triplets first came to live with her, she’d been completely lost and practically hopeless at caring for them. She hadn’t done much babysitting as a kid and none of her friends had children, so she’d had zero experience. But she’d consoled herself with the fact that most first-time moms were as lost as she herself was. Since she didn’t have any choice but to jump in and do the best she could, Dina had learned as she went. She hadn’t so much gotten the babies into a routine as she’d gotten herself into one. She’d had to learn from scratch—and fast—how to take care of three babies, and she’d made too many mistakes to count.
Then Connor King arrived, jumped into the fray like a natural and handled it all. He’d seemed so darn sure of himself, she’d stood back, prepared to gleefully watch a disaster unfold. Instead, he’d taken charge, as he probably did in every other aspect of his life, and gotten the job done. Sure, he was a little harried, but he’d done it. Babies were bathed and dressed and tucked into their beds with a story read by Connor, complete with sound effects that had them all giggling.
And honestly, that’s what irritated her the most. The babies liked him. She was here day in and day out and one visit from a handsome stranger and all three of them were won over. What happened to loyalty to good old Aunt Dina, she wanted to know.
As she watched from the nursery door, she felt a small niggle of worry as Connor moved from crib to crib, smoothing his hand across the babies’ heads, each in turn. He was taking a moment—what he probably thought was a private moment—to really look at the children he’d helped to create. She thought she understood what he might be feeling right then, as she’d had a very similar moment herself when the trips had come to live with her. To her, it had felt like a wild mixture of protectiveness and the realization that her life as she had known it was over.
She hadn’t planned on having custody, obviously, but now Dina loved those babies with a fierceness she wouldn’t have believed possible. They were her family. Her only real family now, except for her grandmother and a handful of distant cousins. She would do whatever was necessary to take care of the trips and to protect them from being hurt. Even if that meant protecting them from the man who had only wanted to be a part-time father.
* * *
By the time the evening was over, Connor was wet, exhausted and wanted nothing more than a cold beer, his bed and complete silence for ten or twelve hours. One out of three, he told himself wryly, wasn’t too bad.
He took a long drink of the beer Dina’d given him and let the cold froth slide through him, easing away the tension that had had him in its grip for the last couple of hours.
“So,” Dina said and he heard the grudging respect beneath her words, “you won the bet.”
He managed to turn his head to look at her. “I always do, honey.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Honey?”
His lips quirked. The offhanded honey had slipped out, but now that he saw how annoyed she was by it, he pushed it a little further, just for the hell of it. “Babe?”
She inhaled sharply and hissed out a breath. “Dina will do.”
“Right.” He tipped his head and hid his smile. Connor had only known her for a few hours, but he’d already seen how easy it was to rub her the wrong way. And, for reasons he couldn’t quite identify yet, he really enjoyed pushing her buttons. There was just something about this woman that urged him to push against her boundaries. “I’ll remember that, Dina. Just as you should remember that when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”
“Noted.”
“Good. I’m too tired to say it again.” He leaned his head against the back of the couch and thought about plopping his feet on the footstool, but he was too beat to lift his own legs. “Those three are something else. Just keeping them all in the tub wore me out. I don’t know how you do the whole bath and changing thing every night all alone.”
“I bathe them one at a time.”
He looked at her again and noticed a smile tugging at her mouth. Apparently he wasn’t the only one enjoying himself. “And you didn’t think that worth mentioning?”
“Well, you seemed so confident of your abilities...” She sipped at a glass of wine. “I didn’t want to interfere.”
“Uh-huh.” He shook his head. “Well played.”
“Thanks, but you got through it anyway. It was hard, but you did it. I hate to admit it, but I’m sort of impressed.” She studied her wine, sliding her fingertips up and down the long, delicate crystal stem until Connor had to look away from her before he embarrassed himself. “You don’t strike me as the type to know much about kids.”
“I didn’t,” he acknowledged. “Until two years ago. My brother Colt discovered he was the father of twins. So watching him, I picked up a lot. But three seems like a lot more than two. Still, I gave him a lot of grief—made jokes about just how demented his life had become,” he mused. “Now I feel bad about that.”
“Two years?”
She’d caught that. He looked at her again and sighed. “Yeah. Right after Colt reconnected with his kids, Jackie came to me asking for help.” He paused for another drink of his beer. Maybe he’d been delusional, but at the time, he’d thought it could be fun. Help Jackie and give himself a sort-of family like Colt had, only without all the hassles and the interruptions to the way he wanted to live. “Getting to know my niece and nephew is probably what pushed me into agreeing to this whole deal.”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
One eyebrow winged up. “Is that right? Know me so well, do you? After three whole hours?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know you. But Jackie did. And she told me all about how tight you guys were. I heard all sorts of stories about you before the wedding.”
That was disconcerting. He knew next to nothing about Dina. Hell, he barely remembered speaking to her at the wedding. And Connor really didn’t care for being at a disadvantage.
Warily, he asked, “What kind of stories?”
She laughed a little and he thought that probably wasn’t a good sign.
“The one about the redhead comes to mind,” she admitted.
Surprised, he choked out a laugh. “She was a beauty,” he admitted. “But we made a pact that neither of us would hit on her since we both wanted her.”
“You cared more for your friendship.”
He frowned. “Yeah. Back then, anyway. Apparently, things changed when I wasn’t looking.”
“Jackie loved you.”
Con snapped her a quick, hard look. He didn’t need her to tell him about Jackie. Or maybe he did. Everything he’d known was tossed into a high wind at the moment and he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. But he wasn’t going to talk about Jackie now. Not while his anger was so fresh and raw.
“Yeah,” he muttered instead, “I’m convinced.”
“All I’m saying is that you and Jackie were really tight. That’s why you helped. For her. It had nothing to do with your niece and nephew. You did it for Jackie.”
“Reid and Riley played a part, but yeah,” he said, voice cold, “she was my best friend. Or so I thought.”
In the flood of information that had hit him today, he’d hardly had time to react to any of it. The triplets had taken first priority in his mind, because they were here and the immediate problem of dealing with them was hanging over his head. But the truth was, Jackie’s loss was at the back of his mind at all times.
He hated knowing she was gone. That he’d never see her again. And mostly, he hated the fact that he hadn’t kept in touch with her when she and Elena moved. Not just because then he would have known about the babies, but because Jackie