even kept the leg I wasn’t sure was going to make it with him. I did some shuffling and he’s on his way here for rehab, so I can keep track of that, too. You’ll be able to see him.”
“So he really will be okay?” Liam said, still needing some reassurance.
“His body’s healing,” Conor seemed to hedge. “I’m a little worried about his head—”
“Brain injury?” Liam asked.
“No, thank god there wasn’t that. But I think he’s carrying a lot of baggage about Topher. Declan was driving the Humvee. As bad as he was hurt himself he did everything to try to save Topher. He even carried him away from the burning Humvee—although seeing Declan and how bad he was, I can’t begin to guess how he did that.”
“He’d have done anything to help Topher,” Liam said, knowing his twin, knowing it was what he himself would have done.
“But Topher took the brunt of the explosion. He died before anybody could get to them. Declan won’t talk about it—not to me, not to the counselors I’ve sent in. I’m afraid we’re still facing some rough waters there. But physically... He has some scars, he may have a limp, but yeah, he’s gonna be okay.”
Liam was grateful for that at least. “I do want to see him. As soon as he gets here. But in the meantime, can I call him?”
“Sure, I got him a cell phone. I’ll get you the number when you’re ready.”
“Yeah, I’m ready now,” Liam said. “I’m not going to be staying here...”
He explained the arrangement he’d made to move into the Freelander place.
“You’re gonna start playing dad even before you know for sure?”
He told his brother his reasons for that.
“Did you see the kids?” Conor asked.
“For a few minutes. The nanny—that’s the Dani Cooper who sent me the message—told them I was a friend of their mother’s. They weren’t too interested.”
“And what did you think? Did you feel any kind of instinctive connection?”
“Uh, no, I didn’t even know what to say to them. I was just glad I wasn’t alone with them and that the nanny is pretty smooth.”
And even though he meant Dani Cooper was smooth in her dealings with the kids and the awkwardness of him showing up the way he had, it was suddenly the nanny’s skin he was thinking about—flawless peaches-and-cream skin so smooth he’d wanted to run the back of his hand over it to see if it felt like it looked...
He reined in the odd wandering of his mind and said, “They’re cute kids, I guess... They have dark hair like ours. Blue eyes—”
“Like ours? The color Kinsey thinks ties us to the Camdens?”
“No, theirs are more the light blue that Audrey’s eyes were. There might be a little resemblance between the girl and Kinsey when she was a kid, though—I kind of thought I might have seen that.”
“So they really could be yours.”
“I told you that anyway. That week with Audrey before I deployed was a wild one. Audrey was a partyer and we were drinking like there was no tomorrow. And not always being safe...stupid as that is.”
“But that was five years ago and she never came after you for child support, for anything. Seems like if the kids were yours she would have at least wanted you to pitch in with some money.”
Liam repeated what the nanny had told him about Owen Freelander and described the house that made it obvious there hadn’t been a need for more money.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Audrey would have gone with somebody who was offering what this guy was,” Liam said. “Marriage, money, to take care of her and claim her kids as his own to provide for, too. And actually, the more I think about it the more sense it makes that the guy was so much older than she was—”
“She had daddy issues?”
“Maybe. She saw herself as a helpless kitten, I know that. She was raised by older parents with money. There were nannies and people paid to take care of her every need. Her parents spoiled her rotten and I had the impression that when they died she started searching for replacements to take care of her and spoil her the way she was used to. Finding herself pregnant? With twins?” He shook his head. “There’s no way she would have wanted to do that by herself. I’m kind of surprised that she didn’t terminate the pregnancy at the get-go.”
“Never an easy thing to do.”
Liam conceded to that. “And I don’t think she really understood what it is I do—we met when I was here, doing that training. That lasted two months, looked more like a normal job—”
“But then you deployed...”
“Right. And even though I’d warned her how it would be when I did, I don’t think it really sank in with her until she actually experienced it a few times. I know when I finally did call her that last time—the call that, according to the nanny, was when Audrey made the decision to take this Owen guy up on his offer—she was pretty upset that there hadn’t been one word from me in a long while.” He tried to get some breakfast down but the appetite he’d woken up with had disappeared, so he just pushed his plate away.
“Sooo...how are you doing with the idea that these kids could be yours?” Conor asked.
Liam shook his head. “I’m just kind of in a daze,” he admitted. “Like your message about Declan, the one from the nanny—now guardian—only caught up to me a week ago. I almost thought it was some kind of bad joke. Audrey was dead? She’d left twins that are mine? The kids have no one else and now need me to step in or risk being separated and put into the foster care system?”
He shook his head again. “It sure as hell seemed like it must be a joke. But then I got to a computer and found an obituary for Audrey that didn’t say how she died but said she was survived by four-year-old twins. Four years plus however many months since they turned four, add nine more—that puts it somewhere in that five-years-ago time slot that I spent with Audrey. And here I am.”
“Still, you just said yourself that Audrey was a partyer... You are going to test the DNA the way the lawyer told you to, right?”
“Oh, yeah. This afternoon. I got a text from the nanny saying she scheduled an appointment with the pediatrician to do it.”
“And what about the nanny?” his brother asked.
Yeah, what about the nanny...
That mere mention of Dani Cooper brought the image of her into his head again.
Not only did she have great skin, she was something to look at all the way around. Exquisite caramel-colored eyes. High cheekbones, a straight nose. Pretty, luscious lips. And a delicate bone structure that gave her a kind of sophisticated, unapproachable beauty.
Or at least it would have seemed sophisticated and unapproachable if her long, dark brown hair with its rich reddish cast hadn’t
