And been thoroughly ravished by in return, don’t forget.
Heat exploded in him as the memories hit—the feel of her, the taste of her, Gemma kissing him in turn, caressing him, using her hands and mouth on him. He fought it down; it wasn’t like they could indulge again with the girls right here and so wide-awake. But he wanted to. Oh, he wanted to.
He cleared his tight throat. Swallowed. Managed to speak. “A little risky these days, proposals.”
“Exactly.”
Wait, what? Was that what she was saying, that she simply didn’t expect him to propose with a serial killer running amok? That if it wasn’t for the guy out murdering grooms, she’d expect it?
He started to ask, then stopped himself. He didn’t want to ruin this wonderful feeling by getting into some heavy morning-after discussion. So he said nothing, hoping she’d let it drop. And then Lucia intervened by picking up something shiny from the bed and passing it to her twin. Zita reached for it, had it, and he wondered rather foggily when they’d perfected that maneuver.
Then he realized what it was. A condom wrapper.
“Damn,” he said, forgetting any language caution, and grabbed it away from Zita. The tiny girl gave a start, then her face scrunched up. Dante knew a wail was forming and nearly panicked.
Gemma laughed, full throated and genuinely amused. Zita looked at her, the momentum of her wail interrupted by the cheerful sound.
“You startled her with that quick move,” Gemma said. Then she laughed again, and Zita changed course and began to giggle herself. “Really, Dante, you acted as if you thought she knew what it was.”
“I...” He felt rather sheepish now and crumpled the wrapper in his hand.
“I think you have a few years before you have to have that conversation with them.”
He stared at her, then the twins, horror-struck. A conversation about condoms? His imagination spun dizzily, but he could not picture that. Or a million other things that now awaited him.
But for now Zita was chattering, not wailing, at least.
He looked back at Gemma. “Thanks for...forestalling that storm.”
“They respond very well to laughter, if you get to it soon enough. But once they’re launched, you’re done for a while. Especially that one,” she said, nodding at Zita. “She’s harder to talk down than this one.”
For a moment he just looked at her. Then, slowly, he shook his head in wonder.
“What?” she asked.
“A week ago I couldn’t have told them apart on a bet. Now...thanks to you, I can guess right half the time without even checking that eyebrow.”
She colored slightly, looking pleased, but she said only, “They have different personalities.”
“And a week ago I would have laughed at the idea of six-month-old babies having personalities at all.”
Lucia, on her stomach on the bed, lifted herself up with her arms, tried to balance on one and reach out toward him.
“Yes, Lucia, your uncle Dante is silly, isn’t he, thinking you don’t have a personality all your own,” she said in that singsong voice the twins obviously loved.
“He’s silly, period,” Dante said wryly, but he reached down and picked Lucia up and smiled himself when she cooed delightedly. Even Flash got into the act, rising and coming over to rest his wrinkles, as Dante frequently teased him, on the bed. He glanced at Gemma, who looked over at the dog and laughed. God, he could get used to that laugh.
“Is he allowed?”
“Sometimes. Special circumstances.”
“Well, I think this qualifies.”
“Can’t argue that. Come on up, my furry friend.”
It was a king-size bed, but the five of them filled it to near overflowing. And Dante was starting to feel like a commercial selling...something. But it felt good. Really good. And when Lucia babbled happily at him, he grinned at her and babbled back nonsensically.
When he looked up and saw Gemma smiling at them both as she took her own turn cuddling Zita, he was seized with an urge stronger than anything he’d known since the day he’d become determined to make it as a cop. The urge to hang on to this moment, this treasure of a moment when four disparate people—and a dog—had come together so unexpectedly.
The fiery joy of last night merged with the quieter joy of this moment, and he didn’t even know what to call the result.
Except a family.
Chapter 28
As if to make up for the night they’d been allowed to spend so blissfully together, the girls seemed determined to make the next week as hard as possible. Between Zita’s growing mobility and Lucia’s growing dexterity, watchful eyes were required at all times. Yet Gemma found she didn’t mind at all, even though she was tired. Instead she found herself admiring their ingenuity in exploring the world around them.
As for her and Dante... It had been a bit awkward that second evening, because Dante wouldn’t talk about the amazing night—and the surprisingly pleasant morning—they’d spent. It had taken her most of the day to figure out he didn’t want to assume anything. But she knew what she wanted, and, once the girls were down for the night, she had gone after it in a very Gemma-like way.
“So are you having regrets now?”
He’d given her a startled look, and his immediate “No!” assuaged her concern.
“You had me worried.”
“How could I possibly regret...that?” he said, glancing toward his bedroom door.
She’d given him her best slow smile. “It was pretty amazing.”
“It was,” he’d said solemnly, “the most amazing night of my life.”
She’d felt herself blush and didn’t care. She, who had always tried to come off as light, airy and not caring, didn’t care if this man knew just how much she was feeling.
“Does that mean you want a repeat?”
His answer to that had been to drop everything he’d been doing and sweep her literally off her feet and carry her to his bed. Where she had quickly discovered it had not been a fluke, the circumstances or some odd alignment of the planets—it had simply been that she and Dante were incredible together.
And they’d proven it time and again over the last week.
A movement on the floor now tugged her out of the hot, vivid, luscious memories. She resisted for a moment, savoring the memory of waking up with Dante’s arm holding her in the curve of his body, but then realized some action was needed.
“Oh, no, you clever little widget,” she said with a laugh as Lucia managed to reach Flash’s rope toy on the floor and immediately directed it to her mouth. She quickly swept the tiny girl up in her arms and spun her around, making her laugh before she could cry at the removal of her fascinating discovery. Gemma grabbed the toy and tossed it back to Flash, who was in his chair.
“Here you go, boy,” she said.
The dog merely gave one of his patented long-suffering sighs, but he added a small whuff of sound.
“Nice job.” Dante’s voice came from the couch, where he was once more ensconced with his laptop, although it didn’t seem he was doing much but watching the same pieces of video over and over. “That was as close as he gets to thank you.”
She laughed again. It was funny how much she was laughing when she was so tired. She turned to Flash. “You’re welcome, sir,” she said in the poshest accent she could manage. “I’d curtsy, but I’m afraid I’d drop your cousin here.”
Dante laughed then. She remembered the first time she’d heard that genuine, pure laugh, for the first time not tinged with an undertone of worry that she guessed was from what had happened to his life.
“That was nice,” she said to him.
He blinked. “What?”
“That laugh. I’d like to hear it again.”
“I...” He stopped, as if flustered. She just smiled at him.
> “Know what else I’d like?”
She leaned over and whispered a very sexy suggestion in his ear. She heard him suck in a harsh breath, followed by a muttered oath.
“Nap time,” she promised.
“Wear them out,” he said. “Fast.”
“You sure? You look already worn-out.”
“I’ll manage,” he said with a crooked grin.
She grinned back, then turned herself to indeed wearing out the girls, but kept up a conversation with him as well. “I thought they pulled you off that case you were on.”
“They did.” He glanced over at her. “And put out a press release that I’m on leave, with my...changed circumstances as the excuse.” His gaze flicked to the girls, then back to her. “So the shooter will hopefully think it was message received.”
“You mean he’ll think you backed off and back off himself?”
Dante nodded.
She smiled wryly. “Shows what he knows.”
“Meaning?”
“You are not the kind of guy who backs off.”
He stared at her. “But he came after you and the girls. That makes it different.”
“I won’t say I wasn’t terrified—I was. But I knew you’d come, just like now I know you’ll do what you have to in order to keep us safe.”
She said it simply, because she knew it was true. This was the kind of man Dante Mancuso was.
Unlike Dev, who wouldn’t do anything that inconvenienced him unless there was something he could get out of it.
It wasn’t unlike other thoughts that had popped into her head lately. But this was the first time she had really let Dev into her mind, pictured him, thought about him and felt...nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was as if that wild, mad desperation to make him love her the way she’d loved him had never existed.
Loved. She’d even thought it in the past tense.
“Gemma?” He said her name softly, in that way that made her shiver. She refocused on him. “Where’d you go? You were a million miles away.”
“Just in another lifetime,” she said. “And wondering how I could have been so blind.”
“Blind?”
“About why I was with Dev.” Something in the way he was looking at her made her able to admit to him what she’d half suspected all along. “And why he was with me. I think...maybe it was because his father approved. Sometimes I felt like...a front.”
“A front? Why?”
“He always wanted us to be seen together. And he always made a point of telling his father every place we went.”
“Maybe he was proud of it. Of you.”
He said it like a man who was proud of her, and that warmed her more than she could say.
“I thought so, at first. But when we were alone, he was...never really there. Not a hundred percent, anyway.”
Dante frowned. “That, I don’t get.”
And again he warmed her, with the implication he couldn’t see how anyone could not be completely with her.
“I started wondering if his father’s approval meant too much to him. And there were other things that made me think maybe...” She took a deep breath. “I think he wanted somebody else.”
“Somebody his father wouldn’t approve of?”
She nodded again.
“Ouch,” he said.
And to her own amazement, given how much that suspicion had once hurt, she smiled. “I went to my cousin Quinn, like an idiot, and asked her about it.” She put on her snootiest voice. “Her being inappropriate and yet snagging the guy she fell in love with.”
“Sometimes you scare me, Colton,” he said warily.
“I try not to be that person, really, but I didn’t understand then what I do now.”
“Which is?”
She fastened her gaze on him steadily. “That Quinn was right. The heart wants what it wants, no rhyme or reason except chemistry.”
“And your heart wants...?”
He sounded utterly, completely neutral, so neutral she knew he was working at it. But she saw the tightness of his jaw, and his utter stillness, showing how much that level tone was costing him. And that moved her beyond anything Dev had ever said or done.
“It was my pride that wanted Dev. Because he didn’t want me.”
“His loss.”
She smiled at that. “Yes, actually. But my gain. Because now I know what it feels like to have what my heart truly wants.”
He stared at her. She saw him swallow. He was clearly at a loss for words, but unlike Dev, she knew he would find them eventually. And when he did, they would be the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.
She let him off the hook by asking briskly, “Now, what’s bugging you so much about those videos—security videos, aren’t they?—you keep watching?”
He looked startled, then relieved. Probably that she wasn’t going to demand a similar sentiment from him. And it was odd—normally she would have. But with Dante, she was content to wait. It was very unlike her. But she was also finding she liked the person she was with him much better than the person she’d been with Dev.
“Yes. And just...frustrating. Because what I need isn’t there.”
“Isn’t there, or isn’t shown?”
“Both.” He jammed a hand through his hair in that way he had when he was thinking hard. “And that narrows it down to needing a court order for phone records and a near-impossible amount of grunt work.”
“Grunt work?”
He hesitated. She realized she was asking about a police case, and he probably was deciding what he could and couldn’t tell her.
“Something happened during that power outage last week. When they did the repairs of the damage my brother’s accident caused.”
He said it so evenly it took a moment for it to register that he was talking about the crash his brother and sister-in-law had died in.
“And that’s why there’s no video of it,” he finished.
Gemma was surprised at the sudden rush of emotion she felt. For him to talk about it so calmly, when it was that accident that had so totally upended his life... She stared at him with a combination of admiration and an aching sort of...not sympathy, but something deeper. How did police officers do that—see what they saw all the time and stay at all human, let alone go out and do it all over again?
But then she thought about what he’d actually said. “You mean it was just coincidence? That whatever it is, it happened just at that time?”
“I don’t believe much in coincidence.”
“But wouldn’t that mean whoever did it would have to know when they were going to shut the power off?”
“Exactly. Hence the grunt work. Working through who would know, and how.”
“But...people call about power outages all the time. That could be thousands of people.”
“Yes. But most of them just get the recorded updates, which are pretty general.”
“What about on social media? Did they announce the shutdown there?”
“Checked. They did, but they gave themselves a two-hour window in case they ran into complications. Same thing they told our day-watch dispatcher, and he told whoever asked him. But my guy knew down to the second.”
“How?”
“Best guess, he knows somebody at the utility and called.”
“And that’s why you need the phone records.” He nodded. “But there would still be a ton of calls to go through.”
“Yes, although our tech could do a computer run fairly quickly.” He hesitated again, then said, “Especially since there is a...small pool of possible suspects.”
Something in the way he said that made her frown as much as the puzzle. “So you’d need to...what, cross-reference the calls they got with your suspects?”
“Yes. And a court order for those call records is goin
g to take a while.”
He jammed a hand through his hair again. Gemma felt a tingling in her fingers as she remembered clutching at that thick, silky hair while his body and hands and mouth had been driving her to madness.
She walked toward the kitchen counter where she’d left her phone.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Calling my sister Layla.” His brows lowered in puzzlement. “Layla Colton, Colton Energy VP?” she elaborated as she picked up the phone.
He stared at her. Then, softly, he said, “Sometimes I still forget who you really are.”
“I think,” she said, equally softly, “you’re the only one who really knows who I am.”
For a moment they just stood there, gazes locked, phone in Gemma’s hand forgotten.
Then he said, “Maybe because you don’t show it to everyone. You just let them think what they think. It’s a good disguise. And useful. If people can’t see behind the facade, or don’t even bother to look, then that’s on them.”
She wanted to run back across the room and grab him in a fierce hug. Maybe drag him back to the bedroom. But she heard the girls starting to fuss a bit, and that told her time was limited, so instead called Layla’s number.
“She should be able to at least get the numbers. Would that help? Without names attached?”
“Of course it would. I have the numbers of most of the...suspect pool.”
“So if one of those numbers called the utility...”
“Then I’d have a solid piece of evidence. But it would be inadmissible without that court order.”
She thought for a moment. “You can trust Layla. She can keep a secret with the best of them. I’m her sister and I have no idea why she agreed to marry Dev’s father,” she added wryly.
“I’m not questioning that. If you say she can be trusted, I believe you.”
When she had a moment, she thought, she’d savor that simple fact, that he believed her that easily. But for now she just said, “She could run a search on the list. What if you gave her the numbers you have and Layla only said yes or no? Then you’d know if it’s worth waiting for the court order.”
Colton's Twin Secrets Page 20