Tempting as Sin

by Rosalind James

  “It’s the hard one for Lily,” Rafe informed her. “And it may be the hard one for you. It’s hard to believe in forever when you’ve had too many endings. But maybe all those endings just brought you both here, did you think of that? It’s all in how you look at it. I’m the unluckiest bloke in the world, or I’m the luckiest. I tend to go with ‘luckiest.’ So far, so good, anyway. I’ve helped keep the girls I love safe from a grizzly. How much luckier can you get?”

  “Maybe luckier,” Lily said. “Or not. Depending.”

  Rafe had started out looking a little nervous, then increasingly confident. Now, he was back to “nervous” again. That was nothing to how she felt. “Tell me,” he said. She looked around, and he made an impatient gesture and said, “I don’t care. I need to know now.” He tried to laugh, but didn’t seem able to. “Tell me now.”

  Rafe couldn’t believe it. If this was what he thought it was… He couldn’t believe it.

  He was always cool. Always calm. The Drama-Free Zone. Except now.

  Lily said, “I called Paige this morning. She and Jace are having a baby. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Oh,” Rafe said. “Her twin, and my brother,” he told the others, in case anybody didn’t know. Well, Jo probably didn’t, although if it didn’t have to do with horses, she probably didn’t care, either. He tried not to be disappointed. That’s madness, mate, he told himself. It’s been, what? Five weeks? Less? He couldn’t quite get himself to “not disappointed,” though.

  Never mind. He had enough to be going on with. He’d already had more answer out of Lily, more certainty, than he could have hoped for. The rest, he’d work on. If he kept on being lucky—and he intended to—he’d have a lifetime to do it.

  “And then I realized,” Lily said, and he focused on her again, “that there was a reason I didn’t already know she was pregnant, that I hadn’t already felt it. Because it just felt like me. Even more than usual.” She shook her head and tried to explain to Jo. “We’re identical twins. We feel the same, even though we’re not the same. We feel each other, I guess.”

  “You realized,” Rafe prompted. Bugger Jo.

  “I thought,” she told him, “that I’d just…check. So when I went to the store this morning, I got the kit, and I checked.” Her color was rising, and she was talking faster. “I was going to tell you later today. I wasn’t at all sure what you’d think. I wasn’t going to tell you in front of everybody, because I need to know what you do think. But I’m going to say this. I want this baby. I’m having this baby. Bailey’s going to be a wonderful big sister, and if you’re not ready to be a dad, I’ll…I’ll…” She tried to go on, but nothing happened for a minute. “I’ll be so sorry,” she finally said. “My heart will break. But I’ll live with my broken heart, and I’ll love with it. I’ll love Bailey, and I’ll love whoever this is, and I’ll love you, too. I’ll keep on loving you. I don’t think I can stop. The only thing I can’t live with is a lie. Please, Rafe.” Her eyes were shining, her mouth trembling. “Don’t tell me a lie.”

  “Sweetheart.” He took a step closer. “We’re going to have a baby?” He laughed, and then he didn’t. He looked away, at the garden, at everything Lily had planted and tended, at everything she loved, and then he looked back at her. “Really?”

  “Yes. That’s what seems to be happening.” Her cheeks were all the way pink now, and she lowered her voice and said, “When I came back from Australia, and, ah…the, ah, shower. And Paige and I usually have the same cycle, which is why I didn’t guess, maybe. But, yes. I am. Barely, but it counts. I am.”

  It probably didn’t make sense to anybody else, which was fine. It made sense to him. “No,” he said. “We are. Bloody hell. Crikey. I’m gobsmacked.” Nobody else had said a thing, and he said, “You lot don’t need to hang about anymore. Except Bailey.” He told Jo, “A bit of a change of plan. Take them back, will you? I’ll let you know when the stable’s built. You’ve got, ah, the check. We’re good. Feed. Boarding. All that. Martin will handle it. And you,” he told Lily, “stay here. Or—wait. Should you be out here in the heat?”

  She was laughing. “Rafe, I’m fine. I’m wonderful.”

  “Oh. Then stay here. One minute. All right, maybe five. Bloody hell. I need to go to my place.” He started to leave, then came back, took her in his arms, kissed her as thoroughly as he could possibly manage, so she’d know he meant it, and said, “I’m gobsmacked. I love you. Wait for me.” Then he got in his car and took off.

  It wasn’t five minutes, but it wasn’t ten, either, before he got back. Jo was still putting Starlight back in the horse box, in any case, though the other two horses were inside, but Martin and Ezra were gone. Good.

  “Don’t mind me,” Jo said, continuing to walk the horse up the ramp. “I don’t like people. I like horses. Less complicated. I have a client in an hour, and all three of these to take care of. Damnedest way I ever saw to waste a morning. Why don’t you just go on and say it, stop all this pussyfooting around?”

  “That’s the plan,” Rafe said, then ignored her. He told Bailey, “You can stay, if you like.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “Chuck’s barking, and you’re just going to kiss Lily some more.”

  She headed inside, and Lily said, “Bailey, wait,” then went to her, knelt right there on the driveway, put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, and said, “Whatever happens, you’re staying with me. Unless you want to go home to your grandma, or she wants you to, and even then—when she gets sick again, you’re staying with me. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Bailey said. “I have to, I guess. Because of the pony.”

  Lily laughed and hugged her close. “That’s right. Because of the pony, and Chuck, and the goats, and Rafe, and sewing, and Hailey, and everything. You’re staying with me.” She waited until Bailey had walked up the steps to the porch and gone inside, then said to Rafe, “We should sit on the porch swing, at least. Don’t you think?”

  She was, suddenly, more composed than he was. But then, she wasn’t the one who’d just been hit between the eyes with the news that he was going to be a father. She was just the one who was going to be a mother.

  He was going to choke up, so he focused on remembering his lines and followed her up to the porch swing. “Right,” he said, sitting down with her. “Right. I planned this, but it was meant to be a bit further away. Time-wise.”

  “How long away, exactly?” Her eyes were dancing, the dimples around her mouth showing. “How long were you planning to give me to miss you too much?”

  He rubbed his nose and may have looked a bit sheepish. “A month, I thought. At least that’s how long I was willing to wait to try. Could’ve ended up being two weeks, though. I wanted it. I want it. Right, then. Give me a moment here.” He paused and collected himself, and she let him. Then he started. “I don’t want to change your direction,” he told her. “I don’t want to change your mind. I don’t even need to change your name, although I won’t lie—I want to. But I do need to share my life with you.”

  She had her hand on his cheek, and it felt exactly right there. Gentle, and strong. He got off the swing, because now was the time, and got down on a knee.

  He’d said the words on screen before. He’d even said them in his life before. It had never been anything like this. He pulled the box from his pocket, opened it up, took her hand again, and told her the rest of it.

  These words, he had thought out. These lines, he’d learned.

  “There are millions of snowflakes in the world,” he told her, “and every one is different. There’s only one that’s mine. There are millions of hearts beating in the world, but only one that beats with mine. There are millions of promises in the world, but only one that’s mine to you.” He held her hand. He looked up into her eyes, and he’d swear that his heart was beating for her. “No matter how far I go,” he told her, “no matter who else I see, no matter who else I kiss, I’ll be coming home to you. Every time, from now until forever. You can bet yo
ur heart on it. You can bet your life.”

  “Rafe,” she said. “You’re so beautiful. That’s so beautiful.” There were tears in her eyes, a smile on her trembling lips, and he’d swear she’d barely looked at the ring he’d spent hours choosing and had only received via courier yesterday. A platinum band with clusters of diamonds arranged like flowers on either side of a center stone that was two carats of pure flash. Feminine, graceful, floral, and so very Lily. He’d known the moment he saw it that it could have been designed for nobody else.

  “It is?” he said. “You haven’t even looked at it.”

  She was laughing, now, exactly like that day when she’d come back from Australia. When he’d been nervous, and she’d been sure. She slipped off the swing and knelt there with him, then put her hands on his face and kissed him, long and sweet and coming home. “I don’t have to look at it,” she said when she’d finished. “I know it’ll be perfect. And I’d rather look at you.”

  “I love you, baby,” he said, because what else was there to say? “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes,” she said, still smiling. He might be going to cry, though. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it, but he thought it could be happening. He kissed her so she wouldn’t see, but he thought she saw anyway, because she had her hand around the back of his head and was kissing him some more, with something in it that felt like comfort.

  He got both arms around her, finally, and laughed out loud. The ring was somewhere. On the porch, he thought. But when she sat back at last, which gave him a chance to look for it, he froze.

  “You’re bleeding,” he managed to say. “Lily.” He put a hand on her, low on her belly. Red. Wet. “Baby, I’m sorry. You’re bleeding.”

  Alarm in her face now. Panic. She put her own hand there. And then—something else. Relief? What?

  She was laughing again. “Tomato juice,” she told him. “I put it in my pocket when the horses came. I was holding it, before. I’d picked it. It was a beefsteak. It was big. Now it’s a crushed beefsteak. Never mind. Oh, man.” She laughed harder. “That gave me a heart attack.”

  He was laughing, too. She had her arms around his neck, and their heads were together, and he was finding the box and, finally, putting the ring on her finger. “There,” he said, watching it slide home with satisfaction that went all the way down to his soul. “That’s better. Now I can leave.”

  Which was the wrong thing to say, of course. Not the right line at all. But oh, well.

  Three days before Christmas, and Sinful was buried under a meter of snow. Good thing they weren’t in Sinful.

  Rafe was standing in a tucked-away room just off a soaring-ceilinged, columned space whose French doors opened to a terrace looking out on subtropical gardens filled with birdsong, bang in the center of the exclusive Victoria Wedding Centre in Byron Bay. The facility included six other spaces to hold ceremonies, both indoors and out: two garden arbors, a meadow beside a waterfall, and three chapels. They were all empty, because Jace had booked the lot over a year earlier, months before he’d proposed to Paige.

  “Planning wins battles, mate,” he’d told Rafe on the phone during the siblings’ four-way conversation back in July.

  “I’m a battle?” That was Paige’s voice. “Nice.”

  “Nah,” Jace said. “You’re a challenge. I didn’t want the media circling like vultures around my famous brother on our big day, that’s all. As long as the girls want it, though, bro, we should do it together. More practical, and Dad’ll be happy. Only one dinner jacket occasion required. We could charter a jet, too, and take everybody from the States, then stop in Brissy and collect the rest on the way down. Cost-effective.”

  Rafe was already laughing, and fortunately, so was Lily. “Mate,” he tried to tell his brother. “Stunned mullet here. Success with the ladies much? That’s not how you pitch that.”

  “No,” Paige said, and beside Rafe, Lily looked distressed. She wanted to do it with her sister, Rafe could tell. She loved the idea. Paige went on, “And I thought I wasn’t tactful, Jace. You tell me, ‘Baby, won’t you and Lily be happier if we do this all together? Surely you want to be each others’ maids of honor, and Rafe and I want to be each others’ best man as well. And as you’ll both be enormously pregnant, it’ll be even more of a sideshow that way.’”

  “You wouldn’t say that last bit,” Rafe said. “You’d say that there won’t be a dry eye in the house. All kinds of family. Sisters and brothers and babies, and Bailey as the flower girl.”

  Now, the day was here, and so were all of them. All kinds of family, because Bailey was Lily’s for good now, and soon, she’d be Rafe’s as well.

  Her grandmother had been moved from the nursing home to hospice care in late July, and one morning, she hadn’t woken up. Her heart had given up, it seemed, on trying to keep her abused lungs working. Or maybe she hadn’t needed to struggle anymore.

  It had been a gentle death, and not the worst one, especially since Bailey had had time with her beforehand. Especially that last day, when Lily had girded her loins and talked to her about adopting the girl.

  Ruby had said, her voice nothing but a gasp, “Sounds good. You’ll be happy, Bailey. Sorry I couldn’t…do better. Couldn’t always…take you.” She’d looked at Lily, held her hand in a weak grasp, and said, “Don’t let her…” Her breath had failed her, and she’d struggled, then finished. “Hook up with the wrong…guy.”

  “No worries,” Rafe had said, choking up in the way he’d kept doing since he’d met Lily, like she’d opened the door to his heart and there was no closing it now. “Not happening.”

  “Good,” Ruby had said, and closed her eyes like she could rest now. At peace. Bailey had kissed her cheek, and the next morning, Ruby had slipped away.

  It had been sad. It was still sad. Chuck and the goats and the pony, though, which Bailey had named Misty after a certain apparently-famous-to-girls animal, had all helped. And on November fourteenth, Bailey had become Lily’s forever daughter. She had a cute haircut now, and her jeans were long enough, but the dress she’d wear today was the first she’d ever allowed Lily to buy, and she still played football and soccer every chance she got.

  That suited Rafe fine. He loved both his girls exactly as they came. He was even learning to throw an American football. You could pass forward, which was naff, but if he ever had occasion to play a quarterback, he wouldn’t need as many lessons.

  The wedding date meant that his part of the publicity tour for Urban Decay 3: Underworld Rising, which had released three days earlier, would be curtailed, but that suited him, too. Never his favorite thing, publicity.

  The film had got him the best reviews of his career, and the new one, his sheriff, was going to do even better. He felt it in his bones. The critics had said, even on Underworld, that he “showed a new depth of character,” which made sense, because that was how he felt.

  On the other hand, the director had left half of Antonio on the cutting-room floor. Box-office poison. Antonio couldn’t have done much worse if he’d embraced Scientology. That would probably come next.

  “Nervous, mate?” Jace asked now, then grimaced. “Stupid bloody tie.”

  “Nah,” Rafe said. “Feeling good.” It was true. He felt like he had that first night, singing karaoke in a bar in Japantown with Lily dancing beside him. It was a good thing they weren’t doing this outdoors, because he’d have floated away. He surveyed his brother critically. “You’ve made a regular dog’s breakfast of that.”

  Jace scowled. “I just said that.” He wrenched at the strip of black silk.

  “Stop it,” Rafe said. “You’re crumpling it more. Mate.” He laughed. “Let me do it.” He took the limp, bedraggled black tie from Jace and tied it quickly into its bow. “It won’t look as good as mine, but then, you never do.”

  Jace was still scowling and pulling at the neck of his white shirt. “I’m unbuttoning the top.”

  “You are not unbuttoning the top,” Rafe said. �
�I happen to know that Paige went through some fairly torturous beauty routines for this. Lily told me she yelled. She’s six months pregnant, too. You can live with a tight collar for an hour.”

  After that, there was nothing to do but wait and listen to the muffled sounds of people gathering and chatting, and the calming strains of a cello, the soaring notes of violins, and the in-between, mellow tones of a viola, drifting in through the open windows on the summer breeze.

  Finally, though, the venue’s wedding coordinator poked her well-coiffed head through the door and asked, “Ready to go, boys? Big moment’s here.”

  Rafe saw Jace swallow hard and asked, soberly now, “Mate. Is it cold feet?”

  Jace didn’t do fear. Jace was a soldier, and he was bloody good at it. Jace was the strong one, the brave one. What was wrong?

  “Nah,” his brother said. “It’s a hell of a thing to live up to, that’s all. Being the man she deserves, and a good father as well.”

  “I reckon,” Rafe said, “that all we can do is our best.”

  Jace reached a hand out to grip Rafe’s shoulder, and the brothers held each other close and hard for an instant before Jace released Rafe, rolled his head on his neck, and said, “I’m the man they’re stuck with, anyway, because I’m not going anywhere. My wife. My baby girl. Let’s go.”

  Bailey’s neck itched. The dress wasn’t lacy, but the neck itched anyway.

  Lily had let her help pick it out, and she hadn’t made her wear tights or high heels or anything. Australia wasn’t very fancy. Everybody wore shorts, and lots of people wore sandals and flip-flops, even though there were snakes and poison spiders.

  There were no crocodiles in Byron Bay, but Jace and Paige, who were sort of her uncle and aunt now, were going to take her to see them while Lily and Rafe did their honeymoon.

  “Yeah, you can still wear sandals,” Rafe had told her when she’d asked him about the snakes. “Hope for the best, that’s the Aussie motto.”