allowed to mess up. Right? And he was leaving, so what did it matter?
“What’s freaking, Daddy?” Anna asked all innocent and cute, and clambered onto my lap, turning so her knees were on my thighs, her hands flat on my cheeks. “Daddy what!” she demanded when I didn’t answer fast enough.
“Nothing, sweetheart,” I lied.
“It’s a bad word. Paul will be mad.”
“Not if you don’t tell him.” I pressed a hand to hers and held it against my skin. “So, no telling him.”
“Okay Daddy.” She stared up at me, and nibbled her lip and I knew something was coming. “Daddy, I love you.”
“I love you too, pumpkin,” I said cautiously. A father never lets an I-love-you go unanswered, but Anna was devious and knew that a simple I-love-you could get her anything.
“Can Big Ted have his own bed?”
Big Ted was the ten-foot stuffed bear Maria had bought when the kids were born, and the constant bane of my life. It was cute at first, all three babies propped up between Big Ted’s huge arms, but now he was this huge hulking thing that none of the kids played with.
“No darling, because Big Ted won’t fit in your bed with you.”
She focused her gaze on me; huge sapphire eyes growing suspiciously damp, and added to that her lip was trembling. Anna was part actress, part princess, and a master manipulator, and I wasn’t falling for it.
“But, Daddy…”
“No, Anna, there’s no way we can get a bed large enough for Big Ted.”
She appeared to consider the conundrum for a while, and then beamed. “Then we’ll make Aden sleep on the floor.”
“We’re not making your brother give up his bed.”
She pouted. “I need to tell Paul you’re wrong and what you said.”
She clambered off my lap, then paused as if she was giving me a final chance to change my mind about turfing her brother out of his bed, and giving a stuffed bear somewhere to sleep. The threat was there, if I didn’t agree then she’d explain to Paul I’d used a bad word that I wanted to hide. Rock and hard place, meet Austin Clarke.
“Paul! Paul! Daddy said a bad word!” she called, even as she stared at me. There was so much troublemaker in her expression that I could’ve bottled it and sold it as practice teenage angst. I didn’t flinch.
Even if I wanted to.
Then she ran out of the room, shouting for Paul, and the room was quiet. I closed down my email, wondering if there was anything I should’ve been dealing with before I went contact-free, and then I heard a chuckle and it wasn’t quiet in my room at all.
“Uh oh,” Paul said, and was laughing at me in that sexy way of his as if we weren’t avoiding the huge elephant in the room. At least he wasn’t asking to talk, so I swung my chair around to face him, taken aback at the way he leaned casually on the door jamb. He was six-feet of sexy man poured into faded torn jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming sorry girls I’m gay with the word gay in bright Technicolor rainbow shades. He was bright and shining, and the only man I’d ever loved.
And that kiss. The way he’d held me, cradled my face, stared into my eyes before kissing me. Then the way he’d left me.
I’m so far gone.
I’d never get over the effect Paul had on me, and it was the same reaction I had to him every time I saw him just as I did on day one when he’d arrived in a suit and tie, his blond hair neat and his face smooth. He’d turned up all sexy, then he’d proceeded to clean up vomit, change diapers, fuss over and feed three babies, and not get one speck of any of it on his suit, all while tackling an interrogation masquerading as an interview. For the first time in three weeks Aden had stopped crying, and Anna hadn’t fussed with her bottle.
That same day Paul had stolen all of our hearts, and I wasn’t sure I was ever getting mine back.
“So Anna tells me you said a bad word,” Paul added with forced enthusiasm, and pushed his hands into his pockets.
“This is me pleading the fifth,” I joked weakly.
“She also informs me that Aden is sleeping on the floor from now on and Big Ted is sleeping in a bed instead, and that it was all daddy’s idea.”