“I came to see the kids, but you weren’t here.” He scrubbed both hands across his face, then glared at her. “I didn’t know where you’d gone. For all I knew, you were out and trapped somewhere, or maybe one of the kids was sick. I called your cell and you didn’t answer. Went straight to voice mail.”
One small niggle of guilt wormed its way through her, but Dina dismissed it fast. How was she supposed to know that he would show up? Just because he’d been dropping by on and off for days was no reason to assume he’d keep doing it. Besides, he was overreacting and that she could hardly believe. He sounded like a worried husband, for heaven’s sake.
“I always turn my phone off when I’m working,” she said, though that wasn’t true. She’d kept the phone on in case her grandmother needed to reach her. She simply hadn’t answered the phone when she saw it was Connor calling. “And now I’m going to put the triplets to bed. They’re sound asleep in their car seats and if you wake them...”
Her threat lay open-ended between them, but it did the trick. He took a breath, made an obvious effort to calm himself and said, “Fine. I’ll help. Go unlock the front door.”
She did it, but only because that’s what she was going to do before he’d ordered her to do it anyway. Muttering under her breath, Dina crossed the yard with hurried strides. It was cold and damp and the moon and stars were blotted out behind a layer of clouds. She opened the door, then turned and headed back to the car, where Con was already unhooking Sam from his car seat. Her heart twisted a bit as the little boy draped himself across Con’s shoulder, arms and legs limp in sleep. Connor kept one hand on the boy’s back and walked to the house without another word to her.
Good, Dina thought. She was in no mood for his attitude. She was tired, her feet hurt and all she wanted was to sit down, have a glass of wine and then crawl into bed for the few hours’ sleep she’d get before the babies woke up.
She freed Sadie from her car seat and soothed the baby girl as she snuffled, whimpered and settled down again.
“I’ll take her,” Connor whispered when he came up behind her.
“You get Sage,” she said, already walking.
In what used to be the bungalow’s master bedroom, three cribs were crowded together in the small space. It wouldn’t be long before Dina would have to find somewhere else to live. The babies were going to outgrow this house within the next year or so. But that was a worry for another day.
“Why the hell didn’t you answer the phone?” Connor’s strained whisper sounded overly loud in the quiet.
“I was working,” she reminded him. “Then when I wasn’t, I turned the phone off to keep from waking up the babies on the way home.”
“Okay, then,” he ground out, “what kind of job are you working that you’ve got three babies out until after midnight?”
She frowned at him as she leaned over the crib and patted Sam’s back until he settled into deep sleep again. “I was catering an anniversary party, and the babies are fine.”
“They should have been home,” he said, that strained whisper somehow even more strained now.
Dina swallowed her impatience. “Not that it’s any of your business, but my babysitter got sick at the last minute, so my grandmother watched them for me.”
While Connor soothed a snuffling, writhing Sadie, he glared at Dina. “Why the hell didn’t you call me? I could have been here to watch them. Hell, I was here. On the damn porch, imagining you and the babies dead in a ditch somewhere.”
He was serious. She didn’t know whether to be touched, amused or angry. Amusement won.
She snorted a laugh and was pleased to see his expression darken even further. “Who’re you, my mother?”
“No,” he reminded her. “I’m their father, and you should have answered my calls.”
Looking into his eyes, she saw beyond his anger to the worry that had been dogging him for hours. If the situation had been turned around and he had been off with the triplets and she hadn’t been able to reach him, she would have been furious, too. And worried. And scared. And her imagination would have tortured her with images of car accidents, kidnappings—heck, even space invaders!
Maybe she should have answered his calls, but the truth was, she only left her phone turned on while working in case there was an emergency with the babies. Otherwise, she was focused on the task at hand. And frankly, every time her phone rang and she saw Connor’s number, she’d enjoyed shifting him to voice mail. He was so...dominant male that being able to thwart him even a little had made her feel better. Now, though, she was rethinking that decision.
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Oh, that was bitter. “I should have let you know the kids were all right.”
“It wasn’t only them I was worried about,” he said, voice deeper, lower, more intimate.
She looked at him and in the soft glow of the night-light, his blue eyes seemed fathomless, fixed on her. She felt drawn to him. So much so that she deliberately looked away and took a step back.
The babies were settled and the baby monitor turned on, so to continue the conversation, Dina led Connor out of the bedroom. She needed some breathing room. Flipping on light switches as she went, to dispel the dark and the accompanying intimacy, she walked straight to the living room with him following close behind. She entered the room, turned to face him and saw that he’d stopped in the open doorway. Taking a breath, she steadied herself. “I’m tired, Connor. Can we do the rest of this another time?”
Rather than answer, he asked a question of his own. “Why didn’t you ask me to watch the kids?”
“The simplest answer? It never occurred to me.”
A rush of pure frustration swamped Connor as he met her eyes and read the truth there. He read the fatigue in her eyes and noted the defensive posture she always adopted when they began to butt heads, and that was almost enough to defuse the anger churning inside him. The last few hours, he’d felt more helpless than he ever had, and he hadn’t enjoyed it. He was used to being in charge, to knowing what was going on at all times. To be in the dark about his own children had been torture.
By the time she had pulled into the driveway, Connor had been tense enough to snap in two. It was only the presence of the sleeping babies that had kept his temper from boiling over. But his frustration continued to bubble and froth in the pit of his stomach.
She hadn’t called him because she hadn’t given him a thought. She’d needed help and she’d gone to her grandmother instead of him. Because he wasn’t a part of her or the kids’ lives. He was still on the periphery, and he was the only one who could change that.
“That’s got to stop,” he said flatly, silently congratulating himself on his rigid control.
“Look, I’m sorry you were worried,” she said. “But I’m too tired to do this right now.”
He nodded solemnly. “Fine. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“Okay, good.” She waved a hand at the hall and the front door behind him. “Now I’m going to bed and you should go home.”
“Oh,” Connor said, leaning against the doorjamb with a casual ease he wasn’t feeling, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“What?”
Her chocolate eyes went wide and outraged and Connor smiled. He liked the way she went from cool to hot in a split second and he really wanted to see how hot she’d burn in his bed. For a second or two, that image scalded his brain and made speech impossible. When he came back to the moment, she was in the middle of a whispered rant, trying to keep her anger from waking the babies in the other room.
“You