The Marine's Family Mission

by Victoria Pade

  “Thank me?” he said as if that was a ridiculous notion.

  “From the start she was glad you weren’t lost, too. She was just too deep in grief to reach out and tell you so. But she knew that you tried to save Topher. She knew you would have done anything to save him. Mandy never—not for one single second—blamed you or held you responsible—”

  “I was responsible.”

  Emmy recognized anguish when she saw it because she was no stranger to it. She’d photographed it too many times. She’d felt it herself after that last trip to Afghanistan.

  “Being the driver doesn’t make you responsible,” she said. “The person who put the bomb there was responsible. You were as much the victim as Topher was.”

  “Not quite as much. I’m here, in his kitchen. I can see his kids. Hold them. Play with them. He can’t.”

  This guy was definitely carrying some baggage.

  Baggage that made her problems with him seem small in comparison. Petty, even. And while they were enough to keep her from any kind of romantic illusions, she knew for sure then that she had to compartmentalize her problems, to shield herself with them while not letting them bleed into her interactions with Declan. To really give him the patience Carla had given her.

  “You’re wrong,” she said simply then.

  “Am I?” he said, his tone letting her know he believed she was the one who was mistaken.

  “Do you think Topher had more right to live than you do?”

  “No. But he had a wife and kids who needed him.”

  “And it wasn’t you who took him away from them. Instead you’re here trying to do something for his kids. If you had died, too, they wouldn’t have that.”

  Declan just shook his handsome head, denying what she was saying.

  She went on anyway. “You can—you should and you need to—mourn the loss of your friend. But there’s no place for guilt or taking responsibility in that just because you were driving the dumb vehicle. Believe me, I was with my sister while she was working through her grief, and when she reached the anger part of it, you weren’t involved at all. She was as mad that you’d been hurt as she was that Topher had been lost. There was nothing about you being blamed for his death. So stop doing that to yourself.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure, done,” he muttered facetiously.

  “I know—feelings are weird,” she said. It wouldn’t do any good to tell herself to stop what she was feeling about going into that orchard. Telling him to stop blaming himself couldn’t have much impact either. But still she said, “Not only didn’t Mandy blame you, but I also can’t imagine that Topher would have.”

  Declan didn’t respond to that at all.

  Emmy took that silence to mean that he knew she was right. Even if it didn’t alleviate any of what he was dealing with.

  Then he said, “Doesn’t matter whether Topher would have blamed me—”

  “Because you do,” she finished for him. “And you can’t give yourself a break?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should work on that. I didn’t know Topher as long as you did, but it seems to me that he’d have gotten kind of mad at you for holding on to that guilt. Sometimes Mandy would get angry at something and hang on to it, and Topher would say—like it was one word—letigo.”

  The short, quick breath Declan let out was almost a chuckle—humorless but still, almost a chuckle. “Yeah, he loved to say that.”

  “So maybe that’s what you should start trying to tell yourself—letigo. Sometimes I say it to myself...” Although she had to admit that in the throes of things like her fear of going into that orchard, it didn’t have much effect.

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll try that,” Declan said without conviction.

  Emmy had the sense that his words were more to shut her up than a vow to actually give it a shot.

  But she didn’t know what else to say to him, so this time she just let the silence stand while he filled the baby bottles. As he finished each one, she capped it, and then she passed it back to him to put in the refrigerator.

  When that was done, Declan leaned back against the stainless steel door and stared at her with those blue, blue eyes. “Still think it’s better to talk?” he challenged.

  She was standing basically in front of him, not far away, and leaned a hip against the edge of the counter. “Better than the silent treatment,” she said.

  “I wasn’t giving you the silent treatment,” he argued.

  “Still.”

  “Okay, if that’s what you want,” he conceded, sounding only the tiniest smidgen more cordial. But he didn’t bother to smile.

  Still, Emmy realized that she’d gone as far as she should talking about Topher’s and Declan’s injuries, so she dropped it and went on with something else.

  “Do you think you can handle the overnight with Kit tonight?” she asked him.

  “You made me practice the diaper thing all day, so yeah, hopefully I can do it without getting spritzed again. And I’ve given him two bottles—I got him to burp better than you did the last time,” he reminded.

  “I get him to burp just fine,” Emmy defended. “What about the walking?”

  “I’ll do whatever he needs.”

  “If it gets to you, you can sit with him. You just have to sort of do a fast rock with your body and still jiggle him—”

  She tried to demonstrate, but it wasn’t easy standing up and without a baby in her arms.

  And while Declan still didn’t smile, something in his chiseled face seemed to ease up slightly, as if somewhere deep down it amused him.

  She stopped. “You get the idea.”

  “No. Show me again.”

  He might be miserable but he could still be bratty.

  She arched an eyebrow at him, shook her head and said, “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Most likely,” he agreed, and there was almost a hint of the sparkle she’d seen in his eyes in Las Vegas.

  That sparkle that had drawn her in and convinced her that he was going to kiss her.

  She’d been sooo ready for him to...

  He was great-looking. He had a sexy mouth. Who wouldn’t have been wondering what it would be like to kiss him?

  She was wondering it right then. Again.

  No illusions! she silently commanded herself.

  And yet, even without them, she was still wondering what it might be like.

  And if he was any good at it...

  Emmy pulled herself out of those thoughts, took a deep breath and said, “You can nap on the couch until Kit cries or just wait for it, but he didn’t let me have much sleep last night, so I’m going to bed.”

  Declan nodded.

  “If you can’t handle him—”

  “I’ll knock on your door. But we’ll be fine,” he repeated.

  “Good luck,” she said flippantly, pushing off the counter’s edge with her hips and catching when his glance dropped to them.

  But she would not read anything into that any more than she’d read anything into that flicker of a sparkle in his eyes, she told herself.

  And as for those dumb thoughts of kissing him?

  Over and done with.

  Now and forever.

  Chapter Four

  “Bye, Decan.”

  “Bye, Trinity,” Declan responded late Monday afternoon to the three-year-old as Emmy buckled in the little girl to the back seat of a small SUV.

  Kit was already strapped in. Emmy was taking the kids to town for an appointment with the local doctor. The doctor was convinced that Kit was having problems adjusting to formula after having been breastfed. Since the latest attempts to help him hadn’t improved the situation, the doctor wanted to see him.

  The plan was for Emmy to pick up hoagies for dinner when she finished with the appointment. While she was
busy in town, Declan needed to make a visit to his own family’s farm.

  He was behind the wheel of his late adoptive father’s old truck and had started the engine before Emmy got into her own driver’s seat, so he left ahead of her. As he went past the SUV, Trinity waved to him.

  He waved back, and on the way out to the main road he said, “She’s a sweetheart, Topher. I’m sorry you aren’t here to see that. You should be...” Battling the clench in his gut that that thought gave him, he added, “Damn it all to hell...”

  Then the weirdest thing happened.

  In his head he heard Emmy’s voice from the night before saying, letigo.

  That had been Topher’s favorite thing to say since they were seventeen.

  Letigo...

  “Easier said than done,” he grumbled.

  But it wasn’t something he’d thought of since Topher’s death, and he had to admit that that funny reminder of his easygoing friend was preferable to the thought of his friend not being there.

  Thanks for that anyway, Miss About-Face...

  And Emmy had done another about-face on him.

  Since meeting up again here she hadn’t been outright hostile, but she had given him the distinct impression that she was barely suffering his presence because she needed his help.

  Then last night she’d done another one of her about-faces.

  He’d actually seen her pause as he was talking. Rethink something. And then alter her attitude toward him.

  She hadn’t turned instantly warm and cuddly, but she had mellowed out and stopped acting as if she hated him.

  Definitely another about-face. But the ones that made her more pleasant to be around were better than the ones that made her difficult.

  Hey, it wasn’t much, but it was a little bit of progress.

  Not that he was looking to make progress with her. He just wanted things between them to be civil enough to get the job done. Animosity would slow things down. And his goal was to get in, get the job done, get out. They didn’t have to like each other, they just had to work together.

  Which was what they’d done today.

  And he had to give her credit—as rotten as she was at farm work, she tried damn hard. She worked damn hard. And without complaint even though it couldn’t have been more obvious that she was out of her element clearing a farm field.

  Of course, who knew—by tomorrow maybe that would be different, too. Maybe she’d sit alongside the field and do her nails or something.

  The point was, he knew to be leery of her. Not to trust that what he saw from her one minute would be what was there the next.

  And seeing her make another about-face last night had made him wonder about something else—what if she was as inconsistent with the kids as she was with him?

  And if she was, shouldn’t he be leery of her as Trinity and Kit’s guardian, too?

  He might not know much about kids or raising them, but he did know that the last thing any kid needed was a caretaker who ran hot and cold. They needed someone they could rely on, someone they could trust to be consistently caring day after day.

  He wasn’t altogether convinced that that person was Emmy Tate. It sure as hell hadn’t been the Emmy Tate he’d experienced.

  Not that he could fault her handling of the kids so far. Everything he’d seen of her with them was patient, low-key, loving. It was just with him that she was all over the place.

  But between having seen her swings before, then seeing one again last night, he thought he’d better keep an eye on her when it came to Trinity and the baby.

  And if he saw her display those mood swings with them?

  “I’ll take care of it, Topher. I won’t let you down. Again,” he swore out loud to his late friend. “I won’t let anything get in the way.”

  Like the way Emmy looked...

  Because damn, but it was hard to ignore that, he admitted to himself.

  She had those chestnut eyes with caramel-colored flecks in them. And those dimples that flashed at the slightest upturn of those luscious lips of hers. And yeah, even out in the field today, with her hair in a ponytail and dressed like a farmhand, he’d still caught sight of her compact little body and that butt that just begged to be cupped by his hand rather than to be used for wiping the dirt off hers...

  Enough of that! he told himself, forcing into his mind the images of her in cold-shoulder mode instead. Of those eyes glaring at him. Of that mouth turned down at the corners and the dimples gone.

  That helped.

  Until what jumped into his head was the picture of her after her quick shower before taking the kids into town just now.

  Hair all shiny and smooth. Her high cheekbones sun kissed into a healthy pink. Dressed in jeans and a simple white blouse fitted just enough to show off a couple of other things his hands wanted to cup...

  Frown lines between her eyes...

  Her chin raised at him in contempt...

  Talk! she’d snapped at him last night just when he’d thought things had been going fairly well...

  Yeah, that was enough, he thought as he pulled up in front of his family’s farmhouse. Erratic was not a turn-on, and since the last thing he wanted was for her to turn him on, he was good with that. As long as she was only erratic with him.

  Feeling more in control than he had all day, he turned off the truck’s engine and got out, cringing slightly when he put weight on his injured leg.

  But he immediately rebounded from that cringe. He’d worked that leg, that knee, hard in the last twenty-four hours—hiking around the farm yesterday, walking Kit for nearly four hours last night, resting it only a few hours before essersizing it—as Trinity had called what he was doing when she’d joined him this morning to mimic his workout. And then he’d worked in the field all day today.

  A night’s sleep and he’d be good again. He had to be. There was no way he was letting it stop him from getting back to duty.

  And as far away from Northbridge again as he could get.

  “Hey, I just came for the clothes that were in the wash when I left,” he called when he went in the farmhouse’s front door.

  “I’m so glad you’re here! I need to talk to you,” his sister called back with more enthusiasm than he’d expected. “I’m in the kitchen.”

  Declan found Kinsey sitting at the oblong table reading a piece of mail and smiling.

  “Good news?” he asked as he sat down, too.

  “It’s from our lawyer. The DNA results confirmed that Mitchum Camden was our father. We are Camdens.”

  So...not good news. At least as far as Declan was concerned.

  His sister must have read his feelings in his expression because when her eyes met his, she stopped smiling. He felt a pang of guilt but pushed it away. She knew he’d been so against her pursuit of being accepted by the Camden family that he’d refused to submit his own DNA for testing.

  Not that it had mattered—Liam had let her have his and Liam was Declan’s identical twin.

  But no matter what the DNA said, Declan believed they were better off ignoring the whole ugly subject of the secret relationship their mother had had with one of the richest men in the country—a man who had already been married when he’d fathered the four of them in a years-long affair. They’d been the dirty secret, openly sneered at by half the town for not having a father until their mom finally married Hugh Madison a few years after Mitchum’s death. To Declan, Hugh Madison—who had adopted them and raised them as his own—was their one and only father. The genetics didn’t matter, and Mitchum Camden and the rest of his family could keep them. Not that the ten legitimate Camden children—all of them around the ages of Declan, Liam, Conor and Kinsey—didn’t seem to be decent people. They were known for their philanthropy, for their good deeds. But that didn’t change Declan’s feelings about them. Or about his sister’s desire to
be embraced by them as part of the family.

  “The letter is from your lawyer, not from the Camdens themselves,” he pointed out.

  Lonely after the deployment of her brothers and intrigued by their mother’s deathbed confession of the name of their biological father, Kinsey had become determined to pursue a relationship with the grandmother who had never claimed or acknowledged them, and with the half siblings and cousins who made up this generation of Camdens.

  Initially Kinsey had gone to GiGi Camden—the matriarch and grandmother of the legitimate family—with the letter from their mother, describing the affair. The elderly woman had appeared shocked and unaware of their existence before that. But she also had not instantly taken Kinsey into the fold the way Kinsey had hoped she might. Instead she’d initiated an investigation into the claim and then demanded DNA evidence.

  Now there was proof. But it still wasn’t GiGi Camden or any of her other grandchildren approaching them. This was merely a formal letter from an attorney relaying the test results to Kinsey—test results that presumably were also being relayed to the Camdens.

  Declan didn’t want his sister reading too much into what was merely a relaying of facts. Even though Conor and Liam had let her have their DNA for testing, they weren’t much more enthusiastic about Kinsey’s quest than Declan was, and all three of them were worried that she was setting herself up for an enormous disappointment.

  “No, the letter isn’t from the Camdens,” she acknowledged. “But now I know they know the truth. And so do we.”

  “And do you think that’s going to make us any less excluded from that family?” Declan asked gently. It had been different for Kinsey—and for Conor and Liam—than it had been for him. Yes, they’d all been looked down upon, but for the rest of them it hadn’t been as overt—or as brutal—as it had been for Declan at the hands of a bully. He didn’t ever want Kinsey to feel the things he’d felt and he was worried that now that she knew they really were the offspring of Mitchum Camden, not being allowed into the inner circle of Camdens might cause that.

  “Maybe,” Kinsey said hopefully.

  “Have any of them RSVP’d to your invitation to the rehearsal dinner or the wedding?”