Who Do You Trust?

“We love them, Mitch,” she blurted, staring hard at the creamy-tiled wall with hand-painted diamond tiles interspersing the plain squares. “They’ve become my sons, Jenny’s big brothers. They had their troubles when they came. I expected it after the way Kerin died. But it’s settling down. They’re happy here…they have a home and family. They need family stability, Mitch, and they love us, Jenny and me—” She turned to him, pleading in the depths of her pretty eyes. “Please don’t take them away from me.”

Quick as a flash, he made up his mind. “I knew they’d love you, Lissa, and I knew you’d love them. I counted on it. Which is why I came back here to live.”

She kept her gaze on him, eyes wide, pupils dilated. Filled with half-scared questions only he had answers to.

“Matt and Luke need a mother,” he said quietly, formulating his plans with the lightning speed of a man trained to think on his feet, or in the cockpit. “One who’ll be more loving, more stable than Kerin could ever have been. And no woman could be more loving, more stable than you. I know that from experience.” He watched the soft rose flush fill her cheeks, and ached with the need her fresh, countrygirl beauty always set off in him. The need to hold her, run his hands through that shining honey-gold waterfall of hair, touch her silky, golden-brown skin. Shed her clothes and kiss every secret part of her until she was glowing in her earthy sensuality and crying out in pleasure for him—

Oh, how he ached to make her his. But the only emotion she’d shown at all so far was for his kids.

When he spoke again, his voice was harsh with the strain of his never-ending craving for her. “I’ve had constant nightmares since Kerin took off with the kids from school—horrifying visions they’d end up in places I’ve been. But when you said you’d take them, the fear died. I knew you’d love my kids as your own. I trusted you to keep them safe. I can’t take them away from here, from the only real family and mother they’ve known.”

Lissa sagged, gripping the counter for support, white-faced and shaking. Her knuckles were transparent to the bone. “I’ve been so scared you’d take them from me,” she whispered. “I think I’d want to die if I lost them now.”

Oh, bloody hell. He should have seen this coming, should have known his girl wouldn’t just care for Matt and Luke, or love them simply—simple just wasn’t in her nature. She’d taken his sons right into her heart, and she’d hold on to the love with all the tenacious, desperate strength her delicate frame belied. Just as she’d once done with him. And while he’d half-counted on that, it made telling her his plans a whole hell of a lot harder.

But then, nothing was ever simple between him and Lissa. Ever. Not even the unspoken burning in his gut for her.

Especially not that.

He drew in a breath. “But I can’t just leave them behind. They’re my sons, and I love them.” He touched her arm to keep contact with her warmth; he felt so cold with fear, his teeth almost chattered. “You know me, Lissa. You know how I’ve always wanted to be part of a family. I’ve come home to find my family.”

Her eyes fixed on his face, filled with trepidation. Anguish. And, though he hunted as deeply as he dared, he couldn’t see a trace of the longing that filled him for her, body, heart and soul. “What are you saying?”

He dragged in a breath. “I’m saying I’m home to stay. I want a family—and that includes you and Jenny. If you’ll have me.” He took her hands in his, feeling like a drowning man holding on to a lifeline—and he finally said the words he’d been holding in since the girl he loved started dating his best friend fifteen years before. “Marry me, Lissa.”

Chapter 2

“Wh-what?”

It wasn’t exactly the answer Mitch hoped for. Nor was the look on her face. Surprised, yes. Stunned, maybe. Joyful, beyond his dreams. But the one look he hadn’t expected from her was that of a fawn he’d just shot.

Stricken. Bewildered. Betrayed.

So much for dreams and half-hidden hopes. He’d done it again. What a fool. What a heel. The world’s biggest jerk. Come home after twelve years, make conversation for five minutes and what did he do? Propose to her! He shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. He should have taken it slow, courted her with care; but no, he’d gone at her like a bull at a gate, let the dam break—and all he’d accomplished was to shock and confuse her.

He had no option but to go on with it now. He had to try to repair the damage he’d caused. “Think about it, Lissa. It’s the perfect solution for us all.”

She whitened and her eyes went dark like a lamp shattered by stones, bloodless and cold and broken. “No.” She tugged until he released her hands; she stumbled away from him, her breaths harsh and heaving, like she was trying not to throw up. “Don’t say it again,” she finally muttered. “Not ever!”

“Lissa—”

“I said no.” She flung up a hand between them. It was small and delicate, like Lissa herself—yet because it shook so hard, it was as effective a barrier as bricks and mortar, halting his advance. She turned her back on him, picking up her mug, sloshing coffee on the counter as she took unsteady swigs. “The kids will be home from school soon.” She spoke as if nothing had happened. “Matt and Luke will be so happy to see you—but expect hostility from Jenny. She loves her brothers. We’re a family.” The implication was clear: And we don’t need you.

Mitch dragged in a breath, seeing his life’s dream besides flying planes crumbling before his eyes. To him Lissa always had, always would, represent everything good and right and decent in the world. All that was beautiful and precious in his eyes lived and breathed here in Breckerville, on a sleepy verdant farm and in a pair of gentle gray eyes, a mouth made to love his body and a heart that had never known what boundaries were.

Except in this, obviously.

God, oh, God, he’d lost her. She didn’t love him. Didn’t want him. Not even to keep his kids—kids she obviously did love. “Won’t you even think about it?”

“I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want a ‘perfect solution’ to a problem I didn’t know I had!” Spitting the words out like epithets, she swiveled around to face him, her face filled with burning wrath. “You’ve been gone over twelve years, and in all that time, I never get a thing. No word, no call, no letter. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead until you needed my help with Matt and Luke. Now you waltz home after almost half a lifetime away and tell me you want to get married, just like that.” She snapped her fingers, her eyes flashing. “I’m not a dog you can call to heel, Mitch McCluskey.”

He bit the inside of his mouth. Somewhere along the line, his gentle Lissa had grown feisty. She’d squared up to him like Mike Tyson in a prematch slanging bout. What the hell had he said to make her quiver with fury like that? “I’m sorry.” He stumbled over the long-unused word, jerking a hand through his hair, and cursed when it caught in his tangled curls. “I hated leaving you. I’ve missed you like crazy the whole time I’ve been gone. Not a day’s passed when I didn’t think about you, want to see you, call or write—but Tim made his feelings pretty final.”

“But I didn’t,” she snarled, startling him with the vivid passion in her face. “You just left me—left us both behind. You knew how much Tim cared about you. Surely you knew he’d regret what he’d done when he was sober? And he did, Mitch—but we both thought you’d come back. And how do you think I felt, waiting day after day for a call or letter to know you were safe? I had to call the Air Force a year later to make sure you were alive!” She whirled on him again, a delicate china tigress, even her sheathed and painted claws ripping his heart to shreds. “I loved you, damn it. You knew I’d worry myself sick about you, and you never once bothered to let me know you were alive and all right!”

“I knew. You and Tim were the only two people on God’s earth I was sure cared about me.” He turned aside, looking out the window to the vista of shimmering, sun-drenched fields he’d loved from first sight, seventeen years before. Breckerville and Lissa. The only sense of belonging he’d ever had; the only place he ever felt at home, at peace, where the tempests roaring inside him calmed like the waters of the Jordan at a word from the Messiah. “But when he did that to me right in front of the whole town, and you didn’t stop him, I didn’t know what to think. Sure I was out of line with the speech about you. I was stupid, jealous of what you two had, and more than a bit drunk, I’ll admit it—but I’d forgiven him far worse. Did he ever tell you why?”

Her voice came to him, strained. Hiding secrets. Hers or Tim’s? “I think that’s something he’ll have to tell you himself.”

So she was still loyal to Tim, even after all he’d done to her. He held the sigh in. The path he’d finally hoped clear was far from smooth. Mitch the dreamer strikes again—shot down as usual by the Red Baron of reality. “Where does he live now?”

“Sydney. Ashfield. He owns and runs a gym near the city with a partner. He comes up here every second weekend to see Jenny. Sometimes during the week, too, depending on his schedule. He’s become a father figure to the boys in the past five months. He takes the kids to football games, plays with them, helps them with school projects. Things like that.”

He turned to her, but she’d averted her face. She was talking too much. Lissa always did that when she was scared, or hiding something. “Does he stay here?”

“Yes.” She fiddled with the cloth on the counter. Waiting for the question. He knew it. He sensed the pot boiling inside her, the potent stew of dread and anger, daring him to speak.

Like a fool, he plunged on. He couldn’t stop the gut-deep jealousy eating at him, clawing with the sharp-edged talons of Iago’s cunning. “In your bedroom?” he rasped.

Like a flash she turned on him. “And who’s been in your bed lately, Mitch? Who’s filled your lonely nights the past twelve years? How many times have you sunk to doing things you hate so you’re not alone, even for a few hours?”

He’d expected her to shove the question back in his face, but not with such raw intensity. Oh, yeah, she’d walked his path, if from the other side of the fence. He understood that loneliness. The darkness of nights filled with aching. The sunrises and sunsets over concrete and stone, standing alone in a city of four million people, that city not where you ached to be, none of those people the one you hungered to be with. Even when he was on a mission, even when he’d saved someone’s life, it only patched over the gap for a few hours, before the gut-gnawing voracious need for home and family and Lissa. Dear God, how he’d ached for her; a devouring need to sink inside her, lose his pain in her smile, her arms and welcoming body forever left the wound open again, savage and unhealed and bleeding.

He’d learned long ago how to live alone. Taking another woman to his bed or hers—even women who knew the score—had only ever intensified the loneliness, the anguished yearning. An hour, a minute of mind-numbing forgetfulness nowhere near compensated for weeks of self-hate, using a woman as a replacement for the only woman he’d ever truly 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 eyes twinkled. She bit her lip, then poked her tongue out and wrinkled her nose. “You still stink with it—cityfella.” She snorted. “Buying a house at Bondi Beach. What a yuppie!”

Matt wriggled. “Wanna come see our room, Dad? It’s mega cool. It’s got pics of Mick Doohan and Wayne Gardner—”

Luke jumped off Mitch’s hip. “And Luke Longley, Andrew Gaze, Michael Jordan and the Shaq—”

He laughed. “I see you two are as alike as ever.”

The boys grinned. “Basketball. Kids’ stuff,” Matt snorted. “Who’d wanna waste time playin’ with balls, just runnin’ up and down and dribbling, when you can burn rubber at 220 an hour?”

“Bikes are all right, I s’pose,” Luke retorted with lofty condescension, “but I’d drink the grog if I won. Who wants the good stuff poured all over your head?”

“Hey, mithter, do you like Barbieth?”

Belatedly, Mitch noticed someone was tugging at his shirt. He looked down to the source of the little, lisping voice.

Oh, dear God. Living proof of Tim and Lissa’s love. A sweet sprite gazed hopefully at him, a child with Tim’s riotous blond curls and an angel’s face. Lissa’s face.

“You must be Jenny.”

Jenny rolled her eyes, reminiscent of her mother. “Mithter, I thaid, do you like Barbieth?”

Oh, yeah, this was Lissa’s daughter all right—with her one-track mind. The boys were sniggering already. “Watch out, or she’ll get you into the dollhouse.”

Jenny’s brow lifted; she stared Matt down, her childish lisp adorable and impatient. “You play with me all the time, so don’t you talk!” She turned back to Mitch. “You gonna play or not?”

“Jenny.”

The quiet word brooked no denial. Jenny sighed dramatically. “Sorry, Mummy. Sorry, Mister. Please are you gonna play with me?”

Lissa put a hand on Jenny’s pigtail. “Jenny, this is Mitch. He’s Matt and Luke’s daddy.”

“No!” Jenny’s sweet, flushed face drained white; those lovely china doll’s eyes filled right up with tears and spilled over. “Don’t take my bruvers. Don’t take Matt and Lukey away from me!”

“Jenny.”

The little girl’s tiny, flower-like face lifted, drenched with tears. “No, Mummy, no!” she sobbed. “Don’t let him take them, Mummy! Make him go away!”

Lissa squatted before the sobbing child as Matt and Luke stood either side of her, patting her in awkward affection. “Mitch is a friend of mine, and Matt and Luke’s father. Would you like it if Matt and Luke told your Daddy to go away?”

Jenny sniffed and gulped. “But he’s gonna take them away from us, Mummy! Stop him, stop him!”

“No, I’m not, Jenny,” Mitch cut in quietly, aching for the child’s pain. So much like her mother…

Jenny’s eyes grew round. “You’re goin’ away? Yay!”

But the twins gasped, forgetting Jenny’s grief in an instant. “Dad?” Matt’s voice quivered.

“D-don’t you want us?” Luke whispered.

Oh, damn. This was a delicate minefield he had to walk—especially with Luke—and he wasn’t any good at careful balance with words. Or with saving people’s feelings.

There was too much at stake here. Either way he could lose. How the hell could he explain the situation—what he wanted for them all—without either betraying Lissa’s trust, making the boys resent her, or looking like he wanted to dump Matt and Luke with the first available caregiver?

Just like Kerin—even after she went to the trouble of stealing them from me.

“Of course he wants to be with you both,” Lissa answered for him, caressing Luke’s curly mop of hair with exquisite tenderness. “He wouldn’t have come for you if he didn’t. He means that he’s moved here, to Breckerville, so he can be near us all. And you guys have the choice. You can go with your Dad, or keep living here if you want to, and he’ll be—”

Watching her founder, he supplied the first words that came to his mind: “Right next door.”

Lissa whirled to face him. “N-next door? You bought Old Man Taggart’s place?”

“All two hundred and fifteen acres of it, rotting fences and all.” Well, he would by tomorrow. He’d be the master of the place he’d once worked at for nothing. The For Sale sign he’d passed was so rusted and sagging he knew he’d get a bargain—and guaranteed a quick sale. Old Man Taggart must’ve died ages ago. The house and land were in such a state of disrepair—

He saw the flash of anger in Lissa’s gaze before she looked away. “You have it all worked out, don’t you?”

He shrugged, hiding the quick spurt of pain. Was she making it hard for him because she resented his manipulating the situation to his advantage, or because she didn’t want to know about marrying him? “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it’s not as if I don’t know the land, is it? I know every inch of it. Seems fair to get something out of it this time, instead of Old Man Taggart getting it all.”

He was right. After all the years of thankless effort he’d put in, Old Man Taggart treating him like a slave instead of an honest worker, it was right he finally reap the rewards from the land he’d always loved to till. Still, Lissa shook with primitive anger at his blatant maneuvering of her life.

Join families. Join the land while we’re at it. The perfect solution for everyone…except me.

But the fury melted into heart-deep guilt when she saw the radiant joy in the boys’ faces.

“So you’re staying here forever, Dad?” Luke cried, his little face blazing with eagerness; “And we don’t hafta leave Mum?”

“I’ll be right here with you guys from now on, mate. Living and working in Breckerville.” Mitch grinned at his son. “I quit the Air Force to be with you—not just a desk job with the force like last time. I’m out for good.”