The More Mavericks, The Merrier!

But maybe he hadn’t been as successful at hiding his thoughts as he’d hoped, or maybe Fallon just knew him too well, because she touched his arm. It was simply a gesture of support, but the sight of her hand on his arm made him crave her touch on other parts of his body. He wanted those fingers gliding over his skin, her nails biting into his flesh as he—

Whoa! Not going there. Not with Fallon. No way.

“It’s not easy for her, either,” she said gently, drawing his attention back to the issue of his sister’s wedding. “As excited as Bella is about starting a life with the man she loves, she’s going to be thinking of all the people who won’t be there on her wedding day.”

He nodded. “I’m going to walk her down the aisle, but I’m not giving her away. Aside from it being an archaic tradition, it just doesn’t feel right, so we’re going to ask the minister to skip that part.”

“She’d probably be happy to skip all of the parts that come before ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife,’” Fallon said, in what he recognized as a deliberate attempt to lighten the mood.

“Because she knows I wouldn’t approve of her moving in with Hudson until he’s put the second ring on her finger.”

“And you know she wouldn’t just abandon you and the babies,” she pointed out.

He nodded. “She’s already put her life on hold long enough to help us out. And while I sometimes think I should have insisted that she stay at school to get her diploma, there’s no way I would have managed this past year without her.”

“She’ll go back and finish,” Fallon assured him.

“Even if she doesn’t, she’s got Hudson to take care of her now.”

Fallon shook her head despairingly. “It’s not his responsibility to take care of her,” she chided. “When a man and a woman decide to join their lives together, they take care of each other.”

She was right, of course. If he let himself think about his parents—which he rarely did—he knew that they’d enjoyed a mutually loving and supportive relationship. But his own experience with marriage had been very different.

At first, it hadn’t been so bad. Paula had kept up the house and prepared the meals while he’d handled all of the ranch chores. And he was okay with that, because she was a city girl adjusting to life in Rust Creek Falls. But even that tentative arrangement had fallen apart after the two lines had appeared in the little window of the pregnancy test.

And when his wife had learned that she was carrying three babies, it had been the end of any cooperation or even communication between them. There had been no give-and-take with Paula after that—just a whole lot of unhappiness and anger.

Something beeped in the kitchen, and Fallon pushed herself up off the floor. “Are you still hungry?” she asked.

“Does today end with a y?” Jamie asked her.

She smiled at that. “Give me ten minutes to finish up the gravy.”

He watched her walk out of the room, his gaze focused on the sexy curve of her butt and the gentle sway of her hips. Of course, when he realized what he was doing—ogling his best friend—he was appalled. But that brief glimpse of her mostly bare torso in the laundry room had reminded him of a simple fact that he’d denied for too long: Fallon O’Reilly wasn’t a girl anymore.

Yes, she was his loyal friend and a dedicated caregiver to his babies, but she was also an attractive and appealing woman. Very attractive and incredibly appealing. And the acknowledgment of those simple facts made him a little uneasy, because he had no business thinking of her in those terms.

“Fa!” Henry demanded. “Fa-fa!”

Jamie saw that his son had made his way to the other side of the play yard and was looking toward the doorway through which Fallon had disappeared. All of his kids loved Fallon, but he’d recently begun to suspect that Henry had a little bit of a crush on his second-favorite caregiver—“Auntie Bella” being the favorite of all of them, of course, by simple virtue of the fact that she spent the most time with them.