We’ll go back down on the beach.”
They didn’t swim this time. They sat on the sand and dug tunnels and made sand castles because that was what he and his brothers had done here years ago and it seemed right that he do it with Sierra. She was family now.
“We can do this with our kids,” he said.
She looked up from digging a tunnel and her eyes were wide. “Kids?” she said in barely more than a whisper.
“You want kids, don’t you? I figured you did. You’re good with kids. Frankie. Stephen and Lizzie.”
“I’d love to have kids.” She looked like he’d given her the moon. “I wasn’t sure you…” Her voice died out and she shrugged a little awkwardly.
“I want kids,” he said firmly. “I would always want them. No matter what. I couldn’t believe Rhys turning his back on Mariah when she was carrying his child.”
“I remember you didn’t fight too hard to keep his whereabouts secret,” she said with a mischievous grin.
Dominic remembered that day, too, remembered being astonished when this purple-haired virago had invaded his office and threatened his manhood unless he surrendered his brother’s address.
“I wouldn’t have given it to you,” he said, “despite the turn-on, if I hadn’t thought you were right. A man has a responsibility to his child. And to its mother.”
Their gazes met across the castle. Then they were kneeling right in the middle of it, kissing with a desperation that might have led them to be a public spectacle if Sierra hadn’t pulled back suddenly.
Dominic groaned, needing her now.
“I wonder if Estelle has finished in the house,” Sierra said raggedly.
He hauled her to her feet. “She’s done, whether she’s finished or not.”
They walked into the small harborside village that afternoon because Sierra insisted. “I know honeymooners are supposed to spend every minute in bed. But I do want to see where I’ve been.”
“In bed,” Dominic said, grinning. “Why does it matter where you’ve been?”
“It does,” Sierra insisted. “We’ll have a good time. We can pick up some groceries, and stop and tell Estelle we’ll cook for ourselves tonight.”
“And then she won’t come back and…” Dominic could already see possibilities in that.
“And I’d like to find something to take home to remember this by. A souvenir.”
“You might already have a souvenir,” he said with a grin and a glance at her midriff.
The heat of his gaze made Sierra warm all over. And the thought that he, too, wanted a child thrilled her to bits.
If he would only say, “I love you.”
She stopped herself even as she thought it. She knew of other men who couldn’t say the words. Her own father, according to her mother, had barely managed to get them past his lips half a dozen times in his life.
Which was six more than Dominic had, she thought. But then she slipped her hand in his and leaned up to kiss him.
And he kissed her back with such fervor that she wondered how she could ever doubt.
He would never have told her it at all if she hadn’t asked.
They’d gone out fishing that afternoon with Maurice’s brother, Victor, and Victor had said, “Ain’t seen you in years an’ years. Not since your weddin’ what wasn’t.” And then he’d clamped his mouth shut and seconds later when he opened it again, everything he’d said had to do with fishing.
But that night when they were in bed, lights out, hunger sated, sleepy and warm in each other’s arms, Sierra asked, “Will you tell me about it?”
He knew she wouldn’t press. It wasn’t so much of a question as an invitation, and though he would never have guessed he would take her up on it, now that she was asking, he did.
“It was the year after my mother died,” he told her and felt the familiar lump lodge in his throat. “I was twenty-four. Finished with my M.B.A. I’d been working for Wolfe’s since high school in one capacity or another, being groomed to take over, my dad directing every move. And that year I’d moved out of the subsidiary offices to New York. I was his right-hand man—and loving every minute of it. And he was missing my mother. We both were. Rhys had Sarah and Nathan had his photography and was gone a lot. But the two of us were sort of…lost, I guess. Him for sure, and I just wanted to be like him. And then he said, ‘You ought to get married.’”
He rolled onto his back, folded his arms