He behaved no better in the kitchen. When she leaned over the table to pour Corn Flakes, her fanny was treated to a surreptitious squeeze. When she reached into the refrigerator for milk, Rafe reached in front of her, slid his hand over her breast and emerged with butter for toast. At the sink, he stood behind her length to length. At the table, he brushed imaginary toast crumbs from her lips. When she bent down for goodbye kisses at the door, Rafe was third in line. He managed a loud smack like the kids, but those weren’t a child’s eyes staring back at her. They were a man’s, and that unrepentant grin made sure she knew it.
She reached for the doorknob with a heart gone thumping and her nerves in shreds.
“Forgot your jacket, Zoe,” he said idly.
“Yes.” She rushed back to the front closet for her navy parka.
“Forgot your purse, Zoe.”
The shoulder strap was dangling from his finger. Completely addled, she snatched that, too.
“Zoe?”
She turned back one last, exasperated time.
“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten anything else,” he said cheerfully from the door.
Over lunch with her coworkers, Zoe considered sending Rafe a package of darts in payment for his dangerous sense of humor. She knew exactly what he didn’t want her to forget. The foolish man-if she were knocked out, half dead, unconscious or suffering from amnesia, she still couldn’t forget having made love with him the night before.
But she wasn’t about to pretend that making love solved their problems. She knew it simply aggravated them. For the long term, the twins had to come first. Slowly, her feelings about children had been changing over the past four weeks. Long-closed emotional doors were creaking open, sometimes painfully. Possibilities skimmed the corners of her mind, but nothing she was absolutely sure of yet, any more than she was sure of Rafe. No matter how often she’d seen him bestowing love and caring on the kids, he’d never once mentioned his willingness to take them on without her. All she knew-all she could know-was that making the best long-term decisions for the children had to be her first priority.
But those decisions didn’t have to be handled quite yet, and it was short-term options that plagued her as she slid on a wet suit later in the afternoon. Rafe wasn’t going to be content with making love one time, she knew that.
And she didn’t want him to. Before Rafe, she’d never had to face how seriously both the surgery and Steven’s rejection had affected her confidence as a woman. Because of Rafe, she was coming out of limbo. Feeling again, hurting again, living again, wanting again.
Zoe, you’re in such trouble…
“She’s in the third holding tank. Come on, I’ll show you.” Sandy bobbed a grin at the two boys and threw a quick appreciative glance at Rafe before pushing open the lab door.
Rafe bundled the twins into their jackets, which he’d unzipped during the makeshift tour of the lab and institute Sandy had insisted on giving them.
“Where is she?” Parker tugged at his arm.
Which was the problem that was twisting his gut. According to the little brunette, Zoe was in the water. With a blasted whale. Evidently, she spent a great deal of her time in the water with whales.
Teeth clenched and adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream, he leaned against the metal fence with the kids and waited. When a sleek white fin emerged on top of the water, he felt his stomach tighten up in an acid ball. When the whale arched in the water and lunged back down, he caught a glimpse of the mammal’s size and came darn close to losing his lunch. Zoe was in there? Sure, she’d told him what she did for a living, but if he’d really had any idea…
“Well, hi! Darn it, I expected to be done by the time you guys got here!”
“Zoe!”
“Snookums!”
Both boys rushed over to the ladder. Rafe had to wait a minute before the bile trickled back down to his stomach. In a sleek black wet suit, she looked even more petite and far more vulnerable than usual. Halfway up the ladder, she tugged off the hood and tossed her hair. Her smile was natural and infectious, her eyes sparkling with life.
“Well? Did you see George?” she asked the little ones.
“Is that George?” Aaron motioned to the water.
“That’s George…probably the biggest baby in the entire Pacific. Not that he’s so large for an orca, he isn’t; he just seems to require more pampering than your average ten whales put together.”
“Did you pet him, Zoe?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I did with him in just a second.” After peeling off her scuba gear, she tugged off her flippers and then started to unzip her wet suit, talking all the while.
She told the kids how whales had a fantastic gift called echolocation. “See, toothed whales, like the orca, can send out sound beams so powerful that they can detect the presence of their prey, or their enemies, and they can use those same sound beams to find their way if the water’s dark or murky.” She told them that when something went wrong with a whale’s echolocation powers, it could become disoriented and confused; it could even swim toward shore and get stranded at low tide. She told them about the experiment she was doing with George, and a two-ton magnet in the water. “See, the deal is this, guys. Scientists figured out that those sound beams are affected by magnetism. You know what a magnet is, don’t you? And whales are incredibly smart, but not smart enough to understand that certain parts of the land are loaded with magnetism-just as if there were zillions of little magnets in the ground. And we don’t want those whales to get stranded, so we figured…”
The kids asked questions almost faster than she could answer them. Rafe listened, and loved her. Her hair dried fast in the brisk breeze, and locks of chestnut silk fluttered around her face. Her skin turned pink from cold, and she shivered when she first climbed out of the wet suit and tugged on a navy sweatshirt that was obviously three sizes too large for her. Her slim hands moved expressively when she talked; he loved those hands.
Memories of last night washed over him like a fog. He couldn’t let her go. She was a blend of fragility and incredible courage, all give and subtle stubbornness. Animated like this, she gave the impression that she thrived on blithe laughter. He’d never met a more complex woman, or one so deeply caring at the core.
“You sure that doesn’t hurt George?”
Zoe leaned over to ruffle Aaron’s hair. “Of course I’m sure, lovebug. I’d never do anything to hurt George. In fact, he’s perfectly free to go whenever he wants, but he’s sort of adopted us here. See, he lost his mom, and we fed him from the time he was a baby, so I think he’s got this idea he’s half human-”
“You have some kind of weapon when you’re down in the water?”
“Weapon?” She raised surprised green eyes to Rafe’s. At that exact instant, he felt something tight begin to ease inside him. She just looked at him, but it was the way coral suddenly touched her cheeks, the way her lips parted, and the sparkle in her eyes turned helplessly soft. All day long, he’d been afraid she’d do something damn foolish, like think too analytically about what had happened the night before. All day long, he’d been braced for the argument that last night had been a one-time-only occurrence for her.
He knew she wasn’t ready to talk about a lifetime commitment; he knew she didn’t yet believe such a commitment was possible for her, not in any relationship where children were involved. Truthfully, he was so certain he’d have a fight on his hands when he saw her today that her soft smile took him aback. Maybe that enigmatic curve of her lips disturbed him even more than a fight would have.