Desiring the Reilly Brothers: The Tempting Mrs Reilly / Whatever Reilly Wants... / The Last Reilly Standing. Maureen Child
none of the men she’d dated over the years had been able to touch her heart. Her heart had always been here, in Baywater with her ex-husband. She couldn’t fall in love with anyone else when she still loved Brian Reilly.
As if he, too, felt the sense of misery creeping into her heart, he said, with regret rather than temper, “Don’t you get it, Tina? I don’t want to be a part-time father.”
“You don’t have to be, Brian,” she said and wondered if he knew what it cost her to say this. “I’m not asking you to be an active parent. You can be as involved or as distant as you choose to be.”
“Oh,” he said quietly, “now I get a vote?”
“Yes,” she said, just as quietly, “when I told you not to worry, I meant it. If you want to, you can never speak to me again.”
“Just like that.”
Okay, she was willing to admit that maybe, maybe, what she’d done had been a mistake. Unfair to him. But she wasn’t going to stand here and let him pretend that he’d rather things were different between them. “Yes, Brian. Just like that. It’s been five years, remember? And we’ve talked maybe three times in all that time.”
“This is different,” he snarled. “What’s between you and I is one thing. What’s between me and a child I created, is something else altogether. You think I could let my child not be a part of my life?”
“That’ll be up to you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Despite the already growing heat, Tina felt a chill snake along her spine and she wished fervently that they’d never had this conversation. She should have waited to see if there was a baby before confronting him with the possibilities.
“There’s no point in talking about this anymore,”
she said suddenly, turning as she spoke to head for the door. “I’m going back to the house.”
“What about locking yourself out?” he said, sarcasm dripping from every word.
She stopped, one hand on the doorknob, and shot him a look over her shoulder. “I lied.”
“Big surprise.”
Her shoulders hunched as his words slapped at her. “I’m sorry you’re mad, Brian,” she said, never taking her gaze from his, despite inwardly flinching from the fury she saw written in his eyes. “But I’m not sorry about last night. And I’m not sorry that we might have made a baby.” She opened the door and paused again. “I am sorry that you are, though.”
Then she stepped through the door and closed it softly behind her.
Brian stood alone in the growing patch of sunlit warmth and had never felt so bone-deep cold in his life.
Chapter Nine
Later that morning, Brian really lived up to his call sign, Cowboy. Every pilot had his own nickname used during flights. Some of his best friends were known as Bozo, or Too Cool, or Goliath. Brian though, had come by his call sign because of his aggressive approach to flying.
Nothing he liked better than doing loops and spins miles above the ground. Ordinarily, too, he emptied his mind of everything but the task at hand—much safer to be thinking only about flying when you went faster than the speed of sound.
But today, Tina was flying with him.
She was there beside him in the close confines of the cockpit. She was in his blood, in his brain, and to get her out again, was going to be far tougher than anything he’d ever faced before.
“She tricked me,” he muttered, still unable to grasp the fact that his ex-wife had deliberately set him up to father her child.
“What?” The voice came from the seat behind him. His radar officer, Sam “Hollywood” Holden.
“Nothin’.”
“Okay, Cap’n,” Hollywood said, “that’s the way you want it. So if you’re finished trying to make me upchuck my breakfast, why don’t we turn this puppy around and head home?”
Brian grinned. “What’s wrong, Hollywood? Late night last night?”
“Hey,” his friend pointed out with a chuckle. “Not all of us signed up for that stupid bet.”
Groaning, Brian shook his head and stared into the clouds whizzing past the plane. Impossible to keep a secret on a military base. At least this kind of secret. Spies, battle plans, sure. You were safe. A humiliating, personal problem—fair game.
He never should have agreed to the bet. If he had told Liam to get lost, he never would have been in such a vulnerable condition when Tina hit town. And he never would have spent a long, endless night exploring her body.
Hard to regret that, even considering the way it had ended.
However, he’d be damned if he’d just sit back and let the guys get a good laugh at his expense.
“Just for that,” Brian said with an evil chuckle, already maneuvering his jet into an upside-down position, “I think we’ll just fly home inverted.”
“Oh, man….”
“I really made a mess of this, didn’t I?” Tina looked down at Muffin and Peaches, sprawled across her bed. “Not that I’m really regretting it. I mean, that is why I came here, right?”
Peaches yawned and rolled over.
Tina paced, marking off the same steps in her old room that she had as a teenager when she was angsting over the serious problems that had faced her back then. Things like, would she ever get her hair straightened? Would she ever get a date? Would she ever get out of AP Chem?
Well, times had changed and the problems had gotten bigger. But her solutions were still the same. Pace and talk to herself.
“It’s not like I forced him, you know,” she said aloud, shooting a look at Muffin, since Peaches, the little traitor, was snoring. “He was more than willing.”
Muffin yapped.
“So why do I feel so blasted guilty?” she demanded and knew the answer, though she didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Using Brian had been wrong. “Fine. I’m a rotten human being. Stand me up against a wall and shoot me.” She stopped at the foot of the bed and plopped down onto the edge of the mattress. “I just wanted—”
What? A baby? Sure. But that wasn’t all, was it? No. She’d wanted Brian back. She hadn’t been able to admit it even to herself before she’d arrived back in Baywater. But it was impossible to deny now.
It wasn’t just his child she wanted.
It was his heart.
And that was the one thing she couldn’t have.
Pushing herself to her feet, Tina stalked around the edge of the bed, grabbed the phone and punched in a familiar number. It rang twice.
“Hello?”
“Janet.” Tina sighed, reached down to scoot a limp Peaches over and then sat down. “Thank God.”
“Tina! How’s it going girl?”
“Not so good.”
“Oh.” Janet was silent for a long minute. “So you couldn’t get him to—”
“No,” Tina said, toying with the pale blue, coiled cord of the ancient Princess phone. “Mission accomplished.”
A long pause. “Really? You mean you really went to bed with your ex?”
“No,” Tina said, scooting back farther on the bed. “I asked him for a donation, then I took it to the clinic and had them douse me with a turkey baster.”
Janet