fast disappearing. Saying no had never occurred to her. No matter what her feelings about children were, she would have done anything on earth to make the twins miss their parents less.
She marveled, watching Parker. It took him
“We’ll cool it down,” she assured him, and immediately flicked on the cold-water tap.
She figured he’d sit on the opposite side of the tub, but he immediately arranged himself on her lap. The warm body wriggled until he was comfortable just so, and then he raised his head to grin at her upside down. “I
“Me, too.”
“I have a beautiful body. Did you notice?”
She smothered a laugh. “I certainly did.”
“Want to play a game?”
“Sure.”
The game was that he closed his eyes and she made a letter on his chest with the edge of the bar of soap. If he guessed the letter correctly, he got a kiss. If he guessed the letter wrong, he got a kiss, too. Parker liked games where he couldn’t lose.
Zoe didn’t hear the door opening again until Aaron stepped in. When she looked up, she saw a pair of stricken, soft eyes and sturdy legs planted belligerently. “How come
“Because she asked me specially,” Parker said smugly.
Zoe’s jaw dropped. “Now wait a minute, Parker, I never-”
“Snookums, I thought you loved me!” Aaron’s eyes immediately brimmed.
“Honey, I
“Probably she loves me more,” Parker offered with a careless shrug.
“
It wasn’t as if she had a choice. In the end, Aaron squeezed in on her right and Parker on her left. Sardines couldn’t have been packed any tighter. The best Zoe could manage was to guard her vital parts from injury and exert token control over the soap, which kept flying back and forth between the boys like a rocket. A limp and sodden washcloth seemed to be draped over her head when the bathroom door opened yet again.
Strange, but this time she clearly heard the soft click of the knob over the splashing and giggling. She promptly froze.
For three and a half seconds, she couldn’t see anything because of the washcloth. But then, she comforted herself, for three and a half seconds Rafe could hardly see anything either, because she was completely covered with little boys. Both circumstances changed rather fast. As she pushed off the dripping cloth, Rafe was calmly, firmly lifting one boy and then the other out of the tub.
She’d never heard his preacher-stern voice before, but she certainly heard it now. “Snookums,” he said as he dried two small bodies at the same time, “is going to take a bath every single day after dinner from now on. That means that for a full half hour she is going to be behind a closed door. Nobody bugs her when that door’s closed. Nobody. Have we got that, boys?”
“What if we spill a glass of milk?” Aaron always liked to know the rules for extenuating circumstances.
“You call me.”
“What if you’re not there?”
“I’ll be there.”
“But what if you’re not?”
“Then you let the milk stay spilled. Snookums is entitled to privacy. All grown-ups need privacy.”
“Why?” Parker asked bewilderedly.
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because-never mind. We’ll discuss this in your bedroom.” Rafe rose from his crouch and patted two bare fannies in the direction of the door. “Out.
As soon as they were gone, silence filled the steamy blue bathroom. Zoe didn’t say anything, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Her arms and legs were all appropriately twisted up to hide everything it was possible to hide, but the water was definitely clear now. One last soap bubble was floating toward the faucets, but that was all.
She watched that lone soap bubble, and then she stared with fascination at Rafe’s jeaned knees, mostly because they weren’t moving. If he’d been any kind of gentleman, they
She’d made a mistake, thinking that his eyes were blue. They were a brooding blue-black, like the sky at midnight and just as fathomless. Dammit, he could have smiled. Her hair had to be hanging in wet ropes around her face, and he could have relieved her unbearable tension if he’d smiled, but he didn’t. He just looked at her until her throat went dry.
“I…um…they said their mother let them take a bath with her.”
“And you believed that?” He shook his head, still not moving, but she saw the spark of humor in his eyes. “Know something, Zoe?”
She hoped this conversation wasn’t going to be long. “What?”
“It would have been a lot easier on both of us if you’d been fat and ugly.”
He closed the door behind him. And not that she’d been holding her breath, but a huge gush of air suddenly whooshed out of her lungs. Freezing, she pushed up the drain and reached for a towel. So much for relaxing baths.
Putting the twins to bed covered up all kinds of tension. After that, the atmosphere in the house plummeted directly to uneasy. Rafe didn’t help when he brought blankets and a pillow from upstairs to make a bed for himself on the couch. She could have argued with him, but didn’t. Arguing beds with Rafe just didn’t seem wise.
By nine o’clock, she could honestly claim exhaustion, and escaped to his bed with three books about earthquakes-not because that was his field, but because the reading material in the house consisted of nothing but seismology texts and the last three issues of
Propped against his pillows in a green nightgown, she read about fault lines and snagged bedrock and trench subduction. That had her yawning. The second book had a section on how winter snow loads and increased barometric pressure could trigger earthquakes, and how even the slightest tremor could ignite an avalanche of disastrous proportions. That had her frowning. The damn fool was in a dangerous profession. Seismological projects were particularly perilous in this area of Montana. An earthquake here in 1959 had jolted some 500,000 acres.
She turned off the light at eleven, punched her pillow a few times and settled down to worry about earthquakes and avalanches, not necessarily of the geological variety.
There was every chance, of course, that she was exaggerating the significance of this little attraction problem. People thrown together under adverse circumstances always felt some normal curiosity and interest in each other. But to acknowledge even a little tremor was to invite the most disastrous kind of emotional avalanche, with implications for the children that Zoe couldn’t begin to face. The thing was, to keep things honest and aboveboard.
The thing was, to control that hum.
The thing was, he should have hightailed it out of the bathroom instead of looking at her with those damned blue eyes.
She was turning the pillow to the cool side for the fourth time when she heard the faintest sound coming from the boys’ room. Pushing back the covers, she padded to the door and listened again. More muffled sounds. Crying?
She crossed the hall and hesitated in the boys’ doorway. Aaron was in the far bed, the pillow over his head, and