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With handprints and food stains all over the pristine white of that shirt, Houston allowed himself to be dragged to the sinks, where he obediently washed his own hands, and then one by one helped each of the children wash theirs.

After he washed “Princess’s” face, the same child who had sat beside him at snack, she crooked her finger at him. He bent down, obviously thinking, as Molly did, that the tiny tot had some important secret to tell him.

Instead she kissed him noisily on his cheek.

Molly held out the camera, framed the exquisite moment. Click.

He straightened slowly, blushing wildly.

Click. She found herself hoping that she was an accomplished enough photographer to capture that look on his face.

“Did you turn me into a prince, little princess?” Houston asked.

The girl regarded him solemnly. “No.”

But that’s not how Molly felt, at all. A man she had been determined to see as a toad had turned into a prince before her eyes.

Again she realized that this excursion was not telling her as much about Houston Whitford as it was telling her about herself.

She wanted the things she had always wanted, more desperately than ever.

And that sense of desperation only grew as Molly watched as Houston, captive now, like Gulliver in the land of little people, was led over to the story area. He chose to sit on the floor, all the children crowding around him. By the time they were settled each of those children seemed to have claimed some small part of him, to touch, even if it was just the exquisitely crafted soft leather of his shoe. His “little princess” crawled into his lap, plopped her thumb in her mouth and promptly went to sleep.

Molly could not have said what one of those stories was about by the time they left a half hour later, Houston handing over the still sleeping child.

As she watched him, she was in the grip of a tenderness so acute it felt as if her throat was closing.

Molly was stunned. The thing she had been trying to avoid because she knew how badly it would weaken her—was exactly what she had been brought.

She was seeing Houston Whitford in the context of family. Watching him, she felt his strength, his protectiveness, his heart.

She had waited her whole life to feel this exquisite tenderness for another person.

It was all wrong. There was no candlelight. It smelled suspiciously like the little girl might have had an accident in her sleep.

Love was supposed to come first. And then these moments of glory.

What did it mean? That she had experienced such a moment for Houston? Did it mean love would come next? That she could fall in love with this complicated man who was her boss?

No, that was exactly what she was not doing! No more wishing, dreaming! Being held prisoner by fantasies.

No more.

But as she looked at him handing over that sleeping little girl, it felt like she was being blinded by the light in him, drawn to the power and warmth of it.

Moth to flame, Molly chastised herself ineffectively.

“Sorry she’s so clingy,” the daycare staff member who relieved him of her said. “She’s going through a rough time, poor mite. Her mother hasn’t been around for a few days. Her granny is picking her up.”

And just like that, the light she had seen in his face snapped off, replaced by something as cold as the other light had been warm.

Selfishly, Molly wanted to see only the warmth, especially once it was gone. She wanted to draw it back out of him. Would it seem just as real outside as it had in? Maybe she had just imagined it. She had to know.

She had to test herself against this fierce new challenge.

As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, he seemed coolly remote. The electronic device was back out. She remembered this from yesterday. He came forward, and then he retreated.

“You were a hit with those kids.” She tried to get him back to the man she had seen at lunch.

He snorted with self-derision, didn’t look up. “Starving for male attention.”

“I can see you as a wonderful daddy someday,” she said.

He looked up then, gave her his full attention, a look that was withering.

“The last thing I would ever want to be is a daddy,” he said.

“But why?”

“Because there is quite a bit more to it than carrot sticks and storybooks.”

“Yes?”

“Like being there. Day in and day out. Putting another person first forever. Do I look like the kind of guy who puts other people first?”

“You did in there.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You seem angry.”

“No kidding.”

“Houston, what’s wrong?”

“There’s a little girl in there whose mom has abandoned her. How does something like that happen? How could anybody not love her? Not want her? How could anybody who had a beautiful child like that not devote their entire life to protecting her and making her safe and happy?”

“An excellent daddy,” she said softly.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he said, coldly angry. “Can you wait for the cab yourself? I just thought of something I need to do.”

And he left, walking down the street, fearless, as though that fancy watch and those shoes didn’t make him a target.

Look at the way he walked. He was no target. No victim.

She debated calling after him that she had other things on the agenda for today. But she didn’t. This was his pattern. She recognized it clearly now.

He felt something. Then he tried to walk away, tried to reerect his barriers, his formidable defenses, against it.

Why? What had happened to him that made a world alone seem so preferable to one shared?

“Wait,” she called. “I’ll walk with you.”

And he turned and watched her come toward him, waited, almost as if he was relieved that he was not going to carry some of the burden he carried alone.

Chapter Seven

HOUSTON watched Molly walking fast to catch up with him. The truth was all he wanted was an hour or so on his punching bag. Though maybe he waited, instead of continuing to walk, because the punching bag had not done him nearly the good he had hoped it would last night. Now it felt as if it was the only place to defuse his fury.

That beautiful little girl’s mother didn’t want her. He knew he was kidding himself that his anger was at her mother.

From the moment he’d heard Molly laughing from under the pile of children a powerless longing for something he was never going to have had pulled at him.

You thought you left something behind you, but you never quite left that. The longing for the love of a mother.

The love of his mother. She was dead now. He’d hired a private detective a few years back to find her. Somehow he had known she was dead. Because he’d always thought she would come back. He would have left Beebee’s world in a minute if his mother had loved him and needed him.

It had been a temporary relief when the private eye had told him. Drugs. An overdose.

Death. The only reasonable explanation for a mother who had never looked back. Except, as the P.I. filled in the dates and details, it wasn’t the explanation he’d been seeking after all. She’d died only a few years before he made the inquiries about her—plenty of time to check in on her son if she had wanted to.

She hadn’t.

And he was powerless over that, too.

There was nothing a man of action like Houston hated so much as that word. Powerless.

Molly came and walked beside him. He deliberately walked fast enough to keep her a little breathless; he knew intuitively she would have a woman’s desire to talk, to probe his wounds.

He could feel his anger dispersing as they left the edgier part of the Lower East Side and headed back to where Second Chances was in the East Village.

“This is where I live,” she said as they came to a well-kept five-story brownstone. “Do you want to stop for a minute? Meet Baldy? Have a coffee?”

She obviously intended to pursue this thing. His feelings. He was not going to meet her bird, enter her personal space and have a coffee with her!

On the other hand, the punching bag had not been working its normal magic. He hesitated. And she read that as a yes. In the blink of an eye she was at the door with her key out.

He still had a chance to back away, but for some reason he didn’t. In fact, he ordered himself to keep walking, to call after her, Maybe some other time. But he didn’t.

Instead, feeling oddly powerless again, as if she might have something he was looking for, he followed her up the three flights of stairs to her apartment.

“Close it quick,” she said, as he came through the door behind her. “Baldy.”

And sure enough out of the darkness of the apartment a tiny missile flew at them, a piece of flesh-colored putty with naked wings. It landed on her shoulder, pecked at her ear, turned and gave him a baleful look.

“Good grief,” he said, but he was already glad he had come. The bird was so ugly he was cute. The tiny being’s obvious adoration for Molly lightened something in Houston’s mood. “ET call home!”

Still, there was something about that bird, looking as if it, too, would protect her to the death, that tugged at a heart that had just faced one too many challenges today.

The bird rode on her shoulder as she guided him into the apartment which looked to be all of five hundred square feet of pure feminine coziness.

The bird kissed her cheek and made a whimpering noise that was near human. She absently stroked his featherless body with a tender finger. The bird preened.

“Just have a seat,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

But he didn’t have a seat. Instead he questioned his sanity for coming in here. He studied the framed poster of a balloon rising over the Napa Valley in California. He turned away from it. How was it her humble five hundred square feet felt like home in a way he had never quite managed to achieve?

It must be the fresh flowers on the coffee table between the two sofas.

“Nice flowers,” he heard himself say.

“Oh, I treat myself,” she called from the kitchen. “There’s a vendor on the way home from work.”

He went and stood in the doorway of her tiny kitchen, watched her work.

“No boyfriend buying you flowers?”

That’s exactly why it had been a mistake to accept her invitation into her personal space. This was going too far. He’d chased her with a worm. And danced with her. He’d felt the exquisite plumpness of her lip on his finger when he’d fed her from his hand. Now he was in her house.

In high school, he scoffed at himself, that might count as a relationship. But for a mature man?

“Believe me,” she muttered, “the boyfriend I had never bought me flowers.”

“Really?” he said, and some of his dismay at that must have come through in his tone. What kind of cad wouldn’t buy her flowers? He would buy her flowers if he was her boyfriend.

Now that was a dangerous side road his mind had just gone down!

Her tongue was caught between her teeth as she concentrated on putting coffee things on a tray. She pressed by him in the narrow doorway, set the tray on the coffee table by the flowers.

It all looked very cozy. He went and sat down.

She poured coffee. “He was more than my boyfriend. My fiancé.”

“Ah.” He took a generous gulp of coffee, burned his mouth, set it down and glared at it.

She took a tiny sip of hers. “His name was Chuck. We were supposed to get married and live happily ever after. Instead, he emptied my bank account and went to live on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s what finished me for being a romantic.”

Why was she telling him this? He got it very suddenly. They were going to share confidences.

“Now I see it as a good thing,” she said. “It got me ready for you.”

He stared.

“Hardened me,” she declared. “So that I’m not a romantic anymore. So that I can handle all the changes at work.”

And he wasn’t aware he had stopped breathing until he started again. For a suspended moment in time, he had thought she was going to say losing her fiancé had freed her to love him. What would give him such a notion?

Still, it was very hard not to laugh at her declaration that she was hardened. “But there’s such a thing as being too hard,” she went on.

“I guess there is,” he agreed warily.

“I’d like you to trust me. Tell me why the situation at the daycare with the little girl and her mother made you so angry today?”

Her perception—the feeling that she could see what he least wanted to be seen—was frightening.

What was even more frightening was the temptation that clawed at his throat. To take off all the armor, and lay it at her feet. Tell her all of it. But the words stuck.

“When I was little,” she told him, still thinking it was a confidences exchange, “my mom and dad fought all the time. And I dreamed of belonging to a family where everyone loved each other.”

“Ah,” he said, unforthcoming.

“Do you think such a family exists?”

“Honestly? No.”

“You’re very cynical about families, Houston. Why?”

She wanted to know? Okay, he’d tell her. She probably wasn’t going to be nearly as happy to know about him as she thought she was going to be!

“Because I grew up in one just like yours. Constant fighting. Drama. Chaos. Actually it would probably make yours look like something off a Christmas card. And it made me feel the opposite of you. Not a longing for love. An allergy to it.”

“Isn’t that lonely?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “Maybe,” he finally said. “But not as lonely as waiting for something that never happens. That’s the loneliest.”

“What did you wait for that never happened?”

This was what he had come here for. For her to coax this out of him.

He was silent.

“Trust me,” she said quietly.

And he could not resist her. Even though he pitted his whole strength against it, he heard himself say, his voice a low growl of remembered pain, “Once, when I was quite small, I was in a Christmas concert.”

And somehow he told her all of it. And with every single word it felt like a chain that had been wrapped hard around his heart was breaking apart, link by link.

Somehow, when he was finished, she had moved from the couch across from him to the place right beside him. Her hand was in his. And she was silent for the longest time.

“But why didn’t she come?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“Was it just that once that she didn’t come?”

Here she was dragging more out of him.

“No, it was all the time.”

“Because she couldn’t care about anybody but herself,” Molly said sadly. “Did you think it was about you?”

As she spoke those words Houston knew a truth he did not want to know. Of course he had thought it was about him.

It was not his father he had never forgiven. Not entirely.

Somewhere in him, he had always thought the truth was that he was a person no one could care about. Not if tested. Not over time. If his own mother had found him unworthy of love, that was probably the truth.

It was not his mother he had not forgiven, either.

It was himself he had never forgiven. For not being worthy of love. For not being a person that his mother and father could have at least tried to hold it all together for.

Molly reached up and guided his hand to her face. It was wet with her tears. It was such a tender powerful gesture, without words.

Something in him surrendered. He allowed himself to feel something he had not felt for a very long time. At home. As if he belonged. As if finally, in this world, there was one place, one person who could accept him for what he was.

He contemplated the temptation to tell her more, not sure if a man could put things back the way they used to be after he had experienced such a thing as this.

And it felt like a weakness that he could not fight and that he was not sure if he wanted to.

Damn it, he wanted to. He could not give in to this.

But then, his hand that rested on the wetness of her cheek went, it seemed of its own volition, to the puffiness of her lip. He traced the fullness of it with his thumb, took in the wideness of her eyes, the gentle puff of her breath touching his thumb.

I’m going to kiss her, he thought, entranced. Dismayed.

He snapped back from her, dropped his hand from the full and exquisite temptation of her lips.

But she wasn’t having it. When he pulled away, she stretched forward. She had clearly seen what he would have loved to have kept hidden. In every sense.

Her lips grazed his. Tender. Soft. Supple.

Sexy.

It took every ounce of his considerable discipline to pull away from her. He got to his feet, abruptly, aware if he stayed on that couch with her he was not going to be fully in control of what happened next.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” he said gruffly.

“Why?” she said softly.

She knew why. She knew she was crashing through his barriers faster than he could rebuild them.

“It was inappropriate. I apologize.”

“I think it was me who kissed you. And I’m not apologizing.”

“Molly, you have no idea what you are playing with,” he told her softly, sternly.

“Maybe I do.”

As if she saw him more clearly than he saw himself! Just because he had told her one thing. He didn’t like it that he had told her that. That brief moment of feeling unburdened, not so damned lonely, was swiftly changing to regret.

“I have work to do,” he said, hardened himself to what these moments had made him feel, turned and walked away, shutting the door firmly behind him.

But he didn’t go back to Second Chances, despite his claim he had work to do. He also had no work at home, not even his laptop. He didn’t even feel compelled to check his BlackBerry. Life could go on without him for one evening.

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