On the Fly (35 page)

When he finally headed back up the
stairs, I laughed. “I feel like a teenager again, trying to make
out with my girlfriend on my parents’ couch.”

“
Let’s not go back there,”
she murmured against my neck. “That’s what got me kicked out of my
parents’ house…what got me pregnant.”

“
That would take a little
more than making out,” I replied.

“
True. Kissing’s not
enough.”

Kissing wasn’t anywhere near enough,
and not just to make a baby. I let my hands slide along her rib
cage, settling just below the curve of her breasts. “Not even yucky
tongue kisses.”

I moved in to kiss her again, but we
bumped noses on the way. We were both laughing by the time our lips
found each other. Rachel lifted one leg across my lap so she was
straddling me, and she wrapped her arms around my neck.

I’d just gotten her shirt untucked and
my hands on her bare skin beneath it when Dad cleared his throat at
the top of the stairs again. Rachel jumped, pulling herself all the
way off my lap and tugging her shirt down.

“
Fuck, Dad.”

“
Your mom forgot her
glasses in her purse.”

“
She doesn’t need glasses
to sleep,” I grumbled.

“
No, but she wants to do
some reading before she goes to sleep.” He fumbled around in the
purse, pulling out at least half of its contents and nearly
upending it on the kitchen counter before he finally found them.
“Here we are. You two can go back to what you were
doing.”

“
Not here, we won’t,” I
said as he disappeared up the stairs again, the faint sounds of his
laughter trailing back to us. At least
he
was enjoying himself.

“
This probably isn’t the
best idea,” Rachel said. “Doing this here, I mean.”

There wasn’t a better idea on the
planet than finding a way to get my hands on her without constant
interruptions.

“
Come to bed with me,” I
said, and instantly wished I’d thought it through a little better
before opening my mouth. “Just…just to sleep. I don’t want to rush
you, and I don’t want you to regret anything or think you made
another stupid mistake. But I really want to hold you.
Please.”

She sat there without speaking, and I
was pretty sure she was going to say no. If she had any intention
of agreeing, she would have said something by now. Then Dad cleared
his throat at the top of the stairs again, and she burst out
laughing.

“
Yeah, let’s go,” she
said.

Dad clomped down the stairs. “Just
need to get my—”

“
Get whatever you need,” I
said, getting up and putting the crutches under my arms. “We’re
going to bed. Can you get the lights when you’re done,
Dad?”

“
Will do.” He headed into
the kitchen for God only knew what this time. “Now that I can
report this development back to your mother, maybe she’ll stop
finding reasons to send me downstairs and I can get some
sleep.”

Rachel’s blush only intensified as she
grabbed the bags we’d brought with us for the night. We had to go
through the kitchen to get to the downstairs apartment, which meant
passing Dad. She moved as fast as she had that first day I met her,
when she kept trying to get away from me in the parking garage
after her interview with Jim. She opened the door to the apartment
ahead of us and flipped on the lights. I closed it when I came in
behind her.

She’d set the bags down on the foot of
the bed and was staring at something up near the headboard. I moved
around her so I could see what it was.

A box of condoms and tube
of lubricant were situated right in the center of the pillows, with
a red ribbon tied around them and a note in Zee’s
handwriting:
Just in case.

“
I’m sorry. My family is
trying to drive me crazy, and they’re hitting you with it,
too.”

Rachel turned to me and put her arms
around my waist. “It’s okay. At least this way we’ll be safe if we
do any more of that gross tongue kissing.”

“
Good point,” I said.
“Maybe we should test it out.”

Her laugh was swallowed up by my
kiss.

Every night since
Christmas Eve, he had stayed in my bed. It had
been years since I’d shared a bed with a man, but it had never been
like this. Back when Jason and I were married, he had always slept
on his side of the bed and I’d slept on mine. We might have had
sex, but afterwards there’d been no affection. No closeness or
cuddling or anything that remotely felt like love. He’d told me he
loved me, and I’d thought I’d loved him, but then I got older and
wiser and recognized lust for what it was. There had never been any
real love between me and Jason.

Sleeping with Brenden
couldn’t have been more different. When he’d said he wanted to hold
me, he hadn’t been kidding. Each of those nights, as soon as I’d
crawled under the covers, he had pulled me closer to the middle of
the bed and wrapped me up in the cocoon of his arms. We’d kissed
and touched and explored each other until we were both panting and
breathless and aching with need. There was lust between us, sure.
But there was more. When Brenden had told me he loved me, it felt
real—because he made me
feel
loved. And more and more each day, I feared I was
falling in love with him.

But night after night, he had been
true to his word. He hadn’t rushed me. He hadn’t pushed me into
anything I wasn’t ready for. He’d let me fall in love with the way
he would slide his hands beneath my shirt to cup my breasts, gently
molding them and kneading them while his thumbs drove me wild. He
had allowed me to discover some of his most sensitive places, like
the nape of his neck and the area surrounding his belly button.
Time and time again, we had taken each other to the edge of sanity
before backing off and trying to remember how to breathe
again.

Then he’d held me all night long,
keeping me right beside him so I felt warm and safe and cherished.
Sometimes he would lie on his back with his arm beneath me, and I’d
rest my head on him like he was my own personal pillow. Other
times, he would pull my back against his front and we would lie
like two spoons in a drawer, his warm breaths fanning out near my
ear.

Our mornings were filled with long,
lazy kisses that made me wish we could stay in bed forever. We
couldn’t do that, but I wondered if maybe we could have mornings
like that forever.

I was starting to think that maybe my
instincts were right about Brenden. Maybe he truly was the man he
seemed to be—kind and protective and thoughtful, and a little bit
overly confident in some areas while a little bit lacking in
others. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to keep letting my
kids get attached to him…to allow myself to continue falling in
love with him.

Maybe I’d made one mistake—a horrible
mistake—but that didn’t mean I was incapable of being the best mom
I could be to my kids. Maybe it didn’t mean I had to keep my kids
isolated from all men—from this man.

Those three days we had, where the
whole league was shut down for the Christmas holidays, had flown by
so fast I felt like I had whiplash. We’d spent a lot of time with
Brenden’s family. They’d made me and the kids feel like we
belonged, too—treating us as though we’d always been a part of
them.

When we’d gone back home, Jamie’s
parents and brothers had all been around, so we’d spent time with
them, as well. They all treated Tuck like he was one of the Babcock
brothers, and they were always ready to include Maddie if she felt
up to playing.

She stayed back a lot, but more
because she was having some headaches and dizziness from her
concussion than from a reluctance to play. She felt better doing
something quiet, so on the day after Christmas Brenden and I had
taken her back to Powell’s for a while, leaving Tuck to play video
games with the Babcock boys to celebrate Jamie’s birthday. She
hadn’t really read any of the books she looked at. Mainly she just
flipped through the pages and looked at the pictures, but at least
it allowed her some quiet time.

Wednesday night, Brenden stayed on my
couch while I put the kids to bed. I read a Dr. Seuss story to Tuck
and kissed him goodnight before crossing the hall to Maddie’s
room.

“
Want a story?” I asked
when I sat down beside her.

She shook her head and grinned at me.
I wasn’t too surprised. Ever since she got concussed, she hadn’t
wanted stories much.

“
Okay.” I got up and kissed
her forehead before heading toward the door. “Get to
sleep.”

“
Mommy?” she
said.

I turned around with my hand on the
knob. “Yeah, baby girl?”

“
Are you gonna marry Mr.
Soupy?”

I’d hoped we were done with all that
kind of talk after the other night, at least for a while. Mainly
because I didn’t have any real answers.

“
I don’t know, Maddie. We
haven’t talked about getting married yet. We’re just trying out the
whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing for now.”

“
Oh. Because I think he
would be a good daddy.”

“
You do?”

“
Yeah. He takes good care
of us, and he makes you happy.” She rolled over so her back was
facing the door. “Good night, Mommy.”

“
Good night,
Maddie.”

Pumpkin darted into her bedroom and
leaped up his steps onto her bed as I pulled the door
closed.

Brenden looked just the same as he had
when I’d left him, only now he had a heated expression that made me
tingle with awareness.

“
They’re all set?” Brenden
asked when I got back into the living room. He’d turned the TV on
to hockey news, but he’d muted it so it was just moving
images.

I sat next to him, and he put his arm
around my shoulders almost immediately, drawing me in to his
warmth. “They’re down for the count—or at least they will be
soon.”

“
What has you
grinning?”

I hadn’t realized I was grinning. It
made sense, though, after what she’d said about Brenden. I agreed
with her. “She thinks you would make a good father.” It seemed only
natural to tell him that, even though I probably wouldn’t have not
too long ago.

He chuckled. “Then she’s got a lot
more confidence in me on that front than I do.”

“
Maybe you’re being too
hard on yourself.”

“
Maybe.” Brenden’s hand
slid down to my waist, settling there almost possessively. He
picked me up and settled me on his lap like he’d done after I’d cut
my feet. His erection made itself known against the side of my
thigh, much like it tended to press into my belly or my bottom when
he held me at night. It sent my pulse into a tailspin.

He kissed my cheek then rested his
chin on the top of my head, wrapping both his strong arms around
me. “I love you,” he said. “I know you’re not sure yet if you love
me, and that’s okay. But I need you to know how much I love you and
want to take care of you. How much I want to be with you. I think
you love me, too, even if you don’t recognize it.”

I did love him, though.