Once upstairs, she didn’t retrieve another towel, though. She left her wet clothes in a heap on top of her empty laundry basket, dried off enough with the now-damp towel to pull a loose-fitting T-shirt dress over her head, and went back to the stairs.
She could see the living room was empty by the time she was halfway down the staircase. Well, good. He’d left.
She didn’t want to hear more excuses anyway, right?
Twisting her hair into a wet rope over her shoulder—no, her shoulders were not slumping—she padded barefoot through the kitchen and back out to the patio.
“See, Jay?” Harper’s voice greeted her. “I told you she wouldn’t be long.” She was setting out paper plates on the picnic table and she smiled at Arabella. “Jay’s agreed to join us for dinner. Isn’t that nice? We’re ending up with a proper summer cookout here.”
Chapter Six
Nice.
Arabella’s teeth clenched but she summoned a smile. “Aren’t we the lucky ones?” She started to turn right back around to escape. “I’ll get the salad.”
“Already have it,” Harper told her.
Sure enough, the salad bowl was sitting in front of Jay.
“I’ll get the drinks then,” she said, annoyed that she sounded a little desperate. “Can’t have a summer cookout without libations. Milk for the boys, I know. Beer for everyone else?”
But Harper shook her head. “I’ll just have milk, too.” Her voice was casual. Too casual.
Arabella eyed her soon-to-be sister-in-law’s down-bent head for a moment, then looked at her brother. Brady was focused on the burgers. Too focused.
The suspicion she’d been harboring since the twins had drawn that picture over a week ago warred with her consternation over Jay and won. So victoriously won, in fact, that in her effort to contain a broad smile, her gaze collided with Jay’s. He, too, seemed to be struggling not to smile, though surely he couldn’t understand her reason.
Warmth engulfed her and only being jostled by two wet, slippery little boys as they chased their ball under the table near Arabella’s feet was enough to break the trance. Bad enough that Murphy was already under the table, too.
“Come on, guys. Get out from under there and finish drying off.” She grabbed two towels and lightly flipped the ends under the table.
Tyler popped out and giggled madly when she dropped the towel over his head. “Can we have the radio?”
Toby popped out, too, and caught his towel midair. “Yeah, I wanna floss!”
Jay laughed. “Where’d you learn to do that dance?”
“Harper taught us.”
At the sound of her name, Harper finally looked up. “Sorry, what was that?”
Arabella bit back another smile. She was convinced that Harper was pregnant. “The boys say you taught them how to do the floss. Which means we definitely need some music out here.”
“Get that new Bluetooth speaker that Brady brought home the other day,” Harper called after her as she went inside the house. “It’s on the washing machine.”
When Arabella went back outside a few minutes later with the beverages and the speaker, she was equally convinced that her brother knew about the pregnancy and was reeling. There was no other way to explain his uncommon silence, the tinge of pallor on his face and the totally abject adoration in his eyes when he looked at Harper.
She opened her streaming service on her phone, connected to the speaker and music from her favorite radio station back home in New York filled the patio as though she’d just hooked up a huge sound system. “Don’t you love technology?” She had to raise her voice above the robust volume.
Jay’s smile seemed to twist slightly. “Sometimes.”
Brady finally looked away from Harper. “Geez, Bella. Neighbors?”
She made a face but turned down the volume. “This is so much better than Murphy’s radio.”
“The dog has a radio?”
Arabella didn’t look at Jay. “Don’t they all?”
“Only thing that keeps Murphy out of mischief when we’re all gone is to leave the radio playing,” Harper explained. “Don’t ask how many pairs of shoes we sacrificed before we figured out the solution, though.” She patted her lap and the dog hopped up. “Yes, you’re still a good boy,” she crooned, then broke into giggles because the boys were jumping around doing their surprisingly coordinated version of the floss, swinging their hips one way while their arms went the other.
“Auntie Bella,” Toby called. “Come and dance.”
She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m not that coordinated!”
“I doubt that,” Jay said.
“Go on,” Harper encouraged. “You can do it.”
“You’re the one who taught them,” Arabella reminded.
“Come on.” Jay stood and held out his hand. “It’s not that difficult.”
Arabella eyed his hand, not wanting to be as tempted as she was.
Fortunately, Brady announced just then that the burgers were ready, which solved that. The ravenous boys sat up at the table, and with the exception of Jay sitting next to Arabella and the conversational gaps that kept happening whenever Brady and Harper looked at each other, it was just another normal night in the Radcliffe/Fortune household.
Arabella supposed it wasn’t surprising that they weren’t announcing anything—verbally, that was. Not with an outsider present in the form of Jay. On the other hand, she wanted to whoop and jump around the same way her nephews had been doing and hug her brother silly because nobody deserved that panicked look of awe and devotion more than he did.
After hamburgers, though, Harper and Brady disappeared inside for a few minutes, leaving Arabella and Jay alone with the boys, who’d gone back to racing around the yard with their boundless energy. The only difference now was that they’d progressed from dancing to brandishing twigs as if they were light sabers.
She rolled her empty beer bottle between her palms in time to the beat coming
