wanted.
Kerin’s fall from grace completed the lesson forever. He’d used her in his unhealed grief for Lissa, taken Kerin’s eager smile and giving sexuality as a shallow replacement for real love, and discovered too late the abyss of unbalanced emotion that lay beneath. But by then, she was pregnant with his children, and leaving her wasn’t an option.
But now Kerin was gone, Lissa was free—and his heart and body, primed and hard all day, thudded till the pounding need roared in his ears, reminding him they’d been starved way too long.
In his whole life he’d never known love the way Lissa used to give love to him. She sneaked him food when Old Man Taggart left him hungry again. She helped him with his homework, even did it for him when he didn’t have time. She sat and talked to him by the pond that joined their farms when the sun went down—the loneliest time for him, when families gathered around the tables to be with their kids—often giving up her own family time to be with him. She’d listened to him as he talked about his hopes and dreams for the future, and confided hers to him. Sweet Lissa Miller of the popular crowd at school really cared about unknown, unimportant Mitch McCluskey. She worried about him, fussed over him, poured her heart and soul’s care over him until he’d swum in it, drowned in it, lived and breathed the love filling him. Even when she started dating Tim—damn Tim for asking her to their formal first!—Mitch never felt less than special, less than loved by her, even when he’d been jealous enough to murder Tim when he touched her, kissed her.
Even now the memory had the power to make him burn.
How could he feel so much, hurt so much, and she not know it?
Deep inside, he’d always known this sort of love only came to a man once in a lifetime. He’d learned long ago that to have another woman in his arms and bed was nothing more than an empty cheat, fool’s gold, a poor substitute for what he wanted. To have and to hold the woman he loved, forever. To have, not just her body, but her trust, her joy and pain, to grow old beside her at the place they loved best. To love and be loved in return.
And if he’d been the one to marry Lissa he’d never have walked out, never left her. He’d have loved her forever, kept that innocent joy glowing from her eyes—eyes now filled with the cloudy shadows of suffering and rejection.
Suffering Tim had put there. Shadows he’d have to erase before she’d even consider his proposal.
Why had he ever stood aside for Tim? Why didn’t he ever tell Lissa how much he wanted to be the one?
Never a time, never a place, he’d always thought. But the simple truth filled him with self-contempt. Because you were a bloody coward, always terrified she’d say she only loved you like a sister. Too scared you wouldn’t be enough for a girl like her.
He still was. He, who regularly looked death in the face, was too scared to look into the eyes of a delicate, five-foot-four woman and tell her he loved her. If only Tim hadn’t walked in on them on her seventeenth birthday—but Tim had. And then he’d had to walk away. Tim had a home, a life, security—a family to offer Lissa. He, Mitch, didn’t even have a real name to give, just the minister’s surname from the church steps his mother had dumped him on as a newborn. He was a hooker’s unwanted bastard, pushed from place to place all his life, a worker begrudged even the basics of life, like food or affection. How could he ever think she’d love someone like him, beyond the miracle of her friendship?
“Mum!” At the other end of the house, a door slammed once, twice. “Hey, Mum, you shoulda seen this cool girl-fight—” Matt ran in, saw him, gaped and yelled, “Daaad!”
“Dad?” Luke came flying in. “Dad! Oh, Dad, you came!”
Within seconds two blurs cannoned into him. He staggered back, laughing. He hitched them up in his arms, feeling the identical little heads snuggle into either side of his neck.
Matt and Luke. His boys. His beautiful, precious sons. So like him, and so alike few could tell them apart—but they were his kids. He would know Matt from Luke any time. “Of course I came, matey. You knew I would, as soon as I got off my tour.”
Matt pulled back, looking at the father he closely resembled, with a solemn frown. “Kerin’s dead, Dad.”
His heart ached for the boys who’d never called their own mother Mum. “I know.”
“She topped herself on crack,” Luke added.
He shook with the primitive fury he still hadn’t conquered, even after her death. Damn Kerin for her paltry revenge on him, making the kids suffer! No nine-year-old boy should know what topping meant, let alone crack—and little guys of eight should never have to find their mother’s body with the empty crack pipe hanging out of her mouth. “I know, mate.”
Luke’s gaze was anxious. “We didn’t want to go with her. We didn’t want to steal your stuff, Dad—it was Kerin.”
Mitch kissed his son’s hair. “I know, mate. I knew it wasn’t you.” Just Kerin paying for her bloody drugs. Trying to hit out at me any way she could. Needing someone to blame for her life.
“What took you so long to get here, Dad? Mum said you’d be here in a few weeks, an’ we waited an’ waited—”
So it’s Mum already. Oh, yeah, taking the risk of calling Lissa when Nick told him he’d found Matt and Luke had paid off all right. He knew Lissa’s gift of healing hearts—he’d been a recipient of the same loving treatment. And now his kids had that same total love, the unconditional support, he’d once had.
Then it hit him: they’d forgotten Kerin already. They told him about her death like an item they’d watched on the news, only anxious to know he didn’t blame them for anything Kerin did.
His gaze met Lissa’s. She nodded and touched her finger to her lips. Counselor, she mouthed.
He’d never wanted to kiss her more than now. The love he’d counted on for so long was there for his sons. She knew what his fear had been, the shadows of old ghosts still stalking him, and she’d led him to the sunlight with a single word. She wasn’t fostering Matt and Luke. His boys were loved, an integral part of her family.
His heart whispered in delicate hope, She did it for me.
He couldn’t fool himself for long. Lissa, his lovely, open-hearted girl, would have done the same for any child in need. As she’d done for him once—until he blew it.
Thank you, he mouthed back.
“Sorry, kids. I couldn’t get away from work,” he answered Matt’s question. “The brass wouldn’t let me off until yesterday. I couldn’t even quit a day early.”
Luke’s mouth twisted. “Cityfellas.”
Mitch chuckled and ruffled his son’s tousled mop of curls. “I see Lissa’s been passing on some of her ideas about the city. She used to call me that, until I’d been here a year or two.” He grinned at her. As a kid, he’d loved the way she’d called him Cityfella, poking her tongue out, wrinkling her nose in cute teasing. There was never any malice intended, no offence taken. Being a cityfella had given him the sort of glamorous mystique he’d never had as a plain unwanted foster kid—and it gave him undivided attention from the girl whose angel-faerie face haunted his dreams, night and day.
Lissa’s smile was slow in coming, but when it did, her soft, dove-gray
