Tender Loving Care

The hallway still looked like an obstacle course. Not that he’d expected her to do all the unpacking, but she’d certainly led him to believe that was her goal for the afternoon. “All right. Where are they?” he said patiently.

“The twins?” Zoe smiled brilliantly. “They’ve been little angels, Rafe. You’re not going to believe how easily they’re going to fit in your life; they’re absolutely no trouble!”

“What did they do, Zoe?”

“Nothing. Nothing!” Carting two grocery bags, she turned into the kitchen, out of his sight. He peered into the living room to find king-sized sheets stretched between the two couches. Giggling could be heard from within the makeshift tent. “I’ll unpack these,” Zoe called back to him, “and start dinner.”

He followed her. He’d noticed that she was usually excessively well groomed. At the moment, however, her blouse was hanging out, her hair looked as if she’d been hit by a hurricane, and her eyes shone on the glassy side of exhaustion. “I’ll do that. You sit down.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Zoe didn’t dare meet his eyes. Her nerves had something in common with limp lettuce. She’d grossly underestimated the difficulty of handling two small boys for a few hours. The twins had decided to turn on the washing machine for her. Their choice of dials had resulted in a full hour’s cleanup, and mountain reception was so poor that they’d deserted the television in favor of making rubber-band sling shots, which they loaded with pellets of Play-Doh. Aaron had gotten hit in the nose. He’d bitten Parker, and they’d both cried. She’d tried hide-and-seek-didn’t all kids like hide-and-seek? Except that she’d made the mistake of being the one to hide, and no one had come looking for her. By the time she’d discovered Parker poised on the mantel, prepared to risk an Incredible Hulk-type leap…

“What happened, Zoe?” Rafe’s voice was as smooth as melted butter. For no reason at all, he was setting a glass of red wine in front of her.

She shook her head. “I don’t think we should drink in front of the kids.”

“I don’t think seeing you sip a glass of red wine will corrupt them for the rest of their lives.”

“Well…” She gulped it, smiled at him and then resumed unpacking the groceries. “Macaroni and cheese. Thank God,” she murmured, and then awkwardly confessed, “I didn’t get quite as much done this afternoon as I’d planned.”

“No? Well, I’ll tackle the unpacking after dinner. And the kids. You can just relax.”

Relax? She had already failed at being any kind of positive influence on the kids. She was not comfortable in a man’s house where she was terrified of tripping over another woman’s lingerie. She had an attack of vertigo the minute she stepped outside, and the awkwardness she felt around Rafe was increasing instead of letting up.

Relax? Maybe…maybe by the next century.

Chapter Three

Zoe sank into bubbles up to her chin, closed her eyes, sighed…and immediately tensed. Something had dropped with a deafening clatter in the twins’ bedroom. She heard the thundering of little feet, then Rafe’s firm, quiet voice, then the sound of the boys’ bedroom door closing.

Silence. Relaxing again, she tried out another blissful sigh, languidly raised a washcloth and let the water dribble over her raised knee. Laziness felt sublimely wanton, even if she only had in mind a five-minute bath. After dinner, Rafe had insisted that she disappear and let him handle the boys for a while, but she didn’t want to push that. Until he formed a really strong attachment to them, she figured she’d better shield him from discovering they weren’t quite the well-behaved angels she’d led him to believe.

Still, she had absolutely nothing to do for a few minutes but watch steam rise from the blue bathtub. She liked her baths wrinkle-hot and pore-opening. Leaning back against the cool porcelain, she felt her tense muscles gradually loosen in the hot water.

Through half-shuttered eyes, she studied her body. All the parts, however distorted by water, looked basically female, basically normal. Exercise gave her skin a healthy tone and suppleness. Her breasts were firm, white, proportionate. Her stomach was flat, and when not exposed to chocolate-chip cookies, her hips behaved. Her thighs were slim; she had terrific calves; and except for her big toes-both of them annoyed her-she had nice small feet.

It was a darn good body, and her pelvis was never going to have stretch marks, her breasts were never going to sag from nursing a baby, and her stomach was never going to turn into Jell-O from carrying a child.

The problem was that she wanted the stretch marks, the sag, the Jell-O.

She squeezed her eyes closed, furious with herself. After all this time, she should have gotten over it. And exactly when was she going to manage to completely forget Steven?

Being around the children had brought it all back. Aaron and Parker were the image of the kids she’d wanted to have with Steven-a mixture of scamps and innocents, love and trouble. Loving a man, she’d discovered, meant desperately wanting to bear his children. If that was basic human instinct, Zoe had learned it as basic pain.

She should have told Steven when she first met him that she couldn’t have kids. She hadn’t. Maybe because she’d met him at that vulnerable time right after the operation. A time when she’d desperately needed to know that she could be loved, that she was still a whole woman capable of filling a man’s life. She’d loved him so much! And when she had told him, when he’d walked out of her life, she’d died inside. It wasn’t Steven’s fault. All the blame was hers, for not telling him earlier, for hurting him, for being less than adequate as a woman…

The emotional scar still hadn’t healed. But she would never make the same mistake again. Falling in love meant ramming her head against the steel wall of all the natural biological urges she could no longer fulfill. And the very thought of falling in love still left that taste of acid in her mouth. Zoe, the woman, wasn’t enough for Steven. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand, but it hurt.

An image of Rafe’s face rose up in her mind and stayed there. He repeatedly insisted that he couldn’t tackle the kids alone. At first, she’d understood-his lifestyle had never included kids, and the sudden responsibilities of being a single parent were overwhelming and threatening-maybe especially for a man. That was all still true, but Zoe could see how firm and caring and compassionate he was with the boys. At his age, a bachelor could have been far more selfish and self-centered. In Rafe she saw no sign of either quality.

Loving a man like that would be all too easy. Zoe didn’t, of course. She barely knew him. She just wished fleetingly that he didn’t think badly of her. She’d deliberately misrepresented herself as selfish and insensitive to children; she’d had to do that, to make sure he knew the twins would be better off with him, but…

Her thoughts scattered instantly when she heard the faint creak of the doorknob turning. Her head whipped around. One freckled nose was slowly sneaking through the doorway. For a moment, she couldn’t identify which twin it was, but then she recognized Parker. He usually led with his tummy.

“Whatcha doing, Snookums?”

She was gathering suds together, fast…but not faster than Parker could close the door and edge closer to the tub. Zoe swallowed a huge lump of frantic indecision. Darn it, what was the parental thing to do? Cover herself, because he was a boy and hardly a baby at four, or act comfortable with nudity because that seemed a fairly important thing for him to learn? What about teaching the value of privacy as a personal right? But what about teaching honesty and natural behavior within a family? And did the same rules apply to a legal guardian as to a parent in this situation?

Parker overrode her indecision by leaning over the tub and studying her breasts interestedly. “Your bazooms are sure bigger than Mommy’s,” he said politely.

A conversation stopper if ever there was one. “Oh?”

“Mommy always let me take a bath with her.”

“That’s nice.” At least Zoe had learned fairly fast about how Janet had been raising the twins in terms of bodies and modesty.

“Could I? Take a bath with you?” Parker sent her a disarming grin. “Mommy always let me.”

“Well, I guess…if you’re sure she always did? I mean…” Parker was already pulling off his striped shirt; he had apparently taken her agreement for granted. Zoe slid up to the faucet end of the tub, the thought of a relaxing bath