When I knocked on the front door, Saint pulled it open looking disheveled and rumpled in a really delightful way. She had a tiny toddler on her hip and a slightly older little girl peeking at me from behind her knees. She smiled at me and blew a loose red curl out of her face.
“I’m happy to see you.” Well, hot damn, that was the best news I had heard recently. “This is Zoe.” She kissed the toddler on the cheek. “Brea is hiding behind me and the boys, Owen and Kyle, are in the living room playing video games.”
I followed her into the house and winked at the little girl who was looking up at me with huge eyes.
“Your sister doesn’t look old enough to have all these kids.”
She snorted and guided me into the kitchen, where the scent of tomato soup on the stove made my mouth water.
“She started young and doesn’t have any plans to stop. She and her husband, Justin, always wanted a big family.”
She looked at the stove, then at me, and unceremoniously plopped the wide-eyed toddler in my arms. We stared at each other for a long moment, the baby deciding if she wanted to scream at me and me trying to decide how to best hold her without squishing her. I guess the little girl decided I was okay, and she proceeded to try and get her chubby little fingers around my nose ring, which resulted in a ridiculous game of don’t touch. Saint just laughed at me while she stood at the stove and made sandwiches.
The other little girl, who was probably only four or five, wandered over and stood by my knee looking up at me. Saint grinned down at her.
“That’s Auntie’s friend Nash. Tell him hi.”
The little girl didn’t say anything to me, so I smiled down at her and bit back a swearword when the baby got her hand on the piercing and gave it a yank. It made my eyes water up, but it had her laughing so hard I couldn’t be mad about it.
“Hot.”
The other little girl was shy, I could tell. She must take after Saint. I lifted an eyebrow down at her and she pointed a tiny finger up at my head and said again, “Hot.”
She was talking about the flames inked on my head and the fire that flowed out of the collar of my T-shirt where the baby was yanking on it.
Saint turned around and looked at me with bright silver sparks in her gray eyes. She walked over and crouched down in front of the little girl and poked her lightly on the nose.
“You have good taste, Brea. He is very, very hot.”
All three of the girls burst into hysterical laugher while I just sat there and watched Saint. She stood and kissed the baby on the cheek and me on the mouth and called the boys in for their simple dinner. The boys, since they were older, had all kinds of interesting questions about my ink, about the gauges in my ears, about what I did and how I knew Saint. They were scary energetic but funny and overall nice kids.
We all ate dinner, and when everyone was done, I told Saint to go get them all settled while I cleaned up her sister’s kitchen. Her eyes had something in them when she smiled at me that I couldn’t identify, but it was warm, kind of melty, and I liked everything about it even if this was the most G-rated date I had ever been on.
The older kids crashed on the floor and Saint and I took spots on the couch with both the little girls between us. I had no intention of staying, I wanted to be gone before Saint’s sister came home, but after the first five minutes of the movie, Brea was asleep with her head on my arm. The toddler, Zoe, had crawled into my lap, curled up like a little cat, and was out like a light. I didn’t want to disturb either of them, so I just settled in and watched the fish try and find his way home. The way Nemo’s dad never gave up, never lost hope, had me running parallels with my own life through my mind and it had me thinking about Phil.
When I looked over at Saint she was watching me with big eyes and there was a bright pink flush in her cheeks.
“What?”
She just gave her head a little shake and turned back to the movie.
“You just always surprise me.”
I blew out a breath because that was tied in to my latest revelation about this relationship and her.
“The person that should be surprising is you, Saint. Trust me, the person you are is remarkable and exceptional. If you get acquainted with her, your entire life will change.”
She just looked at me like she had no idea what I was saying, but I felt better having said it. I would love her unconditionally if she let me, but in order to do that I had to get her to love herself fully, first.
CHAPTER 16
Saint
It was already hard to keep a lid on everything Nash stirred up in me, but seeing a big, tough, tattooed guy hold on to a little girl like she was something breakable and precious, how in the hell was I supposed to keep my heart cloistered from that?
When Faith and Justin returned home, all the kids had been put to bed and Nash was on his way out the door. I didn’t miss the look my sister gave when he said good-bye. She was tired and supposed to take it easy, which is the only reason I escaped getting an earful, I’m sure. The next morning while I was at work she left a voice mail that went on for a solid twenty minutes about how she now had two boys that were insisting on getting skull tattoos when they were old enough. I shouldn’t have thought it was funny but I really did. I wanted to try and take Faith’s concern to heart. I knew she was just worried about me, worried about what would happen if Nash hurt me again, but something about his words to me the night before had stuck with me.
There was a part of me that could never believe that he saw me the way he did. I never recognized myself as a beautiful, desirable creature and so never took him at face value when he said those things to me. I was confident at work, knew what I was doing and that it was what I had always been meant to do, but even though he looked at me like I was the start and end of everything, I just couldn’t find any belief in the idea that Nash Donovan felt that way about me. I still didn’t have enough confidence to be secure in any of the other areas of my life. It wasn’t fair to Nash that I was on pins and needles waiting for him to prove that he was nothing more than a typical guy and would eventually fall to the lowest common denominator, when all I was doing was using my fear and weaknesses to hold all the parts of me that had never really stopped loving him in check and not allowing what was between us now to grow and flourish.
I had never been resentful of my work or my busy schedule at the emergency room. I was always the happiest, the most centered and secure when I was caring for others, but lately I wanted to have time to see Nash. I knew Phil was getting worse, that the end was on the horizon, and Nash was almost always at his side. He was trying to stay on top of things at work and everything else, but he was losing weight, and every time I did manage to see him he had shadows on his face that rivaled the color of his eyes in purpleness and his strong jaw was more often than not scruffy and unshaven.