“Why in the hell would you do that?” he demanded, and kicked his foot, trying to dislodge Peaches from his ankle. It didn’t work. She managed to hang on.

“Because I knew if she told you that you’d find a way to disappear.”

That rankled a little, but only because she was right. He would have signed on for extra duty, pleaded for a top-secret mission, asked to be deployed to a base several thousand miles away.

When, Brian suddenly wondered, had he become a coward about Tina?

Then he dismissed the question, because it wasn’t relevant at the moment.

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Brian,” she said and cocked one hip as she folded both arms across her chest.

Well, under her breasts, pushing them higher, giving him a closer look at the smooth, tanned curve of flesh peeking up from the top of her low-cut shirt. He forced himself to lift his gaze to meet hers.

“But,” she continued, keeping her gaze locked with his, “you always do. Every time I’ve visited Nana in the past couple of years, you’ve ‘coincidentally’ been called away.”

Nothing coincidental about it. Ever since the divorce, he’d purposely avoided running into Tina. He reached up and shoved one hand across the side of his head. “I just wanted to make it easier on you. Visiting family without having to—”

“—see the man who divorced me without an explanation?” she finished for him.

She was still mad. Easy enough to see in the sparks shooting out of her dark brown eyes. He couldn’t really blame her, either. “Look, Tina…”

“Forget it.” She waved whatever he’d been about to say away and shook her head until her hair whipped back behind her shoulders. “I didn’t mean to start anything. I just wanted to see you. That’s all.”

Brian studied her and wished to hell he could read her mind. Dealing with Tina had never been easy, but it had always been an adventure. And if he knew her, then there was something else going on besides just wanting to say hi to her ex.

Still, he told himself, did he know her anymore? They’d been married for one year and divorced for five. So maybe he didn’t. Maybe she’d changed. Become a stranger. The thought of which left him a lot colder than it should have.

“Why’d you want to see me?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Her eyes went wide and innocent. “Jeez, Brian, lighten up. Can’t an ex-wife say hello without getting the third degree?”

“An ex-wife who flies in all the way from California to say hello?”

“And to take care of two sweet little—”

“—furry monsters,” he finished for her and snarled at Peaches who was trying desperately to crawl up his leg. Probably wanted to bite through his jugular.

Tina laughed and everything inside him went still.

He looked at her from the corner of his eye and watched her like a hungry man eyes a steak. Divorced, he reminded himself, but still just the sound of her laughter could reach down inside him and warm all the cold, empty spots.

Five years since the last time he’d touched her and his fingertips could still feel the softness of her skin. Her perfume, a soft blend of flowers and citrus, seemed always to be with him, especially in his dreams. And the memories of their lovemaking could make him groan with need.

Hell.

Especially now.

Man, he so didn’t need Tina in town with this stupid bet going on.

“I don’t know why they don’t like you,” Tina said as she bent down to scoop Muffin into the crook of her arm. The little dog quivered in excitement and affection and gave Tina’s neck a couple of long swipes of its tongue.

Brian wouldn’t mind doing the same.

He spoke up fast, to keep that image from coalescing. “Because they know it’s mutual.”

Tina scratched Muffin behind her ear, giving the dog a taste of heaven and giving herself something to do with her hands. If she hadn’t picked up the dog, she might have given in to the urge to grab Brian. Her mouth watered just looking at him.

His black hair was still militarily short, showing off the sharp angles and planes of his face to model perfection. His dark blue eyes were still as deep and mysterious as the ocean at night. His black USMC T-shirt strained over broad shoulders and a muscular chest and his narrow hips and long legs looked unbelievably good encased in worn denim.

She’d forgotten, God help her.

She’d forgotten just how much he could affect her.

Maybe Janet had been right. Maybe this wasn’t

such a good idea after all.

She wanted a baby, sure.

And she wanted Brian to be its father.

But if simply standing beside the man could make her weak in the knees, what chance did she have to keep herself from falling back into the stupid-withlove category?

As soon as that thought flitted through her mind though, she firmly pushed it aside. She could do this. It had been five years. She wasn’t in love anymore. She wasn’t a kid, trusting in one special man to make her dreams come true.

She’d worked long and hard at her career. She was respected. She was mature enough to handle Brian Reilly without getting her fingers burned again. And if she was still breathlessly attracted to him, that was a good thing.

It would make seducing him that much easier.

“Look, Brian,” she said, keeping a tight grip on Muffin while Peaches scrabbled at the hem of Brian’s jeans again, “there’s no reason we can’t be civil to each other, is there?”

“I guess not.”

“Good.” It was a start, anyway. “So, I’m going to barbecue a steak tonight. Want me to add one for you?”

For one small second, she thought he was going to say yes. She could see it in his eyes. The hesitation. Then he apparently got over it.

“No, thanks. Gotta go see Connor tonight. He’s uh…having some problems with his uh—”

Tina smiled and shook her head. “You never were much of a liar, Brian.”

He stiffened. “Who’s lying?”

“You are,” she said, smiling. Then she turned for the gate leading to the backyard and the house. “But that’s okay, I’m not taking it personally. Yet. Come on, Peaches. Dinner.”

Instantly, the little dog released her hold on Brian and scuttled for the backyard and her food dish.

“Tina,” Brian said.

She stopped at the gate and flashed him a smile. It was good to know she could still get to him so easily. If he hadn’t been worried about being alone with her, he never would have lied about having to meet Connor.

And now, he looked…confused. Also good. If she could just keep him off his guard for a week or two, things would work out fine.

“It’s okay, Brian,” she said, giving him a shrug and a brighter smile. “I’m going to be here for almost three weeks. I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of each other.”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and hunched his broad shoulders as if trying to find a way to balance a burden that had been dropped onto him without warning.

She wasn’t sure she liked the analogy much, but it seemed to fit.

“Have a good night,” she called out as she closed the gate behind her, “and say hi to Connor.”

“Right.”

Tina went into the house with the dogs, and once the back door was closed, she fingered the edge of the white Priscilla curtains until she could see the stairway leading to the garage apartment. Brian climbed those stairs like a man headed for the gallows.

And when he reached the landing, he paused and looked back at the house.

Tina flinched. It was almost as if his gaze had locked with hers instinctively. She felt the heat and power of that steady stare and it rocked her right to her bones.

Long after he’d gone inside his apartment, Tina was still standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. And she couldn’t help wondering which of them was really off their guard.

Two hours later, Brian was finishing dinner and listening to Connor laugh at the latest development. It was his own fault. Not that he’d been expecting sympathy, but outright hilarity was a little uncalled for.

“So, Tina’s back in town,” Connor said, grinning. “Man, I can almost feel that money sliding into my wallet as we speak.”

“Forget it,” Brian snapped, still feeling the effects of Tina’s smile hours later. “She’s not going to help you win this bet. I divorced her, remember?”

“Yeah,” Connor said and signaled to the waiter for another beer. “Never did understand why, though.”

None of his family had understood, Brian thought, momentarily allowing himself to drift down memory lane. Hell, even he’d had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that divorcing Tina had been the only right thing to do.

It hadn’t been easy. But it had been right.

He still believed that.

If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to live with the regrets.

Tina Coretti still haunted him. At the oddest times, his brain would suddenly erupt into images of her. Cooking, laughing, singing off-key with the radio while on one of their notorious road trips. He remembered arguing with her, both of them shouting until one of them started laughing and then how they’d tumble into bed and rediscover each other.

The sex had always been amazing between them.

Not just bodies coming together, but in his more poetic moments, Brian had convinced himself that even their souls had mated.

And once she was gone from his life, he’d had to believe it, because he’d been left hollow. Empty. His heart broken and his soul crushed, despite knowing that what he’d done, he’d done for her.

That hadn’t changed.

He shoved what was left of his burger and fries to the edge of the table for the waiter to pick up, then leaned back in his seat.

The Lighthouse Restaurant was packed, as it generally was. Families crowded around big tables and couples snuggled close together in darkened booths. Overhead, light fell from iron chandeliers bristling with hanging ferns and copper pots.

Studying his brother across the table from him, Brian shifted the talk from himself by asking suddenly, “So how’re you doing on the bet front?”

Connor choked on a swallow of beer and when he was finished coughing, he shook his head. “Man, it’s way uglier than I thought it was going to be.”

Brian laughed.

“Seriously,” Connor protested. “Getting to the point where I’m hiding from women completely.”

“I know what you mean,” Brian said, though for him, hiding had just gotten a lot harder. Staying away from women at work was easy. There weren’t that many female pilots or female personnel assigned to the F-18 squadrons. And those that were there made a point of avoiding the guys. Couldn’t blame them. They had to work twice as hard as the men just to be accepted and they weren’t going to blow a career by flirting with their fellow officers.

So work was safe and Brian had planned to hide out at home, staying away from the usual spots, bars, clubs and whatever, to avoid women in his off-duty hours. But now, home wasn’t a refuge. Instead, with Tina in town, home was the most dangerous territory of all.

“It’s only been two weeks,” Connor admitted, “and already, I’ve got way more respect for Liam.”

“I’m with you there,” Brian said.

“Talked to Aidan last night and he says he’s thinking about joining a monastery for three months.”

The thought of that was worth a chuckle. “At least he’s suffering, too.”

“Yeah.” Connor narrowed his eyes, nodded at the waiter, who stopped by to deliver their check, then said, “At least I get to take out my frustrations by screaming at the ‘boots’ every day.”

Brian smiled but couldn’t help feeling sorry for the new recruits under Connor’s charge in boot camp.

Then his brother spoke up again.

“Have you noticed the only one who’s not suffering is our brother the priest?” Clearly disgusted, Connor shook his head. “He’s just sitting back laughing at the three of us. How’d he talk us into this, anyway?”

“He let us talk ourselves into it. None of us could ever resist a challenge. Or a dare.”

“We’re that predictable?”

“To him anyway. Remember, priest or not,” Brian said, “he’s still the sneakiest of us.”

“Got that right.” Connor reached for his wallet and pulled out a couple of bills, tossing them onto the tabletop. “So, what’re you gonna do about Tina?”

“I’m gonna stay as far away from her as I can, that’s what.”

“That was never easy for you.”

Brian tossed his money down, too, then grumbled, “Didn’t say it was gonna be easy.”

Connor stood up, looked at his brother and gave him a smile. “We could try the old switcheroo trick. Since you have a hard time being around her, I could talk to her. Ask her to leave.”

Brian looked at him and slowly slid out of the booth. They hadn’t used the switcheroo since they were kids. The triplets were so identical, even their mother had sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. So, the three of them had often used that confusion to their advantage, with one of them pretending to be the other in order to get out of something they didn’t want to do. They’d fooled teachers, coaches and even, on occasion, their own mother and father.

But, Brian reminded himself, as the idea began to appeal to him, Tina had always been able to tell them apart. They’d never once fooled her as they had so many others. Still, he thought, watching Connor smile and nod encouragingly, it had been years since she’d seen the three Reilly brothers together. Years since Tina and Brian were close enough that she’d been able to pick him out of a crowd of three with pure instinct.

“I’m willing if you want to give it a shot,” Connor prodded.

What did he have to lose? Brian asked himself. If Tina didn’t catch on to the trick, maybe she would leave, making Brian’s life a little easier. And if she did catch on…well, it had been a long time since he’d seen Tina Coretti’s temper.

And as he remembered it, she looked damn good when she was fighting mad.

Chapter Three

Tina heard Brian’s car when he returned to the house late that night and she breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Moving to the curtains of the upstairs bedroom that had been hers since she was a child, she peeked out to watch him walk up the driveway. When he paused long enough to snarl insults at the barking dogs, she smiled.

She’d been half worried that he might bolt. It would have been easy for him to up and move to the base for a few weeks just to avoid her. But he hadn’t. And she was pretty sure she knew why.

Brian would never admit that he wasn’t up to the challenge of seeing her every day. He’d never allow himself to acknowledge that there was anything to worry about.

He took the flight of steps to the garage apartment two at a time and her heartbeat quickened just watching him move. By the time he opened his door and went inside, without a glance at the house, her mouth was dry and her breath came in short fits and starts.

“Okay,” she muttered, “maybe I’m the one who should be worried.”

When the phone rang, she lunged for it gratefully. Sprawled across the hand-sewn quilt covering her double bed, Tina snatched at the “princess” style telephone and said, “Hello?”

“So, you’re there.”

“Janet.” Tina rolled over onto her back and stared up at the beamed ceiling. Smiling, she said, “Right back where I started, yep.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And…?”

Tina grabbed the twisted cord in one hand and wrapped the coils around her index finger as she talked. “And, he’s just like I remembered.” Actually, he was more than she remembered. More handsome. More irresistible. More aggravating.

“So you’re still set on this.”

Tina sighed. “Janet, we’ve been all through this. I don’t want to go to a sperm bank. Can you imagine that conversation with my child? ‘Yes, honey, of course you have a daddy. He’s number 3075. It’s a very nice number.’”

Janet laughed. “Fine. I’m just saying, it seems like you’re asking for trouble here. I’m worried.”

“And I appreciate it.” Tina smiled and let her gaze drift around her old bedroom. Nana hadn’t changed much over the years. There were still posters of Tahiti and London tacked to the walls, bookcases stuffed with books and treasures from her teenage years and furniture that had been in the Coretti family since the beginning of time.

There was comfort here.

And Tina was surprised to admit just how much she needed that comfort.

Though she’d been born and raised in this house, this town, she’d been gone a long time. And stepping into the past, however briefly, was just a little unnerving.

“But you want me to back off,” Janet said.

Tina heard the smile in her friend’s voice. “Yeah, I do.”

“Tony told me you’d say that,” Janet admitted, then shouted to her husband, “okay, okay. I owe you five dollars.”

Tina laughed and felt the knots in her stomach slowly unwinding. “I’m glad you called.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I needed to hear a friendly voice,” Tina admitted. With Nana in Italy and Brian holed up in his cave, Tina had been feeling more alone than she had in a long time. “Even I didn’t know how much I needed it.”

“Happy to help,” Janet said. “Call me if you need to talk or cry or shout or…anything.”

“I will. And I’ll see you in three weeks.”

After her friend hung up, Tina sat up and folded her legs beneath her. She looked around her room and felt the past rise up all around her. She’d still been living in this room when she and Brian had started dating.

It felt like a lifetime ago.

Back then, she was still working part-time at Diego’s, an upscale bar on the waterfront, and studying for her MBA during the day. Brian was a lieutenant, the pilot’s wings pinned to his uniform still shiny and new. He’d walked into the bar one night, and just like the corniest of clichés, their eyes met, flames erupted and that was that.

In a rush of lust and love, they’d spent every minute together for the next month, then infuriated both of their families with a hurried elopement. But they’d been too crazy about each other to wait for the big, planned, fancy wedding their families would have wanted.

Instead, it was just the two of them, standing in front of a justice of the peace. Tina had carried a single rose that Brian had picked for her from the garden out in front of the courthouse. And she’d known, deep in her bones, that this man was her soul mate. The one man in the world that she’d been destined to love.

They’d had one year together. Then Brian dropped the divorce bomb on her and left the next morning for a six-month deployment to an aircraft carrier.

“So much for soul mates,” Tina whispered to the empty room as she left the memories in her dusty past where they belonged. Then she flopped back onto the bed, threw one arm across her eyes and tried to tell herself that the ache in her heart was just an echo of old pain.

The next day, Tina dived into work on her grandmother’s garden. Nana loved having flowers, but she wasn’t keen on weeding. She always claimed that it was because she had no trouble getting down onto the grass, but getting back up was tougher. But Tina knew the truth. Her grandmother just hated weeding. Always had.

The roses were droopy, the Gerbera daisies were being choked out by the dandelions and the pansies had given up the ghost. Tina knelt in the sun-warmed grass and let the summer heat bake into her skin as she leaned into the task.

Classic rock played on the stereo in the living room and drifted through the open windows to give her a solid beat to work to. The sounds of kids playing basketball and a dog’s frantic bark came from down the street. Muffin and Peaches watched Tina’s every move from behind the screen door and yipped excitedly whenever something interesting, like a butterfly, passed in their line of vision.

She’d already been at it for an hour when she straightened up, put her hands at the small of her back and stretched, easing the kinks out of muscles unused to gardening. In California, Tina lived in an apartment and made do with a few potted plants on the balcony overlooking Manhattan Beach. At home, she was always too busy working, or thinking about working, or planning to be working, to do anything else. And when had that happened? she asked herself. When had she lost her sense of balance? When had work become more important than living?

But she knew the answer.

It seemed as though everything in her life boiled back down to Brian. She’d buried herself in her ambition when he’d divorced her. As if by immersing herself in work she could forget about the loneliness haunting her. It hadn’t worked.

It felt good to be out in a yard again, she thought. Good to not be watching a clock or worrying about a lunch meeting. It was good just to be, even if the South Carolina humidity was thick enough to slice with a knife.

A thunderous, window rattling roar rose up out of nowhere suddenly and Tina tipped her head back in time to see an F-18 streak across the sky, leaving a long white trail behind it. Her heart swelled as it always did when she spotted a military jet. Every time, she imagined that Brian was the pilot. She’d always been proud of him and the job he did. There’d been fear, too, of course, but when you married a Marine, that was just part of the package.

She lifted one hand to shield her eyes as she followed the jet’s progress across the sky.

“Pretty sight,” a voice from behind her said, loud enough to be heard over the music still pouring from the house into the hot, summer air.

Tina sucked in a breath and slowly turned around to look up at him. She hadn’t heard him drive up. Hadn’t expected him to come back home in the middle of the day. In fact, she’d figured him for spending as much time away from the house as possible.

Yet, here he was.

Taller than most pilots, Brian used to complain about the cockpit of an F-18 being a tight fit. But she’d always liked the fact that he was so much taller than her. Unless she was on the ground having to tip her head all the way back just to meet his eyes. She stood up, brushing grass off her knees and then peeling the worn, stained, gardening gloves from her hands.

The sun shone directly into her eyes, silhouetting Brian, throwing his face into shadow. But she felt him watching her and knew that his gaze was locked on her. “What’d you say?” she finally asked, then remembered and said, “Oh. The jet. Yes, it is pretty.”

“Didn’t mean the jet, but, yeah,” he said, “it looked good, too.”

Tina felt a rush of warmth spin through her and told herself that a compliment from Brian meant nothing. Only that he was alive and breathing. He’d always been smooth. Always known just what to say. Known how to talk her down from a mad and how to talk her out of her panties.

Instantly, memories dazzled her body and the resulting warmth turned to heat and Tina had to fight to keep her knees from wobbling.

“Brian—”

“Tina—”

They started talking together, then each of them stopped and laughed shortly, uncomfortably. A twist of regret tightened in her chest as she acknowledged that discomfort. How had they come to this? she wondered. How had the passion, the love they’d once felt for each other dissolved into this awkward courtesy between strangers?

“You go first,” he said tightly.

Shaking her head, she said, “No, it’s okay. You go ahead.”

Nodding, he jammed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, rocked on his heels and shifted his gaze to one side briefly before slamming back into hers. “Tina, this isn’t easy for me, but…”

While he talked, Tina watched him. And as she watched, her brain, dazzled at first by his unexpected arrival, began to kick in. She noticed the way he held his head. The shrug of his shoulders. The way he stood and the way one corner of his mouth tilted up when he spoke. But it wasn’t just how he looked that was different. It was how he felt. Or rather, how he wasn’t making her feel. There was no buzz of electricity jumping up and down her spine. There was no hum of energy bristling between them. And no matter what else had passed between them, they’d always shared a combustible chemistry.

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