Desiring the Reilly Brothers. Maureen Child

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ