A Family Come True (16 page)

As quickly as Ian reached for Cady, that was how fast Darcy’s memory flew to another time and place. She probably had been about three or four years old, walking atop a narrow rock wall. Her dad had walked beside her, saying something about the flowers. A missed step, some wildly flailing arms, and then Daddy had grabbed her hand and everything had been steady again.

“Easy, Bug!” The determined lines creasing Ian’s face melted into his usual Cady-indulgent smile. “I know it’s fun, but it’s not worth landing on your pretty little kisser.”

Sylvie hadn’t been the world’s most stereotypical mother, and Darcy might have issues with the way her mother had allowed both of their worlds to be tossed around by the whims of whatever man she had been with, but in one area she had come through big-time: she made sure Darcy knew how awesome her dad had been. Seven years wasn’t much time to build up a lot of memories. Sylvie had supplied them. She had always been able to come up with a Daddy story when Darcy needed one.

Watching Ian with Cady was almost like being given the chance to see how her dad must have been with her.

Cady stared at Ian as if trying to decipher some secret message, bounced up and down, and raised her free hand.

Given the angle, Darcy was pretty sure Xander couldn’t see the way Ian’s fingers twitched before he took a quick breath and glanced up at Xander.

“Give it a try.”

The words were casual. The impact on her was not. Ian was known. He was trusted. He knew Cady as well as she did. But Xander... God help her, but all she could think was that he had the potential to play havoc with Cady’s life the way Sylvie’s men had done to Darcy.

She and Ian exchanged a fleeting look. His expression was reassuring. If only there were some way to do a certainty transfer.

Cady’s hand did a kind of up-and-down motion in the air, as if she were trying to make up her mind as well, but Xander had no doubts. He held his palm in the approximate position Ian had done.

“Hey, cutie. How about a high five for your dad?”

Darcy bit down hard on her lip.

Cady bobbled again, tipped her little head so her topknot tipped to the left and slowly reached forward to tap Xander’s hand.

* * *

E
VERY TIME
I
AN
thought that this trip home had already grown as unbelievable as possible, the stakes ramped up again. Like now. Sitting down to dinner with his folks, his meddling grandmother, his former fiancée, his brother who had married and knocked up his former fiancée, his fake lover, her baby and the baby daddy. They were a freakin’ reality show in the making.

With seating arrangements sorted, the blessing on the meal invoked and the salad passed, Moxie folded her hands beneath her chin and looked to the pseudo-family end of the table with the kind of smile that the North brothers knew meant pleasure for no one but her.

“Well, Xander. Been a long time since we’ve seen you. Never woulda thought that you’d be back under these circumstances.”

Xander turned the slightest bit pink but met Moxie’s gaze head-on. “That makes two of us, Mrs. North.”

“Huh. Can’t imagine you’re too surprised by some of those events. Unless someone planted little receivers in your brain and sent messages about breakin’ the law into your head while you were sleeping.”

At Ian’s right, Darcy wheezed. On his left, Ma covered her eyes and muttered something that he was pretty sure was an appeal to the Almighty.

Xander didn’t flinch. “I made a lot of lousy choices and hurt people in ways I never imagined. I’ll be the first to admit that I was an idiot. But those days are behind me now, and I’m looking forward to a fresh start with a new job and my amazing daughter. Now, did I hear that the dairy recently celebrated one hundred years in business?”

Ooh, smooth.

Moxie gave Xander a watered-down version of the evil eye—no doubt because she knew exactly what game he was playing—but Ma jumped into the breach with tales of ways they had marked the anniversary. Ian stayed silent. The big event had happened right after he’d returned from Tanzania, short weeks after the Carter-Taylor situation had erupted. He had walked through the weekend in a haze of jet lag and heartbreak—not a recipe for retaining many details.

But it kept the conversation going and meant nobody was interrogating him. It also gave him the chance to do something he’d needed to do since their arrival.

He needed to be sure Taylor was happy.

He stole a few glances at her as she followed the conversation with Carter’s arm bumping against hers, her face alight with a smile. Had she ever been that relaxed, that lit up, while she was with him? He couldn’t be sure. They had been good together, but watching her he realized that something was different about her now. She had been nervous around him when he’d first arrived, sure, and the whole hijacked-pregnancy-announcement thing probably had thrown her, but even with that, she seemed more—well—
relaxed
was the only way he could describe it.

If that was indeed what he was seeing, then he knew in his heart she had been right to end things.

Carter, though...

Darcy, who had been slipping bits of gravy-soaked food to Cady, extended her fork over his plate. “Mind if I steal your peas? Little Miss Piggy has decided she loves them.”

Sharing food—yeah, that was definitely a couple kind of thing. Nice way to get the message across.

“Go for it.” And, because he was trying to be better, he leaned forward to catch the attention of Xander, seated on the other side of Cady. “I think she has your metabolism, Xander. She eats all the time.”

Xander was silent for a moment as if waiting for the other shoe to drop before finally nodding. “Hey, when the food is this good, who can blame her?”

“That’s for sure.” Darcy sounded bright and perky. All for show, he knew, given the way her fist clenched the fork like a dagger.

“So, Ian,” Moxie began, and his appetite disappeared. “What exactly do you do at your job?”

Moxie knew the answer. She had grilled him on the subject during every phone call. Probably ferreting out information to use to lure him back home, but it had given them something to discuss at a time when a hell of a lot of topics had been off-limits. So, if there had been a hidden agenda, he could live with that.

“Different things on different days,” he said slowly. “That’s one of the reasons I enjoy it.”

“Here’s what I want to know,” Xander piped up. “The blacksmith thing. Where did that come from? I don’t remember you ever saying you had a burning need to shoe a horse. Or are you doing your Superman imitations, like bending steel rods with your bare hands?”

The truth was that he had picked it up on a whim when he’d seen a flyer for a class being offered the autumn right after Xander’s visit. His only motive had been to find something to fill the evening hours, to keep him from dwelling on how his life had belly flopped. Finding that he liked it, that he was half-decent at it, had been a happy bonus.

But he couldn’t say any of that in this crowd.

He shoved a bite of chicken into his mouth to buy a moment. Darcy must have picked up on the ploy, for she placed a warmly protective hand on his forearm.

“Xander, a word of warning. Don’t mention shoeing horses and blacksmithing to Ian unless you’re ready for a very detailed lecture.” She patted his arm, her voice warmly indulgent. “Long story short, farriers take care of horses. Blacksmiths forge things from wrought iron or steel. Farriers need some blacksmithing skills, but a blacksmith might never see a horse. Ian makes a lot of beautiful pieces with a practical purpose, like candleholders and hooks for hanging things.”

“Sounds like you know a lot about it, Darcy.” Carter smiled. “Are you a blacksmith, as well?”

Her laugh pealed around Ian. “Me? Heavens, no. I am the least artistic person on the planet. No, anything I know has come from hanging out with Ian, that’s all.” She punctuated her words with a shoulder bump that left him grinning on the outside but issuing stern reminders to himself on the inside.

Damn, she was good at this.

“Oh.” Carter helped himself to a bread stick. “I thought that might have been what drew you two together.”

Beneath the table, an elbow connected with his ribs.

“No, sorry. The only thing I make is websites for authors.”

“And beautiful little girls,” Xander added, grabbing a bit of carrot from the high chair before Cady could send it to the ground. He always had been a fast learner.

“So now I’m curious.” Ma’s smile was all innocence but Ian knew better than to relax. “Did things just evolve, or was there a moment when you two looked at each other and figured out that everything had changed?”

All eyes and ears turned to Ian. Forks hovered over plates, heads tilted and he saw with dismay that Darcy had been doubly correct. They needed a story. Not simply because folks were curious, but because this particular crowd had a vested interest in knowing he was happy, that he had moved on and that there was still magic in his life.

He really should have listened to Darcy.

“Oh,” she said in that overly bright way. “You know how it is. He was in the apartment and I brought Cady home—”

“Christmas,” he blurted, and the moment he said it, he knew it was the right answer. Christmas was all about miracles. People expected things to happen then.

“Christmas?” There was a world of questions behind Moxie’s short utterance.

“I... Yeah.” Memories tumbled through his head, with one outshining the others the way the star of Bethlehem must have stood out in the heavens. “Last year. Darcy decided she needed a real tree.”

Her eyes widened but she played along. “It was Cady’s first Christmas. I couldn’t have anything fake.”

“Right. She twisted my arm and made me go to some cut-your-own place. I think there was a bribe involving hot chocolate and homemade cookies. So we got Cady all bundled and drove to this farm—”

“An hour outside of town, and of course it was freezing cold—”

“And when we were almost there, it started raining.”

“Pouring,” she elaborated happily.

“It was about as miserable as you could imagine. Just when we pulled into the lot, it decided to come down in sheets. We sat there and stared out the window.”

“Cady may have learned her first swearwords,” Darcy said.

“Darce said to forget it. She’d get a tree from a lot. But I knew she wanted the real thing.” He grinned down at her, and it was as if their audience had faded into some fuzzy watercolor background. As far as he could tell, he was back in that cramped car with the rain battering the roof and the windows fogging up, feeling cut off from the rest of the world and not the least bit unhappy about it. In fact, as he recalled, he’d sat there and thought that if the zombie apocalypse had erupted at that moment, his only regret would be that he hadn’t kissed Darcy.

“So what did you do?” Taylor’s soft question pulled him out of the memory.

What did he do? In reality, he had been so blown away by the direction of his thoughts that he had jumped out of the car, grabbed the saw and cut down the first tree he’d spied. It had been lopsided and way too tall, but none of that had registered at the time. All he had been aware of was the sweet smell of fresh-cut pine and a fear that had chilled him even more than the rain—the fear that he was straying way too close to a line that should never be crossed.

But this audience needed the happy ending.

Stick to the truth as much as possible,
Darcy had said. It made everything easier.

Maybe that was true for details. But feelings—nope. Totally different story.

“Well, boy, don’t leave us hanging,” Moxie said. “What happened next?”

He looked at Darcy. Mistake. With her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted, he knew she was remembering, too. And if he was going to be totally honest—because with all the secrets and lies floating around this table, a little honesty sounded like a great idea—she probably remembered the way the air between them had seemed to crackle for a few seconds. The way the world had shrunk down to the space of the front seat. The way, for a moment or two, they both had known exactly what was going through the other’s mind.

Kind of like the way he could read her thoughts right at this moment. It wasn’t hard. They were written in the swirl of confusion and wonder in her eyes, painted in the pink of her cheeks, carved in the curve of her lips.

A sudden
clang
jerked him back to his family, to reality. Darcy jumped, too, and broke into nervous laughter as she turned to Cady, busy smashing a napkin ring against her tray.

“Think she’s trying to tell you to hurry up and finish your story, Ian?” Ma’s voice had that indulgent tone she only employed in the presence of babies and puppies.

What was he supposed to say now?

Darcy to the rescue. “I can’t do justice to the story the way Ian can—” she flashed him a smile guaranteed to set romantic hearts everywhere fluttering “—but I can tell you this. We kind of forgot about the tree for a while.”

Chuckles erupted around the table. Moxie nodded in seeming approval. Carter applauded. Cady squealed and clapped her hands together as well, setting off another round of laughter. Ma said something about dessert. Dad rose to clear dishes and the danger passed.

He should have felt relieved. He was, in a way. People were convinced. Xander seemed to believe them. Mission accomplished. Except every time he looked at Darcy, he couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened that day if he’d followed his gut and reached for her instead of for the car door.

CHAPTER TEN

W
ITH DINNER OVER
and Xander and Carter on dish duty, Ian made sure Darcy had everything she needed to bathe Cady before deciding he had earned that walk by the river. He dragged Lulu out of the kitchen and slipped out unseen.

He’d located a new stick for throwing and made it halfway across the yard before he remembered an important point about life in the North household:
unseen
and
unnoticed
were at very different ends of the spectrum.