Plus he was clean-shaven and smelled like a tropical breeze, and suddenly her appetite for food had switched to an appetite for something that involved him instead.
Which she’d curbed the minute she’d realized what she was hankering for.
She’d been reining in a multitude of wayward thoughts about him for the last twenty-four hours, striking her like lightning bolts since that craziness had gone through her mind last night about kissing him.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her but she knew she needed to fight it.
“Heart-shaped pizza and star-shaped pizza with ketchup instead of tomato sauce, ground beef, salami, black olives, slices of orange and yellow cheese?” he was saying as she again thought about how incredible-looking he was while running a pizza cutter through their own pie to slice it. “And they actually ate it.”
“They did,” she said with some horror of her own. “No accounting for a four-year-old’s palate. But they also ate broccoli and sliced tomatoes—”
“Why do they call tomatoes ‘red potatoes’?”
Dani laughed. “I have no idea. They just do. But anyway, they ended up eating a pretty good dinner, so that’s all that counts.”
“But yeah, it was really unappetizing,” he confirmed as she served him a slice of pizza. “But this...this is pizza.”
Homemade dough she’d had rising for hours, sauce, four kinds of Italian cheese, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, olives and red onions, which were not only for flavor but also so she could think about onion breath if kissing came to mind tonight.
“So give me my report card for today,” Liam said after tasting the pie and getting slightly rapturous over it, judging it the best he’d ever eaten.
“You improved,” she said, knowing he was referring to his behavior with the twins.
It had been a full—and rainy—day of entertaining them. By the time Liam had returned from his breakfast with his sister, they’d already used the tubes he’d cut the night before to make dragons and they’d been chasing each other around with them, growling through the tubes that had tissue paper at the opposite ends to billow out like flames.
After lunch and their naps—during which Liam had gone to the workout room beside the ballet studio to lift weights—he’d again invited Evie to do the boot camp workout with him and Grady. She’d declined but he had engaged the little boy in the clearly toned-down exercises they’d done downstairs while Evie had helped Dani make pizza dough.
Dani had been a little worried that the barked-out commands that went with the boot camp workout might put Grady off. But Grady had actually seemed to like the gruff praise and encouragement that went with it, and had, in fact, gone to great lengths to earn it.
“You definitely made some strides with Grady,” Dani informed him. “Plus he liked that you watched their movie with us.” Though Dani had found it difficult to concentrate with Liam sitting just within her peripheral vision.
Liam made a pained face at the mention of the movie. “That was a lot of singing.”
Dani laughed. “That’s what they like best—the animated musicals. And then it was good that you took them outside to splash through puddles when the rain stopped.”
“That was supposed to be close-order drill—to move a unit from one place to another in an orderly manner.”
Dani laughed. “Uh-huh. And Evie wasn’t into that when it sounds like so much fun?” she said facetiously.
“Yeah, she just did the splashing. With her back to us to make sure we knew she wasn’t going to march.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to make a miniature marine out of Evie.”
“She actually kind of seemed mad at me today.”
And he really had tried with both kids.
“She and Grady are close. Sometimes they get a little bent out of shape if the other one plays with someone else. Grady would have done the same thing if you’d been doing stuff with Evie instead of him.”
“But I wasn’t leaving Evie out. I tried to get her to do what we were doing,” he defended.
“I know—”
“Only we weren’t doing anything she wanted to do,” he guessed. “My sister thinks you’re right, that I have to figure out some other girlie way to win her over.”
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘girlie’—although she does convince Grady to play dress-up and dolls and castle with her. But she’s actually a little more of a daredevil than Grady is, too. Remember yesterday it was Evie who was the first of them willing to cross the monkey bars.”
“I should take her bungee jumping?” he joked as he polished off his first slice of pizza and took a second.
“She’d probably like it but I wouldn’t recommend it,” Dani said. “It helps that you made a few strides with Grady, though. That’s kind of broken the ice with them, and it might help bring Evie around a little—”
“An if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em thing?”
“Sometimes it works like that, yes. But I don’t think it will be through your workout or marching drills,” Dani said, barely able to suppress a smile at what he thought might lure a four-year-old girl to participate. “She does always need a prince when she plays castle.” And boy, did his looks qualify him!
“So I should go up to her and say let me be your prince?”
He was joking and Dani did laugh at that. “A little subtlety might work better. When you see her playing with the castle you could just ask her things—what each room is for, who the dolls are, just show an interest. Then maybe kind of slip into the role with the prince doll. The prince doll could ask the princess doll to go to the ball. Evie loves it when there’s a ball.”
Liam made another pained face and frowned at her. “Do you know what I do for a living?” he asked as if she must be clueless to suggest what she was suggesting.
“Not take princesses to balls?” she joked.
“Not hardly.”
“Well, buck up, Marine, because if you want to win Evie over, you might have to.”
He groaned and Dani laughed again.
Then she said, “You talked to your sister about the twins?”
“Some. Kinsey pointed out how she wasn’t as close to our adopted father as my brothers and I were because—like Evie—she wasn’t interested in being turned into a marine. And with Hugh it was that or nothing.”
“You were adopted?” Dani asked, curious about his roots. Well, curious about everything about him, although she was trying to convince herself that was only to evaluate him as the twins’ potential parent.
“We weren’t adopted from out of the system because we were in need of a home or anything. We lived with our mother on a farm in a small town in Montana called Northbridge. The man our mother married adopted us.”
“You mentioned an older brother and your sister—”
“And I have a twin brother, too.”
That surprised her. “You’re a twin?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard they run in families so that probably ups the chances that Grady and Evie are mine.”
That was what she’d been thinking.
“Declan is my twin,” he went on. “We’re in the middle. Conor is the oldest. He was a navy doctor but he just resigned his commission to go civilian after a restart with his high school sweetheart. Kinsey is the baby of the family. She’s a nurse, and she’s getting married in May.”
“Are you and your twin close?”
“Yeah, we’re close.”
“Are you identical?” Could there really be two guys running around looking like he did?
“Identical,” he confirmed. “We got a lot of mileage out of confusing people when we were kids. I think it’s a little easier to tell us apart now.”
Because Liam was a big, muscular marine and maybe his twin wasn’t?
At least that’s what Dani
imagined because she couldn’t fathom that even his identical twin would be quite as impressive a specimen as Liam.
But what she said was, “What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a marine,” Liam said as if that should have been a given. “We’ve both been overseas for a while, but in different units. Although right now he’s stateside, too, recovering from what I’m told was a pretty serious injury that he almost didn’t make it through.”
“You were told?”
“Special Forces missions cause me to drop out for periods of time—I can’t be reached, I can’t reach out to anyone else. I heard about my mom dying just before I was set to follow my latest orders. I’ve been underground since then. Declan was hurt in an IED explosion two days after Mom’s death and I was already in the field. I found out about it the same time I heard about Audrey and the twins—when the mission was complete and I came up for air again a week ago.”
“That’s a lot to have waiting for you.”
“A whole lot,” he agreed. “Now Conor and Kinsey have told me what’s been going on and how Declan is, but I haven’t been able to connect with him yet even by phone. I came straight here to deal with this situation when I hit the States, and he’s in transit to Denver for more rehab so we keep playing phone tag. But no matter what, I’m not really going to be able to rest until I can see him for myself.”
“They’re saying that he’s going to be okay, though, right?”
“That’s what they tell me,” Liam answered with some reservation. “But like I said, I need to see him for myself. And, now that we’re talking about this, Conor called while I was showering and left a message that Declan just arrived in Denver. He’ll need to go through admission at the rehab center and they won’t let me see him tonight or I’d go, but... I know I keep bugging out on you in the mornings and I’m sorry about that, but Conor can get me in to see Declan tomorrow morning—”
“Oh, go! For sure,” she said. Not that he was asking permission, but she certainly didn’t expect him to put off seeing his injured twin just so he could help make oatmeal. By moving in and making the effort with Grady and Evie, he was already doing more than she thought most men would before being sure they actually had fathered the twins. Or even just to safeguard the orphaned kids of an old flame. She certainly wasn’t going to condemn him for not being here every minute.
She took another half slice of pizza and let him know that would be her last if he wanted to finish the pie.
“I do,” he said without question, taking his third full slice.
After eating a little more salad Dani got back to the rest of what they’d been discussing, hoping for additional information. “What about your biological father? Did he die and leave your mom with four kids?”
Liam hesitated in answering that and she wondered if he was still thinking about his twin or if she’d just asked a question he didn’t want to answer.
But after a few minutes he said with disgust, “The guy who I guess was my father just left my mom with four kids.”
That didn’t sound good.
Before she could say anything, he sighed and confessed, “That’s not exactly true. He did die—in a plane crash with a bunch of his family. But even before that he left my mother on her own with us. And if he hadn’t died, I’m sure he would have gone on leaving her alone with us, just dropping in when it suited him.”
Liam’s expression was stern and as disapproving as his voice. “Apparently we’re the product of an affair,” he explained. “My mother kept it hidden until she was dying at the end of last year. That was when she told Kinsey that we’re the secret family of Mitchum Camden.”
“Camden? Like the Superstores?”
“Yeah,” he said unhappily.
“Oh,” Dani repeated because that was quite a revelation and she really didn’t know what to say.
But once again she didn’t have to come up with anything before he went on, as if he needed to get it off his chest. The chest her eyes wandered to periodically because it was just so fine...
“In the romantic version,” he was saying, “my mother told my sister that Camden was torn between her and his wife. And even though my mother knew it shouldn’t go on, and so did he, they couldn’t stop themselves. My mother was pregnant with Kinsey when he was killed in the crash. Who knows how many more of us there might have been because she said she didn’t think she would ever have been able to actually end it with him.”
The way Liam said that did not make it sound romantic but Dani refrained from pointing that out and instead said, “And in the unromantic version?”
“I don’t see anything romantic about lying to and cheating on the woman he was married to and had a family with. I don’t see anything romantic about using the feelings my mom had for him to string her along on the side, to get her pregnant three times. I don’t give a damn if he supported her and left us money or not. I don’t see anything romantic about leaving her to answer for four illegitimate kids in a small town that couldn’t have looked kindly on that!”
He definitely needed to vent.
“You said they ‘couldn’t have looked kindly on that.’ That sounds like you didn’t experience it?” she asked.
“Declan and I were two years old when he died, so no, I don’t have any memories of Camden or of anything before Mom married Hugh and he adopted us. To me, we always looked like any other family. But I grew up in that gossipy small town and now that I know the truth I also know a situation like that couldn’t have been good for her until Hugh made an honest woman of her.”
“What did your mom tell you about your biological father when you were growing up?”
“Nothing. She said Hugh supported us, looked after us all and that to talk about another father was disrespectful and hurtful to him. So she wouldn’t do it. She saved it for the end,” he muttered somewhat under his breath. “None of us ever pushed it because there was nothing about Hugh that didn’t make him our father.”
“Except that you call him Hugh,” Dani pointed out.
“Actually we called him Gunny. He retired as a master gunnery sergeant from the marines, the highest rank for enlisted, and Gunny is what he preferred. If we said something about him outside of the family we called him our father, but Mom always just referred to him as Hugh. She never said ‘your dad’ or ‘your father’—maybe she was hanging on to the memory of Camden in that. So whenever Declan or Conor or Kinsey or I had anything to say about him to each other, we called him Hugh, too.”
“But you still thought of him as your dad. You loved him and respected him,” Dani observed, making the assumption from the change in his voice and attitude when he spoke of Hugh as opposed to when he spoke of his biological father.
“I did. He was a good man,” Liam said readily. “Tough and stern—a marine to his core—but kind and fair and decent to my mom and to all of us, too. The same way he would have laid down his life for his country, he would have laid down his life for any of us. Come to think of it, probably everyone in Northbridge knew that, too, and that’s why there were only a few snobs who went on snubbing my mom, while everyone else let go of her past and the fact that we were the products of it.”
Tough and stern, kind and fair and decent—that seemed to describe what Dani knew so far of Liam, too. Now she knew where it came from. And also maybe why he was there to look out for the twins even if they weren’t his—the way his adopted father had looked out for kids he hadn’t biologically fathered.
Liam had polished off what remained of their dinner and even though Dani could have gone on talking to him much longer, she knew that she should put an end to the evening. While she wanted to get to know him well enough to feel confident in handing over Evie and Grady to him should that day arrive, she was finding that the more she learned about the kind of man he was, the more she liked him. And that made things difficult on an entirely diff
erent level for her.
So she stood and stacked their plates on the pizza stone to take into the kitchen, saying as she did, “It’s getting late.”
“Yeah, and I want to check in with Conor, make sure Declan got in all right tonight,” Liam concurred, following her with his empty beer bottle and her water glass in hand.
She’d cleaned the kitchen while their pizza cooked so there was very little left to do. She took care of the pizza stone and washed off the dining room table and countertops while Liam put their dinnerware in the dishwasher.
Still, he didn’t seem in any hurry to make his phone call because, rather than leaving her, he instead leaned a hip against the end of the island, effectively cornering her cozily in the L of the surrounding counter she’d just finished sponging off.
“So, what should I do tomorrow after seeing Declan—come home in a horse-drawn carriage like a fairy-tale prince to soften up Evie?” he asked.
“Only if it’s a ‘wipe’ horse,” Dani said with a laugh.
“I don’t know what a ‘wipe’ horse is...”
“That’s how Evie says white. She’s very big into white horses right now. But I don’t think you have to go quite that far.”
“Thank god because I don’t know where I’d get one!” he joked, cracking a smile that put lines at the corners of those amazingly blue eyes and—like the night before—turned that mouth that could be very sober into something so much more appealing...
Then, in a voice that was deeper, quieter, he jokingly confided, “I’m not always such a clod. Sometimes I actually do succeed with girls.”
That had to be an understatement because just looking up into that face made her wobbly inside, and she didn’t have a doubt it did that to everyone. How could it not?
Special Forces Father Page 8
