“If you’ll pardon me, Mrs. King,” Sean said with a smile and a wink, “you’re not to worry about a thing. This is Ireland. Children are welcome everywhere.”
With those words, she felt more than welcome, and nearly relaxed. Until she saw Sadie pulling flowers up and had to run to catch the little girl before she did too much damage. Connor ran after the boys at the same time and while the Irish wind blew all around them, they worked as a team to gather the babies.
By the time they were settled in their palatial suite and had ordered room service dinner, the trips were ready for bed. Using teamwork, Connor and Dina got all three of them bathed and tucked in, then Connor poured two glasses of wine and they collapsed into lush green velvet wing-back chairs in the luxurious living room.
Through the wide windows that overlooked what she’d learned was Lough Corrib, Dina saw the twilight sky and the tips of the trees guarding the castle dancing in the wind. Still watching the magical scene outside, she took a sip of her wine and said, “The manager seems to know you very well. You even have your usual suite.”
“I stay here when I visit my cousin Jefferson and his family.” He eased back into the cushy armchair. “Maura’s sheep farm is only a half hour away, and the castle is comfortable.”
She laughed a little. “Comfortable? It’s...I don’t even have a word for it.” Shaking her head, Dina said, “I’ve never been anywhere even remotely like it.”
He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed his feet at the ankles. “Wait until you see it at night with the moonlight on the lake. Pretty spectacular. Tomorrow, we can take the triplets down to the lake, let them throw rocks...”
“Or fall in and go swimming?”
“We’ll be with them. But that’s a good question. Have they taken swimming lessons yet?” he asked.
“No,” she said, studying the gold-colored wine in her glass. “Elena was going to take them this summer, but—”
He frowned, took a small sip of his own wine and said, “We’ll have to do it instead. My cousin Rafe is going to install a fence around my pool, but swimming lessons are pretty much life or death for kids, don’t you think?”
“I agree.”
“Good.” He gave her a fast smile that resonated inside her with a heat she really didn’t want to acknowledge. “I’ll arrange for a private instructor to come to the house starting next month.”
“I don’t know that we’ll still be at your house next month,” she said.
“Oh, I think we can count on it.” He tipped his head to one side and stared at her for a long moment or two.
“Connor...” He wasn’t treating their move to his house as if it were temporary, but that was how she had to think of it. No matter what it felt like occasionally, she and Connor and the trips weren’t a family. They were...more like survivors of a shipwreck huddled together in what, at the moment, was a pretty fabulous lifeboat.
She had to make him see that she couldn’t stay indefinitely at his house. But what could she say? She was too nervous to stay at his place? She didn’t trust herself around him? Oh, a man that sure of himself really didn’t need to hear anything like that. Muttering under her breath, she took a sip of her wine.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” she said. “So what are we doing here in Ireland, exactly?”
His mouth quirked as if he knew she was desperately trying to change the subject. “Well, I told you I’ve stayed here at the castle before, but this time I’ll be talking with management, gathering information about what kind of activities they offer families and in general seeing if Ashford Castle would be a good fit for our family adventure company.”
“I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying staying here.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” he agreed, shifting his gaze around the room, “but will it be enough to qualify as a family adventure? We’ll see.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be so much about adventure as it does a family spending time together in an amazing place,” she said. “I know the castle itself would be enough to capture the imagination of any child. They’d picture themselves as knights and princesses...”
He nodded. “You might be right about that. My brothers and I would have loved this place when we were kids.”
Several seconds of silence passed before he asked, “Did you see much of the triplets before they came to live with you?”
“What?” The change of subject threw her for a moment.
He stared into his wine, then slowly lifted his gaze to hers. “The babies. Did you see much of them before Jackie and Elena died?”
“Not a lot, because they were living in San Francisco,” she said quietly, sensing the shift in his mood to contemplative, “but they came to visit and I went to see them a few times.”
“What were they like?” His voice was so soft, it was almost as if he regretted asking the question at all. “The babies, I mean.”
Looking at him, Dina felt a twist of sympathy. Over the last week or so, he’d become so involved with the triplets. She’d stopped expecting him to give up and walk away. The man would never turn his back on those children and he was doing more and more to convince Dina that he was actually enjoying being a father.
Bottom line was, Connor was changing his home, his world, to accommodate them and he had been cheated out of knowing them for the first year of their lives. Yes, cheated, she thought and sent a disgusted thought toward her sister, wherever she might be. Jackie and Elena had been wrong to keep the kids from him. Wrong to leave town and run rather than share the children with the man who had helped to create them. And if Dina had known the truth, she would have told Connor herself.
So maybe, she thought, she was wrong to fight him so hard on the kids now. But what choice did she have, really? She couldn’t lose the triplets. Not even to their father. It would be like tearing her own heart out. He was watching her, waiting for to speak, to tell him about the children he hardly knew. She took a breath and said, “The babies were always so cute. But oh, boy, were they tiny when they were born.”
A wistful smile curved his mouth as he tried to picture it. “I bet Jackie was afraid to pick them up.”
“She was,” Dina said with a laugh. “For a while, but she got over it because Elena insisted.”
“What kind of mom was she? Jackie?”
“A little crazy. Fun.” Dina smiled at the memories and tried to make them feel real for Connor. “Elena was the one with the schedule. She wrote everything down. What time the trips ate, napped, play time, bath time. My sister loved schedules.” Now it was her turn to be wistful. Only three months since she’d lost her big sister and Dina missed her. “But Jackie was fun. As the kids got older, she would dress up to read them bedtime stories. She bought them all miniature baseball bats so they’d be ready to play as soon as they could walk...”
“Sounds like Jacks. She used to play shortstop. She was really good, too.” His smile faded into a thoughtful frown.
Twilight crept into the luxuriously appointed room, and shadows lengthened. It felt intimate, sitting here in the half light with Connor, sharing memories with him so that he could hold the images in his mind. But, she realized suddenly, she could do better.
Reaching to the table beside her, she turned on a lamp that sent shards of light glancing off its carved crystal base. He scowled a little at the sudden brightness, but Dina ignored that and picked up her purse. Pulling her phone free, she turned it on, went