LITMIR.BIZ

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know that when you’re away from her good influence, you revert to a ten-year-old?”

      “At least I’ve learned how to be a grown-up part of the time. Just one of the benefits of life with a good woman,” Danny said. “Something you would discover if you settled down.”

      “There’s the problem,” Devin said. “Why ‘settle’ when I can get to know so many different beautiful women, each with her own delightful and unique personality?”

      “Yeah, ’cause it’s really their personalities you’re after, you hound.”

      Devin jerked his head meaningfully toward Ronnie, apparently wanting to spare her delicate sensibilities. Then he smiled, taking the opportunity to redirect Danny’s brotherly concern. “If you want someone in the family to find domestic bliss, you should stop badgering me and help Ronnie here.”

      Ronnie ground her teeth and grabbed some paperwork from the inbox on Danny’s desk. “I don’t need ‘help.’”

      “Sure you do,” Devin said. “How long’s it been since you had a date?”

      “My darling siblings run off my potential dates.”

      “That’s not true!” Devin protested. “We just screen them carefully. To keep away those who aren’t good enough.”

      Danny nodded. “The guys who wouldn’t be right for you in the long run, the guys who are too stupid to know how to change their own oil, the guys who only have One Thing in mind.”

      “You mean like Dev?” she asked wryly.

      “Exactly!” Devin flashed an unrepentant smile, then grimaced. “God forbid you go out with anyone like me. If you did, we’d have to kill him. You don’t want Kaitlyn and Ashley reduced to visiting Danny in prison, do you?”

      It was time Ronnie got to work on a car. Interlocking automotive systems made far more sense than her knucklehead brothers. Besides, she felt like taking something apart with her hands. But Danny calling her name in a soft voice stopped her in the doorway.

      She looked over her shoulder with mild curiosity. “Yes?”

      “There isn’t someone…specific you’d like to date, is there?” he asked. “Someone like, well, Jason McDeere.”

      “Jason McWho?” She felt herself go white. Literally felt all the blood drain from her face in an almost audible whoosh.

      Danny held her gaze. “After we had dinner at Adam’s Ribs last week, Kaitlyn mentioned that you were watching Jason.”

      Darn her sister-in-law’s keen powers of observation! “I was just admiring what a good father he is to that little girl,” Ronnie mumbled.

      “See?” Devin’s posture relaxed. “She was melting over the kid, not the guy. Her biological clock’s probably in countdown mode.”

      She was going to clock the next person who used that phrase! Still, hard to argue without invalidating her own alibi.

      “But Kaitlyn said you were looking at McDeere the way I used to look at my old Thunderbird.”

      Devin shook his head. “As much as I adore your wife, Danny-boy, I think she’s off base. McDeere’s a decent sort, but a high school English teacher? Not the most manly job, reading Lord Bryan and Edgar Allen Poe to kids all day.”

      “It’s Lord Byron,” Ronnie snapped. “And how is shaping the minds of today’s youth and, by extension, the future of our country, somehow inferior to selling wiper fluid? Just because he doesn’t spend his time belching or scratching or chasing skirts at Guthrie Hall like you…Jason McDeere is an intelligent, charming, good-looking man, and any woman in town would be lucky to have him.

      “Really good-looking,” she added in a breathless afterthought, temporarily recalling those eyes and that smile instead of her audience: two brothers who were now gaping.

      “Well, I’ll be,” Devin said. “Kaitlyn was right.”

      A slow smile spread across Danny’s face. “Ronnie’s in l-o-o-o-ve.”

      “We may have to screen him,” Devin said thoughtfully.

      “You stay away from Jason McDeere or I will bludgeon you unconscious with a crescent wrench!” On the heels of that threat, Ronnie spun around and headed for the repair bays.

      Her interfering, overprotective brothers knew about her attraction to Jason. What were the odds that they wouldn’t mention it to her equally overprotective father? Ronnie groaned, inhaling the scent of gasoline and industrial cleaners. Was it too late to fake her own death, skip out of town and start a new life far from Joyous?

      Preferably, a life without siblings.

      Chapter Three

      “Wiseshine, Daddy!”

      Even from his nearly unconscious state, Jason was able to translate Emily’s message of rise and shine—a phrase he’d made the mistake of using sometime in the past. Because she liked the sound of it, his nearly three-year-old daughter used it frequently, whether it was technically appropriate or not. It would be more appropriate now, for instance, if the sun were actually up.

      He cracked one eye open. “Morning, sweet pea.” The digital clock on the nightstand said that it was 6:26 a.m. His little girl hadn’t grasped the concept of sleeping in on the weekends and loved to bounce out of her toddler bed first thing Saturday.

      At times like this, he really missed the retired crib, where she’d been confined to playing with her stuffed animals until at least seven. Was it wrong to keep your kid behind bars so you could get an extra half hour of sleep?

      Emily was struggling to hoist herself onto the double bed that dominated what had once been Sophie McDeere’s guest room. The lavender wallpaper with its climbing vines of faded flowers had hung in here since his father was a boy.

      Jason scooped his daughter up next to him and reached for the remote control nestled between the phone and the clock. While he hadn’t bothered to bring the queen bed he’d once shared with his ex-wife to Joyous, he’d brought all the electronics, like the first-class stereo system, the DVD player and the large television that sat on the rose faux-marble top of a white wooden dresser.

      Stifling a yawn, he smiled at his daughter. “How about I find some cartoons?” Maybe she wouldn’t mind if he watched them from behind closed eyelids.

      “’Kay.” She snuggled closer, instantly agreeable as long as she got to be in his company.

      As it so often did, the fact that he was all she had weighed heavily on his shoulders. Sometimes he worried that Emily was more clingy than other kids her age, but who could blame her? Her own mother, after months of an extreme postpartum depression, had shoved a crying baby into Jason’s arms one day and walked out, never to return. More recently, “Gran-Gran” had, as Emily solemnly put it, gone to live in the sky. It was entirely possible Em would grow up with a few abandonment issues. Hell, after the way his marriage ended, he had abandonment issues.

      He’d been fully aware of Isobel’s depression and escalating panic that she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, but he’d been trying his damnedest to help her through it, to solidify them as a family. He’d failed.

      He refused to do so again. We’ll make it work, kiddo. I swear I’ll do everything I can to be a good father. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, breathing in the grape smell of her no-tears children’s shampoo. God, life should be like that. He should be able to protect this trusting little person curled into his side, be able to guarantee that everything would always come up smelling sweet, with limited tangles or tears.

      For this morning, at least, she was coping better than him. While he spent twenty minutes worrying about all the ways he might potentially screw up as a parent, his daughter laughed—that unabashed, full-bodied sound that had taken him by surprise when she was a baby—at the antics of

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