A Family for Good : A sweet, small town, second chance romance (Tall Dark and Driven Book 6)

by Barbara Deleo

  Petro didn’t like her. That was obvious. When it had only been him and her with the babies yesterday, he’d huffed and puffed and hardly said a word. How would that affect the way he spoke about her to Ana-Maria? A shiver rippled up her spine. Would Petro do anything to protect Markus?

  She took the details for the girls’ doctor appointment from Ana-Maria, said goodbye, and hurried out onto the deck. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she could see Markus and Petro standing partway down the hill among the lavender, the older man gesticulating his arms as he talked. Liv sat straight-backed on the luxurious outdoor couch and chewed her lip, as indecision and fatigue washed through her.

  A few minutes later, Petro stormed back up the hill and past her into the house, but not before she caught the look he shot her. Was it her tired imagination or did she see a thaw in those hard eyes? He stalked into the kitchen then started pulling out pots and pans, opening and closing cupboards.

  Liv turned as Markus walked toward her. Lines of concern bracketed his mouth.

  “You’ve told him everything?” she whispered as she stood and met him halfway on the sweeping deck.

  “I have now. I should’ve done it first thing this morning, but there was a problem with my American distributor, and I had to schedule a quick meeting.”

  “He seems pretty angry.” She glanced back to the kitchen, worry dancing up her body

  “He’s embarrassed that he thought you were the nanny. Now I’ve told him everything, he’s probably cooking up an apology dinner for being so hard on you.” He rubbed a hand across his face, and she was moved by the weary look in his eyes. Maybe he hadn’t slept either.

  “But it’s not his fault. He didn’t know.”

  Markus huffed out a breath. “Of course, it isn’t. It’s mine. Ana-Maria wanted details of anyone else who lived here. I told her about Petro, and she said she’d need to talk with him, so I should have made telling him a priority.”

  “And you hadn’t told him he might be questioned?” She bit her lip.

  Markus shook his head. “I should’ve told him what was going on, but I know how passionate he gets. All he knew was that the babies’ mother was an old friend of mine, and when she died, they had no one else to take care of them.”

  He looked at her then, really looked at her with eyes that spoke of certainty—and the power of what he’d said struck her between the ribs.

  No one would be the winner here. The longer she stayed with the custody issues unresolved, the more people would be affected, and the harder things would become. Not least of all because every time Markus stood in front of her as he did now, confident and sure, espresso-colored eyes flashing, she had to dampen down the need for him that kept blooming, unbidden, from deep within.

  She swallowed away the want and the guilt and thought of the one foster family she’d stayed in touch with.

  Now, she had the opportunity to provide the same sort of loving environment for Phoebe and Zoë, and that had to be her motivation for everything. She had to make firm decisions now, hard ones, but always with the girls’ welfare paramount.

  Markus leaned against the side of the house. “It’d be best if we left him alone for a while.”

  Liv had to shake off the thoughts that were growing heavier in her mind to concentrate on what he was saying. “Yes, of course.”

  “Let’s take the girls for a walk down to the beach. Petro can have some time by himself to digest what I’ve told him.”

  She had to stop her hand from flying to her mouth as she imagined them together, just like old times. All she could think about was how, in the past, they’d strolled along beaches, his strong, protective arm holding her close against his hard body, and her hand inching up under his T-shirt . . .

  “I can manage,” she said on a hot breath. “It’s really only me he needs time away from.”

  “I want to come.” Markus’s gaze rested on her fingers nervously stroking her lips and he grinned. “We need to give that flash new stroller a test drive anyway.”

  Her skin chilled. It wasn’t that he wanted to spend time with her; he wanted to present a united front to Ana-Maria. Now that Petro was to be interviewed, Markus would want to pretend everything was fine between them.

  She could do it. Of course, she could. It might break some of the ice, or cool some of the heat, depending on which way you looked at things . . . and she needed the heat cooled.

  When they had the girls strapped into the stroller and rugged up against the sea breeze, they set off down a path that led from the house to the beach. Rows of lavender surrounded them, the heads of deep purple, lilac and mauve nodding in the light wind.

  Liv breathed in a lungful of the sweet fragrance combined with the tangy coastal air, and a layer of tension slipped from her shoulders. Beyond the lavender was a stand of orange trees and, closer to the beach, another of what looked like almonds. The teasing scent of all three filled her head.

  “Do you use these in your Turkish Delight?” she asked as she walked behind Markus, who was pushing the stroller. The broad expanse of his back was covered in a simple black T-shirt, and muscles stretched and recovered as he maneuvered past rocks and bushes.

  He glanced over his shoulder and shot her a wry look. “That was the idea.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “When I moved here from Paris, I had the crazy idea I could formulate my own essences, try out some new combinations. I imagined I’d have a cottage laboratory where I’d get back to basics. The company’s become hugely successful because of our great marketing, but I wanted to bring some honesty back to it.” He paused to negotiate some rocks with the stroller before continuing. “I moved my grandfather’s old still into the workshop out back of the house.” His shoulders stiffened. “It hasn’t come to anything.”

  Liv thought back to the conversation they’d had about his senses being diminished. He’d hinted his lack of feeling had something to do with their break up and part of her understood what he meant. “You seem more settled,” she ventured, “as if you don’t need to race around doing all the crazy things you used to. Do you still fly?” From somewhere, the question she’d most wanted to ask had come hurtling out of her mouth, and she didn’t know if she was ready to hear his answer.

  He stopped, stood statue-still, and her heart dropped like a stone down a well. All the old feelings of desperation, worry, fear that she might lose him the way she’d lost her parents came roaring back to life. She tripped on a piece of hard ground but recovered.

  He turned to look at her and then down to where she’d tripped. “Are you okay?”

  The concern on his face was obvious, the light in his eyes one she’d studied a hundred times. She waved him on and then looked out to sea to avoid his gaze, not wanting him to see the emotion that was surely plastered on her face.

  She had to know if he was still putting himself at risk by doing the extreme sport and rescue helicopter work that had scared the living daylights out of her.

  The thought that he could die the way her parents had and leave the girls alone had been with her since she’d arrived. She couldn’t bear to think of the girls losing another person who loved them.

  Shoving her hands in her pockets, she walked past him so she didn’t have to meet his gaze. Not wanting him to guess how desperate she was for his answer, she tried to shift the conversation. “This place is breathtaking.” Sun-sparkles off the sea winked conspiratorially, as if she wasn’t the only one who knew how her heart beat raggedly hoping he’d changed.

  When one of the girls began to grizzle, Liv turned around.

  “I don’t fly anymore,” he said.

  As small lines pulled together on his forehead and a shadow passed across his face, relief threatened to erupt out of her.

  “Just the flying, or all those other things?” she asked, her voice faltering. “The diving, the BASE jumping, the rock climbing?”

  “Everything.”

  She couldn’t believe it. H
e’d stopped doing the things she hadn’t been able to live with? Stopped taking the risks that had made her so determined to take the girls from him? One baby was now crying, and Markus pushed the buggy back and forth.

  The suddenness of his answer scrambled her thoughts. Where did that leave her resolve, her determination to take the girls away?

  “I didn’t think you’d ever give those things up,” she said, desperate to know why he’d stopped, why he’d finally turned his back on what had destroyed them. “Especially after I asked you to give them up so many times and you didn’t.”

  He took a step toward her and something pulled deep in her chest. As he dragged a hand across his jaw, her eyes were drawn there, and she remembered the way those fingers felt on her skin, dancing their way across her body, leaving her gasping for him. Feelings that had never gone away. Feelings that were with her in the drugged moment of first waking and in the threadlike connection to reality before she fell asleep. Every. Day.

  “I have a responsibility to the girls,” he said as the wail became louder. “I will protect them and keep them safe, and I can’t guarantee that if I’m doing something risky.” He looked into the stroller, his face grim. “I don’t want to do those things anymore because now I understand what they could cost me.”

  He tilted his head, as if waiting for her to say something, but she couldn’t.

  “Look, perhaps we should head back,” he said. “She might need changing.”

  The thought that he finally understood, finally realized why she’d asked him to give those things up before, was bittersweet. He was doing everything she’d asked, living his life responsibly and safely, only now she wasn’t the most important person in his life, and he wasn’t doing it for her.

  6

  Markus was concerned at how unsettled the girls were. In the past few days, nothing seemed to pacify Phoebe and Zoë. A quick glance at the clock showed him it was fast approaching midnight. Fatigue mixed with trepidation tracked down his spine.

  Before Petro had left for the day, he’d cooked Markus and Liv dinner, which they’d shoveled down while standing with a baby over each of their shoulders, something that had become routine in the week that Liv had been here. Now, they’d fed and changed the girls again and were trying to put them back to bed.

  Markus had no idea what was wrong. The girls had slept most of the day and early evening in the first few weeks while he’d gained skills as a parent, but now they were more wakeful, harder to settle, and his newfound confidence was slipping away.

  Had he messed with their routine in bringing them to Aphrodite’s Rock? He’d been hoping they were comfortable having two caregivers now. But above everything, he hoped Phoebe and Zoë weren’t picking up on his uncertainty about Liv. He had to ensure they felt protected and loved.

  “Do you think it’s wind?” Liv asked. She turned anxious, troubled eyes in his direction as she jiggled Phoebe in a front pack. A nearly full moon made the sea silver through the picture windows, and it was as if the four of them were the only people awake in the world.

  Liv paced backward and forward across the room, exhaustion lines hugging her eyes as she dodged rugs and wipes, bottles and wraps that were strewn everywhere. Such a contrast to the way the house had before two tiny bundles had turned their worlds upside down.

  She was dressed in loose pants and a T-shirt and had her ringlets tied back in a low ponytail, although as the evening wore on more and more strands had come loose. And she’d never looked lovelier.

  “One of those books you suggested said wind can give them stomach pain and until you can work the bubble out from their tummy they won’t settle,” she said, her voice laced with concern.

  Both girls were fine when they were carried, but the second they were put down they’d start crying again, building to a symphony in stereo that buried itself in his brain and turned his nerve fibers raw.

  Although the books said the babies would spend some time crying when they were put down, a string of unease pulled taut every time Markus thought either of them were upset.

  “Could be.” He stopped pacing and rubbed his hand up and down the pink cotton of Zoë’s nightgown, the feel of the fragile body beneath startling him as it did every time one of the girls was in his arms. The downy tufts of hair on her head tickled his chin as she nodded into him, and he breathed in the baby scent that was like nothing else he’d ever experienced. “Or maybe it’s a growth spurt. My book says they can have one of those when they might want to feed all day and all night.”

  He watched as Liv walked up and down with Phoebe’s tiny face snuggled into the creamy skin of her neck, and he felt the now familiar burst of warmth when he watched her with one of the twins. She’d smell of jasmine and rose water on her neck there—he remembered from when his face had been buried in that same place . . .

  In his wildest dreams, he’d never have imagined she’d be like this with babies. When they’d been in Paris, he’d told her he couldn’t wait to have children with her. A family as soon as possible. But every time he’d mentioned it, she’d shut him down, shut him out, and now seeing the capacity for love she displayed every day brought a chilling reminder of what he’d lost when Liv walked out.

  “We could’ve had this,” he whispered. Fatigue played some funny tricks, and he’d said aloud the words he’d meant to keep to himself. “Do you ever stop and think that our child would be five now? If we’d had a family when I’d wanted to start one.”

  She turned; her eyes glassy. “I know, Markus. But it wasn’t right, not the right circumstances.”

  “These are pretty incredible circumstances too,” he said, trying to sound light but wanting her to think through his question.

  She walked past without meeting his gaze. “Now it’s not about what you and I might want, it’s about what Phoebe and Zoë need. It’s completely different.”

  He forced a deep breath. The girls’ grizzles were the only sound in the room.

  Get back on track, Markus. Focus on two tiny babies who need you.

  “I guess we’ll just have to keep walking until they’re asleep.” He threw her a grin. “One thing that’ll come out of all this is we’re both going to be fit. I’m sure this floor’s getting a track worn into it.”

  The exhausted smile she threw back at him was so sweet he could taste it. Her cheeks were tinged pink, her face without makeup, and she’d never looked more beautiful. “Fit and with great muscle tone from lifting these precious weights up and down. I can feel my biceps getting bigger by the day.”

  “Me too,” he said. “And every now and then I get a whiff of myself and it’s all sour milk and baby wipes. Who needs perfume when you can smell like this all day for free.” He chuckled.

  Liv laughed and then caught his eye before she paced past. “Do you think about what they’ll be like?” she said, startling him by talking about a time in the future neither of them had acknowledged. “When they’re older. I can see they’re going to have Polly’s huge brown eyes and her gorgeous eyelashes, but I wonder what they’ll be like as people.”

  “I bet they’ll laugh like Polly used to,” he said as he rubbed Zoë’s back in circles. He remembered with warmth how Liv’s live-wire friend had lived life at full throttle. The three of them grew up in Brentwood Bay, but he met Polly through Liv when he and Liv began dating at eighteen. “And maybe have that way of looking at you like Polly did, as if you were the only person in the world.” He thought about the girls as teenagers, as young women, and something powerful swept over him. “But I guess it depends on what sort of upbringing they have.”

  Liv eased herself gingerly into a chair, her loose ringlets moving across her shoulders. “What would you like for them?” She looked up at him, an openness that he hadn’t seen from her in a long time shining in her eyes.

  Phoebe let out a squawk as she realized she’d stopped moving, but as soon as Liv was settled and holding the little girl in her arms, Liv rubbed Phoebe’s back once more and th
e crying stopped. “I mean, what do you really want them to experience growing up? The sort of upbringing you had, or something different?”

  Markus held Zoë close, her tiny heart beating against his chest. Liv was opening a door to a path they’d never journeyed down, and the promise of it was too much for him to refuse. He took the chair next to her, cocooning Zoë in his arms and rocking her.

  “To be loved,” he said quietly. “To always know they are loved and accepted no matter what they do, or who they are with. To know that someone, somewhere, loves them unconditionally.”

  Liv’s gaze lifted to his and the joy in her luminous violet eyes connected directly with his heart. The warmth of their bond, a shared purpose they’d never really had before, wrapped itself around him like a warm sweater on a winter’s day.

  Her face glowed as she put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn. “And that they’ll always have a home, somewhere they feel safe and protected. That’s got to be the greatest gift a parent can give a child. I think about all the things I missed out on growing up in care.”

  Despite her obvious exhaustion, her cheeks were flushed with memories, and a burst of pain flared in his chest. She wanted all the things for Phoebe and Zoë that she’d searched for when she’d tried to find her place in the world.

  “I want them to play a musical instrument too,” she continued, the spark in her eyes growing. “Maybe the violin.”

  Markus grinned. “Or the bagpipes?”

  Liv laughed so loudly and suddenly that Phoebe let out a wail, and Liv tut-tutted as she rocked her closer. “Oh, sorry, sweetie,” she said. Her gaze met his again, a happy glow radiating from her. “Can you imagine? Two little five-year-olds with pigtails, sawing backward and forward on a violin, or marching in a band playing their pipes, and us loving every minute of it!”

  He held her gaze, and when she bit her lip, he knew she’d been imagining them together with the girls. He didn’t know what to do with the thought, so he stowed it away for later.