course she wasn’t looking forward to that. Even if the person doing the judging had turned into a staggeringly handsome man.
Aunt Kira, I’m just here to be Aunt Kira.
Aunt Kira.
And Marla had been Mom…
That seemed so strange.
Whenever Kira thought of her sister she thought of the age Marla had been the last time Kira had seen her—seventeen. Just a teenager.
But Marla had grown up. She’d been a wife. A mother.
And now she wasn’t just out in the world somewhere where Kira had hope of finding her again. Now she was lost to Kira forever. Tears flooded her eyes. Tears for her lost sister, for her lost nephew.
Kira knew there was nothing she could do to bring back either of them and reminded herself that there were still the twins. Marla’s twins. And if she couldn’t have Marla, if she couldn’t ever know Anthony, at least she could maintain her connection with her sister through those babies.
Which was exactly what she intended to do, she vowed as she left the dressing table to make the bed, fighting the longing that things had been different. That her family hadn’t ended up the way it had.
And not just because it would have been nice to have had Marla and Anthony in her life. If things had been different and Marla hadn’t been estranged from them all it might have also been easier for Kira to think of Cutty Grant as her sister’s husband, as someone who was off-limits.
As it was, she didn’t have any sense of him as family. Maybe that was part of why it was so difficult to get past how attractive he was. So difficult not to notice it. Not to be affected by it the way any woman would be affected by it.
She was determined not to be, though, Kira told herself forcefully. She was going to have with the twins what she’d missed with Anthony. To be Aunt Kira now, even if she hadn’t been before.
Aunt Kira, she thought, moving into the tiny bathroom to straighten it. Nothing but Aunt Kira.
And she meant it, too.
It was just that it would have been so much easier just to be Aunt Kira if Cutty wasn’t going to be right there with her every minute. Right there where all she would have to do was look up to see his face. Those eyes. That big, hard body…
But she wasn’t going to let herself be affected by it. She wasn’t. She really wasn’t.
She was going to do the best she could to take care of the twins, to get to know them, to earn their love, and in the process she was also going to keep their father nothing more than a sidebar to her relationship with them.
She was going to make sure of that if it was the last thing she ever did.
It was just that it might not only be the last thing she ever did.
It also might be the hardest…
Kira left the apartment at 6:45.
As she crossed the yard she wondered if Cutty would be awake yet or if he stayed in bed until the twins woke him. If that was the case and she couldn’t get into the house, she had every intention of waiting outside the back door on one of the patio chairs just to make sure that she was there the minute she was needed.
But when she got to the house the back door was open and through the screen she could smell bacon frying and see Cutty sitting at the kitchen table—his foot propped on a second kitchen chair. There were also two babies in matching high chairs on the other side of the table, and a short, plump, older woman who was setting bowls on the high chairs’ trays.
Kira felt a sinking feeling at the thought that she was already late. That someone else had had to come in to do the job she’d volunteered for.
But she didn’t want to make it any worse by wasting time standing there looking in from outside, so she knocked on the screen door’s frame.
Cutty looked away from the twins and that first glance of those evergreen eyes sent the oddest sensation through Kira. It was like a tiny jolt that skittered across the surface of her skin.
“Come on in,” Cutty encouraged.
Kira opened the screen and went in, apologizing as she did. “I’m sorry if I’m late. I thought you said seven was early enough to get here and it’s not even that yet.”
“I did say seven was early enough,” Cutty responded. “But Betty—this is Betty Cunningham,” he interrupted himself to do the introductions. “Betty, this is Kira, Marla’s sister. Anyway, Betty came over early on her way to the hospital to get her mother, and I dropped the cane coming down the stairs and woke the girls, so here we are.”
Betty had waited for him to finish, but just barely before she came to stand directly in front of Kira to wrap her arms around her and give her an unexpected hug. “It’s so nice to meet our Marla’s sister.”
Kira tried not to stiffen up at the physical contact from the stranger. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Betty released her and turned toward the table, extending one hand in the direction of the twins as if they were the prize on a game show. “And these are our darlings. Cutty said you didn’t get to see them last night.”
And that was when Kira got her first real look at her nieces.
She’d never been an easy crier before, and she didn’t know what was wrong with her now, but yet again quick tears filled her eyes at that initial glimpse of the two babies, who were paying no attention to her whatsoever.
There wasn’t any question that they were Cutty’s children but there was enough of Marla in them to cause Kira’s tears. Identical, they both had Cutty’s sable-colored hair in tight caps of curls that were just like Marla’s. They had big green eyes slightly lighter than Cutty’s, chubby cheeks and rosebud mouths like Marla, and the cutest turned-up noses Kira thought she’d ever seen.
“This is Mandy,” Cutty said, pointing to the baby on the right. “And this is Mel—short for Melanie. About the only way any of us can tell them apart is that Mel has that tiny mole above her left eye. We’re hoping Mandy doesn’t get one like it or we’ll have to go back to guessing which of them is which.”
Fighting the tears because she was afraid Cutty and Betty would think she was crazy if they saw them and because she didn’t want to alarm the babies, Kira went to the table and leaned across it.
“Hi, Mandy. Hi, Mel.”
They were doing more playing with their oatmeal than eating it—Mel had a handful she was squishing through her fingers and Mandy was taking spoonfuls and placing them meticulously on the tray around the bowl—but they finally looked up from what they were doing.
Kira didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t what she got. Mel immediately held out her arms to Betty as if to save her from Kira, and Mandy’s adorable little face screwed up into a look of great alarm before she let out a wail.
That made Kira really want to cry.
“Oh, no, it’s all right.
