Special Forces Father

by Victoria Pade

  Sling-back sandals with nothing but sexy little crisscross straps over the base of her toes to hold them on completed the outfit, and as she took one final look at herself in the full-length mirror in the closet, the doorbell rang.

  It was the stroke of seven. Since Liam’s rented SUV hadn’t been there when she’d arrived home and she hadn’t heard him come in, she assumed he’d dressed at his brother’s place and was now at the front door to pick her up.

  Making sure to slip her phone into the small evening bag that matched her shoes, she tried to walk to the door at a moderate pace. But there was still a quickness to her step because she just couldn’t wait to get to him.

  She opened the door and there he was, tall and straight, dressed in a light gray sport coat, darker gray slacks, a crisp white shirt with a grayish cast to it and a charcoal tie. Clean-shaven, his hair neat but not slick, she was struck again by how drop-dead gorgeous he was, and it required a minute for Dani to take it all in.

  A minute he spent giving her the once-over before a grin slowly spread across his supple mouth in flattering appreciation.

  “Ohhh, very nice...” he breathed.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You clean up pretty well yourself,” she countered, even as she was thinking that as great as he looked, it was no better or worse than the first time she’d opened that door to him. The man just couldn’t look bad.

  “I made reservations for seven thirty, so if you’re ready...” he said.

  She took a deep breath to calm herself down because she was more excited for this evening than she had been since the first date she’d gone on when she was fifteen.

  You’re being silly, she told herself. It’s just dinner with some guy you’ve seen and had dinner with every day for a week.

  But still, as she stepped over the threshold and pulled the door closed behind her, it felt different.

  * * *

  “I love this place!” Dani said as they were seated at a table in the chic Sushi Sasa, a Japanese restaurant in Denver’s hip Lower Highland area.

  “I know,” Liam said. “I didn’t have any idea where to take somebody who owns a great restaurant herself, so I talked to Bryan on the sly when we were there last night. He told me.”

  Dani appreciated that Liam had gone to that length. She’d never had anyone consider that aspect of dining out with her before.

  “Do you like sushi?” she asked.

  “I learned to when I was in Japan.”

  “So you’ll know how this compares to the real thing.”

  “Compares, maybe. But I’m not an expert,” he hedged.

  They ordered drinks then—a lychee martini for Dani and Japanese beer for Liam. Over appetizers that Liam ordered, they discussed what else to have.

  When they’d made their selections, Dani said, “How did your day with your family go?” Although she was most interested in how his family had responded to his request for help with the twins.

  “It went okay,” he said without much zest before adding, “Not great, but okay. I made a couple of mistakes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The first one was that I brought up what to do with Evie and Grady when we were with Declan.”

  “And that was a mistake...why?”

  “He’s wrestling with guilt over Topher’s death, and part of that involves the little girl and the new baby Topher’s wife is pregnant with—”

  “And there you were talking about two other kids who’ve lost parents,” Dani said, predicting what he was getting at.

  “Yeah. Talking about making sure the twins are taken care of, about making it a family effort—in front of Declan—was stupid of me when I had a similar conversation with him the first day I saw him, about us doing whatever we could to help Topher’s widow and kids.”

  “Did he feel like taking care of Grady and Evie was instead of that?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a little. Maybe he thought I was asking for Grady and Evie to have priority—”

  “If they’re part of your family they kind of will, won’t they?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably inevitable—which Declan probably realized. And I think it might have made him wonder if we’ll forget Topher and his family, which we won’t, but... I don’t know. He got a lot quieter and seemed to shut down more—if that’s possible. I should have thought about what it might mean to him and talked to Kinsey and Conor when we weren’t with Declan. But I was in such a hurry to see if I could get them into this, I didn’t think about that.” He sighed, sounding rife with self-disgust. “And actually I guess the second mistake qualifies as jumping the gun and not thinking everything through, too.”

  Dani finished a sip of her martini with raised eyebrows that asked for him to expound.

  “Conor pointed out that I’m asking things of him and Kinsey before I can be sure what it is I’m asking, that I’m sort of pushing for them to make a decision...a commitment...even before I have any idea what I’m going to do.”

  Liam went on to explain and as Dani listened she realized that she’d jumped the gun, too. It hadn’t occurred to her that Liam hadn’t made any decisions about himself or his future with the kids. She, too, had been so eager for a comfortable solution for Evie and Grady that when it seemed like he’d come up with a plan of action providing it, she’d just been relieved.

  “He’s right, isn’t he?” she said about Conor’s point of view and balking at being pressured to make some kind of commitment to the twins before Liam had.

  “He is.”

  “So what happens to Evie and Grady is still up in the air,” Dani said, feeling as if a little of the wind had been taken out of her sails.

  “It’s less up in the air if they’re mine. Then it’s a matter of if I’m asking my family to look after them just until I can get situated to take over myself, or if I’m asking for something more indefinite.”

  “But if they aren’t yours...”

  “Conor is right and I don’t really have any business asking him and Kinsey to become foster parents on their own at this point. Conor didn’t shoot down the idea. And neither did Kinsey. They both said they’d talk to their other halves. But I can see now that it’s a different—a bigger—suggestion. And at first it seemed like a good idea, but I have to admit that when I said it, it felt kind of...off. I don’t really understand it. I guess I have more thinking to do.”

  “Sure,” Dani said, disheartened. And worrying all over again that her young charges’ future was hanging in the balance.

  “I’m not just giving up, Dani,” Liam said, as if he saw the reemergence of her stress over the kids’ future. “But I do have to make up my mind about what I’m willing to do myself before I can go to my family again.”

  Dani nodded, and as she studied him across the table she could only hope for the best. Again.

  Their sushi arrived and after pointing out what was what, their waiter left and Liam said, “Has this been mistake number three today? Has talking about this now wrecked tonight?”

  “It didn’t help,” she said with a humorless laugh.

  “I’m sorry. I wanted tonight to be a treat—just you and me, free as birds. I didn’t mean to bring it down.”

  At least he knew how to apologize in a tone that made her believe he genuinely meant it.

  As they began to try the sushi he said, “Did I hear you and Bryan talking about the offer on the restaurant last night?”

  Dani could tell that he wanted to get them past the last topic, but it must not have occurred to him that this one wasn’t going to lighten things up.

  Still, she went with it and said, “Apparently dragging my feet making a decision caused the offer to go up. By a full 50 percent.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “A lot,” Dani confirmed.

  “Does that sweeten the pot or thicken
the plot?” he asked.

  “Both,” she said with another laugh. “It’s too much money not to consider. I need to really be sure I want to run the restaurant before I can say no to it. I don’t want to be making meatballs one day and fantasizing about all that money that could be sitting in a bank account as a big fat cushion that would have let me work with kids instead and wishing that’s what I’d done.”

  “Would your grandmother be happy thinking that selling the restaurant would be the cushion that lets you go on working with kids?” he suggested.

  “Maybe,” Dani admitted.

  “So you have as much weighing on you as I do,” he concluded, taking another California roll.

  Dani took one of those, too, thinking that maybe it was impossible for either of them to have even a temporary reprieve when they were both facing so many heavy decisions.

  Then Liam said, “But tonight we’re free birds! Let’s give ourselves a break from the rest so we can come at it fresher this week when it’s all going to hit the fan.”

  It all was going to hit the fan this week when the DNA results were in, when Grady and Evie’s future would again be a court decision that Dani feared could land them in the system. When those results either made a father out of Liam or would put his vow to help the kids to the test.

  He didn’t give Dani the opportunity not to switch gears, though, because in a genuinely lighter vein he said, “I told you who my first love was. Tell me about yours.”

  She’d been so excited about this dinner tonight. She couldn’t let it be ruined. So she played along. “You mean after Bryan?” she said, only half joking.

  Liam’s eyebrows shot up. “Bryan was your first love?”

  “I was almost seven and he was very sensitive to my feelings over losing my parents.”

  “So you fell romantically in love with him?” Liam said.

  Dani laughed. “It seemed romantic at seven,” she contended.

  “And now?”

  “I love Bryan like a brother. Maybe more because we don’t have any sibling rivalry. But there’s nothing romantic about it.”

  “Okay, so your second first love,” Liam prompted while they continued to work their way through the platter of sushi.

  “That was a crush when I was ten on the delinquent son of the carpenter who my grandparents hired to build the booths at the restaurant. The carpenter owned a small farm and the handyman stuff was the supplement to the farm’s income. I don’t remember what the handyman dad’s name was, but the delinquent son was Neville—”

  “How much of a delinquent can a ten-year-old named Neville be?” Liam teased.

  “I was ten, he was sixteen. And he was enough of a delinquent that he’d been kicked out of school, so his dad brought him to work as his assistant. That’s how I got to see him. He was a very bad boy,” Dani said as if she was dishing up a torrid scandal. “He had all the cowboy stuff going—a few muscles from the farm work and he wore Western shirts and tight jeans and pointy-toed boots and a cowboy hat with sweat stains—”

  “You were turned on by sweat stains?” Liam asked with another laugh.

  “Oh, yeah, it seemed so manly,” she gushed. “And he was cute and insolent and just simmering with teenage angst and anger and rebellion—” Dani sighed at the memory. “I followed him around like a puppy.”

  Liam laughed and those joy lines she liked so much formed at the corners of his eyes. “Now that’s a love story,” he judged facetiously.

  They ate their sushi but Dani opted for leaving most of the spicy tuna rolls for Liam because they were a little too hot for her.

  After that Liam amended his inquiry into her past again and said, “How about the first love that was reciprocated?”

  “That didn’t happen until ninth grade. Parker Fitzpatrick and it almost caused a rift between Bryan and me because Bryan loved him, too. But Parker loved me.”

  “Loved loved?” Liam asked with innuendo.

  “I did not lose my virginity to Parker, if that’s what you’re getting at. But we did go together until junior year...”

  “When it ended badly?” he guessed from her ominous tone.

  “When he decided he might have developed a crush on Bryan after all.”

  “Ooo...” Liam said as if absorbing a hit.

  “Yeah. That was as hard on me at that point as me being with Parker was on Bryan at first,” Dani said as she finished the salmon sashimi.

  “And where did the confused Parker ultimately land?”

  “Gay. He and Bryan dated for a while and the whole thing kind of shook my self-image for the rest of high school, especially when some not-so-nice kids made me the butt of jokes about how I turned guys gay...”

  Liam’s laugh was sympathetic again. “Am I just on a roll today when it comes to making mistakes with what I say?”

  Dani laughed, too. “No. That was all too long ago to bother me anymore. It just isn’t as pretty as your first love story with the one hometown girl you dated until you both went to college. My past is a little more checkered.”

  “I don’t think it qualifies as that,” he judged.

  Dani took one last California roll and announced that she’d had enough, leaving the remaining variety of three rolls for Liam, who took them onto his plate as he said, “Did you rebound in college?”

  “That followed a more regular dating zigzag path that wasn’t particularly noteworthy.”

  They’d both finished eating by then and even though Liam tried to talk her into dessert he didn’t succeed, so he paid the check and they headed back to the Freelander house.

  Along the way they discussed how the sushi had compared to what he’d had around the world and Liam rated it in the top five.

  Then they were home again and he was walking her to the door where he’d already assured her he would leave her if that was what she wanted.

  When they reached the front door he said, “Well, this is it...” and he did kiss her.

  It was a leisurely kiss with lips parted but with no claim to more.

  Before he ended the kiss and grinned down at her.

  “That felt like an invitation...”

  It should have—she’d put her heart and soul into it.

  “Was it?” he asked in a quietly husky voice.

  She asked herself the same thing.

  But as she stood there looking up into those blue eyes in the glow of the outdoor house lights, drinking in the sight of his dark hair and chiseled features, she was thinking that tomorrow everything could change. DNA results could come in and the future would take over.

  And what Bryan had said about her regretting it if she didn’t see things through with Liam was true. Because there was no question that she wanted him. More than she’d ever wanted anyone.

  A single sweet memory to take with her out of what had been such a rough time these last several months...

  So she smiled back at him and said, “I think it is an invitation.”

  “You can’t just think,” he warned. “You have to be sure.”

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him to show just how sure she was.

  Then she turned and punched in the code to unlock the door and went inside, casting him an expectant glance over her shoulder to let him know to follow.

  He laughed in a way that said game on and stepped over the threshold, closing the door firmly behind them before he grasped her upper arm and spun her into a third kiss that made the other two pale in comparison. His mouth opened over hers and his tongue mounted a sexy assault so fierce that he had to catch her head in his hand to support it against the onslaught.

  But Dani gave as good as she got, clamping a firm hand of her own to the back of his neck.

  His other arm went around the small of her back and hers went to his chest, where that sport coat suddenly seemed far too bulky.
So while her mouth went on answering the call of his, she let him know the jacket had to go by snaking her hands underneath it to his shoulders and pushing it partially off them.

  With his cooperation, she managed to remove it. Then she tossed it onto the table beside the door.

  She returned both of her hands to his neck then, one rising higher into his coarse hair while they went on kissing like two people meeting again after a long and lonely separation.

  But only until Liam went from kissing her mouth to kissing the side of her neck as he said in an even huskier voice, “I found sheets in a linen closet upstairs and changed the ones on my bed this morning before I left...”

  Dani laughed. “Oh, did you...” she said.

  She felt him smile against her skin before he flicked the tip of his tongue to it. “Just in case,” he said.

  “I do love clean sheets...” she responded softly.

  That was all he needed to hear to grab her hand and take her up the stairs to the guest room, a step ahead of her the entire way, unwittingly providing her with the chance to check out his great rear end.

  The guest room was awash in moonlight coming in through its glass walls and the skylight overhead. But Liam flipped the switch that mechanically closed the curtains all the way around them for privacy, leaving only the starlit sky overhead visible and bathing them in just enough illumination to satisfy her desire to see him.

  He closed the bedroom door behind them, too. Then he leaned that strong, straight back against it, and while his eyes held her in the heat of his gaze, he got rid of his shoes and socks.

  Dani took that same opportunity to step out of her sandals, feeling somehow more vulnerable in her bare feet and missing those two inches of height as he came close again and his over-six-foot frame dwarfed her.

  But while he was imposing, there was nothing threatening in him raising only one hand to gently brush the backs of his fingers on her cheek while he leaned over and again kissed the side of her neck ever so lightly.

  “You have no idea how much I want you,” he said, as if it was taking everything he had to contain himself.

  Dani tilted her head to allow freer access to her neck, bringing her own hands to the top button of his shirt to unfasten it.