Apparently he noticed the way Hailey was looking at his foot attire.
“Callum said I needed to wear something other than boots,” he explained.
“Ah, so you made the ultimate sacrifice for your nieces,” Hailey concluded. Her smile was wide as her eyes sparkled. “Very noble of you.”
Coming from someone else, Dillon would have taken it as sarcasm. But there was something about the way the woman smiled when she talked that softened everything and pulled him in. He couldn’t take offense.
Shrugging, he told her, “I didn’t want to scuff up your floors.”
Hailey inclined her head by way of acknowledgement. “The floors and I thank you.” She looked over toward the instructor in the center of the room. “Looks like you’re about to get started,” she warned Becky and Dillon.
Becky and her brother-in-law each took a twin’s hand. The girl that Becky was holding onto looked disappointed to have her connection to her uncle broken.
“I really appreciate this, Dillon,” Becky told him.
He shrugged off Becky’s thanks. “Don’t mention it.”
He slurred the statement a little because Luna, having shimmed up his leg, was now trying to stick her fingers into his mouth.
Apparently, Hailey judged, the little girl was plucking at her uncle’s face, trying to make her uncle’s smile wider.
“Luna, honey, Uncle Dillon doesn’t want to smile right now,” Becky prompted.
The little girl looked up at him questioningly, then pushed even harder at Dillon’s mouth, determined to make him grin as Becky tried to entangle the twin from her brother-in-law.
Hailey tried her best not to laugh, but it wasn’t easy. “I’d say you definitely have your hands full,” she said as she began to back away.
“You’re going?” Becky asked, sounding just a touch distressed.
“Unless you’d like me to stay,” Hailey told her. She had gotten the impression that Dillon would have rather that she wasn’t around to witness what he was about to go through.
“Please,” Becky said.
The hopeful look on Becky’s face overrode what she assumed might be Dillon’s wishes in the matter. After all, he hadn’t said anything.
“Then I’ll stay,” Hailey replied.
Glancing in his direction, Hailey couldn’t tell if Dillon took her decision in stride, or if her presence put him on edge.
She supposed she would find that out soon enough.
Chapter Six
She had learned something today, Hailey thought, smiling to herself. She had learned that, without a shadow of a doubt, Dillon Fortune was an incredibly patient man.
She had been watching Sasha and Luna’s Unca Dilly contort his body into all sorts of really awkward, uncomfortable positions for the last half hour, simply to entertain his sister-in-law’s two little girls.
Some of the movements he’d attempted, like virtually making a pretzel of himself, could not have been easy for him. Hailey was fairly certain that at least half the moves he attempted had to have really hurt.
In her opinion, the movements he was doing would have been challenging for an accomplished yoga instructor to execute.
But Dillon had gamely tried each and every one of them as they came up. Some movements he’d attempted had come with accompanying sound effects. Those too had been for the girls’ gleeful benefit. The twins had lapped it all up like hungry little puppies. Entertained, they had giggled to the point that they had fallen down—and then they had giggled some more.
It was clearly obvious to anyone who was watching that Sasha and Luna really loved their uncle.
They weren’t the only ones, Hailey thought. She found herself thinking that the contractor was just adorable, willingly doing all this just to keep the twins entertained.
If it hadn’t been for the twins, Hailey was fairly sure that she would have never been privy to this kinder, sillier side of the handsome contractor. While she was attracted to the former, she found this Dillon Fortune to be utterly endearing.
Her only problem was that she kept staring too much.
But she really couldn’t help it. Every time she tried to look away, Dillon did something else to make his nieces laugh and she found she just couldn’t take her eyes off him.
When she managed to avert her eyes, she noticed that Becky looked a great deal more relaxed now than she had when she had first walked in.
The man was definitely a miracle worker, Hailey thought, even though she suspected that, if he was human, he just had to be counting the minutes until the class was finally over.
And then, inevitably, it was.
The moment Linda Hathaway, the woman who was running the class, declared, “That’s it for today, Moms and Dads. See you all on Friday.” Dillon, already on the floor because of the last exercise he had attempted to do, completely collapsed and seemed to all but press his exhausted body flat, practically sinking into the exercise mat he was on.
“Oh, thank God,” he murmured, barely audible. “If I had to contort myself into one more position, I think I would’ve wound up breaking up into a hundred pieces,” he groaned for the benefit of his pint-sized captive audience.
Sasha and Luna might not have understood all the words, but they did understand that Unca Dilly was out of oomph. The little girls gathered around him on either side, giggling, and then they finally lay down next to him, curling up against him.
“I really appreciate you doing all this for Sasha and Luna,” Becky told her brother-in-law. She gently tried to prod the twins to get them up. “C’mon, girls, your uncle’s exhausted. You need to give Uncle Dillon a little breathing room.”
But the girls stubbornly remained where they were, apparently content to be lying next to their beloved, funny uncle forever.
“That’s all right, Becky. Don’t worry about it. Leave them where they are right now. I can breathe,” Dillon told her.
Even so, Dillon did sit up, although he made no attempt to rise to his feet and move away from the little girls.
“You certainly have the patience of Job,” Becky marveled, making no effort to hide how very impressed
