“Don’t make this any more complicated than it already is,” she pleaded softly.
“Do you think I chose for this to happen?” he asked, the husky tone of his voice making the words feel as intimate as a caress.
“There is no this.”
He took another step closer. “Are you saying that if I touched you now, you could just walk away?”
“I would walk away,” she insisted.
And she did just that before he could prove her wrong.
Chapter Eight
Zach let Paige go.
He could have stopped her. He didn’t doubt that for a minute. He could have blocked her path and made her face not just him but the feelings that were between them. Feelings that he knew she wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
Feelings that he wasn’t sure he was ready to acknowledge.
That was why he let her go. And why he wouldn’t get any sleep right now knowing that Paige was in her bed just across the hall.
So he headed to the kitchen instead, and found his mother there with a cup of decaf coffee and a slice of leftover lemon meringue pie.
Her brows rose when he walked into the room.
“I can’t believe you’re not exhausted,” she said. “I am exhausted,” he admitted. “I just can’t sleep.”
“I guess it’s not surprising that you would have a lot on your mind.”
He found the pie in the refrigerator and cut himself a piece. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Emma.”
“If you’d known that your girlfriend was pregnant and didn’t tell us, I’d be kicking your ass,” she told him. “But under the circumstances, there’s no need to apologize.”
Her no-nonsense attitude and unconditional love were only two of the things he loved about her, and as he sat down across from her and scooped up a forkful of tangy lemon filling, he thought about how truly lucky he was to have been given such wonderful parents.
But then she asked, “Did you love Emma’s mother?”
And he remembered that, wonderful though she was, she didn’t always understand the concept of boundaries.
He winced as his fork clattered against the plate. “Mom—”
“I know love isn’t always necessary—or even desired—for two people to be intimate,” Kathleen said. “I just wondered about your feelings for the woman who had your child.”
“I cared about her,” he said at last.
“But you love Paige,” his mother guessed.
He’d only recently admitted—and only to himself—that he had feelings for Emma’s guardian. He wasn’t yet ready to put a label on those feelings, and he certainly wasn’t ready to make that emotional leap.
So instead of admitting or denying her claim, he said, “I’ve never known anyone like her. She’s beautiful and smart, compassionate and caring. She’s ready to change her life for Emma—in a lot of ways, she already has.”
Unlike Heather, who’d claimed to love him but hadn’t been willing to make the slightest compromise for their future together. So long as he’d been in training in California, everything had been great. The minute he’d been posted out of state, she’d turned her back on him.
“So maybe it’s not surprising that you’d fall in love with her,” his mother noted. “But how does she feel about you?”
“You mean you haven’t got that all figured out?”
Her lips curved in response to his teasing, but the smile quickly faded.
“She’s guarded,” she said, her tone reflecting her worry. “She’s wonderful with Emma and it’s obvious that she loves that little girl, but it’s not easy to know what she’s thinking or feeling about anything else.”
“I guess you have her figured out,” Zach mused.
His mother shook her head. “She’s even more guarded around you, and I can’t figure out if that’s because of Emma or if there’s some other reason for her caution.”
“She has issues with my career,” Zach admitted.
His mother frowned. “What kind of issues?”
“I don’t know exactly. I know her father was in the military and she had something of a transient childhood.”
“And she doesn’t want that for Emma,” she guessed.
He nodded.
“I can understand why that would be a concern.”
“I thought you’d be on my side.”
“I want what’s best for my granddaughter.”
He smiled. “And you don’t have any doubts that she is your granddaughter, do you?”
“Not from the first minute she opened her eyes.”
“I felt the same way when I saw her. I was stunned, more than a little panicked, but absolutely certain that she was mine.”
“But Paige still isn’t convinced.”
“I think Paige doesn’t want to acknowledge that Emma is my daughter because she’s worried about the repercussions from a legal standpoint.”
“You know, if you let Paige know that you want to be with her as much as you want to be with your daughter, you might alleviate a lot of her worry,” his mother suggested.
“I’m working on it,” he admitted.
“Then I have no doubt you’ll succeed.”
The next night there was a family dinner to celebrate Zach’s homecoming, which gave Paige the opportunity to meet the rest of his siblings.
His sister Lauryn showed up with her husband, Sam, and their two kids, four-year-old Regan and two-and-half-year-old Shane. She remembered Zach telling her that Lauryn was a doctor and she learned through conversation that her husband was an anesthesiologist and that they’d met, not surprisingly, at the hospital.
Zach’s middle sister, Jocelyn, looked more like a cover model than a college professor, although her boyfriend, Luke, definitely looked like the accountant that he was. Or maybe Paige just had a chip on her shoulder as far as his profession was concerned because Ashley’s cheating ex-fiancé had been an accountant, too. Of course, everything had worked out for her cousin in the end, so she decided she would make a conscious effort not to hold Luke’s choice of career against him.
Hayden was the last to show up, which was surprising because she was the only one who still lived at home. Paige was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for the salad, when Zach’s youngest sister finally arrived.
“Something smells good,” she said, and leaned over the stove to kiss her mother’s cheek.
“Chicken Parmesan,” Kathleen told her.
“Mmm. One of my favorites.”
“Anything’s your favorite, so long as you don’t have to cook it,” her mother noted.
“True enough.” Hayden snagged a slice of cucumber from Paige’s chopping board.
Her mother slapped her hand. “You can wait until we sit down to eat like everyone else.”
“When will that be?” Hayden wanted to know.
“We’d be eating now if you’d been here earlier to help,” Kathleen told her.
“I’ll put the rolls on the table,” Hayden said and, taking a basket in each hand, ducked out of the kitchen to do just that.
Kathleen sighed. “Sometimes I wonder where I went wrong with that girl.”
Paige dumped the veggies into the enormous bowl of lettuce that had been washed and torn earlier. “I only hope I can do half as good a job raising Emma as you’ve done with all of your children.”
Zach’s mom smiled. “I know I don’t really have cause to complain, but as a mother, I can’t seem to stop worrying about her—worrying about all of them, actually.” She glanced over at Paige. “Of course, I’m sure you’ve learned that with Emma already.”
Paige shrugged. “I’m not really Emma’s mother,” she felt compelled to remind her.
“You are now, in every way that matters,” Kathleen told her, then went to call the rest of the family for dinner.
Dinner was, as Crawford family gatherings usually were, a noisy event. It was also a belated surprise celebration of Emma’s first birthday, although Zach hadn’t told Pa
ige what he’d planned because he’d wanted it to be a surprise for her, too.
“I know it’s not really her birthday,” Zach said, watching as Emma grabbed for a big pink frosting flower from the top of the enormous cake his mother had baked and decorated. “But because I wasn’t around when it was, I wanted to do something special for her.”
“I’d say you succeeded,” Paige told him.
“She does look like she’s having fun.”
“Are you kidding? She’s the center of attention and her whole body is revved up on sugar—of course she’s having fun.”
Zach noted that while Paige continued to watch Emma, her own plate of cake sat untouched beside her.
“I know she’s too young to remember this day,” she said a few minutes later, “but it says a lot that you went to the effort.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Are you kidding? The balloons and party hats and the cake. Not to mention the presents that you and your parents and your sisters all lavished upon her. Now I know what your mysterious errands were all about this morning.”
“Well, what kind of a first birthday would it be without a party?” Zach asked.
Her lips curved a little in response to his question, but he noticed that the smile didn’t quite chase the shadows from her eyes.
“Will you promise me something?” she asked him.
“Sure,” he agreed easily, ready to promise her anything.
“Promise that you won’t ever forget her birthday.”
“Of course I won’t,” he said, stunned that she would even suggest such a thing.
“I mean it, Zach. I know there will be times that you won’t be able to celebrate with her, but wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, try to at least give her a call, let her know you’re thinking about her.”
Something in the earnestness of her tone warned Zach that Paige wasn’t just thinking about Emma now, and although he’d suspected that she had some unresolved issues with her father, it was even more apparent to him now that she was still carrying the scars of his disinterest and neglect.
“I promise that Emma will never have cause to doubt how important she is to me,” he told her.
Paige nodded, apparently satisfied.
Zach was anything but, and his curiosity about her past—and her relationship with her own father in particular—had definitely been piqued.
The day after Emma’s birthday party, Paige decided to take Hayden up on her offer of a tour of the winery. But when Zach’s sister was summoned to participate in an overseas conference call, Justin Crawford stepped in to take over.
The first time Paige had met him, she’d realized she was looking at the man Zach would be about twenty-five years in the future. Justin was as tall as his son and solidly built, with a little more gray sprinkled through his hair and deeper lines at the corners of his blue eyes. But he was still a very good-looking man and absolutely charming.
He easily picked up where his daughter had left off, but whereas Hayden had stuck to the facts, Justin liked to mix family history in with details about the wine-making process.
“Hayden is the fourth generation of Crawfords to make wine at Stonechurch Estates Winery,” Justin informed her proudly.
“It must be nice to have a legacy to pass on to your children,” Paige commented.
“It’s as much a responsibility as a legacy,” Zach’s father told her. “And for a while, Kate and I weren’t sure any of the kids wanted it.
“From the time he was knee-high, Zach was determined to fly airplanes, Lauryn was born to be a doctor and Jocelyn always wanted to be a teacher. As for Hayden, well, let’s just say that Kate and I went through a period where we thought our youngest daughter’s sole goal in life was to turn our hair gray.
“And then, just when we were convinced she would never find her focus, she came home from college one day and said ‘I want to make wine.’ At first, I wasn’t sure she meant it. And for a long while, I worried that she’d taken it as the easy route.”
“Hard to imagine, considering how passionate she is about the business,” Paige noted.
“And I’m grateful that she is. I hated to think that almost a hundred years of making wine would be lost when I retired.”
“You spend an awful lot of time in the winery for someone who is supposedly retired.”
He chuckled. “You’ve been talking to my wife.”
“I have,” she admitted. “But from what I can see, she’s just as busy as you are.”
“It’s hard to cut yourself off from something that was your life for so long,” he said, just as Hayden returned to the office to retrieve some files.
“No one’s asking you to cut yourself off,” his daughter said. “But a little easing away would be appreciated.”
“We’ll be out of your hair for two whole weeks in November,” he reminded her.
“If I haven’t pulled it all out by then,” Hayden grumbled.
“Where are you going in November?” Paige asked.
“Kate and I are escaping on a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate our fortieth anniversary,” Justin replied.
“Forty years,” Paige mused. “That definitely sounds like something to celebrate.”
“If he lives that long,” Hayden muttered. “I might bludgeon him with a wine bottle and stuff his body in an oak cask before then.”
“You wouldn’t do such a thing,” her father said confidently. “You wouldn’t risk contaminating the wine.”
His daughter’s smile was grudging. “True enough. And I wouldn’t do it before the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition because I want to see you eat your words when Hayden’s Reserve gets rave reviews from all of the judges.”
“I’ll happily do so, as long as I have a nice glass of Stonechurch Estates merlot to wash them down with.”
Hayden shook her head, tucked the files under her arm and walked out, Justin’s chuckle following behind her.
“Did I miss something there?” Paige asked.
“She’s been experimenting with a new vintage,” Justin explained.
“And you disapprove?”
“On the contrary—I’m both pleased with and proud of what she’s done, but when Hayden first developed the wine, she wanted me to take the lead with it.
“I wanted her to have enough faith in it to put her name on it, and now she has. Now she’s as much a winemaker as Zach is a pilot,” he said. “Of course, a career shouldn’t completely define a person, but the right career is an important key to a happy life.”
“The first time I met Zach, he was in uniform,” Paige told his dad. “And I thought that uniform completely defined who he was. But seeing him here, with his family, I’ve realized it’s only a part of the whole.”
She’d also realized that she liked the man he was. His obvious attachment to and affection for his family, his sense of loyalty and responsibility, his sense of humor. There was a lot more to him than she’d originally thought, and her feelings for him were getting more and more complicated.
Since taking custody of Emma, she hadn’t had the time or energy to pursue any kind of personal relationships. Nor had she missed the casual flirtations and meaningless hookups that were so prevalent in the dating scene. And truthfully, she’d never had a relationship that was anything more than that. Not since she’d gotten over her infatuation with Matt Sanders, anyway.
Her feelings for Zach were already stronger and deeper than anything she’d ever felt for any other man, and she knew that if she wasn’t careful, she could fall for not only Zach but his whole family.
“Just as, I’m sure,” Justin continued, drawing her attention back to their conversation, “being a lawyer is only part of who you are.”
“And a lesser part than it used to be,” Paige admitted.
Justin nodded his understanding. “I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been for you to juggle child care with a demanding career.”
“There are days when I wish I
’d chosen corporate law instead of family law,” she admitted. “Because I go home to Emma and I just can’t understand how some parents get so caught up in their personal grievances and demands that they lose sight of what’s best for the children.”
“Do you know much about other kinds of law?” he asked curiously.
“Why—are you looking for some legal advice?”
He smiled. “No, but I have a friend whose son is looking to take a new partner into his firm.”
Paige was humbled by the suggestion that he might recommend her. “But…I’m not even licensed to practice in California.”
“How do you get licensed?”
“I’d have to write the state bar exam.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty big deal,” she told him.
“Well, I just thought I’d put the idea out there,” he said. “Because we’d sure love to be able to see more of you and your little girl.”
After her tour of the winery, Paige spent some time playing in the pool with Emma. Zach’s mom returned from a luncheon meeting with a customer just as they were drying off. When she saw an obviously sleepy Emma rubbing her eyes, she asked if she could take the little girl inside to get her ready for her nap. Because Kathleen had been nothing but gracious and helpful, Paige didn’t see how she could refuse.
So she sat alone with her thoughts—and still in her two-piece bathing suit—when Zach came down to the pool a few minutes later. She glanced over at the chair where she’d left her towel but knew that going out of her way to cover up her body would only draw more attention to it. Besides, the black halter-style top and boy-short bottoms were actually quite modest.
Or so she believed until Zach’s eyes skimmed over her in a way that made her feel as if she was completely naked.
“You’ve been in the pool,” he noted.
She nodded. “Emma loves the water.”
“Where is Emma?”
“Napping.”
He sat down beside her, nudged her shoulder gently with his own. “Wanna go skinny-dipping?”
“No. But thanks for the offer,” she said drily.
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