He glanced from each of his daughters’ tiny faces back to Sadie. Dappled shade danced across his face as the leaves of the black oak dipped and swayed in the sultry breeze.
“I appreciate that. I do.” He took a bite of the sandwich, chewed and swallowed. “But I want more than the occasional day with them, Sadie.”
“I know that.” She picked up the sippy cup of milk Wendy toppled over and set it upright again. “But—”
“No buts about it, Sadie. They’re my family. My blood.”
“And mine,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, which brings me back to my point.”
She cut him off. Sadie wasn’t going to give him the chance to talk marriage again. Sharing the twins wasn’t enough of a reason to get married. She wouldn’t take that step again unless she was in love. “I know what your point is, Rick, but I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Why the he—” he broke off, looked at the girls and gave a rueful smile. “Why the heck not? We were good together.”
“Yes, for one night.”
“Could be every night.”
“Marriages aren’t only lived in bed.”
“Doesn’t hurt.”
She sighed. “Rick, we’ve been over this already.”
“And will be again,” he told her, his brown eyes locked with hers.
“What’s the point?”
“We have kids.”
“And we can both love them without being married to each other.”
“We could be a family,” he said softly.
And for one brief moment, that word seemed to reverberate inside her. She had always wanted a family of her own. It was the main reason she had agreed to go along with her father’s plan when he married her off to Taylor. She had believed back then that even if a marriage hadn’t started out for the right reasons that two people who wanted to badly enough could build something good.
But she’d found out soon enough that a marriage without love wasn’t a marriage at all.
“It’s a bad idea, Rick,” she said finally and met his eyes.
“You don’t know that.”
She actually laughed and Gail looked up at her with a grin. “Oh, yes,” she said, “believe me when I say I do.”
“You can’t use your marriage as a measure of what we could have.”
“It’s exactly what I should do,” she told him firmly. “My marriage was a misery because there was no love there. I married him for all the wrong reasons and I paid a heavy price.” She paused, looked down at her daughters, laughing and babbling to each other, and she felt a well of love fill her. Shaking her head, she looked at Rick. “This time, it wouldn’t be only me paying the price. And I won’t risk putting my girls into an unhappy home.”
“You think I would risk that?” Rick picked up a piece of banana and handed it to Wendy. “I only want what’s best for them.”
“And I believe you,” Sadie said. “We just disagree on what’s best.”
He laughed shortly. “You think you’ve got your mind made up about me,” he said after a long moment, “but things change, Sadie.”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” she warned.
“Don’t make statements that are going to be hard to back down from when I finally convince you to see things my way.”
“Are you always this confident?”
“When I know I’m right,” he assured her.
A squeal of sound shattered their conversation and had Sadie’s ears ringing. Wendy cried for her mommy and Gail crawled to her father and scrambled up onto his lap.
The mayor stood on a hastily built stage at one end of the square. Tapping and blowing into a microphone, the feedback was loud enough to tear paint from walls.
“Sorry about that noise,” the mayor said, “but I think we’ve got it whipped now.”
The crowd stirred, then settled down as they waited for the inevitable speeches. Sadie’s gaze slid to Rick. He had one arm wrapped around Gail’s sturdy little body and jiggled her instinctively to keep her happy.
He did that so easily, Sadie thought with a sigh. He had stepped into fatherhood so smoothly, it was as if he had been with the twins since the beginning. And if he had, she wondered, how would things be different now?
Might they have already become the family he claimed to want?
“I know,” the mayor called out, his voice echoing weirdly through the speakers, “that none of you came to listen to speeches …”
“That won’t stop you, Jimmy,” someone in the crowd shouted.
“That’ll be enough outta you, Ben,” the mayor chided with a smile. “I’ll make this short. But since we’re all here and since it’s our country’s Day of Independence, I wanted to take the time to honor a few of our own.”
A ripple of applause skittered through the crowd. Hesitant, since no one was sure what the mayor was up to yet.
Then he let them all know.
“Rick Pruitt?” Mayor Jim called. “I know you’re here son, so come on up to the stage, will you?”
Frowning a little, Rick set Gail down on the blanket. His features went dark and his eyes were suddenly shadowed. Dutifully, though, he shrugged, then walked through the other picnickers toward the stage. Meanwhile, the mayor went on with his small roll call.
“Donna Billings. Frank Haley and Dennis Flynn, you come on up here, too.”
Sadie’s gaze locked on Rick as he walked up the steps to take his place on the stage. The other people who had been called up stood alongside him, each of them in uniform. They all looked as uncomfortable with the attention as Rick did.
Then the mayor announced, “How about we give a big Royal round of applause for our very own finest. Let’s thank them all for their service to us and our country.”
As the gathered townspeople erupted into wild shouts and thunderous applause, Sadie felt a chill of pride ripple along her spine. From across the square, Rick’s gaze locked with hers and she knew that he had been right. If she wasn’t careful, he might just change her mind.
During the next week, Rick got reacquainted both with the woman he had spent the last three years thinking about, and with his home.
The Pruitt ranch, under foreman John Henry’s steward ship, had continued to thrive. The herd of beef cattle was healthy and growing, and the acreage set aside for raising grain was more productive than he had a right to expect. John had done a hell of a job and Rick was grateful. Knowing his home was in good hands had made it possible for him to follow his own dream of service.
Now, though, he was back and he had to decide for himself if his dreams hadn’t changed. Evolved.
Rick’s life was more full than he’d ever experienced before. He had once thought that being a marine was the toughest job on the planet. But that was before he became a father. For the last several days he had