Tender Loving Care (3 page)

The kitchen was paneled in oak and accented with more of that cool blue he liked. She found Brie, steaks, apples and beer in the refrigerator. On the counter by the toaster, she discovered a lovely pair of black silk panties, which she casually stuffed in her back pocket before the twins could see them.

Her spirits promptly improved. Not that it wasn’t easy to believe there really was a woman in his life, but the panties were such nice proof. He certainly couldn’t be looking for another lady friend if his kitchen was already stocked with panties, so worrying about those thoughtful glances he kept shooting her was obviously unnecessary.

She found a bottle of women’s cologne in the bathroom off the kitchen, another nerve soother; then she poked her head into the last two downstairs rooms. One was a laundry filled with piled-high clothes and heavily laden coat hooks. The other was a game room with a pool table all set up to play and a television with a huge screen. The kids would love it.

The upstairs wasn’t as large. The first bedroom she peeked into would do for the twins, she decided, and evidently they’d already discovered it: The plain brown spreads on the twin beds had already been well trampled. Zoe wandered past the bathroom until she came to what was apparently the only other bedroom.

Rafe’s room had its own balcony, a corner fireplace and a wall of mirrored closet doors. The king-sized bed was built on a pedestal and flanked by stereo speakers. He obviously liked music. In this setting, she could already hear Ravel, and promptly felt another vague attack of nerves.

Ravel and Rafe together struck her as a dangerous combination…and life was not going to go too smoothly if there were only two bedrooms. Maybe he could sort of camp out permanently at his lady’s house? Except that Zoe needed Rafe here, if he was ever going to form a bond with the kids.

Only how, exactly, was she supposed to convince the man that he loved children when his whole lifestyle was clearly set up for nightly romps with a woman who wore black silk panties?

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” she exclaimed to Rafe when she found him crouched at a low cupboard in the kitchen. The four-year-olds were perched on the counter, heels swinging.

“You like the place? Zoe, what the hell—heck are we going to give them for lunch?”

“Macaroni and cheese!”

“We can’t have that until we’ve been to the store, guys.” Rafe pushed back from the counter. “How about mushroom soup?”

“Yuck.”

“Double yuck.”

He nodded weakly. “You like cheese?” he asked them.

He got a matched set of shaking heads.

“French onion soup?”

“Nope. Snookums, we’re
hungry.
”

“Scrambled eggs?” she suggested.

“That’s for
breakfast!
”

“Well, it just turned into a lunch dish,” she said brightly, and gave Rafe a look that said
See how easy it is to get along with them? Aren’t they adorable? Don’t you just love them?
Before their banging feet drove her nuts, she lifted the boys off the counter and urged them to try out the TV in the game room.

At about the same instant they vanished, she felt Rafe’s hand sliding intimately into the back pocket of her jeans. Heat curled instantly around the curve of her hip. She turned so fast that his hand ended up on intimate territory. It took him a moment to remove it; and then, dangling from his fingers were the black silk panties.

“Now, don’t be embarrassed,” she said in a rush. “I just didn’t think the kids should see them. I mean, you’re entitled—”

“I’m not embarrassed,” he interjected.

Well,
Zoe
was! She turned abruptly to the refrigerator, where nice cold air fanned her cheeks as she reached for the eggs. “Any time you want to go out for an evening, I’ll stay here with the kids,” she assured him.

“Nice of you to offer.”

“Yes. Well, you already told me you were involved with someone…”

“It was never that serious a relationship, Zoe.”

Her thumb bit into a shell. Sticky egg oozed over her fingers, and now she’d have to pick out the bits of shell. Where she came from, a woman didn’t leave her panties around unless it was a
damned
serious relationship.

“Why don’t I scramble the eggs while you make out a grocery list? I haven’t any idea what to buy for two growing boys.”

Neither did Zoe. “I’ll cook. You write the list. Meanwhile, what are we going to give them to drink?”

“Iced tea?”

She shook her head. “Caffeine. They’ll make do with water, I guess, until we can get some milk.” She winced. The boys had clearly discovered the volume control on the television. “I’ll take the couch,” she said casually.

“No, you won’t. You’ll sleep in my room; I’ll be comfortable enough downstairs.”

She shook her head firmly. “I have no intention of putting you out of your bed.” He needed his sleep. Anybody was grouchy without sleep, and being grouchy wouldn’t help him form a strong emotional bond with the boys.

Suddenly looming over her shoulder, Rafe said gently, “Don’t you think that’s a bit much food?”

She glanced down at the frying pan. A dozen egg yolks stared back at her. Had she really cracked all the eggs? “I’m starving,” she said weakly.

“Ah. For a minute there, I thought you were nervous.”

“Not at all.” She scrambled, fast.

He leaned back against the counter, watching her. “Because there’s no need to be nervous. This whole situation’s tough on both of us, and maybe you especially. We barely know each other, and neither one of us knows a darn thing about kids…We can just take it one thing at a time, Zoe.”

“Of course we can.”

He paused. “And I do understand that it’s extra rough on you, feeling about children the way you do…”

“It’s not that I dislike them. It’s just—”

“I understand.”

“I can’t
help
it, Rafe. I know it must sound cold and uncaring to admit flat-out that I can’t handle being around them, but…” Her tone turned to a whisper. Parker was shuffling toward the doorway. He’d lost a shoe, and his lower lip was trembling. Zoe sent the spatula flying and rushed over to him. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

“Where’s blankie?”

“Blankie?”

“My blankie. My yellow blankie. You promised you wouldn’t forget to pack it!”

“Oh, the blanket! We’ve got it, honey. Just a minute.” She hustled into the front hall, where their gear lay in untidy piles, looking like storm-shelter debris. When she finally found the ragged blanket, she hurried back to the kitchen. Parker folded his arms around it, his grin monumentally huge. She couldn’t help but drop a kiss on his forehead, and then he pattered off back to the television.

Rafe was slowly finishing her egg-scrambling project. He lifted his head, let his eyes dawdle over her face until she flushed. “As I was starting to say, I understand why you don’t want to be around children. Although I really think you don’t need to worry too hard that they’re going to sense your ‘cold and uncaring’ attitude,” he said gravely.

Too gravely. She stiffened. “Look, that was completely different, for heaven’s sake. They’ve just lost their parents. Naturally, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they feel loved! That doesn’t mean—”

“Of course it doesn’t, Zoe,” he said smoothly, and changed the subject. “If you don’t want to stay here alone with the twins, we can all go to town together.”

“Unnecessary. The boys and I will get along here just fine.” His leaving struck her as the next best thing to chicken soup. She needed some time to gather her addled wits in privacy. And she could make a few careful changes in his house, get the kids’ gear all neatly put away, change into some other clothes and relax away from those thoughtful blue eyes.

Four hours later, Rafe turned the knob on the front door. Behind him stood a briefcase filled with work he’d collected, a package of Zoe’s clothes delivered by UPS and six bags of groceries.

He’d barely reached for the first bag when Zoe came flying toward him from the kitchen.

“You’re home!” she said jubilantly.

His eyebrows lifted as he straightened. A few hours earlier, he’d gotten the definite impression she’d been glad to see him go. Now she was looking at him as if he were a god. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing, nothing at all! I’ll help you carry all that.”

The hallway still looked like an obstacle course. Not that he’d expected her to do all the unpacking, but she’d certainly led him to believe that was her goal for the afternoon. “All right. Where are they?” he said patiently.

“The twins?” Zoe smiled brilliantly. “They’ve been little angels, Rafe. You’re not going to believe how easily they’re going to fit in your life; they’re absolutely no trouble!”

“What did they do, Zoe?”

“Nothing. Nothing!” Carting two grocery bags, she turned into the kitchen, out of his sight. He peered into the living room to find king-sized sheets stretched between the two couches. Giggling could be heard from within the makeshift tent. “I’ll unpack these,” Zoe called back to him, “and start dinner.”

He followed her. He’d noticed that she was usually excessively well groomed. At the moment, however, her blouse was hanging out, her hair looked as if she’d been hit by a hurricane, and her eyes shone on the glassy side of exhaustion. “I’ll do that. You sit down.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Zoe didn’t dare meet his eyes. Her nerves had something in common with limp lettuce. She’d grossly underestimated the difficulty of handling two small boys for a few hours. The twins had decided to turn on the washing machine for her. Their choice of dials had resulted in a full hour’s cleanup, and mountain reception was so poor that they’d deserted the television in favor of making rubber-band sling shots, which they loaded with pellets of Play-Doh. Aaron had gotten hit in the nose. He’d bitten Parker, and they’d both cried. She’d tried hide-and-seek—didn’t all kids like hide-and-seek? Except that she’d made the mistake of being the one to hide, and no one had come looking for her. By the time she’d discovered Parker poised on the mantel, prepared to risk an Incredible Hulk–type leap…

“What happened, Zoe?” Rafe’s voice was as smooth as melted butter. For no reason at all, he was setting a glass of red wine in front of her.

She shook her head. “I don’t think we should drink in front of the kids.”

“I don’t think seeing you sip a glass of red wine will corrupt them for the rest of their lives.”

“Well…” She gulped it, smiled at him and then resumed unpacking the groceries. “Macaroni and cheese. Thank God,” she murmured, and then awkwardly confessed, “I didn’t get quite as much done this afternoon as I’d planned.”

“No? Well, I’ll tackle the unpacking after dinner. And the kids. You can just relax.”

Relax? She had already failed at being any kind of positive influence on the kids. She was
not
comfortable in a man’s house where she was terrified of tripping over another woman’s lingerie. She had an attack of vertigo the minute she stepped outside, and the awkwardness she felt around Rafe was increasing instead of letting up.

Relax? Maybe…
maybe
by the next century.

Zoe sank into bubbles up to her chin, closed her eyes, sighed…and immediately tensed. Something had dropped with a deafening clatter in the twins’ bedroom. She heard the thundering of little feet, then Rafe’s firm, quiet voice, then the sound of the boys’ bedroom door closing.

Silence. Relaxing again, she tried out another blissful sigh, languidly raised a washcloth and let the water dribble over her raised knee. Laziness felt sublimely wanton, even if she only had in mind a five-minute bath. After dinner, Rafe had insisted that she disappear and let him handle the boys for a while, but she didn’t want to push that. Until he formed a really strong attachment to them, she figured she’d better shield him from discovering they weren’t quite the well-behaved angels she’d led him to believe.

Still, she had absolutely nothing to do for a few minutes but watch steam rise from the blue bathtub. She liked her baths wrinkle-hot and pore-opening. Leaning back against the cool porcelain, she felt her tense muscles gradually loosen in the hot water.

Through half-shuttered eyes, she studied her body. All the parts, however distorted by water, looked basically female, basically normal. Exercise gave her skin a healthy tone and suppleness. Her breasts were firm, white, proportionate. Her stomach was flat, and when not exposed to chocolate-chip cookies, her hips behaved. Her thighs were slim; she had terrific calves; and except for her big toes—both of them annoyed her—she had nice small feet.

It was a darn good body, and her pelvis was never going to have stretch marks, her breasts were never going to sag from nursing a baby, and her stomach was never going to turn into Jell-O from carrying a child.

The problem was that she wanted the stretch marks, the sag, the Jell-O.

She squeezed her eyes closed, furious with herself. After all this time, she should have gotten over it. And exactly when was she going to manage to completely forget Steven?

Being around the children had brought it all back. Aaron and Parker were the image of the kids she’d wanted to have with Steven—a mixture of scamps and innocents, love and trouble. Loving a man, she’d discovered, meant desperately wanting to bear his children. If that was basic human instinct, Zoe had learned it as basic pain.

She should have told Steven when she first met him that she couldn’t have kids. She hadn’t. Maybe because she’d met him at that vulnerable time right after the operation. A time when she’d desperately needed to know that she could be loved, that she was still a whole woman capable of filling a man’s life. She’d loved him so much! And when she had told him, when he’d walked out of her life, she’d died inside. It wasn’t Steven’s fault. All the blame was hers, for not telling him earlier, for hurting him, for being less than adequate as a woman…

The emotional scar still hadn’t healed. But she would never make the same mistake again. Falling in love meant ramming her head against the steel wall of all the natural biological urges she could no longer fulfill. And the very thought of falling in love still left that taste of acid in her mouth. Zoe, the woman, wasn’t enough for Steven. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand, but it hurt.

An image of Rafe’s face rose up in her mind and stayed there. He repeatedly insisted that he couldn’t tackle the kids alone. At first, she’d understood—his lifestyle had never included kids, and the sudden responsibilities of being a single parent were overwhelming and threatening—maybe especially for a man. That was all still true, but Zoe could see how firm and caring and compassionate he was with the boys. At his age, a bachelor could have been far more selfish and self-centered. In Rafe she saw no sign of either quality.

Loving a man like that would be all too easy. Zoe didn’t, of course. She barely knew him. She just wished fleetingly that he didn’t think badly of her. She’d deliberately misrepresented herself as selfish and insensitive to children; she’d
had
to do that, to make sure he knew the twins would be better off with him, but…

Her thoughts scattered instantly when she heard the faint creak of the doorknob turning. Her head whipped around. One freckled nose was slowly sneaking through the doorway. For a moment, she couldn’t identify which twin it was, but then she recognized Parker. He usually led with his tummy.

“Whatcha doing, Snookums?”

She was gathering suds together, fast…but not faster than Parker could close the door and edge closer to the tub. Zoe swallowed a huge lump of frantic indecision. Darn it, what was the parental thing to do? Cover herself, because he was a boy and hardly a baby at four, or act comfortable with nudity because that seemed a fairly important thing for him to learn? What about teaching the value of privacy as a personal right? But what about teaching honesty and natural behavior within a family? And did the same rules apply to a legal guardian as to a parent in this situation?

Parker overrode her indecision by leaning over the tub and studying her breasts interestedly. “Your bazooms are sure bigger than Mommy’s,” he said politely.

A conversation stopper if ever there was one. “Oh?”

“Mommy always let me take a bath with her.”

“That’s nice.” At least Zoe had learned fairly fast about how Janet had been raising the twins in terms of bodies and modesty.

“Could I? Take a bath with you?” Parker sent her a disarming grin. “Mommy
always
let me.”

“Well, I guess…if you’re sure she always did? I mean…” Parker was already pulling off his striped shirt; he had apparently taken her agreement for granted. Zoe slid up to the faucet end of the tub, the thought of a relaxing bath fast disappearing. Saying no had never occurred to her. No matter what her feelings about children were, she would have done anything on earth to make the twins miss their parents less.

She marveled, watching Parker. It took him
hours
to put his clothes on in the morning, but he could strip them off faster than a speeding bullet. He dipped his big toe in the water and wrinkled his nose. “Why is it so hot?”

“We’ll cool it down,” she assured him, and immediately flicked on the cold-water tap.

She figured he’d sit on the opposite side of the tub, but he immediately arranged himself on her lap. The warm body wriggled until he was comfortable just so, and then he raised his head to grin at her upside down. “I
love
baths, Snookums,” he told her.

“Me, too.”

“I have a beautiful body. Did you notice?”

She smothered a laugh. “I certainly did.”

“Want to play a game?”

“Sure.”

The game was that he closed his eyes and she made a letter on his chest with the edge of the bar of soap. If he guessed the letter correctly, he got a kiss. If he guessed the letter wrong, he got a kiss, too. Parker liked games where he couldn’t lose.

Zoe didn’t hear the door opening again until Aaron stepped in. When she looked up, she saw a pair of stricken, soft eyes and sturdy legs planted belligerently. “How come
you
get to take a bath with Zoe and not me?”

“Because she asked me specially,” Parker said smugly.

Zoe’s jaw dropped. “Now wait a minute, Parker, I never—”

“Snookums, I thought you loved me!” Aaron’s eyes immediately brimmed.

“Honey, I
do.
It was just that Parker came in here first, and I—”

“Probably she loves me more,” Parker offered with a careless shrug.

“
Parker!
Aaron, listen to me…”

It wasn’t as if she had a choice. In the end, Aaron squeezed in on her right and Parker on her left. Sardines couldn’t have been packed any tighter. The best Zoe could manage was to guard her vital parts from injury and exert token control over the soap, which kept flying back and forth between the boys like a rocket. A limp and sodden washcloth seemed to be draped over her head when the bathroom door opened yet again.

Strange, but this time she clearly heard the soft click of the knob over the splashing and giggling. She promptly froze.

For three and a half seconds, she couldn’t see anything because of the washcloth. But then, she comforted herself, for three and a half seconds Rafe could hardly see anything either, because she was completely covered with little boys. Both circumstances changed rather fast. As she pushed off the dripping cloth, Rafe was calmly, firmly lifting one boy and then the other out of the tub.

She’d never heard his preacher-stern voice before, but she certainly heard it now. “Snookums,” he said as he dried two small bodies at the same time, “is going to take a bath every single day after dinner from now on. That means that for a full half hour she is going to be behind a closed door. Nobody bugs her when that door’s closed. Nobody. Have we got that, boys?”

“What if we spill a glass of milk?” Aaron always liked to know the rules for extenuating circumstances.

“You call me.”

“What if you’re not there?”

“I’ll be there.”

“But what if you’re not?”

“Then you let the milk stay spilled. Snookums is entitled to privacy. All grown-ups need privacy.”

“Why?” Parker asked bewilderedly.

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because—never mind. We’ll discuss this in your bedroom.” Rafe rose from his crouch and patted two bare fannies in the direction of the door. “Out.
Now.
And head straight for your pajamas.”

As soon as they were gone, silence filled the steamy blue bathroom. Zoe didn’t say anything, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Her arms and legs were all appropriately twisted up to hide everything it was possible to hide, but the water was definitely clear now. One last soap bubble was floating toward the faucets, but that was all.

She watched that lone soap bubble, and then she stared with fascination at Rafe’s jeaned knees, mostly because they weren’t moving. If he’d been any kind of gentleman, they
would
have been moving. Toward the door. Her gaze wandered up to his lean thighs, whisked past the bulge near his zipper and paused momentarily on the hands on his hips. His sweater sleeves were pushed up; his chest looked massive. Just above that, her eyes paused on a long brown throat with a distinct Adam’s apple. That Adam’s apple was pulsing wildly. She risked only a very quick glance at his face.

She’d made a mistake, thinking that his eyes were blue. They were a brooding blue-black, like the sky at midnight and just as fathomless. Dammit, he could have smiled. Her hair had to be hanging in wet ropes around her face, and he could have relieved her unbearable tension if he’d smiled, but he didn’t. He just looked at her until her throat went dry.

“I…um…they said their mother let them take a bath with her.”

“And you believed that?” He shook his head, still not moving, but she saw the spark of humor in his eyes. “Know something, Zoe?”

She hoped this conversation wasn’t going to be long. “What?”

“It would have been a lot easier on both of us if you’d been fat and ugly.”

He closed the door behind him. And not that she’d been holding her breath, but a huge gush of air suddenly whooshed out of her lungs. Freezing, she pushed up the drain and reached for a towel. So much for relaxing baths.

Putting the twins to bed covered up all kinds of tension. After that, the atmosphere in the house plummeted directly to uneasy. Rafe didn’t help when he brought blankets and a pillow from upstairs to make a bed for himself on the couch. She could have argued with him, but didn’t. Arguing beds with Rafe just didn’t seem wise.

By nine o’clock, she could honestly claim exhaustion, and escaped to his bed with three books about earthquakes—not because that was his field, but because the reading material in the house consisted of nothing but seismology texts and the last three issues of
Penthouse.

Propped against his pillows in a green nightgown, she read about fault lines and snagged bedrock and trench subduction. That had her yawning. The second book had a section on how winter snow loads and increased barometric pressure could trigger earthquakes, and how even the slightest tremor could ignite an avalanche of disastrous proportions. That had her frowning. The damn fool was in a dangerous profession. Seismological projects were particularly perilous in this area of Montana. An earthquake here in 1959 had jolted some 500,000 acres.

She turned off the light at eleven, punched her pillow a few times and settled down to worry about earthquakes and avalanches, not necessarily of the geological variety.

There was every chance, of course, that she was exaggerating the significance of this little attraction problem. People thrown together under adverse circumstances always felt some normal curiosity and interest in each other. But to acknowledge even a little tremor was to invite the most disastrous kind of emotional avalanche, with implications for the children that Zoe couldn’t begin to face. The thing was, to keep things honest and aboveboard.

The thing was, to control that hum.

The thing was, he should have hightailed it out of the bathroom instead of looking at her with those damned blue eyes.

She was turning the pillow to the cool side for the fourth time when she heard the faintest sound coming from the boys’ room. Pushing back the covers, she padded to the door and listened again. More muffled sounds. Crying?

She crossed the hall and hesitated in the boys’ doorway. Aaron was in the far bed, the pillow over his head, and his diminutive figure huddled in a tight ball under the covers. The muffled sobs wrenched her heart. She tiptoed closer and touched his cheek. “Aaron? Honey, are you having a nightmare?”

Two small arms grabbed for her neck and hung on like a vise. “I want Mommy. I want my
Mommy,
Zoe!”

“Oh, darling, I know…” Cradling him against her, she sat on the bed and just rocked him. In three seconds flat, she was crying as hard as he was. She didn’t know what to say, what to do. His little body was hot and tense, and he was crying so hard.

She rocked him back and forth and then from side to side, and when his nose started running she grabbed a tissue from the night table and told him to blow his nose. He blew, and then started crying again. So did she. She’d never felt more inadequate in her entire life.