the walls when they arrived. He looked brighter than he had in some time. He’d been through all the tests, Pam told her while Frankie, wide-eyed, looked around.
Everything was great, Pam said. Except she wasn’t a good match to donate a kidney and neither was her sister. “So we just have to wait until the right match comes along.”
“It will,” Sierra said confidently.
“I hope so.” Pam lifted her gaze to the heavens. “I’m counting on it.”
“C’mere, Mom,” Frankie urged. “Look out here. It’s just like you’re in my tree house. This is so cool,” he said over and over till Pam shushed him.
“You’ll bother Sierra’s husband. He’s working upstairs,” she admonished.
He was. He’d disappeared straight after dinner. “I’ll get out of your way,” he’d said. She’d been going to invite him to stay, but given his eagerness to be gone, she didn’t say a word.
She just wished. And then, sometime during the second episode, Sierra heard a noise in the doorway and turned around to find Dominic standing there.
“I thought I’d make some popcorn,” he said. “Want some?” he asked Frankie.
The boy’s eyes shone. “You bet.”
Star Trek was put on hold while they made popcorn. Then the two of them sat side by side on the sofa, the popcorn bowl between them, engrossed in the video while Sierra and Pam looked at each other and shook their heads.
When the video ended, Frankie told Dominic how much his apartment looked like a tree house he’d drawn.
“You draw tree houses?” Dominic asked. And he opened a cabinet and took out a yellowed folder and showed Frankie drawings of house plans and tree house plans he’d drawn as a boy.
“Oh, cool. Way cool” Frankie exclaimed. “Lookit, Ma. Don’tcha like this one.”
“I prefer this one,” Dominic said, showing him an even more elaborate one.
“Oh, wow,” Frankie breathed, looking at Dominic with hero worship in his eyes.
The bonding, needless to say, was mutual and intense.
“I thought he was supposed to be a stuck-up jerk,” Pam whispered to Sierra when they left “the boys” to their tree houses and went to the kitchen to make some cocoa.
Sierra smiled a little wistfully. “He tries to be. Sometimes. He keeps his assets well hidden.”
“I like him,” Pam said.
“I do, too.”
Worse, every day, heaven help her, she fell more deeply in love.
She saw how hard he worked on the business. It demanded his attention most of the day and half of the night, but he didn’t seem to mind. And while he expected a lot of his employees, he treated them like human beings, too.
He came home early one night after telling Sierra he’d be late because of a meeting.
“No meeting?” she’d said, surprised.
“Canceled it.”
“Why?”
“Doakes’s daughter had a dance recital,” he mumbled.
Sierra’s eyes widened. He’d canceled a business meeting so one of his managers could go to his daughter’s dance recital?
“We can meet early tomorrow morning,” he’d said gruffly. “The work will get done.”
“Of course it will,” Sierra said. She moved to kiss him, then stopped. She couldn’t do that unless she was ready to resume intimacies with him. It would be teasing if she did, taunting, tempting. Even if she didn’t mean it to be.
What she wanted it to mean was that she loved him.
But she still didn’t think he was ready to hear it.
He made it difficult to stay aloof, though. Just yesterday he’d called from work right after she got home.
“I’m going to be late,” he said, and she smiled because in the last few days he’d taken to calling and telling her if he wasn’t going to be there for dinner. “I’ve got to stop by the hospital.”
Sierra felt an immediate stab of panic. “Why? What happened?”
“Nothing major. My secretary, Shyla, had her baby this morning, that’s all. But I said I’d stop in to see her. Admire the offspring. Do you think I ought to take it a Yankees’ cap?”
Dominic and his Yankees. Sierra grinned. “By all means. Gotta start ’em young. Tell her and her husband congratulations. What did they name him?”
“Deirdre Eileen,” he said. “They had a girl.”
Probably the only girl to go home with her very own Yankees’ cap, Sierra thought as she hung up the phone and stared out the window, smiling.
Oh, Dominic! Why are you making this so difficult?
She wanted a child with him. A child like Dierdre Eileen or Stephen or Lizzie. A child to wear the smallest size Yankees’ cap. To cuddle, to hug and to love. A child with Dominic’s dark hair and deep blue eyes.
So,