  If Liam noticed her sudden fluster he didn’t show it, but he also didn’t deny that he was tired—despite the fact that he didn’t look it. And there was something in his eyes that made her think he knew what was unnerving her.

  Oh, she hoped not!

  Unless maybe it was on his mind, too...

  No, no, she couldn’t go there, she told herself sternly.

  Then he got to his feet and stepped away from the coffee table and the sofa—and her.

  And she could only hope that wasn’t because he’d had any inkling of what she’d just been thinking about.

  “I need to have breakfast with my sister tomorrow morning,” he said. “I was at my older brother’s place Sunday night and I’ve talked to Kinsey on the phone, but I haven’t seen her yet—”

  “Sure,” Dani agreed too quickly. “It’s supposed to rain and be cold tomorrow so I planned an inside day. That’s what the tubes you cut are for, to keep the kids busy. And I thought we’d watch their favorite movie while I set some dough to rise. They love it when they get to make their own pizzas, so that’ll be dinner tomorrow night.”

  He smiled again, though this time there was mischief around the edges. “You’re gonna make me learn to cook, too?”

  “I don’t know if putting toppings on a piece of dough counts, but I have faith that if four-year-olds can do it, so can marines,” she goaded him again.

  “Fighting words,” he warned with mock affront, helping Dani get over the stress that her wayward thoughts had caused her.

  “You’ll just have to prove yourself,” she challenged.

  “In so many ways these days...” he groaned, making her laugh at the reemergence of his anxiety over the situation with the kids.

  Dani picked up the laundry basket and headed for the twins’ rooms. “We’ll just see you when we see you tomorrow,” she concluded casually.

  Then she warned herself to keep it casual as she slipped silently into Grady’s room to put away his clean clothes.

  Reminding herself firmly that casual did not mean ever experiencing how Liam Madison kissed.

  Not ever.

  Chapter Four

  “It’s a good thing I ran an extra mile before I came over,” Liam moaned on Wednesday morning.

  “It’s been two years since you’ve had my waffles. Might be another two before you come home and get them again...” his sister tempted good-naturedly—unlike in the past when she would have said it sadly.

  Liam was happy for that particular change in her.

  It had been hard on Kinsey to have all three of her brothers in the military. On the rare occasions when they’d been able to visit her she’d made the most of it, but their time together had been tinged with the fact that she didn’t know when she would see them again.

  Those long absences had also left all the responsibilities for their parents on her—which Liam, Declan and Conor regretted. Coupled with friendships that had been sacrificed to the care of their parents during their declines, Kinsey had been desperate to gather more people, more family into her life. Family that would be accessible to her rather than halfway around the world when she needed them. Liam understood that.

  But now she was engaged to Sutter Knightlinger and Liam knew that helped her not feel the loneliness and abandonment she usually did over the looming reality of him—or Declan—returning to duty.

  But, according to Conor, neither Kinsey’s engagement nor the ending of Conor’s own military career were enough for her to cancel the quest she’d been on in recent months.

  And Kinsey proved that when she pushed her own plate away and said, “Did Conor tell you that the Camdens are asking for DNA from us now?”

  The Camdens.

  Ten of them, all around the same ages as Kinsey, Liam, Declan and Conor. Raised by a grandmother called GiGi. Running an empire founded by their great-grandfather. An empire continued and expanded by his son and GiGi’s husband, Hank, and then by Hank’s sons, Howard and Mitchum Camden, who had, between them, produced the ten people who oversaw it all now.

  Mitchum Camden was also the man Liam, Kinsey, Declan and Conor’s mother had revealed on her deathbed was their father.

  It had been a revelation that had sent Kinsey on a path to have herself and her brothers recognized as Camdens and taken into the fold.

  Something none of her brothers were enthusiastic about.

  “He told me,” Liam answered her question.

  “Will you do it?” Kinsey asked.

  Liam stood and poured himself another cup of coffee without saying anything.

  Then he rejoined his sister at the small kitchen table in the alcove of the apartment that she was beginning to pack up in anticipation of moving in with her fiancé.

  He looked squarely at her, sighing heavily. “I don’t know, Kins. Can’t you just let it lay? You’re getting married. You’ll have a mother-in-law. Conor and Maicy live in Denver now. They’ll probably have kids. You’ll probably have kids. I may have kids...” That had come out more ominously than the rest but he went on anyway. “Our own family is growing. Before you know it, you’ll have more than you know what to do with. Why keep on with that other family?”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “You guys,” she complained. “You’re all so stubborn!”

  “About this? Yeah!” he confirmed. “Why the hell would we want to be Camdens? Or even acknowledge any link to them? They’ve got money coming out of their ears that they accumulated off the backs of people they basically swindled and conned and ripped off. That’s not what any of us are about.”

  The Camden name was now highly respected, redeemed by the current generation. But it had always been widely rumored that the fortune amassed by the predecessors of Camden Superstores had been ruthless, devious and scheming, that there was very little done by any of them to be proud of. Or to be proud to be associated with.

  “At least Conor soft-pedaled it a little,” Kinsey complained about Liam’s blunt depiction.

  “What’s to soft-pedal? It’s the truth. Robber barons—that’s where H.J. Camden and his son and grandsons have their place in history. And you think I want any part of that? I fight for people not to be trampled over, Kinsey.”

  “I know,” she said. “But the Camdens who also came from Mitchum are our half-siblings, the ones who came from Howard are our cousins, GiGi is our grandmother—they haven’t done what the other ones did—”

  “But you want to make one of those ‘other ones’ our father.”

  “I’m not trying to make him our father. Mom did that.”

  Liam sighed again and shook his head. “I don’t know what a father is to you, but to me it isn’t what that guy was. To me it’s what Hugh was. If it was what that guy was I wouldn’t be here now, would I? I’d have just blown off the fact that I might have kids the way he did. Or thrown some money at them and gone on about my business.”

  “So this is really striking a chord for you,” Kinsey said quietly.

  “How could it not?”

  “Okay. But, Liam, take away the father part. The past. That’s over and done with and there’s no one left to answer for it
or to punish for it or to hold accountable. And what’s left? We could have half brothers and half sisters. We could have a grandmother. Isn’t that something that we shouldn’t just ignore?”

  “It seems like they’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring us.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t have a clue that we existed until I brought Mom’s letter to GiGi. If you could have seen the look on her face when she read it and found out about us, you’d know it was a shock.”

  “And did she open her arms to you? No, she left you twisting in the wind. Then they had us investigated like the criminals they come from. Now they want DNA proof?”

  “You want DNA proof that the Freelander kids are yours.”

  “Not the same thing!”

  “Exactly the same thing.”

  “These kids and I—and the court—need clarification so we all know where to go from here. I don’t need clarification of who my father was—it was Hugh Madison, not the sperm donor. And if these kids are mine then I’ll do whatever it takes for them. What do you think is going to happen if you force the Camdens to know for sure that Mitchum Camden was our father? They probably just want to know what they’re up against to keep us away from their money and their stores. Maybe from them.”

  “I made it clear to GiGi when I saw her that we don’t want anything from them—”

  “And I’m sure she believed you,” he said facetiously.

  “If Audrey’s kids do end up being yours, are you gonna wish you never knew?” Kinsey challenged.

  “Would I rather not know that I have kids out in the world? You have to be kidding to even ask me that.”

  “And I certainly want to know if they’re my niece and nephew. Mom would have wanted to know she had grandchildren. When I think about it, it’s horrible to me that she didn’t, that she could actually have had three and a half years with them before she died. But you think that we shouldn’t give information like that to the Camdens? That we should just gloss over the fact that they’re our family because it didn’t have such a great start?”

  “We’re their dirty little secret. Living, breathing proof of the lowlife things one of them did. My situation is different.”

  “You’re already having your DNA tested,” Kinsey reasoned. “All you’d have to do is get a second copy of the results for me to send to them.”

  She really wasn’t letting up on this.

  “And then what, Kinsey?” Liam asked. “Are you picturing a big family dinner the next time I’m in town?”

  “The Camdens have those every Sunday. They’re really nice.”

  Liam put his forehead in his hand and shook his head, thinking that he had enough to deal with without this on top of it.

  “And if the twins are yours, then they’re Camdens, too. Shouldn’t everyone know that?” Kinsey added.

  “Oh, geezez...” was all Liam could say to that because intertwining these two loaded issues just made it worse.

  But he knew his sister wasn’t going to let up so he looked at her again and sighed once more. “I’ll think about it. But if I do it, it won’t be because I want to or want any part of that family. It’ll be because you want me to. It’ll be for you.” For all she’d done, she deserved to have what she wanted, even if he thought it was ill-advised.

  He stood and took his plate to the sink. “Let’s clean this up. I should get back.”

  “To being a dad?” Kinsey taunted, finding some humor in it.

  “Yeah, I’m not really being that. I’m just trying to get them not to hate me.”

  “They don’t hate you,” Kinsey assured him, bringing her own plate and taking over at the sink. “Why would they hate you?”

  “I’m not good with kids.”

  She laughed. “What, you? How could that be, Mr. Tact... Mr. Storm Trooper... Mr.—”

  “Yeah, I get it. I don’t ‘soft-pedal,’” he said, using her earlier complaint. “I’m trying to, though. With them. But apparently it doesn’t come off that way and I just seem like some kind of tight ass who needs to relax. Today I’m gonna do the boot camp workout with the boy—”

  Kinsey laughed. “And that’s your idea of relaxing and getting a four-year-old to like you?”

  “We always liked doing that with Hugh,” Liam defended.

  “You and Declan and Conor liked doing that with Hugh,” she amended. “Not me.”

  “Yeah, I asked the girl to do the workout, too, but she wrinkled her nose at me as if I’d suggested dipping her in dung.”

  “Uh-huh. I understand that.”

  “Dani says I have to think of something to do with her that she’d like to do. But I don’t have the foggiest idea what that would be.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kinsey repeated.

  “Hugh never did anything special with you,” Liam said, defensively again.

  “No, he didn’t,” Kinsey confirmed pointedly.

  And then it struck Liam. “And you didn’t feel about him the way we did, did you?”

  The tone in his sister’s voice had caused Liam to recall that and wonder suddenly if the lack of attachment Kinsey had felt to the man who had raised them was part of what made her so determined to connect with the Camdens now.

  “I loved Hugh,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say that I felt close to him. He was all about the military and whipping us into shape for that. When I wasn’t interested in being whipped into shape or in going into the military, it seemed like I became incidental. You guys were who was important to him.”

  “And you think Dani is right and the girl will feel like that with me if I don’t do something else with her,” Liam said.

  Kinsey shrugged. “I think that Dani—that’s the nanny’s name?”

  “Nanny and acting guardian.”

  “Yes, I think she’s right. If you want Evie to feel closer to you than I felt to Hugh, you’ll have to figure out how to bond with her by doing something other than the boot camp workout.”

  Liam just sighed again.

  “And this Dani?” his sister said. “You call your potential daughter and son ‘the girl’ and ‘the boy,’ but the nanny is ‘Dani’—like you like her...”

  “She’s great,” he said without hesitation, but also without affection, giving credit where credit was due. “She’s great with the kids. She’s going above and beyond the call of duty for them at a time in her own life when things are tough, when someone else would have bailed to deal with her own stuff. And she’s patient with me. She’s not putting any pressure on. She’s trying to help me wade through the waters with the kids.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  Beautiful.

  “It doesn’t matter. I have enough problems. I could be the father of two four-year-olds and I don’t know what the hell I’ll do if I am. You think I’m dumb enough to add to that with some kind of hey-let’s-get-it-on-during-the-short-time-I’m-here hookup?”

  His sister grinned at him. “Oh, you’ve thought about it.”

  Damn but he had...

  Last night, after doing nothing but talking to Dani, folding laundry with her, he’d gone up to that space-age guest room and spent much too much time thinking about her...

  But it had been a long time since he’d hooked up with anyone and that was why it was on his mind, he’d decided both last night and again this morning. When it—and she—had still been on his mind.

  It was only natural that after a long hiatus from sex, plopped down in shared quarters with someone who looked like Dani did, someone sweet and funny and nice, that the idea of starting something physical with her would occur to him.

  But there was no way he would act on it. He was here for one reason and one reason only—to find out if he’d fathered the twins and go from there. If the twins were his, he had a whole can of worms to deal with. If they weren’t, then they were still the kids of someone h
e once cared for. He had to see what he could do to make sure they were taken care of in the best way by someone else—and he didn’t have any idea how he’d do that either. The last thing he was going to add to this mess was the complication of any kind of personal relationship or hookup.

  “I think about a lot of things,” he said in response to his sister’s remark. “But I don’t have anything if I don’t have self-discipline.”

  “A direct quote from Hugh,” Kinsey said with a laugh. “If you had self-discipline you wouldn’t possibly have two kids.”

  “Oh, that’s low,” he said, laughing himself.

  “Is your self-discipline strong enough when you’re staying in a house with a pretty nanny who’s ‘great’?” Kinsey said skeptically.

  “Yes,” he answered unequivocally.

  Because while Dani Cooper might be beautiful and great, while he might be finding himself looking forward to being with her—with and without the kids—while he might, at that very moment, be champing at the bit to get back to the Freelander house with more thoughts of spending the rest of today with her than with the kids, it didn’t mean a thing.

  He’d come here on a mission. And a marine on a mission didn’t let himself be distracted even by flowing dark hair or big toffee-colored eyes or skin like cream or a smile that made something in him heat up the minute he saw it.

  A marine on a mission kept to the straight and narrow to complete that mission.

  And that’s exactly what he was going to do.

  Whether his sister scoffed at his ability to pull it off or not.

  * * *

  “Now this was a good idea!” Liam said as Dani brought their pizza into the dining room from the wood-burning pizza oven in the kitchen.

  “I thought we earned it. Plus sometimes letting the kids cook ruins my appetite and I like to have my own dinner after I’ve put them to bed.”

  Which she’d done about an hour earlier, before focusing on the meal for herself and Liam while he went up to the guest room to shower.

  He’d come down dressed in jeans and a plain white crew-neck T-shirt that looked better on him than any jeans or T-shirt had ever looked on anyone. At least that’s how it had seemed to Dani when she’d glanced up from preparing a salad to feast her eyes on the T-shirt that hugged broad shoulders, well-defined pecs, bulging biceps and a hard, flat stomach. And jeans that, when he’d gone to the fridge to get himself a beer, had shown her that he also had a derriere to die for.