The Inconvenient Bride - By Anne McAllister Page 0,44

her for a lot of years. It wasn’t as if he needed her there.

But he wondered if maybe she needed him.

So he called his brother’s and asked Sierra if she’d like him to bring over dinner.

“You have time?” she sounded surprised.

“I have to eat,” he said gruffly. “I might as well do it with you.”

“Well, when you put it so nicely, I don’t see how I can refuse,” she said. But she wasn’t really sarcastic. Her gently teasing tone just made him ashamed of his surliness.

He picked up some Burmese food from a place near Rhys’s, and when he got there he found that she had set the picnic table in the back garden of Rhys and Mariah’s brownstone.

“It’s nice here,” Sierra said. “Like being in the country.”

After they’d eaten she stretched out in a chaise longue, balancing Lizzie on her thighs and letting the baby hold on to her hands as she bounced up and down, giggling and grinning. Sierra was grinning, too.

She looked young and happy and very maternal as she played with Lizzie. They rubbed noses and giggled some more. Then Sierra blew kisses against Lizzie’s soft belly and got a full-blown gurgle out of her niece.

She was very good with children. It made Dominic wonder if she wanted some of her own.

They’d never talked about children. They’d never talked about much.

Experimentally he rolled a ball toward Stephen who was sitting on the patio banging a spoon. The little boy batted the spoon at it and the ball rolled partway back.

“Wow! Look at that. What a swing! He’s going to be a ball player,” Sierra said with a grin.

Dominic couldn’t help grinning, too. “Of course he is. All Wolfe men play ball.”

Sierra’s brows lifted. “Even you?”

“Of course me,” he said, affronted. “I pitched my team to the state semi-finals in high school. I won there, too. A three-hitter,” he added, and was unaccountably pleased when she looked impressed.

“Did you play in college?”

He shook his head. “No. No time. I started working for the firm then, plus I was going to school full-time, double major in accounting and communications technology. Baseball was just a game. Dad figured it was time to grow up.”

“Dad ought to mind his own business,” Sierra muttered.

Sometimes, traitorously, Dominic had thought that, too. But he’d never ever articulated it. “The firm is important. It was Dad’s sweat and blood. Long hours and a hell of a lot of determination. It’s our livelihood. And I needed to learn it from the ground up.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Sierra said. “I just think it’s too bad you didn’t get to play ball if you wanted to.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” Dominic said gruffly.

“Not always,” Sierra agreed. She gave Lizzie one more bounce. “You have to decide if it’s worth fighting for.”

Her words stayed with him. They echoed in his head all that evening and for days afterward.

It would help, he thought, if he knew what the hell he wanted.

He’d thought he did—the business, freedom from parental harassment, and a wife who knew her place, which was in his bed.

But the longer he spent with Sierra, the less he was sure.

In spite of his resolve not to get involved, he spent time with her. The fact was, he liked spending time with her out of bed as well as in.

He liked coming home and eating with her, some nights even cooking with her.

He liked baby-sitting with her at Rhys’s and Mariah’s.

After they’d eaten, he could have gone back to their apartment. Instead he hung around.

Of course, there was a Yankee game on television and he had started watching it while she heated bottles and got the twins ready for bed.

Then she appeared next to the chair where he was sitting, handed him Stephen and a bottle and said, “Feed him.”

“What? Me?” Dominic felt something vaguely akin to panic and tried to hand the baby back.

But Sierra shook her head. “He needs a little male bonding,” she told him. “Besides, I’ve only got two arms, and I’m going to be feeding Lizzie. Relax. You’re his uncle. He loves you.”

Did he? Was being an uncle all it took? Dominic considered that as he considered the child in his arms.

He wasn’t much of an expert on love. He wasn’t really sure he believed in it.

Once upon a time he’d thought he did. Before Carin.

After Carin he’d given anything remotely resembling it a wide berth. As devastated as he’d been at Carin’s defection, he couldn’t imagine leaving himself open