Harlequin Superromance February 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: His Forever GirlMoonlight in ParisWife by Design

by Liz Talley

  “You’ve always liked to have me around,” he added as he headed down the hall and out the back door. Darin kept pace with him.

  “I do like having you around,” his older brother agreed.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was a truculent “nothing.” Not an assured, truthful one. But he let it go. Because he knew what was wrong—if Grant was there, Darin couldn’t wait for Maddie—and was hopeful that if they continued to ignore the issue, it would fade away as so many others had in the past.

  “Oh, yeah, look.” Reaching over with his right hand, Darin pulled Grant to a stop on the sidewalk. He held out his left leg. Pulled up the leg of the sweatpants he’d worn to therapy that day.

  In place of the piece of gauze taped to his brother’s shin, there was a line of pink puffy skin. “Lynn came and got me and we went to her room and she took out my stitches.”

  He’d wanted to be there. If for no other reason than to have the excuse to spend the time with Lynn. “She said seven to ten days,” Grant said aloud. “It’s only been six.”

  “But I saw her in the hall before my therapy and I told her I was itching there and she said, ‘Let me take a look,’ and she did and she brought me right over and took out the stitches and walked with me back over to my therapy. Don’t worry, I wasn’t late, Grant.”

  “I wasn’t worried. And I’m very glad the stiches are out. Now you can shower without having to make sure it’s covered.”

  “That’s what Lynn said.” They continued on toward the garden.

  And Grant thought about Darin’s nurse in the shower. His shower.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, AFTER stopping for burgers on the way back home from The Lemonade Stand, Grant asked Darin to help him find the landscape lights he wanted in the supply shed behind their garage.

  While they were in the shed, his phone rang, and he talked to Luke about a problem he and Craig had run into that day on a fifty-thousand-dollar job. At the customer’s request they were planting two rows of flowering trees along a river rock walkway and they’d run into some slate ground.

  He’d tested patches of the ground himself and found the soil nutrient rich. Telling Luke he’d be at the job site at six in the morning, he made a mental note to check the design blueprint before turning in that night. He needed a plan B for the mini-orange-tree grove at the end of the line of trees if he was going to have to reroute the walkway.

  Luke filled him in on the other job they’d been at that morning. And by the time Grant hung up, Darin had a bin open on the workbench.

  “These are the ones you wanted, right?” he asked.

  He glanced in the bin. “Yep, thanks, bro.”

  Darin closed the bin with his good hand and pushed it to the corner of the workbench, turning to replace the other plastic bins he’d pulled off the waist-high shelves. Handled one at a time, the bins were light enough for Darin to move on his own without breaking the doctor’s no-lifting rule.

  They were light enough to move with one hand, but his brother was using both. Slowly. Awkwardly. But successfully.

  Darin’s left hand didn’t do much more than touch the underside of the bin—a two-or three-inch movement that didn’t appear to be weight bearing. But it was a start.

  Grant grabbed some wire, clips and extra bulbs, put them in a bag and turned to find Darin standing at the workbench between them, frowning at him.

  “What?” Grant asked a little more irritably than he probably should have. He had a problem at a job site—a very lucrative job site—he’d had a long week, his brother didn’t seem to want him around and he had formed an unhealthy addiction to a woman he couldn’t have. Could you blame a guy for being a little frustrated?

  “You know that girl, Maddie, the blonde you saw me with, who was looking after Lynn’s little girl, Kara? The one who was so upset the day Kara almost fell in the hole?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like her.”

  Play it down, man. It’s only a big deal if you make it one. Darin’s words to him when he was a junior in high school and wasn’t chosen to play first string basketball...

  “I like her, too.”

  Darin stood tall, making eye contact. A sign of a lucid moment. “You don’t know her as well as I do.”

  “No, I don’t. But from what I’ve seen she seems very nice.”

  “I know a lot about her.”

  Was this the time to mention the phone calls he knew about?

  Or maybe it was time to ask Darin if he wanted to make a run for some ice cream.

  “She’s very trusting and sometimes gets hurt.” Darin had both hands on the workbench.

  All Grant could think of to say was, “That’s nice.” And managed to stop himself.

  “We like talking to each other.” Darin’s tone was growing stronger. And the child in him wasn’t surfacing, Grant noted.

  He knew he was going to have to engage.

  “I had a call from the phone company yesterday,” he said, equally serious as he met his brother’s gaze head-on. “We were over our minute allowance. They did a usage analysis for me.”

  “I’ve been talking to Maddie on the phone.”

  “Late at night, apparently.”

  Darin wasn’t a child to be disciplined, he reminded himself as he heard the almost accusing tone in his voice. “Which is fine,” he quickly added.

  His tension was his problem. Not Darin’s.

  “I’ll pay you for the phone bill.”

  Grant nodded, knowing full well that Darin had no idea how much the phone bill cost, or how much money it would take to cover it. He had a bank account because Grant paid him, and he got federal assistance, as well. But Grant was the executor of the account. And kept very clear records of every dime of Darin’s money that was spent.

  “You already pay your share of the phone bill, bro,” he said, wishing he’d opted for ice cream. Or that Darin had started this conversation while he still had things to do in the shed.

  “I’m sorry the phone company had to call you.”

  “I’m not. You have a friend, Darin, that’s fine.”

  It was just going to have to be. Because his brother deserved a life, for God’s sake. Standing there listening to a forty-four-year-old man apologize for talking on the phone—and knowing that his handling of the situation had prompted his brother’s remorse—made him sick.

  Darin watched him for a long time, which wasn’t all that unusual. His brother took a long time to focus sometimes. And then he said, in a perfectly normal tone, “I want to take Maddie on a date.”

  Grant needed a beer. A whole case of beer. And a deep breath, too. He’d already screwed up the phone company conversation.

  Of course Darin couldn’t take Maddie on a date. That was a given. How to handle the situation in a way that respected his older brother, he didn’t know.

  “I need your help, Grant.” Darin could have been in college, and Grant fourteen again. That was how Darin sounded. And how Grant felt.

  He waited.

  “I can’t drive. And while I could pay with a debit card, I’m afraid I’d screw it up and spend too much of our money.”

  Life wasn’t meant to be this way. Logic and knowing mixed with helplessness. It just wasn’t natural.

  But Darin was alive. With him. He hadn’t died with Shelley that day. Or in the critical days afterward when they’d had to do the first of many surgeries on his brain.

  “Maddie needs me.”

  It was a completely adult concept. A completely Darin concept.

  “How does she need you?” he challenged, on the defensive again, but managing to keep his feelings out of his tone as he posed the question.

  “She needs me to be a m
an who’s her friend.”

  So any man would do? The words, thankfully, didn’t make it out of his mouth.

  “And she trusts me not to hurt her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  Grant’s eyes narrowed as he and his brother stood facing each other across the workbench—man to man—wishing he knew how much man was really left inside his brother.

  Sometimes he was convinced that Darin was all there, just challenged in his delivery.

  “And that’s why you want to go on a date with her? So that you won’t hurt her?”

  The old Darin would have known that to lead a girl on would hurt worse in the long run. But the act of trying to prevent a woman from hurting was just like the old Darin.

  “I want to go on a date with her because I like her and want to go on a date with her, silly,” Darin said. He dropped his head and slurped saliva before scooping the box of lights under his arm. Grant followed, bag in hand, turning off the lights to the shed as they left. He stopped to deposit the morning’s supplies in the back of the truck.

  Were they done, then? Was that it?

  Darin stood back, waiting for Grant, and then followed him into the house. Grant had work to do. He waited to see if his brother would go calmly about his routine, take his shower, eat a snack.

  Grant dropped his keys on the kitchen counter. Darin emptied his pockets beside them, something Grant had trained him to do early on after the accident. You could tell a lot about a guy and his day by what was in his pockets.

  Grant also always made sure Darin had money in his pocket. Money that would most likely get lost if Darin didn’t turn it in every night.

  Darin moved toward the archway that led from the kitchen to the living room.

  “I want to go diving, too, Grant,” he said, and then turned slowly to face him again. “But I want to go on a date with Maddie first.”

  “Darin...”

  “Please, Grant. Don’t make me beg for this.” Darin’s brow was furrowed, and he looked as if he might cry.

  “Okay, bro. If Maddie wants to go on a date with you, I’ll find a way to make it happen.”

  Darin laughed then, and followed it up with a full-bodied, unrestrained whoop. A little-boy reaction to a big-boy request.

  “And I don’t even have to cover my stitches,” he said, proceeding toward the bathroom.

  Grant was left standing in the middle of the room with another problem on his hands. One he had no idea how to handle.

  But there was one thing he did know. Maddie seemed to be good for his brother. He couldn’t remember the last time Darin had had so many “real” moments in one span. It was as though Maddie’s need for him—and his protectiveness of her—was bringing out some latent instincts that hadn’t been diminished by the injury to his brain.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KARA’S BAG WAS packed, and the little girl was sound asleep in her princess bed, covers tucked up to her chin, hugging Sammy.

  Maddie had long since gone home. On Friday nights she liked to stay up to watch old movies on some cable station with the younger girls. Gwen, the woman who stayed at Maddie’s place while her husband worked, was off for the night.

  Lynn didn’t even hesitate before pouring herself a glass of wine and heading to her bathroom. The rose-scented candle was already there. As was the bottle of rose-scented bubble bath. Turning on her portable music player, she found her CD of Pachelbel’s Canon renditions, stripped down and stepped into the still-running water.

  She could do all that was expected of her, do all that she expected of herself; she could contribute to society and be happy, too. She just had to make certain that she maintained control of her heart and, thus, her life.

  The warm water sluiced around her ankles as she stood naked in the tub and bent to adjust the water temperature. A tepid bath wasn’t going to do it tonight.

  She needed enough external heat to melt away the lava burning through her veins.

  It wasn’t like her to be so emotional. But as hard as she tried not to allow herself to wallow, she was angry with Brandon for breaking his promises to her—for asking her to share his life with him and then changing her life so drastically.

  She was illogically jealous of Douglas, who was able to attract her ex-husband when she couldn’t.

  She was worried about letting Kara go off with her father to another city overnight.

  And she was so turned on by Grant Bishop that the following morning loomed amid a mass of anticipation and fantasy....

  At first she thought the ringing was coming from her music player. By the second ring, she’d jumped out of the tub and grabbed her phone off the bathroom counter.

  Being on call 24/7 meant she could never have more than one glass of wine. And could never be far from her cell phone.

  “This is Lynn,” she said, pushing the answer button without looking at the LED screen.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  Pleasant shivers suffusing her body as she slid back down into the water, Lynn said, “No, it’s fine. What’s up?”

  Darin called Maddie at night because he liked her. Did Grant’s call mean that he liked Lynn, too?

  The thought was followed quickly by another. He was calling to cancel their appointment in the morning....

  She took a gulp of wine. Set the stem of the glass carefully on the edge of the tub.

  “How does a double date sound?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Darin wants to take Maddie on a date.”

  “You prevaricated, right? Led him down another path.”

  “I... Not successfully.”

  “So you’re thinking we should let them go, but go with them?”

  “I’m saying I have to help him take Maddie on a date and I’m asking you if you would like to accompany me.”

  Oh. But... The wine was too good going down.

  “You want us to be on a date, though.”

  His hesitation was sexy. And worrisome, too. What if he didn’t want to date her but felt he had to? What if he was only asking her for Maddie’s sake? What if he’d asked her because he thought doing so was the only way The Lemonade Stand would agree to let Maddie go on the date?

  Maddie didn’t need their permission to go. She wasn’t a prisoner at the Stand.

  “I want to emasculate my older brother as little as possible.” Grant’s belated answer was offered softly.

  “You want Darin and Maddie to think we’re on a date with them.”

  “I want it to be a date.”

  Oh, boy. She needed to not be naked in the bath at the moment. Covering her pubic area with her hand, as though she could stem the flow of feeling down there, and shield that part of her from a man who saw far too much, she said, “When?”

  “Tomorrow night. That’s why I’m calling tonight. Otherwise, we could have talked about this in the morning.”

  Right, so he was still coming in the morning. Good.

  “My thinking is to get this done as quickly as possible,” he said. “I don’t want the date to build into something bigger than it is.”

  Was he talking about them? Or Maddie and Darin?

  “And Kara’s going to be gone tomorrow night.”

  Maddie was her usual sitter, but not her only one. Occasionally, when Maddie was otherwise engaged, other residents watched over Kara for her.

  “Okay.”

  “Really? Just like that?”

  She sipped again. Pushed water up over her nipples, stimulating them further. “Yeah, I think so, just like that.”

  It made logical sense. Put the elephant on the table. Take the bull by the horns. Face the issue.

  “Great, then. I’ll plan some
thing. Unless you’d rather...”

  “No, you go ahead.” Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. She used to love it when Brandon surprised her with a special night out, when he took care of the details. She’d felt spoiled. Cared for.

  And she’d been left bereft when the details he’d taken care of had no longer included her.

  She been brokenhearted, too, but hearts mended. It was the way the life one was building could be completely deleted without warning, when one allowed one’s life to be tightly woven with the wants and needs of another, that had nearly killed her.

  It was that joining of hearts and lives that she would never again allow.

  But she could date. Have sex. Be friends.

  Grant asked about her culinary likes and dislikes. She told him Maddie’s, too. He asked if she liked the beach. She told him she and Maddie both liked the beach.

  He wanted to know her taste in music. She told him about Pachelbel, happening to mention that she was listening to him right then. And added, “Maddie likes country music.”

  “You’re listening to Pachelbel?”

  Scooping more water over her breasts, she reached for her wineglass and said, “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Is that water I hear?”

  She’d tried to keep her activities quiet. Until that last time. She’d forgotten.

  Taking a sip of wine, she allowed a drop to spill onto her breast. Watched it trickle into the water and set her glass back on the porcelain edge. “I don’t know, probably,” she said.

  “You listen to Pachelbel while you do dishes?”

  “I’m not doing dishes.”

  His pause was quite lengthy. She dipped her hand in the water and wiped the wine off her nipple.

  And dipped her hand in the water again, not even trying to be quiet about it.

  “You’re in the bathtub.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You leave me no choice but to picture you there.”

  “I’m under bubbles. All you’d see is white.”

  “Completely?”

  Slipping down farther into the water, she concentrated on keeping her phone dry. “Yes.”

  “Too bad.”

  Yeah, well, a girl had to do what it took to save herself from mental and emotional breakdown.