a hard time being around her, I could talk to her. Ask her to leave.”
Brian looked at him and slowly slid out of the booth. They hadn’t used the switcheroo since they were kids. The triplets were so identical, even their mother had sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. So, the three of them had often used that confusion to their advantage, with one of them pretending to be the other in order to get out of something they didn’t want to do. They’d fooled teachers, coaches and even, on occasion, their own mother and father.
But, Brian reminded himself, as the idea began to appeal to him, Tina had always been able to tell them apart. They’d never once fooled her as they had so many others. Still, he thought, watching Connor smile and nod encouragingly, it had been years since she’d seen the three Reilly brothers together. Years since Tina and Brian were close enough that she’d been able to pick him out of a crowd of three with pure instinct.
“I’m willing if you want to give it a shot,” Connor prodded.
What did he have to lose? Brian asked himself. If Tina didn’t catch on to the trick, maybe she would leave, making Brian’s life a little easier. And if she did catch on…well, it had been a long time since he’d seen Tina Coretti’s temper.
And as he remembered it, she looked damn good when she was fighting mad.
Chapter Three
Tina heard Brian’s car when he returned to the house late that night and she breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Moving to the curtains of the upstairs bedroom that had been hers since she was a child, she peeked out to watch him walk up the driveway. When he paused long enough to snarl insults at the barking dogs, she smiled.
She’d been half worried that he might bolt. It would have been easy for him to up and move to the base for a few weeks just to avoid her. But he hadn’t. And she was pretty sure she knew why.
Brian would never admit that he wasn’t up to the challenge of seeing her every day. He’d never allow himself to acknowledge that there was anything to worry about.
He took the flight of steps to the garage apartment two at a time and her heartbeat quickened just watching him move. By the time he opened his door and went inside, without a glance at the house, her mouth was dry and her breath came in short fits and starts.
“Okay,” she muttered, “maybe I’m the one who should be worried.”
When the phone rang, she lunged for it gratefully. Sprawled across the hand-sewn quilt covering her double bed, Tina snatched at the “princess” style telephone and said, “Hello?”
“So, you’re there.”
“Janet.” Tina rolled over onto her back and stared up at the beamed ceiling. Smiling, she said, “Right back where I started, yep.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And…?”
Tina grabbed the twisted cord in one hand and wrapped the coils around her index finger as she talked. “And, he’s just like I remembered.” Actually, he was more than she remembered. More handsome. More irresistible. More aggravating.
“So you’re still set on this.”
Tina sighed. “Janet, we’ve been all through this. I don’t want to go to a sperm bank. Can you imagine that conversation with my child? ‘Yes, honey, of course you have a daddy. He’s number 3075. It’s a very nice number.’”
Janet laughed. “Fine. I’m just saying, it seems like you’re asking for trouble here. I’m worried.”
“And I appreciate it.” Tina smiled and let her gaze drift around her old bedroom. Nana hadn’t changed much over the years. There were still posters of Tahiti and London tacked to the walls, bookcases stuffed with books and treasures from her teenage years and furniture that had been in the Coretti family since the beginning of time.
There was comfort here.
And Tina was surprised to admit just how much she needed that comfort.
Though she’d been born and raised in this house, this town, she’d been gone a long time. And stepping into the past, however briefly, was just a little unnerving.
“But you want me to back off,” Janet said.
Tina heard the smile in her friend’s voice. “Yeah, I do.”
“Tony told me you’d say that,” Janet admitted, then shouted to her husband, “okay, okay. I owe you five dollars.”
Tina laughed and felt the knots in her stomach slowly unwinding. “I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I needed to hear a friendly voice,” Tina admitted. With Nana in Italy and Brian holed up in his cave, Tina had been feeling more alone than she had in a long time. “Even I didn’t know how much I needed it.”
“Happy to help,” Janet said. “Call me if you need to talk or cry or shout or…anything.”
“I will. And I’ll see you in three weeks.”
After her friend hung up, Tina sat up and folded her legs beneath her. She looked around her room and felt the past rise up all around her. She’d still been living in this room when she and Brian had started dating.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
Back then, she was still working part-time at Diego’s, an upscale bar on the waterfront, and studying for her MBA during the day. Brian was a lieutenant, the pilot’s wings pinned to his uniform still shiny and new. He’d walked into the bar one night, and just like the corniest of clichés, their eyes met, flames erupted and that was that.
In a rush of lust and love, they’d spent every minute together for the next month, then infuriated both of their families with a hurried elopement. But they’d been too crazy about each other to wait for the big, planned, fancy wedding their families would have wanted.
Instead, it was just the two of them, standing in front of a justice of the peace. Tina had carried a single rose that Brian had picked for her from the garden out in front of the courthouse. And she’d known, deep in her bones, that this man was her soul mate. The one man in the world that she’d been destined to love.
They’d had one year together. Then Brian dropped the divorce bomb on her and left the next morning for a six-month deployment to an aircraft carrier.
“So much for soul mates,” Tina whispered to the empty room as she left the memories in her dusty past where they belonged. Then she flopped back onto the bed, threw one arm across her eyes and tried to tell herself that the ache in her heart was just an echo of old pain.
The next day, Tina dived into work on her grandmother’s garden. Nana loved having flowers, but she wasn’t keen on weeding. She always claimed that it was because she had no trouble getting down onto the grass, but getting back up was tougher. But Tina knew the truth. Her grandmother just hated weeding. Always had.
The roses were droopy, the Gerbera daisies were being choked out by the dandelions and the pansies had given up the ghost. Tina knelt in the sun-warmed grass and let the summer heat bake into her skin as she leaned into the task.
Classic rock played on the stereo in the living room and drifted through the open windows to give her a solid beat to work to. The sounds of kids playing basketball and a dog’s frantic bark came from down the street. Muffin and Peaches watched Tina’s every move from behind the screen door and yipped excitedly whenever something interesting, like a butterfly, passed in their line of vision.
She’d already been at it for an hour when she straightened up, put her hands at the small of her back and stretched, easing the kinks out of muscles unused to gardening. In California, Tina lived in an apartment and made do with a few potted plants on the balcony overlooking