Suddenly a Bride (5 page)

“You’ve got it,” he told her, looking at the boys, who were both already sticky with cotton candy, their fingers, cheeks and definitely their tongues turning a deep shade of blue. “Uh, I shouldn’t have let them have that, should I?”

“Cotton candy wouldn’t have been my first choice, no. But they both ate all of their supper, so it’s all right. At least they’re not asking to go home. But you know what? I don’t think I should take them into the store while they’re all sticky like that, do you? Could you watch them for me? I want to get them each something with the pig on it.”

Panic, swift and fairly terrible, kicked Will in the midsection. He suddenly remembered why he’d always made it a point to never date women with children. “Me? Watch them? Oh,” he said, attempting to look, if not fatherly, then at least reasonably competent. “Sure, no problem.”

“Thank you,” she said, rummaging in her purse.
“Here’s some wet wipes in case they finish their cotton candy.” Elizabeth’s smile strangely made his sacrifice seem worth the effort, and he held out his hand as he mutely accepted the wrapped packets. He then watched her disappear into the crowd milling along the walkway behind the right field seats, feeling only slightly desperate.

“Okay, boys, let’s go get Coach a nice cold one.”

“A cold what? Can we have one, too? Where’s Mom?” one of them asked, the one who had somehow gotten cotton candy on his elbow. How the hell did you get cotton candy on an
elbow?

“You’ve got to be Mikey, right?”

“Yeah. So where’s my mom?”

“She went to buy you guys some Pigs stuff. She’ll be right back.”
So please don’t cry.

“Cool,” Mikey said, licking his fingers. “I’m thirsty. Hey, Danny, are you thirsty?”

Danny, who had wandered off without Will realizing he was gone, walked back to them wiping his hands together after tossing the empty plastic bag in a garbage can. At least they were…
trained.
“Sure. I saw a kid with a hot dog. We could get hot dogs. Or maybe pizza? I saw some pizza, too.”

Will was beginning to sense that Elizabeth’s sons were going to eat their way through their first experience at a baseball game.

“Here, hold out your hands,” he told them, ripping open one of the packets. With memories of his mother scrubbing at his sticky face and hands with a washcloth,
he started by wiping their faces and then opened two more packets and gave them each a wet towelette so they could clean their own hands. He reserved the last packet for himself, to clean himself up after cleaning them up.

“Will? Will Hollingswood? Is there something I should know?”

Will shut his eyes for a moment, recognizing the voice, knowing who would be standing behind him when he turned around.

“Hi, Kay,” he said grabbing the used towelettes the twins were shoving at him and stuffing them in his pocket before turning to look at the tall, stunningly beautiful brunette. “I didn’t know you liked the Pigs.”

“Well, then that makes us even. I didn’t know you had children.”

“Very funny. They’re not mine, Kay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Okay, not so funny this time. Kay, look, I’m sorry I didn’t call you, but it’s been a hell—” he shot a quick look at the twins, who weren’t really paying attention, thank God “—a heck of a week.”

“Yes, I heard about The Hammer. Are these two of your little baseball team children?”

“They’ve never seen a baseball game,” Will answered, going into lawyer mode. Tell the truth while saying nothing.

“And the entire team is here somewhere? You’re really taking this punishment seriously, aren’t you? Or maybe just trying to score brownie points with The
Hammer, which wouldn’t be a bad idea. You really were out of line, Will, you know.”

“So says the assistant district attorney. If you’d been sitting at the defense table, you would have objected, too.”

Kay shrugged her bare shoulders. She was dressed in a sort of tube top that didn’t quite reach her waist, and a miniscule tan skirt whose length only barely passed the public decency test. It was like there were two Kays, the buttoned-down prosecutor in the courtroom and the sensual, sexual shark everywhere else. He should know.

And he needed her gone before Elizabeth got back.

Besides, the twins were now running in circles in a small cleared spot near the beer stand, chasing each other and nearly bumping into people, including a guy built like a Mack truck and carrying a full tray of beers. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d just laugh and say “boys will be boys” if the tray hit the ground.

“I’ve got to go, Kay,” he told her, pointing to the twins.

But he’d left it too late, because here came Elizabeth toward him, carrying a large plastic bag with the image of an IronPig on it.

“Danny! Mikey! Get over here.”

The twins stopped running and raced to their mother, each of them grabbing for the bag. She pulled out a pink baseball hat with the IronPigs logo on it and then handed the bag to her sons. “You each have the same thing, so there’s no reason to kill yourselves trying to see.”

Then she looked at Will. And saw Kay.

“I’m sorry I took so long, Will. There was a line at the register. Hello,” she said to Kay.

Will didn’t physically step between the two women, but he did think about it. “Elizabeth Carstairs—Assistant District Attorney Kay Quinlan.”

“Oh, how formal, Will,” Kay said, extending her hand. “Outside the courtroom, I’m just Kay. Are these two adorable boys your sons?”

“Only mostly adorable, but yes, they’re mine.”

Will grabbed the twins and stood them in front of him, his hands on their shoulders. Not that he needed a shield from either woman. “Mikey, Danny, meet Assist—that is, meet Ms. Quinlan.”

The boys mumbled something that sounded vaguely like a greeting and then went back to their new possessions, matching baseball caps and a pair of tan canvas-covered stuffed dogs sporting blue bandannas with the IronPigs logo on them.

Elizabeth must have seen him looking at the dogs. “They’re autograph hounds. I thought if I could interest the boys in the players that they’d also become more interested in the game. The salesgirl told me the players often sign autographs before and after the games. Is that all right? Oh,” she added, reaching into her purse, “I also got them a set of trading cards with the players’ photographs on them. Although the roster—roster, right?—isn’t complete anymore because players are always coming and going. Some of them have gone up to the big show already this year.”

“The big show?” Will grinned at Elizabeth’s earnest expression. “You mean, the big leagues, up with the Phillies.”

“If you say so. She just said the big show. I’m sorry, Kay. This is all new to me—and to the boys. Will has been kind enough to help explain the game to them now that they’re on a team.”

“So they are on your team?” Kay asked, one perfect eyebrow arched. “The one that only came into existence in the last few days? My, my, William, you don’t let any grass grow, do you?”

“Excuse me,” Elizabeth said, taking Mikey’s hand, probably knowing that where one twin went the other followed. “I think Mikey would like a hot dog. We’ll be right over there, Will. Kay? So nice meeting you.”

Will waited until Elizabeth and the boys were standing at the back of the line at the hot dog stand and then turned back to glare at Kay. “You had to do that?”

“Probably not. She seems like a nice woman. Let me guess. Newly divorced?”

“Widowed.”

“Even worse. Shame on you. Well, at least now she’s been warned, hasn’t she? When are you going to make your move, Slick?”

“I’m not making a move, Kay.”

“Sure you are. And the sooner you make it, the sooner you’ll be back in the pool. Call me.”

“I’m not making any—Oh, the hell with it,” he said as Kay turned away, heading for the beer kiosk.

He stood where he was for a few moments, his thirst
for a beer gone, and wondered how he was going to explain Kay to Elizabeth.
She’s nobody important, just someone I sleep with once in a while when we’re both bored?
No, that wasn’t going to cut it. Did he have to say anything at all? Probably not, at least not from the way Elizabeth had looked at him before taking the boys to the hot dog stand.

How the hell had he gotten into this mess? Okay, so he knew how he’d gotten into the mess. He should never have tried to set Chessie up with somebody, especially with anal-retentive estate lawyer Bob Irving. Payback was a bitch, but what was fair was fair. And the idea had seemed simple enough. Show the girl a good time, Chessie said. Flirt with her, make her feel feminine, desirable. Remind her she’s still young—and all that crap.

Sure. Great plan.

Then have her standing there all fresh-cheeked and vulnerable, with her mommy-clothes yellow blouse and knee-length denim skirt and her silly pink IronPigs baseball cap on, and two cute but definitely not disposable kids with her, and introduce her to the sleek, sensual, übersophisticated, smart-mouthed Kay Quinlan.

That ought to help Elizabeth come out of her shell, or wherever the hell place it was that Chessie seemed to think she needed to get out of.
Not.

Then again, who needed this? Not him. He didn’t like kids, didn’t know how to relate to them. Cleaning off sticky faces definitely wasn’t a turn-on. Nor was
trying to romance a woman whose kids kept getting in the way.

He looked over at the hot dog stand to see that the boys were now munching happily as Elizabeth squeezed mustard on her own napkin-wrapped hot dog. They were kind of cute kids, though. Maybe they needed a haircut. All those curls on boys old enough to be swinging a baseball bat? He’d be surprised if they weren’t teased in school. But a woman raising her boys alone maybe wouldn’t know the little ins and outs of boy stuff. The kids could have a problem.

“Nah. Mikey would sock anyone who teased him,” Will told himself quietly. “And Danny would talk the rest of them to death.”

Will frowned. How did he know that? He’d only been with the twins for a couple of hours that morning. But he was already beginning to be able to tell them apart just by their mannerisms, the way they talked, the words each of them used. The way Danny played his mother like a fine Stradivarius, the way Mikey couldn’t seem to stand still for more than five seconds at a time.

The blare of the loudspeaker on a nearby pole alerted Will that the team was taking the field, snapping him out of thoughts that weren’t making him all that happy anyway.

He walked over to Elizabeth and told her it was time to take their seats. They filed into the box in the third row behind the dugout just as it was time to stand for the national anthem. Elizabeth yanked Danny’s baseball cap off just as Will was doing the same for
Mikey—their nearly synchronized movements seeming so natural to him and maybe even satisfying. Elizabeth smiled at him in thanks for his help, and he suddenly had a niggling feeling that, although he was the only one who hadn’t had anything to eat yet tonight, he’d maybe just bitten off more than he could chew.

“I still can’t believe they sell turkey legs at a ballpark,” Elizabeth said as Will eased his car into the line of traffic leaving the ballpark. She felt so comfortable with him now that it was difficult to believe she’d been nervous and vacillating up until the moment he’d picked them up for the game.

“I still can’t believe Mikey
ate
one,” he told her, waving his arm out the window to thank the trucker who’d let him in line. “Plus the slice of pizza and the snow cone.”

“And the hot pretzel—although, to be fair, you ate at least half of it,” Elizabeth told him, taking off her baseball cap and running her hand through her curls. “And we won. You do realize that now the boys will expect fireworks if their team wins a game.”

“We don’t keep score, remember?”

“…four…five…hey, Mom, I’ve got six autographs,” Danny called out from the backseat. “And Mikey got seven. But we can get more next time, right?”

“Yeah, Mom. Next time. When are we going again? I love the Pigs. Oink! Oink!”

Elizabeth and Will exchanged looks. “Methinks you’ve created a pair of monsters, Coach. I don’t know
how much they understand now about baseball, but they certainly understand all that food and getting autographs.”

They were free of the parking lot now, and Will deliberately turned left as most of the traffic was turning right. The trip home might be longer this way, he told Elizabeth, but at least they wouldn’t be sitting in traffic for the next quarter hour.

“No problem. I told you, I have season tickets. But I’m afraid the team leaves for a road trip tomorrow morning. A road trip, guys, means that they’ll be playing their games in somebody else’s ballpark. They won’t be back here for another week or even longer.”

There were twin sighs of frustration from the backseat that were not matched by the occupants of the front seat.

“They’ll be fine,” Elizabeth assured him. “With luck, they’ll also both be asleep by the time we get back to the highway. We all really did have a wonderful time tonight, Will. Thank you.”

“Actually, thank you. That was a lot of fun, explaining the game to the boys. They asked some pretty good questions, too.”

“But I didn’t?”

He shot her a grin. “Oh, I don’t know. The one about why the players don’t wear dark pants so that they don’t get so dirty wasn’t too terrible.”

“They were wearing
white,
Will. Who plays in the dirt while wearing white? I pity whoever has to presoak all those uniforms.”

“But they’re the home team, Elizabeth. The home team wears white. It’s…tradition.”

“And it’s a tradition that would only last another three days if the team owners had to personally presoak the uniforms themselves,” she said firmly. “Don’t say anything. I know I’m being silly. I just couldn’t think of anything else to ask you. But I think I cheered at the right times.” She turned slightly in her seat and looked behind her. “Ah, out cold, the pair of them. And we didn’t even reach the highway yet.”

Worse, Elizabeth thought, with the twins asleep, and the subject of the baseball game pretty much worn out, now she had to find something to say to Will to keep the conversation going. She dredged her mind for a topic, being very careful to avoid the subject of the beautiful and clearly well-known-to-Will Kay.