Blue Dahlia Page 0,27

always manages to get new clothes after he reverts from Hulk form."

"If he was really smart," Harper commented, "he'd figure out a way to make his clothes stretch and expand."

"You scientists," Logan said with a grin for Harper. "Never thinking about the mundane."

"Is the Mundane a supervillain?" Luke wanted to know.

"It means the ordinary," Stella told him. "As in, it's more mundane to eat your potatoes than to play with them, but that's the polite thing to do at the table."

"Oh." Luke smiled at her, an expression somewhere between sweet and wicked, and chomped the potato off the fork. "Okay." After the meal, she used the excuse of the boys' bedtime to retreat upstairs. There were baths to deal with, the usual thousand questions to answer, and all that end-of-day energy to burn off, which included one or both of them running around mostly naked.

Then came her favorite time, when she drew a chair between their beds and read to them while Parker began to snore at her feet. The current pick was Mystic Horse, and when she closed the book, she got the expected moans and pleas for just a little more.

'Tomorrow, because now I'm afraid it's time for sloppy kisses."

"Not sloppy kisses." Gavin rolled onto his belly to bury his face in the pillow. "Not that!"

"Yes, and you must succumb." She covered the back of his head, the base of his neck with kisses while he giggled.

"And now, for my second victim." She turned to Luke and rubbed her hands together.

"Wait, wait!" He threw out his hand to ward off the attack. "Do you think my tooth will fall out tomorrow?"

"Let's have another look." She sat on the side of his bed, studying soberly as he wiggled the tooth with his tongue. "I think it just might."

"Can I have a horse?"

"It won't fit under your pillow." When he laughed, she kissed his forehead, his cheeks, and his sweet, sweet mouth.

Rising, she switched off the lamp, leaving them in the glow of the night-light. "Only fun dreams allowed."

"I'm gonna dream I get a horse, because dreams come true sometimes."

"Yes, they do. 'Night now."

She walked back to her room, heard the whispers from bed to bed that were also part of the bedtime ritual.

It had become their ritual, over the last two years. Just the three of them at nighttime, where they had once been four. But it was solid now, and good, she thought, as a few giggles punctuated the whispers.

Somewhere along the line she'd stopped aching every night, every morning, for what had been. And she'd come to treasure what was.

She glanced at her laptop, thought about the work she'd earmarked for the evening. Instead, she went to the terrace doors.

It was still too cool to sit out, but she wanted the air, and the quiet, and the night.

Imagine, just imagine, she was standing outside at night in January. And not freezing. Though the forecasters were calling for more rain, the sky was star-studded and graced with a sliver of moon. In that dim light she could see a camellia in bloom. Flowers in winter - now that was something to add to the plus pile about moving south.

She hugged her elbows and thought of spring, when the air would be warm and garden-scented.

She wanted to be here in the spring, to see it, to be part of the awakening. She wanted to keep her job. She hadn't realized how much she wanted to keep it until Roz's firm, no-nonsense sit-down before dinner.

Less than two weeks, and she was already caught up. Maybe too much caught, she admitted. That was always a problem. Whatever she began, she needed to finish. Stella's religion, her mother called it.

But this was more. She was emotional about the place. A mistake, she knew. She was half in love with the nursery, and with her own vision of how it could be. She wanted to see tables alive with color and green, cascading flowers spilling from hanging baskets that would drop down along the aisles to make arbors. She wanted to see customers browsing and buying, filling the wagons and flatbeds with containers.

And, of course, there was that part of her that wanted to go along with each one of them and show them exactly how everything should be planted. But she could control that.

She could admit she also wanted to see the filing system in place, and the spreadsheets, the weekly inventory logs.

And whether he liked it or not, she intended to