The Real Father (Twins) (Harlequin Superromance No. 927) (8 page)

Liza didn't beg any further, but her longing was almost like a humming in the air. Her eyes were locked on Molly's face, trying to read her chances.

“Okay,” Molly said, and the syllables were barely out of her mouth before Liza squealed with
delight and rushed over to give her a grateful hug. “Let me clean up, and I'll get you a snack before you go.”

“No need,” Jackson said. “Lavinia's already making sandwiches for the two of them. Peanut butter and—” He paused, giving Molly a deadpan expression. “I suggested jelly, but Vinnie seemed to be leaning toward cucumber.”

Molly wrinkled her nose instinctively, but Liza looked fascinated. “Cool,” she said. “I've never had that before.”

“Better hurry to the kitchen, then, before Tommy eats them all.” He raised one quick wry smile toward Molly. “I'll wait for you here.”

When Liza was out of earshot, Molly chuckled. “Coward,” she said.

“I don't notice you running in for a bite yourself,” he countered. “Not that Lavinia would let you in her kitchen looking like that.” He dragged a nugget of pine bark from her hair and flicked it back into the mulch. “I thought you were the brains of your landscape company, not the brawn.”

She smiled sheepishly, knowing she must look a wreck. She probably had a mud mustache—she remembered carelessly wiping her upper lip with grimy fingers. “But this is the part I like,” she said plaintively. “Don't you think it's perverse that the more successful you are, the less time you spend actually doing the work you love?”

“Extremely,” he agreed, rolling her small plastic gardening cart closer so that he could make a seat out of it. “Being an architect is no different. I seem
to have become a professional luncher. I'm in charge of sweet-talking the clients over white wine while my staff gets to design the buildings. I might as well have become a snake oil salesman.”

Molly laughed. “Since when have you been willing to sweet-talk anyone? Aren't you the guy who once told me that all silver tongues were forked?”

“Did I say that?” He grimaced. “God, teenagers can be obnoxious, can't they? I must have been caught in a particularly vicious bout of Beau-envy that day.”

She didn't really believe that, though the twins had been as different in their social manners as any two people could possibly be. Beau could charm the blue out of the sky if he put his mind to it, while Jackson was usually blunt to the point of discomfort.

Long ago Molly might have believed it was envy—that Jackson had developed his trademark vinegary candor merely because his brother had cornered the market on honey. By their teenage years, though, she had begun to realize that it was something else—a reaction, perhaps. Or an antidote, the way you might add lemon to an oversweetened tea.

“Well, Beau could flatter a girl until her head spun,” she admitted, remembering how she had longed for,
lived
for Beau's pretty compliments and thrilling declarations of undying love—even when she had often feared that he might be fibbing. Not lying, exactly. Just exaggerating. Just a little.

She reached out and touched Jackson's arm, hoping he wouldn't mind her black crescent-moon fingernails. “But it was awfully reassuring to know
that, if I really needed to hear the truth, I could always come to you.”

He didn't look at her. He seemed to be mesmerized by her fingers, staring down at them as if he didn't want to meet her eyes until he had decided how to respond. Could he think she was flirting with him? Discomfort wriggled in her stomach, and she eased her hand away as smoothly as possible.

She wasn't flirting. She wouldn't dream of flirting with Jackson. But even as she reassured herself, she admitted that something was different between them today. Some new, slightly edgy tone had crept into their easy intimacy, and their casual good-buddy relationship suddenly felt just a little more complicated.

This was her fault. If only she hadn't been so foolish the other night, letting his resemblance to Beau knock her into an emotional tailspin…. But the truth was it had felt strangely exciting to be with him. He was such a dynamic, gorgeous man. A real man, whose arms were real, warm, masculine. And ten years of nothing but memories…

Now she was the one looking down, incapable of straightforward candor. She had left tiny beads of soil on his arm. “Oops. Sorry,” she said, whisking them away efficiently with her fingertips. “I'd better finish up here, I guess. I'm a menace to any clean person who gets near me.”

“Need any help?” He looked around appraisingly. “Wow. Things sure look different without that oak tree.”

She nodded as she stood up and, still holding the
muddy spade she'd been working with, brushed the dirt from her knees with her free hand. It had been painful to observe the workers dismantling the two-hundred-year-old tree, their cruel machines buzzing through the limbs section by section. When they had begun to drive their jagged, whirling blades deep into the stump, grinding the roots to sawdust, she had turned away, unable to watch.

“The garden looks positively lost without it, doesn't it?” She scanned the perimeter, thinking out loud. “Whenever you have something that dominant, you tend to make it the focal point. Then everything else you plant has to be chosen to work with it. Eventually, the garden becomes dependent on it.”

“Dependent?” He looked toward the gaping hole where the tree had been. “That sounds a little extreme.”

“But true,” she insisted, absently rubbing the loose dirt from the edges of her spade. “See how the azaleas and oleander were grouped to balance the sides of the tree? And the dogwood over there—they were chosen because their texture and dimension provided the perfect foil. Even the brick paths were laid using the tree as the central axis.”

She sighed. “Without that tree as the focal point, the garden falls apart.”

She stopped, glancing over to see if he was bored. He probably couldn't understand why she felt so passionate about this. He couldn't know how intensely she identified with the problem. She had done very much the same thing with her own life,
once upon a time. She had let Beau become her focal point. She had, without quite realizing it, built everything around him, made even the tiniest decisions with him in mind.

And when he had died, her life had disintegrated into a hodgepodge of meaningless trivia.

But Jackson didn't look bored. He was scanning the garden, his gaze sober and evaluating. “Actually, it's the same when you're designing a house. You start with a central element, then let the rest of the house group around it. It's just easier, I suppose, because we're not working with animate objects. An arch or a column or a chimney can't die on you. So it's a little safer to let yourself depend on it.”

How strange that he should put it like that. She wondered for a moment whether he had read her mind. He was watching her with something that might be pity in his gaze.

“Exactly,” she said brightly, hoping to cover her discomfort. She moved toward the empty spot where the tree had once stood. “That's why I've decided to put something inanimate in its place. A gazebo, I think.” She held out her hand and urged him to follow her. “Come see—the view of the river is wonderful from there, actually. I know the perfect design—I saw it in a catalogue only a couple of months ago.”

“A gazebo?” He joined her on the bumpy earth, lightly touching her elbow for balance as they walked carefully over the crazy minefield of mounds and depressions left by the extricated roots. “You're not willing to try another tree?”

She shook her head—and she also tried to shake the sense that he wasn't just talking about the garden. “No, it would be impossible. And it's not just because I'm afraid of losing it. Trees like that take years and years to grow. If I tried to stick some new one in the ground there, the proportions would be all wrong.”

“Sure,” he said agreeably. “Makes sense.” Stretching his neck as if he'd begun to grow stiff, he stood next to her, looking down toward the river with such a casual air that she suddenly realized she had probably imagined the whole subtext. He'd just been indulging her, showing interest in her work to be polite. Nothing deeper than that.

“You're sweet to listen to all my rambling,” she said, smiling up at him. “I know I get carried away. It drives Liza crazy.” She laughed softly. “Beau used to call me The Garden Bore.”

To her surprise, Jackson turned roughly, a pulse beating in his tightened jaw. “Molly,” he said, speaking slowly. “I am not Beau.”

She looked at him, at the dark slash of brow over blazing green eyes. He looked so hard. So suddenly tense. “I know,” she said hesitantly.

“I don't think you do,” he said. “Not really. Not always.”

“Yes, I do.” She moved closer, and once again she touched his arm. “I'm sorry, Jackson. I really do know.”

He exhaled harshly, and gradually the tension in his muscles seemed to relax slightly under her fingertips.

“Okay. Then prove it, M. Stop comparing me to him.” Jackson put his hands on her upper arms and brought her in closer. Her face was only inches from his. From this intimate perspective he looked less like Beau than ever. Tiny laugh lines radiated out from his shockingly green eyes—lines that had never touched Beau's twenty-two-year-old skin. Jackson's mouth was harder than Beau's, too, and was framed by a light-brown dusting of stubble that Beau would never have tolerated. And the heat. Jackson seemed to generate an appalling amount of heat.

“I don't,” she said, surprised at how shaky it made her feel to stand this close to him. “I mean I won't…”

“And for God's sake don't judge me by Beau's standards. I haven't got the time or the inclination to pretty up everything I do with a coat of social whitewash. If I don't drown you in flattery, it's because I respect you too much. If I listen when you talk, it's because I am interested, because I want to know how you think.”

She knew it was true. It felt almost disloyal, but Molly knew deep inside that her friendship with Jackson had always been more honest, more reliable, somehow, than her love affair with Beau.

But she couldn't say that. In a way, it would be just another comparison, and she had promised… “Okay,” she said simply. “I understand.”

He nodded, but he didn't let go of her. They stood in silence a moment, wrapped in an intense intimacy created by the green, dappled sunlight and the cool,
whispering wind. Their eyes held, unblinking and searching. Finally his thumbs moved almost imperceptibly across her upper arms, rubbing the soft flannel of her shirt against her skin.

When he spoke, his voice had dropped to a warm, slightly amused intimacy. “And if I kissed you…”

She felt her heart stall, startled into momentary paralysis. She gripped the molded handle of her spade so hard it hurt her palm.

“If I kissed you,” he said again, “it would be because you have grown into a damned sexy woman. It would be because I get the feeling your mouth would taste as red and warm as summer roses.”

This couldn't be happening. She searched his face to see if he might be making fun of her. But though his eyes held a spark of laughing fire, it wasn't unkind. And the heat was pulsing out from his body to hers.

“I think maybe you are flattering me, now,” she said unsteadily, trying for the same casual tone he had taken. “At the moment I suspect my lips taste more like winter dirt.”

He reached his right hand up and traced her lower lip with his knuckle, smiling into her eyes. “Shall we find out?”

Something electric snaked through her veins. She could hardly believe what she was doing, but she felt her whole body pressing toward him, the way the tulips at her feet were even now thrusting through the cold earth, seeking the spring.

“Molly?”

She took a deep breath. Before she could allow herself to change her mind, she put her hands on Jackson's chest, ignoring the darkened, muddy tip of the spade as it grazed his sweatshirt. As softly as she could, she touched her lips to his.

Hot skin and cold air. Scratchy beard and velvet lips. Musky male and sweet soap. The unmistakable power of Jackson.

Not Beau. Jackson.

He made a small sound at the back of his throat. Her head swam, trying to feel everything. Trying to understand anything.

But then the air was filled with the footsteps and laughter of approaching children. Jackson's hands dropped. She backed away, as scalded and self-conscious as if she'd been a teenager again, caught necking in Beau's little sports car.

She looked at him, bewildered.

“Darn it, Jackson, it's gonna get dark pretty soon.” Tommy stomped around the corner, his voice aggressive and aggrieved. “My mom will bust my behind if I'm not home by six.”

“I'm ready,” Jackson said calmly, ignoring the brand of mud she had left on his chest. “Your pole's over there by the hedges.”

Liza, who arrived right behind Tommy, looked curiously from her mother to Jackson, then back to her mother. “Don't you want to come with us, Mom?”

“I'd better not,” Molly said. Thank heavens, her voice was calm, too. Unlike her insides. “I need to
finish up here. By the time I've had my shower and made dinner, you'll be back.”

The children began to debate who should get which fishing pole. And just before he joined them, Jackson turned back to Molly with a wicked grin.

“You were right about the dirt, M,” he said, staring boldly at her lips. He raised his warm, laughing green gaze to her eyes. “But I was right about the roses.”

T
HE
A
LTERNATIVE
Classroom didn't have its heat on, and it felt cold, colder than the Planet Cuspian in the dead of night, in the dead of winter. Liza thought maybe that was deliberate. Probably the teachers wanted you to sit in here getting colder and scareder, thinking about the bad things you'd done until you were so sorry you could almost cry.

Well, she was cold all right, but she wasn't scared. Not very scared, anyhow. She didn't get in trouble very often. When her mom got here, Liza would explain everything, and it would be okay. Her mom would understand.

Probably.

She looked over at Tommy Cheatwood, the only other person in the room. Tommy definitely wasn't scared. They had been told not to get up out of their desks for Any Reason Whatsoever, but Tommy had been up and down a dozen times. He was shooting a rubber band at the alphabet border that had been hung along the top of the blackboard, aiming for one letter at a time. He was already up to
J.
He was a very good shot.

Now he was perched on the flat part of his desk, his feet on the chair, facing the back of the room,
where
J
through
P
were displayed. He held up his finger and loaded the rubber band around the tip. Squinting narrowly, he pulled hard and let it fly. The elastic made a snapping sound as it thwacked the paper border, right in the center of the
J.

Tommy cackled triumphantly and climbed down to retrieve his ammunition.

“Aren't you afraid they'll catch you?” Liza knew he didn't want to talk to her. She knew because for the past twenty minutes he'd been pretending she wasn't even in the room. She'd been pretending the same thing, actually. She'd been drawing King Willowsong's coronation on a torn piece of paper she'd found in the desk. But she didn't have any crayons for color, and she was getting bored. Tommy's rubber band game seemed like more fun.

He gave her a look that said she was pathetic. “Oh, yeah, terrified.” His voice was sarcastic, in that ultracool way the other boys always tried to imitate. “What would they do?” He took aim at the
K
and shot. Another bull's-eye. “Call my mom?”

She saw his point. They already had called his mom.

“Is your mom going to be mad?” Now that she had made him talk, she didn't want to go back to silence. If she just sat here and worried about it, she might end up thinking she was scared after all.

“You bet she will.” Tommy grinned suddenly. He had a great grin. It made you want to smile back, for no reason at all.

“Hopping mad,” he elaborated gleefully. He picked up his rubber band, then came back. Sitting
wrong-ways on the desk, he looked at her. “Yours won't be, though.”

Although that was exactly what Liza had been thinking, it annoyed her for him to sound so sure. “Oh, really?” She lifted her chin. “How do you know that?”

Tommy idly snapped his rubber band against the blue denim that covered his knee. “She's not the type. Your mother is the kind that gets—” he lowered his voice, making a tragic face “—disappointed.”

Liza bit her lower lip, knowing that somehow it would be wrong to laugh. But the way he said that—it sounded just like her mom.

“And besides, grown-ups get more upset when boys fight,” he said thoughtfully, as if the subject interested him. “They think it's a Bad Sign.” His voice capitalized the phrase, as if it came straight out of a parenting handbook. “When girls fight, they just think it's cute and brave.”

Liza wasn't sure that was true. But she'd never hit anyone before, so she didn't know for sure. “What will your mom do to you?”

Tommy sighed, either at the prospect of his mother's temper or at Liza's constant questions. “She'll yell a lot. My mom is a big yeller. And she'll ground me for life. But that's okay—she'll forget about it by next week. The part I really hate is that all her boyfriends will start telling her how I need a man in the house.” He looked disgusted. “A male role model. Can you believe that? Like my
having a dad would somehow make me get along with that jerk Junior Caldwell.”

Liza nodded in complete sympathy. “No one can get along with Junior,” she said. Junior Caldwell was the reason she had been sent to the Alternative Classroom. She had seen him sneaking up on Tommy at recess with a big gob of dog-do in his hands, getting ready to throw it all over him. She knew Tommy and Junior fought a lot, but this didn't seem fair, hitting him from behind. So she had shoved Junior out of the way, calling a warning to Tommy. Tommy had swung around, thrusting his fist out instinctively. Junior had fallen and started bawling his eyes out.

And before she even had a chance to explain, she and Tommy were sent to the AC in disgrace, their parents summoned. Junior got a tissue and a Coke in the clinic.

“Junior acts so tough,” she added, feeling wronged all over again. “But he's really just a big baby.”

“You got that right.”

Tommy looked almost friendly, and she began to hope that maybe he had forgiven her for interfering. “Next time, stay out of it,” he had said—quite rudely, she thought, considering. “I darn sure don't need any girl to protect me.”

“Well, I guess you do,” she had countered angrily. “You'd look pretty stupid right now with dog-do in your hair.” That was when he had stopped talking to her.

“What are you drawing over there?” Tommy
squinted toward the paper she had on her desk. She instinctively covered it with her forearms, not sure she wanted to tell him about it. He could be pretty nice sometimes, like the other day when Jackson took them fishing and Tommy taught her how to bait her hook. But she didn't know what he'd think of her planet. And she didn't feel like being laughed at right now.

“Just a picture,” she hedged, fiddling with her cuff so that it covered more. “I like to draw.”

“Let me see.” Tommy actually got down off the desk and wandered over to her chair, twisting the rubber band around his fingers in a complicated, rhythmic pattern, as if he just couldn't ever be completely still. Boys were weird like that.

Reluctantly she moved her arm aside and let him look. He stared a long time without saying anything, and she peeked down, suddenly nervous. Darn. She had liked the picture a minute ago. Now it looked really stupid. King Willowsong's crown was way too tall for his head. And his cape, which was supposed to be regal ermine, looked like a big freckled blob that had landed on his back.

“Who is that guy?” Tommy was staring at Liza now. He was frowning, as if he were trying to figure out a really hard math question. “Is that supposed to be Jackson?”

She felt herself flushing. “Kind of,” she said uncomfortably. Would Tommy think the whole thing was just completely dumb? Would he tell all the other boys?

“Man,” Tommy said, rubbing the pencil marks
with his thumb, as if he thought it might be a trick. “You're pretty good. It really looks like Jackson, I think. And is the queen supposed to be your mom?”

She wondered how he knew that. She hadn't drawn the queen very well. It must be the ponytail, which looked just like the one her mother wore when she was working on the landscaping. “I guess so,” she admitted. She waited to hear what Tommy's reaction would be.

He looked at her, his eyebrows still drawn together, but not as if he were mad. Just as if he were thinking hard. “Does this have anything to do with Jackson kissing your mom the other day?”

“No,” she said hotly, pulling the picture off the desk and folding it up into tiny pieces, making a paper triangle the way she did with her notes to friends. “Of course not.”

“You're not thinking he and your mom might get together, are you? You're not thinking he might move in and be your dad, are you?”

Liza stood, forgetting that she wasn't supposed to. “Of course not,” she said again. “That's dumb.”

“'Cause he won't. My mom kissed Coach Riser, but that darn sure doesn't mean he's going to move in with us.” Tommy began snapping the rubber band again, this time against his own palm. He was still looking at her in that funny way. “Do you ever wish you had a dad?”

Liza squeezed her hand around the triangle of paper. She felt the edges curl in under the pressure. “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

Tommy nodded, his frown easing.

Suddenly there was noise in the hall. Voices and footsteps coming their way. Tommy slid into his chair, set his jaw hard and then squared his shoulders.

“Me, either,” he said firmly, giving her one last glance. “Especially not that dumb old Coach Riser.”

 

A
S SHE DROVE OFF
from Radway, Molly watched Liza out of the corner of her eye, marveling at her daughter's quiet dignity. At Liza's age, Molly would have been an absolute wreck if such a calamity had happened to her. Sent home from school in disgrace—for fighting, of all things! She remembered once having to tell her father that she had failed a Latin test. She hadn't dared to cry—her father hated what he called her “Goddamn waterworks.” But her fingers had felt numb when she handed over the paper, and her throat had worked in dry, desperate spasms as she tried to swallow or speak.

Liza, on the other hand, was contrite but hardly crushed. She had agreed that shoving was inappropriate and listened cooperatively as Molly discussed other options that might have been more effective.

And now here she was, a mere fifteen minutes after Molly had picked her up, sitting in the passenger seat, humming quietly to herself as she worked on a spelling ditto.

She seemed to sense her mother's glance. She looked up with a smile. “Are we almost there? I can't wait to see your old house. It sounds so cool.”

“It does?” Molly wondered what she had ever
said about her childhood home that would make Liza believe that the boxy little structure deserved such a description. “Cool?”

“Totally,” Liza confirmed enthusiastically. “Remember how you said the baby oak tree had grown so big its roots started tearing up the patio? Doesn't that sound cool and magical? Like Jack and the Beanstalk or something.”

Molly smiled, and she was suddenly glad that Liza would be with her when she saw the house again. In the nightmarish months after Beau's death, when she had discovered that she was pregnant, she and her mother had fled from this house as if it had been on fire. And they had never looked back. Her mother had finally divorced Molly's abusive father, and had busied herself in a new marriage. Molly had immersed herself in motherhood.

After the divorce, Molly's father had left the house, too—changing cities every few months until he finally died a few years later in another state. Even then, neither Molly nor her mother could face returning. They had hired someone to clean the rooms out, listed the property with an agent who was hardly enthusiastic, and then they'd let the house stand vacant, paying the annual taxes by impersonal air mail.

So it had stunned Molly this morning when the real estate agent called, telling her there was finally an offer. She had agreed to meet the woman at the house at three o'clock, though the prospect made her stomach feel tight and queasy. Yes, it was good that
Liza would be with her. The world always looked better viewed through Liza's eyes.

And hadn't there been something magical about that oak, after all? The buckled concrete had horrified Molly's mother, but Molly herself had been thrilled to see the sapling become a mighty tree, with limbs strong enough and high enough to lift her above the house, away from her father's anger and her mother's weeping.

But when she and Liza arrived at the cul de sac, the reality was even more depressing than she had remembered. The neighborhood had improved—obviously it had caught on among young professionals, and most of the houses had been given face-lifts and clever new landscaping.

This minisuburban renewal had not touched Molly's house. Now instead of being the most compulsively self-respecting address on the block, it was the most conspicuously neglected. The paint was dingy, stained with rust from the well water of badly aimed sprinklers. The lawn was more dirt than grass, except where weeds had filled in the gaps. The knee-high wall around the tiny front courtyard was missing several bricks, and the gate had lost a slat, giving the house a slightly loony, gap-toothed smile.

In fact, it was a miracle anyone had made an offer on it. Molly felt a sudden fear that the agent wouldn't show up—that the call had been a hoax. This house was a disgrace, and she warmed with shame. Had she really believed that by turning her back on the past she could obliterate it? She had
merely left it to rot on the ground, like discarded flowers.

Even Liza's determination to be cheerful seemed to falter in the face of this sad little house. She stared with her mouth open slightly, her pencil frozen an inch above her last spelling word.

“I know,” Molly said ruefully. “It's pretty terrible. The kind of house where Mudbluffs would live, right?”

Liza frowned thoughtfully. “No,” she said. “Not like that at all. I think it's a Willowsong house deep inside. It's just kind of—” Her gaze was wide, taking in the curtainless windows, the empty, rotting wooden planters, the mildewed sidewalk. “Kind of like a house that's been put under a spell. Like Sleeping Beauty's castle when the thorns grew all over it. You could make it pretty again, Mom, you know you could. It needs roses, I think.” She smiled at her mother. “Willowsongs love roses.”

Molly laughed, shaking her head helplessly. Anything less like a castle, cursed or otherwise, would be hard to imagine. But still—somehow Liza's silly optimism was infectious. The oppressive sense of decay and failure lifted, and the house was once again merely a house. Nothing wrong here that a coat of paint and a good landscape architect couldn't cure. And maybe even a few roses…