Father Most Wanted. Marie Ferrarella

to see if Heather is all right with this.”

      Leaving them at the front counter, Brooke threaded her way into the back. Oma, mercifully, refrained from following her. But she didn’t have to turn around to know there was a pleased smile on her grandmother’s face.

      “This is your store, Brooke. You don’t have to ask if you can go on break.” Heather’s eyes danced as she took in the man in front and shifted back to her sister’s face. “Go, go, before they take back the invitation.”

      “I’m not asking,” Brooke corrected. “I’m just letting you know.” But she had been asking, she thought. Asking and suddenly hoping that Heather would come up with a reason for her to stay.

      Where had this sudden nervous flutter in her stomach come from?

      She was being idiotic. It wasn’t as if this was a date, or even a meeting over coffee. She was just being polite to a customer, nothing more.

      “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Heather,” Brooke warned. “The man just wants to say thank-you by taking me to the soda shop.”

      “Tell him there are other ways to say thank-you than by helping you get your daily chocolate fix,” Heather suggested.

      Brooke began backing away. She didn’t want to keep Tyler and the girls waiting. “This way’s just fine with me. Besides…” Brooke silently raised her left hand and pointed to the third finger with her other hand, her meaning clear.

      “Was that some kind of code?” he asked her when she joined him.

      Tyler’s question caught her by surprise. Embarrassed, she struggled for a plausible explanation. The last thing she wanted was to underscore her embarrassment by telling Tyler they were talking about him and his availability.

      “Um, I was just, um, reminding her to tie a string around her finger. The malt shop’s this way,” she said unnecessarily, hoping to change the course of the conversation.

      Tyler glanced over his shoulder at the young woman remaining in the store. She waved at him, which he thought was rather odd. He looked at Brooke. Two of the girls had gotten between them. “Isn’t it usually the string that’s supposed to remind a person of something?”

      “Heather’s too forgetful to remember to tie one on.” That sounded a little lame, even to Brooke.

      “Is it hard to work with strings on your fingers?” one of the girls asked.

      Looking at the child, Brooke tried to remember which one she was. “Sometimes, which is why she forgets to put them on. We’re here,” Brooke announced, relieved, pausing by the large menu that was mounted on a stand in the middle of the entrance. “See anything you like?”

      “Everything!” the girls cried in unison.

      She laughed, looking over her shoulder at Tyler. “Girls after my own heart.”

      He nodded. “Mine, too.” His hand lightly pressed against the backs of two of them, he gently herded his daughters inside.

      There were no tables for five, only for two and four, so he pulled a couple of tables together. To Brooke’s surprise, he helped her with her chair, ushering her in.

      “You’re very courtly,” she observed. “Not that common these days.”

      He raised his eyebrows. “Offended?”

      “Pleased,” she countered.

      “Me, too, Daddy. Do me.”

      “Me.”

      “No, me.”

      He sighed, pretending to be weary, but the uplifted corners of his mouth gave him away as he did the honors on all three chairs one at a time. “I should have been an octopus.”

      The girls giggled, except for Stephany, who shivered and closed her eyes.

      They were a nice family, Brooke thought. She waited until he sat down himself before commenting on what he’d said when they’d walked in. “You don’t strike me as a man with a sweet tooth.”

      He found himself smiling at the observation. A pervading fondness for chocolate was something else he shared with the girls, as well as with his sister. “Why?”

      “Are your teeth really sweet, Daddy?” Tiffany looked at him curiously.

      “Shh.” Bethany waved her hand at her sister to be quiet.

      “It’s an expression people use when someone has a weakness for candy,” Brooke explained before looking at Tyler. “I just thought it was unusual because you look so…” She searched for a word and settled on “fit.”

      The smile turned a handsome man into a man who was almost devastating. She found that it took her a second to remember to exhale and then reverse the process.

      “Thanks.” He looked down at the paper menus on the tables, small replicas of the one at the entrance. “So, what’ll everyone have?”

      The girls had already made their choices and vied with one another to be first in their declarations. Chocolate, strawberry and vanilla sundaes with pleas for plenty of chocolate syrup were ordered. Brooke wondered if their selection of flavors was a way to tell them apart.

      Tyler’s dark blue eyes isolated the moment for her, fixed as they were on her face. “What would you like?”

      Completely improbable, inappropriate answers popped up in her head. Heather’s influence, she thought, dismissing them all.

      She found it harder to dismiss the feeling they created. Or the one generated by the way he looked at her.

      He probably wasn’t even aware of it. “A strawberry-ice-cream soda. This is one of the few places that makes them the old-fashioned way,” she told him.

      “One strawberry-ice-cream soda coming up,” he said, rising from the table and going to the counter to place the order.

      “You like strawberry,” the triplet sitting directly opposite her observed, beaming. Something told Brooke she had just bonded with the little girl. She only wished she knew which one it was.

      “It’s the first flavor I ever remember having.” She’d been about three at the time. It had come in the form of an ice-cream cone and she had worn it more than eaten it, according to the way her father used to tell the story. She just remembered liking the taste.