Almost a Family Read online

  Ignoring the rising awareness, she shrugged. “Maybe it was time to talk about it, so you could finally let it go.”

  The creases in his cheeks deepened, with just a glimmer of a smile. “You’re a very special person, you know that?” He brushed his fingertips across her jaw, then gently rubbed his thumb across her lower lip. “Those kids of yours are very lucky to have a mom like you. And your husband was a fool to walk away.”

  The reality of Connor’s touch was far more potent than Erin had ever imagined.

  In college, she’d fantasized about him. Imagined Connor leaving everything behind and coming for her—just for her. But of course, Stephanie had been the beauty, the gifted one…. There’d been no contest.

  But whatever Erin wanted right now, no matter how foolish or reckless, Drew, Tyler and Lily were in the family room and could walk in at any moment. And any touch, however innocent, could easily be misconstrued.

  What she wanted was Connor. What she needed was distance.

  “I—I’d better go check on the kids,” she whispered, forcing herself to pull away.

  “No. I’ll go.” He got to his feet. “It’s pretty quiet in there.”

  She followed Connor to the family room. Here, too, a fire sent shadows dancing across the walls.

  Two lumpy shapes on the sofa were bundled up in the sleeping bags. A smaller one—Tyler, though Erin could barely see the top of his head—was on the floor next to his brother.

  “He’s afraid to sleep alone,” she whispered as she stopped at Connor’s side. “He had night terrors for six months after he came to live with me, and if he wakes up and Drew is gone, he becomes nearly hysterical. I don’t know about everything he went through before, but I can guess.”

  Connor watched them for several moments, his eyes somber. “Life isn’t fair. Luck of the draw—a devoted suburban family, or living through hell from the time you’re born.”

  Erin nodded. “These kids are tough in ways they never should’ve had to be. And when they defend each other? You wouldn’t believe it.”

  Connor gave a low laugh. “I’ve had a small taste.”

  “I’m just so proud of all three of them for what they’ve overcome, and for how normal they seem.”

  “And you’ve made it happen.” Raising a brow, he slid an arm around her waist, then pulled her closer. “You are one amazing woman…and I’ve wanted to do this for a very, very long time.”

  He glanced once more at the sleeping children, then searched her face before lowering his mouth to hers for an exquisitely gentle kiss.

  And with just that light touch, every rational thought fled.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SHE HAD NO BUSINESS kissing Connor Reynolds. Given what she knew about him, a wiser woman would have stepped back and fled.

  But she’d dreamed about him, years ago, when he’d belonged to someone else, and nothing during her ill-fated marriage had ever come close to what she felt right now.

  Her imagination hadn’t come that close, either.

  She could no more have broken Connor’s kiss than she could have flown to the moon in her ’98 minivan. She leaned closer to the hard wall of his chest. Reveled in the strength of his arms, the possessiveness of his mouth.

  At Drew’s sleepy yawn from the couch, Connor stepped back and stared at her, his breathing unsteady, his eyes dark and intent. “I shouldn’t have done that.” His voice dropped so low that it felt like a deep rumble against her skin. “Not here. Not now. Not…ever.”

  “You stole my lines.” She conjured up a faint smile. “Maybe we should just blame this on the late hour and let it go at that.”

  He searched her face. “You understand…I’m not looking for anything here.”

  He’d already made that more than clear, and though her nerves still tingled and her pulse still tripped over itself, she smiled for real. “I’m not a little college girl anymore. Don’t worry—I won’t throw myself at your feet over one kiss. Tenant. Landlord. Nothing more.” With an offhand wave of her fingers, she moved past him and into the kitchen, where a three-wick candle bathed the room with soft light. “Guess we can’t make any coffee, unless you have a camp stove handy.”

  “Somewhere out in the garage, probably. Or the storage shed, with Ed’s camping gear.” Connor followed her and headed for the oversize refrigerator at the end of a long, emerald-veined marble counter. “There’s soda in the refrigerator…bottled water…maybe a beer.”

  “Water would be great.”

  Accepting the bottle he handed her, she leaned a hip against the edge of the center island that provided more counter space than she’d had in her entire kitchen back in Wausau.

  High above them, huge skylights were set in the slanted ceiling, and at the far end of the room, behind a rustic oak table and ten matching chairs, rain streamed down a wall of windows that stared out into the night. “This kitchen is even nicer than the rest of the house. Are you a gourmet cook?”

  “Right.” He twisted the tab off a can of Coke, then tipped it back and took a long, slow swallow. “Gourmet all the way.”

  He leaned over and caught the door of the massive side-by-side refrigerator with one hand, revealing a freezer compartment filled to the top with neatly stacked red boxes of frozen entrées. “This is dinner, until the middle of next month.”

  “I suppose you—”

  A bloodcurdling scream from the family room sent a shock wave through the stillness of the house.

  Erin froze for a split second, then slammed her bottle on the counter and ran for the other room. Connor beat her there.

  The two lumpy forms on the sofas stirred, mumbled groggily. Lily peered out from the edge of her sleeping bag, groaned and flopped back down. Drew started to reach for Tyler, then stopped and looked gratefully at Erin and Connor before lying down and pulling his own bag tighter over his head.

  Connor slipped down on the floor next to the younger boy, who was sitting next to the couch, his face a mask of sheer terror as he screamed. His bloodless hands clenched the edge of the coffee table next to him, then flew into the air as if he were fighting away an unseen assailant.

  Whispering soothing words to him, Connor gently curved an arm around the child’s back to protect him from banging against the furniture—though Erin knew Tyler wasn’t really awake, and didn’t even realize Connor was there.

  She dropped to her knees next to them. “He has these night terrors often,” she murmured after Tyler finally calmed. “I do the same thing you did, trying to keep him safe, but I always feel so helpless.”

  Connor settled him back down in his sleeping bag. “It’s unusual to see this so early in the night. He hasn’t been asleep very long.”

  “Maybe because he’s here instead of his own bed. Sometimes these episodes will last for a half hour or more, though the next morning he has no memory of them happening. It scares the other kids, though, and it drove my husband crazy. He kept saying to just ‘wake the darn kid up,’ but that doesn’t really work.”

  Connor stood up and looked down at the sleeping child. “Tyler’s panic probably just escalated.”

  “Exactly.” Erin followed him back into the kitchen. “Sam is a good man, but fatherhood was a hard adjustment for him—and adopting older children was an even bigger challenge. He expected too much of them, and he wasn’t very patient.”

  Though Connor was. She’d seen him gently restrain and protect Tyler from harm despite the child’s frantic screaming, and there’d been no sign of impatience in his calm voice.

  “You would have been a wonderful father,” she murmured.

  He shrugged. “Just pediatrics 101.”

  Not true. She knew how lacking in parenting skills a man could be.

  Later, she curled up under some blankets in a guest room just off the family room, so she could be close to the children. Unable to fall asleep, she stared up at the ceiling as old memories mingled with what she’d seen of Connor tonight.

  He wasn’t just skilled.
He was a caring and thoughtful man, a man who’d been deeply wounded by his failure to save his wife.

  And now, Stephanie’s tearful claims on the day of Uncle Theodore’s funeral began to ring false. “He wanted me to have an abortion—we broke up over it. When we got back together a few years later, I told him I’d had his baby. He swore he never wanted to see her or hear about her—even when I told him she was physically challenged and in foster care.”

  Would Connor really have rejected his own child? It no longer seemed possible. And if Stephanie had lied, did that change the oath of secrecy she’d demanded before releasing Lily for adoption?

  Connor had relinquished his rights to his daughter long ago…but he didn’t know she was now in Erin’s care.

  Torn and uncertain, Erin puzzled over the situation. It was nearly daybreak before she realized what she had to do. Whatever he’d decided in the past—whatever trouble it might now cause—surely Connor had a right to know.

  MORNING BROUGHT A THICK blanket of snow, bright sunshine and unexpected sounds and aromas emanating from his kitchen. The clatter of pans. The scents of brown-sugar-cured bacon—which must have been in the freezer behind the ice cream and TV dinners.

  Connor blearily stared out the large windows next to his bed, then rolled over and reached for the digital clock on the nightstand. He studied the blinking numerals. Electricity.

  Which meant that he could plow the lane, bundle up the Langs and take them back where they belonged.

  A good thing, because hearing the laughter of children echo through this empty mausoleum of a house, and having Erin’s company last night, had been…nice. Too nice. The sooner they were gone, the less they would disrupt his peaceful, solitary world. Already, he knew just how painfully quiet it would be when they were gone.

  Having company was definitely unsettling. Having Erin here was even worse. What on earth had possessed him to kiss her? Big mistake. Big, big mistake, and one he hadn’t stopped thinking about since. He’d given up on sleep when his wristwatch said 2:00 a.m., and had started reading the latest McMurtry novel by flashlight. At five he’d finally dozed off for a couple of hours.

  Ridiculous, dwelling on a simple kiss like some randy teenage boy. But it had been so long since he’d been with a woman, so long since he’d even thought about it, that the sweet scent of her and the lush feeling of her mouth beneath his had apparently slammed his body into overdrive. Damn.

  Throwing back the covers, he pulled on his jeans, a heavy cabled sweater and thick socks, then fumbled for the shoes he’d dropped at the side of the bed.

  Tossing the down comforter across the mattress, he turned to go downstairs, make it through breakfast and see about rounding up Erin and the kids.

  One of them appeared at his door just as he did. Lily looked up at him with eerily familiar pale gray eyes.

  Shaking off that thought, he gave her a brief smile. “Did you sleep okay?”

  “’Cept for Tyler. He wakes us up a lot.” She ducked shyly. “Erin says breakfast is ready, so you should come downstairs.”

  “Then I guess I’d better do that.” He couldn’t help but grin back at her. An angel couldn’t have appeared more fragile or innocent. He reached out to tousle her silky, superfine hair. “Don’t want your mom getting mad at us, right?”

  And then his gaze dropped to her little bare feet. One was misshaped, but the other had a graceful high arch and long, slender toes, the second toe longer than the first, all with perfect little nails. So much like…

  A weight settled on his chest, making it hard to breathe as he studied her oval face. The dark rim around her silvery irises. The swirl of cowlick at her right temple, one that everyone in his family had fought for generations. How could he have missed so many clues? They were all there, in Lily’s delicate features. Yet how…

  Anger surged through him, followed by a deep sense of betrayal—one that burned through his gut with the force of a wildfire. “Maybe,” he said evenly, “you could ask Erin to come up here for a minute first.”

  Searching his face with a worried frown, Lily nibbled at her lower lip as she took a cautious, halting step back, clearly aware of his abrupt change of mood. “But your pancakes are done. We made ’em just for you, and I even made the batter. You don’t wanna come?”

  At the hurt in her eyes and the touch of fear in her voice, he softened. “Of course. Lead the way.”

  He’d watched her awkward ambulation before and had mentally assessed the problem as equinovarus—clubfoot. One that had been inadequately treated with manipulation, bar shoes and a series of casts to bring her ligaments and bones into correct alignment.

  But then he’d seen her as simply someone else’s child—a potential pediatric patient. A medical case, not something more personal.

  Now, his heart ached as he watched his daughter’s uneven stride. He’d seen the Ponseti method of treatment work in dozens of cases, but time was of the essence when a baby was born with this abnormality. Being in foster care, there might not have been much continuity if she’d been moved from one family to the next, but why hadn’t some caseworker followed up to ensure that she was properly treated?

  Erin had said that she’d adopted Lily less than a year ago…but there were other surgical procedures that could be done for an older child….

  In the kitchen, Lily moved across the room to stand next to Erin at the stove. “He’s here,” she announced. “Tyler and Drew already went outside to play in the snow. Can I go, too?”

  Erin reached for a paper towel and dried her hands, then turned to bring a heaping plate of pancakes and bacon to the kitchen table, setting it down in front of Connor. “You don’t have your warm snow pants,” she chided. “Go outside and get chilled, and you could be sick tomorrow.”

  “But Drew—”

  “Drew and Tyler wore their snow boots when we went to town. You said you could only find your sneakers.”

  “I could borrow boots.”

  Lily turned and gave Connor a beseeching look, and he realized that he would have done almost anything to fill her small request. The thought that she’d been without a family to call her own, without a mother who loved her and all the security of a permanent home for so much of her young life, made him feel as if a fist had clamped down on his gut. “No one here is your size, honey. My boots are way too big.”

  She flopped into a chair at the end of the table and slumped down, as forlorn as a child who’d lost her best friend.

  Erin poured two cups of coffee and put one in front of Connor, then sat next to Lily. “I’ll clean up the kitchen, and then we can go home if Connor doesn’t mind giving us a ride back. Then you can put on all your warm clothes and we’ll make some snowmen before this snow melts. Okay?” She glanced up at the skylights, where already the snow was starting to drip in the bright morning sunshine, then reached over to give the child a quick hug. “This is an unusually early snow, but believe me—this far north, we’ll have lots of it this winter.”

  From outside came the whoops and hollers of the other two children, and Lily slid even lower in her seat. “Not fair.”

  No, life wasn’t fair, and Connor knew that more than most. Especially now. “You know what? You don’t have cable down at your house, but there’s a big dish on this one, and there must be a hundred channels that come in up here. Would you like to go into the family room and have the big-screen TV all to yourself?”

  She peeked at him from under her bangs. “Really?”

  “Come on—I’ll show you how to use it.” Connor pushed away from the table and led her into the family room, where he handed her the remote and gave her a quick lesson, then watched as she turned on the TV, found a zoo veterinarian show on Animal Planet, and curled up under an afghan on the love seat. “Like animals, do you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’m going to be a veterinarian when I grow up. I want to work in a zoo, just like those guys. I love cheetahs.”

  “Sounds like a cool job.”<
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  “The best part would be those little orphans, the ones you get to take home, and love, and be just like their mom. That’s so awesome.”

  He wanted to ask what it had been like for her, without a mom and dad. Had she been moved often from one foster family to the next? Most of those homes were wonderful, loving, yet sometimes a county had too few options, and had to overcrowd the limited number of families available. And what if the other kids had been cruel about her disability?

  But the opportunity to talk would come later. He’d make sure of that.

  “Don’t you want your pancakes?” Lily said, tearing her attention away from a pair of lambs frolicking across the screen.

  He wanted to just stay and watch her.

  Yet, with the boys outside and Lily entranced by an animal show, it would be a perfect time to find out a few things, too. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said. “Just holler if you need anything, okay?”

  Back in the kitchen, he found Erin standing at the windows watching the boys throwing snowballs at the trunk of a tree.

  She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Reminds me of when I was a kid. Snow forts, snowmen—and with every big snowfall, we’d make snow ice cream. Small-town stuff, but every minute was such fun. You grew up in…Green Bay, wasn’t it?”

  “Close by.”

  She studied his face, her smile fading. “I think we must be intruding on you too long. I’ll do the dishes quickly while you eat, and then we can be on our way. I’m sure you must have a lot to do.”

  Moving closer to her, he leaned a shoulder against the refrigerator and folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t think I could eat anything, but thanks anyway.”

  “Oh. Well, then, I’ll just clean up the kitchen and—”

  “I’ll get to that later.”

  Now she appeared flustered, uncertain. “It…was so nice of you to rescue us last night. I can just round up Lily and get her coat on—and the boys are already outside. Do you think your SUV can make it down the road?”