If I Loved You - Leigh Riker Mills & Boon Heartwarming

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half dead on his feet?”

      And clearly hurting. The loss of his teammate and the orphaned child had shaken Brig. Just as Brig’s questions about Andrew and Molly’s marriage had shaken her.

      She had noted the weary slump of his broad shoulders, and how he held the baby to him like a security blanket.

      But Molly pushed aside the observations. There was a party going on, and for the next few hours she had to play hostess. With the rain still falling, she supervised the younger children’s game of indoor tag. She refereed a fight over a TV basketball game. Pop should have known better than to get involved. She comforted her teenage cousin’s angst and soothed toddler tears.

      She taught four-year-old Ernie Barlow how to play pin the tail on the donkey—or, rather, on a SpongeBob SquarePants poster—then pretended not to see how her sister, Ann, ignored Ernie’s dad, a new local sheriff’s deputy who seemed to have a thing for her.

      And Molly tried not to notice that Brig never came back downstairs to eat or to show off the baby.

      By evening, when the festivities wound down, the house resembled a giant trash basket filled with broken toys and exploded balloons. As her guests prepared to leave, every child under the age of five was crying—a sure sign in Molly’s experience of too much stimulation and total but happy exhaustion. For everyone but Molly, the party had been a huge success.

      After all the guests left, she hurried upstairs. She found Brig in the spare room, where her offer to heat a late supper for him died on her lips. Brig lay sprawled on the double bed, sound asleep. Clearly he was down for the count. His face told her nothing, which was probably what he wanted after Molly’s earlier criticism. Lying beside him, with Brig’s arm over her like an anchor, the baby stared wide-eyed at the overhead light, flinching each time thunder rumbled in the night sky.

      Now at last Molly gave in to the urge churning inside her during the party and slipped to her knees next to the bed. Brig must have dozed off in the midst of dressing Laila for the night. Her right arm was in one sleeve of an aquamarine sleeper, the other, still bare, waved in the air. Half the snaps on the sleeper were undone.

      “You giving your old man a hard time?” Molly whispered.

      At the sound of her voice, Laila turned her head as if searching for her. Molly reached out, brushing Brig’s arm without meaning to, and quickly touched the baby’s silky hair. Laila’s gaze, dark as a midnight sea, met hers.

      Molly’s breath caught. She was a beautiful baby, another victim of the senseless violence that had taken both her parents. “Oh, sweetie,” Molly murmured.

      Blinking, she eased Brig’s arm aside and heard him grunt in his sleep. She could hardly wake him and make them leave. Where would they go? A glance out the window told her Brig’s parents were still gone. Not a single light glowed in the house next door. She tucked Laila into her sleeper, then snapped the garment all the way. The little girl’s skin felt like velvet, and she smelled, as only a baby could, of sheer innocence. A baby like the one Molly had always yearned for, and lost.

      Children were the best, yet the hardest, part of her job. She got to spend so much time with them, yet they were other people’s, not her own.

      On impulse she peeled the red heart from her face and leaned closer to stick it on Laila’s chest, then nuzzled the infant’s small belly.

      And, against every instinct to protect her heart, Molly fell in love.

      Like the rain that pounded against the windows and the thunder that still grumbled overhead, the feeling seemed to Molly another omen.

       CHAPTER TWO

      BRIG AWOKE THE next morning fully clothed with no memory of having gone to bed—and no knowledge of where he was. Disoriented, he checked his watch, then made a quick calculation. It was six-thirty in the evening in Kabul, but eleven in the morning was late enough here. He’d overslept.

      For another moment, he lay yawning in the sun-splattered bedroom—then recognition dawned. Ah, right. He was in Molly’s house. Almost immediately, he heard a snuffle. Brig shot upright and spotted the baby nearby in a portable crib. Laila! Some guardian he made.

      “Hungry, cupcake?”

      He tucked in the shirt he’d worn all night, fighting a growing sense of parental neglect, and picked up the baby, who was swaddled in a pastel-striped receiving blanket that smelled of fresh air. He didn’t recognize it as one he’d crammed into their suitcases, which he assumed were still on the porch next door. Molly must have donated the wrap. Wearing yesterday’s socks, he carried Laila downstairs. She needed more milk, and Brig needed coffee.

      At the bottom of the steps in the front hall, as if running into an ambush, he met Molly’s father. Thomas Walker turned from the door with the newspaper in hand. He didn’t smile, and Brig remembered his stiff manner at the party. He imagined that Molly, not her dad, had let him stay the night—as if they’d had an option once he’d fallen asleep, one hundred ninety pounds of deadweight.

      “The Reds are in trouble,” Thomas said, reading the headline on page one.

      For a second Brig thought the Russians were stirring up trouble again.

      The older man gave a snort of disgust. “Barely into spring training and already headed for the bottom of the standings. Would you believe? Just traded their best pitcher for some rookie.” He glanced out the front door’s side window. “Look at that,” he muttered.

      Again, Brig missed the connection. “What?”

      “Nosy woman across the street. Every time I get the paper, she’s peering out.” Without missing a beat, he said, “Doesn’t look to me like your folks are home yet. Didn’t see anyone next door. You get any rest, Brigham?”

      Brig nodded his head. “Passed out as soon as I got horizontal.” He still felt drained and his eyes were grainy, but his stomach growled. Or was that Laila’s tummy? And where had his parents gone, if not out for the evening?

      “Molly said you never ate dinner.”

      “Wasn’t hungry.” And where was she now? “My stomach’s off schedule, still in central Asia.”

      “Well, there’s coffee in the kitchen.”

      But Thomas sounded begrudging.

      Brig shifted Laila from one arm to the other. Dark haired, dark eyed and oblivious to the undercurrents between the two men, she sucked on a fist.

      As if he couldn’t help himself, Thomas studied her. And Brig studied him. Molly’s dad was still a solid-looking man. Retirement had added a slight paunch to Thomas’s stomach, but even so, except for his brown hair with touches of gray at his temples, he didn’t look his age.

      Thomas gestured at Laila. “Baby sleep okay?”

      “I never heard her,” Brig confessed, knowing that wouldn’t win him any points. “Thanks for finding her a crib.”

      “Molly keeps one here,” he said in what sounded like a wistful tone. A condemnation of Brig for leaving Molly practically at the altar?

      A dozen questions ran through his brain, but he didn’t ask them. They were for Molly to answer, although maybe he had no right to ask. After the loss of her husband, she should find another man and have the family she’d always wanted, the family she and Brig had planned until he’d thrown a wrench into things and hightailed it out of Liberty.

      Better for her, he had tried to think.

      And if he’d stayed...he wouldn’t have Laila now.

      “And Molly must have dressed the baby for bed,” he said.

      Thomas eyed him like a bug he wanted to squash.

      “Must have.”

      Which meant

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