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  “Oh no, we love pizza,” Axel told him with feeling, stressing the word love.

  “We’d eat it every day if Mama let us,” Ava said, bobbing her head.

  “But then it wouldn’t be special, would it?” Connor pointed out.

  “Yes it would,” Axel said with conviction. “There’re so many different kinds of pizza to eat,” the little boy told him.

  “Well, that answer’s too smart for me,” Connor told Axel, pretending to surrender. He glanced at Brianna. “You’ve got a couple of special kids here,” he told her.

  Axel and Ava were both beaming at the compliment.

  Brianna loved seeing them like that—proud and quiet, she thought, suppressing a grin. She raised her eyes to Connor’s. Just for a moment, she wondered what it would have been like if he had been their father instead of Jonny, wherever he was now.

  That thought pulled her up short. She couldn’t let herself go there. There was no point in fantasizing about something that didn’t even have a prayer of happening. She had too much to deal with right now to let her mind wander like that.

  “I guess I do at that,” she agreed quietly.

  * * *

  The pizza disappeared in an amazingly short amount of time.

  Moving slightly back from the table, Connor held his stomach as if it ached. “I think I ate too much,” he groaned.

  “You ate too much?” Brianna laughed. Despite cautioning them, Axel and Ava had wolfed down their food as if it was the last they would see for a long time. “These two ate so much I’m surprised they’re not exploding.”

  Axel’s eyes widened in fear. “Can we do that?” he asked not his mother but Connor, who seemed to be his go-to authority on everything. “Can we explode?”

  Connor tried to recall if he had ever been this literal when he’d been Axel’s age, but he couldn’t remember. Whether or not he was, he was quick to set the boy’s mind at ease without directly contradicting his mother.

  “You have a long, long way to go before that ever happens,” he assured Axel and his sister. “But all that food might have made you sleepy. You might want to take a nap.”

  “No, no naps,” Axel cried with a little less vigor than he would have been inclined to display if he’d been less full.

  “How about playing a quiet game, then?” Connor suggested, thinking that doing anything more strenuous right now might cause the boy to throw up.

  Axel’s eyes lit up. “Sure! What kind of a game you wanna play?”

  “I wanna play, too!” Ava said eagerly, adding her voice to that of her brother. She made it clear that she wasn’t going to be left out.

  “I didn’t—”

  How had this happened? Connor wondered, stunned. He hadn’t meant that he wanted to play a game with them, only that they should play a game with each other. He was just trying to come up with something they could do that didn’t require them being physically taxed.

  Brianna felt sorry for him. She knew exactly what it was like to feel outnumbered by the twosome. “I think that Mr. Fortunado meant that you two should be the ones to find a game to play,” she told her children as she stacked all their dishes together.

  “No, he didn’t,” Axel protested fiercely. And then the little boy turned to look at Connor, expecting the man to back him up. “Did you?”

  Connor had never had trouble saying no to people, not even to his superiors if he felt strongly about something. He’d always been the kind of person who stuck to his guns no matter what the situation was. But to his dismay, he found that when two small, sad faces looked up at him hopefully, the word no was somehow emulsified, vanishing from the face of the earth.

  “You’re right,” he told them, nodding his head. “I didn’t.”

  Oh Lord, she didn’t want to lose her heart to this man, she really didn’t. It was only asking for trouble, she thought. She’d been that route and wound up having her heart handed back to her, crushed and carelessly stuffed into a plastic bag like so much confetti.

  But reason just wasn’t working here. She could feel her heart slipping away from her and moving toward this man who had fixed her toilet rather than tell her that she’d made a mistake. This man who gave in to her children rather than disappoint them by just shrugging them off and turning away.

  Each of the children grabbed one of his hands, pulling him to his feet. “Looks like they have plans for me,” Connor said as they began to drag him away.

  Brianna rose, holding the stacked dishes. “Do you want to be rescued?” she asked him, ready to call off her children if he gave the word.

  His grin was amused rather than martyr-like. “Not particularly.”

  “Okay,” she said, backing off. “Just remember,” she told him, smiling despite her attempts to keep a straight face, “this was your idea.” She’d been saying that to him a lot lately.

  “C’mon,” Axel cried, tugging insistently on his hand. “No more talking to Mom. The game’s in our room.”

  She saw Connor looking over his shoulder at her. He actually looked as if he was enjoying himself, she thought. “I’ll be in their room.”

  “I know where that is,” Brianna replied, humoring him. “I’ll be working in my office,” she wanted him to know. She said the words just before he disappeared around the corner.

  Brianna turned to go back to her office. She could hear Ava’s and Axel’s gleeful laughter floating down the hall from the opposite direction.

  It’s just a game he’s going to be playing with them. Don’t overthink this and don’t get carried away, she warned herself.

  But it was really hard not to.

  * * *

  By the time Connor finally walked into her office, it was more than two hours later.

  She was aware of his presence before she even turned around. Somehow, the very air felt different to her.

  “I was getting ready to send out a search party for you,” Brianna quipped.

  He laughed, not at her but at his own part in this. “Every time I started to get up after a game was over, they talked me into playing ‘just one more,’” he told her, sitting down in the extra chair she’d brought into the room. The chair had eaten up what little space was left within the office.

  “Your kids can be very persuasive,” Connor informed her.

  Brianna laughed. “You realize that you’re preaching to the choir,” she told him. “It turns out that everything with them is always a negotiation, or a battle of wills. You’d think that kids so young would go along with everything I tell them to do. Ha!”

  She laughed at the very notion of complete, uncomplicated obedience from her children. That would be the day, she thought. And, although it might be nice once in a while, she really did love their spirit. Just as she loved them.

  “Half the time you’d think that they were the parents and I was the kid.”

  In his opinion, Brianna sounded as if she was being too hard on herself. “Oh, I don’t know. I think you’ve done a pretty good job raising them.”

  “All smoke and mirrors,” she confessed. “I’m really just hanging on by my fingertips.”

  “And you’ve raised them without any help?” he asked. She’d told him that the children’s father had walked out on her, but maybe there was someone else she could turn to, someone to help her, like a relative who was there for her.

  But the next moment, she shook her head, letting him know that she hadn’t done absolutely everything by herself.

  “Occasionally, I get a sitter to stay with them and there’s Beth Wilson.” She saw curiosity enter Connor’s eyes.

  “She’s the mother of two kids who are about Ava and Axel’s age. She watches them when I go in to my two other jobs, but I’m not at either one of those places for long periods of time,” she said quickly.

  “So what you’re saying is that there’s really
no one you can turn to for help with the kids on a long-term basis,” Connor concluded.

  “No, not on a long-term basis,” Brianna confirmed. With a sigh she told him, “For better or worse, it’s mostly me.”

  “Oh, I think it’s for the better,” Connor said with feeling. “Definitely for the better.”

  Brianna turned all the way around from her desk and looked at him, confused.

  “I don’t know why you’re being so nice to me. My kids must have run you ragged these last two hours. I know what they’re like when they get someone to play a game with them. I know they appreciate it, but actual war games are a lot easier to handle than playing with those two.”

  He laughed, amused by the comparison. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. I had fun.”

  The man obviously had a strange definition of fun, Brianna thought.

  “Now you’re just lying,” she told him.

  “No, I’m not,” he assured Brianna. “Ava and Axel can be very entertaining when they want to.”

  She knew that she felt that way, but she had an excuse. She was their mother. Connor was someone who had absolutely no ties to her children, nothing to be gained by going easy on them or professing that he was enjoying himself.

  Brianna looked at him closely, scrutinizing the man. He didn’t look any different than he had before, but it really wasn’t adding up.

  “What did my kids do to you?” she wanted to know.

  He laughed. Another woman would have taken the easy way out and not pressed. She obviously valued honesty more.

  “Nothing. They just reminded me what it was like to be their age. It’s been a long time since I had such an innocent view of the world.”

  “Do you have any kids?” she asked, realizing that she knew nothing about this man who had invaded her children’s lives and her own.

  “Kids?” he repeated. “Oh God, no. They wouldn’t fit into the life I have in Denver.”

  Denver. The man lived in Denver. And he made it sound as if he didn’t want kids. Brianna felt her heart drop. Boy, she could sure pick ’em, she thought ruefully.

  “Yes, well, listen,” she said, rallying, “if they wore you out and you want to call it a day, I totally understand. You can come back tomorrow and we’ll pick up where we left off. I’ll be here—at least, in the morning,” she clarified.

  “Oh? Where’ll you be in the afternoon?” he asked her before he thought better of it. It wasn’t any of his business, he thought.

  But he still wanted to know.

  “I promised to fill in at the reception desk. Emily, the woman who’s usually there tomorrow, has to take the afternoon off,” she explained, “so they need me to come in. Unfortunately Beth isn’t available so...”

  “You need someone to watch the kids?”

  Her kids were far too young to be left alone. Finding someone to watch them was on her to-do list today.

  “Well, it’s either that or not come home to a house,” she told him simply.

  He saw the wary look in her eyes. He didn’t want to put her off. He needed her help. Connor realized that he needed to make amends, even if this wasn’t his forte. “Why don’t I watch the kids for you?” Connor volunteered. “That way, you won’t have to pay a sitter and the kids already know me.” He smiled at her. “They won’t have to get used to anyone new.”

  Brianna looked at him, totally taken aback. “You really are a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?” she marveled.

  “No, I really enjoy it,” he insisted. He was lying, but she didn’t need to know that, he thought. He looked down and saw that Juliana, the calico cat who was the latest addition to Brianna’s menagerie, was batting his pant cuff back and forth. Connor’s eyes crinkled. “All of it,” he added, amused. His words surprised him more than they did her.

  “You say that now. Wait until Juliana misses and winds up scratching up your leg,” Brianna predicted ominously.

  Bending over, Brianna picked up the cat and carried her out of the room. She put the animal down and then retreated back into her office, this time closing the door behind her to keep the cat out.

  “You’re closing the door,” Connor pointed out. Was that on purpose or by mistake? “Does that mean you want me to stay?”

  Oh Lord, yes, Brianna thought, suddenly remembering the way his lips had felt against hers.

  Because she found herself longing to feel that sensation again and knew how dangerous that was for her in her present state of mind, especially given that there was no future for them, Brianna said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Actually, I didn’t mean to close the door. It’s just to discourage the cat. Just give it five minutes and then you can go. Otherwise, she might still be hanging around. Once she sees you again, she’ll just exert her little feline wiles on you. Before you know it, you’ll find Juliana wrapped around your leg or some other vital part you can’t do without.”

  He laughed. “Everything about you is intriguing, Brianna. Even your pets.”

  “They all have unique personalities if that’s what you mean. Actually, they’re all strays. Or they were before I took them in.” Brianna smiled ruefully.

  She knew how that had to sound to someone who wasn’t moved by stray animals.

  “I have a penchant for attracting strays and trying to fix them,” she admitted.

  It had been that way all of her life, she thought. Jonny had just been another lost stray who she had tried to fix—and failed.

  He had a feeling he knew where she was going with this. “I’m not a stray, Brianna,” he assured her.

  She looked away, pretending to look for something on her desk. “I didn’t say you were.”

  He ignored her protest. Neither one of them believed it. “And you won’t have to fix me.”

  She smiled then. Her eyes met his. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  Intrigued, he asked, “You think I need fixing?”

  “I think everyone needs fixing to some extent,” she said evasively. “Some more than others.”

  “Interesting idea,” he told her. “Maybe we’ll pick this up when I come back tomorrow.”

  Brianna merely smiled. “You’re the client.”

  Right. Then why did he feel like she was the one in the driver’s seat?

  Chapter Eleven

  When he came over to Brianna’s house the following day, Connor went through what had by now become his usual ritual: greeting Axel and Ava and answering any of their questions.

  It amazed him how two young children could come up with so many different questions to ask each and every time.

  Eventually, Brianna managed to herd the two away, directing her children either to the yard, the living room or their room, and they were always prevailed upon to go play, which they did, but never without protest.

  “They certainly are a handful,” Connor commented, not for the first time, as he followed her into her office. “Dealing with all this every day, how do you manage to stay sane?”

  She grinned at him. “Who says I’m sane?”

  “Well, you seem pretty sane to me,” Connor told her.

  “And the illusion continues,” Brianna said cryptically.

  Pausing at her desk, she picked up several folders she’d been working on and handed them to Connor. “These are all the rest of the names I managed to track down for Charlene—Charlotte.” Brianna corrected herself before Connor could.

  Connor accepted the folders from her, folders it was now obvious that she had placed elsewhere once the project had been suspended.

  He knew that she had to have unearthed them after doing some really intensive searching through the plastic drawers she referred to as her “filing cabinet.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, nodding at a stray paper on top. At first glance it looked like a photocopied list of names.
/>   She didn’t have to look to know what he was referring to. “Those are the names I didn’t get a chance to look for,” Brianna explained.

  Connor wasn’t sure if he understood her. “Come again?”

  Taking the adjacent chair, she pulled it closer to the desk and sat down facing Connor. “Well, initially, this Charlotte person sent me about ten names, all people she wanted to locate. I reported back to her regularly on my progress and, like I said, she paid half up front and promised the rest when I finished. But she kept adding names to that list and there turned out to be a great many people who weren’t exactly easy to find, so I concentrated on the ones that I could find and did those first.

  “When she didn’t make good on her payment for the next installment of reports I sent her, I stopped trying to locate people. I was waiting for her to live up to her side of the deal,” she confessed. Brianna shrugged, at a loss. “She never got back to me and then I got that Return to Sender letter back in the mail. Since she’d made it clear through her actions that she wasn’t going to pay any more money and that she obviously didn’t want to be found herself, I didn’t continue looking for any of these other people.”

  “Wow,” he murmured under his breath as he thumbed through the remaining list of names. “But you think you can find these people?” he asked.

  “Well, I can’t promise anything,” Brianna told him cautiously, “but I can certainly try.”

  He looked at the list again. It astonished him how one man could have been responsible for bringing so many people into the world. Finding them was going to be a big job, he thought.

  “I’ll pay you, of course,” he told Brianna in case he hadn’t made that clear to her.

  “In addition to the three thousand dollars you’ve already paid?” she asked him, surprised.

  “Well, sure,” he told her. He didn’t expect her to do this strictly out of charity. This was going to take effort. “This is additional work on your part.” He saw the puzzled expression on her face. “What?”

  “I have to ask,” Brianna told him, concerned that maybe she was getting involved in something that had more to it than there seemed to be on the surface. She knew she’d already asked him once before without really getting an answer, but this time she felt she needed it. She didn’t want to risk getting involved in something illegal. “Why are you trying to find the same people that this woman was looking for?”