Cassidy's Kids

Divorced, he was more dangerous than ever. She had to get rid of him. To focus on what mattered. Her goals. The clinic. Getting through the day.

“I know it’s presumptuous, me coming in here like this after all this time, but I’m at my wits’ end, Ellie, and I don’t know where else to turn. We were pretty special friends once.”

Opening her mouth to grant him whatever he asked, Ellie bit her tongue, instead. She was working day and night trying to prove herself—and going to night school besides. She didn’t have time to spare for him. Or to risk another broken heart. Sloan Cassidy had had his chance.

“I’d never ask for myself—” Sloan’s big brown eyes were imploring her, and his body made an imposing figure in skin-tight, earth-worn denim and a corduroy shirt that fit his cowboy bulkiness to perfection.

“But the girls are getting so out of hand that if I don’t do something soon, it may be too late.”

The girls? Ellie swallowed, glad she’d bitten her tongue. Even after ten years, hearing about Sloan’s relations with the opposite sex still hurt. There’d never been just one girl in love with him, panting after him: there’d never been fewer than a dozen.

“What, exactly, is it you want from me?” She was curious, that was all. And maybe a bit of a masochist. Entertaining visions of herself posing as Sloan’s fiancée long enough to ward off the troublesome women, Ellie almost smiled again.

“Just some pointers, Ellie. Teach me how to raise them.”

“Raise them?”

“You know how I grew up, El. My own folks didn’t set such a hot example. I’d already been having trouble getting the dad stuff down right. I’m a complete failure at the mom part.”

Mom? Dad? Feeling a resurgence of the panic attack from earlier that morning, Ellie forced her fingers to relax their grip on the arms of her chair. “Just how old are they?” she asked. Sloan was a father? More than once? Somehow she’d just never pictured homecoming-queen, cheerleader-captain Marla having babies. Not even for Sloan.

“Eighteen months.” He looked desperate, standing there in front of her. Desperate and needy. Which was the only reason Ellie didn’t have him removed from her office.

“And?” He’d said girls, plural.

“That’s it. I have eighteen-month-old twin daughters who are holy terrors, and not particularly happy, either.”

The catch Ellie felt in her chest must be part of the panic attack she was fighting. It had absolutely nothing to do with the mention of Sloan and daughters in the same sentence. There was no reason why she should feel a longing at the mention that they were twins. Or a kinship, either.

“I have no idea what to do for them.”

Ellie didn’t do kids. Period. They weren’t in her five-year plan. She had to stay focused. To keep her mind on the things she could have, and off the things she couldn’t. To control what little about her life she could control.

“What makes you think I could help?” she asked as if from outside herself—morbidly curious, she supposed.

Sloan’s gesture encompassed her office and the clinic outside her door. “You’re in the baby business.”

“Wrong.” She shook her head. “I’m in the administration business.” She left the baby part of the Maitland family business to those who were qualified.

His eyes narrowed as he watched her fiddle with a mechanical pencil on top of her desk. “You’re a twin.” The words were softly spoken.

And Sloan knew how hard that had been for her, Ellie thought. Growing up in the shadow of her beautiful, vivacious sister. She shrugged. “Doesn’t make me an expert on raising children.”

Placing both hands on her desk, Sloan leaned forward until his eyes were almost level with hers. She could smell the musky scent of his aftershave, mixed with leather and outdoors and all that was Sloan. “Please, Ellie, at least think about it?”

This had to stop. “I can’t, Sloan.”

“Just think about it,” he said again, straightening. “At least meet them, then see how you feel.”

“No!” She stood, smoothing the skirt of her practical business suit, forcing herself to calm down. “I really don’t have time right now to take on another project, Sloan.” She spoke with every ounce of authority she possessed. And hoped it was enough.

Ellie wasn’t as relieved as she might have been when, without another word, Sloan nodded, turned and left. His last discerning glance haunted her for the rest of the afternoon, and she had an awful feeling he would be back.

THOSE DAMN INCREDIBLY blue eyes tormented Sloan as he turned his pickup truck away from Austin toward the open road and the relative safety of his ranch. Ellie’s eyes were still as filled with determination as they’d been when he’d known her ten years ago. Still emanating an intelligence that was intimidating, or challenging, depending on how you chose to look at it. Sloan, fool that he was, had always been more prone to rising to a challenge than wisely giving in to intimidation.

Ellie—still as sexy as ever.

All they’d ever been was friends. Great friends. On his side, best friends. Ellie had never known how he’d lusted after her. He’d made certain she’d never known.

Swerving so hard his tires shot gravel up past the roof of the truck, Sloan came to a sudden stop in the parking lot of a tavern he hadn’t visited in years. Ariel and Alisha were safe with Charlie’s sister for the afternoon. Their father needed a drink.

Too bad his housekeeper’s sister had to go back home to Arizona at the end of the week. Too bad she was already married and seventy years old.

Up at the bar a few minutes later, a cold mug of beer clasped in his fist, Sloan amended that last thought about Charlie’s sister, Mary. Too bad she was married. Seventy years old wasn’t a problem.

Right. And maybe cow manure could fly.

WHY DIDN’T THE CRYING STOP?

Rolling over groggily, raising a hand to push the cropped strands of dark hair out of her face, Ellie groaned. The family mansion was just too small for both her and the mystery baby. Only two months old, he still wasn’t sleeping through the night.

Consequently, neither was Ellie.

It was hard to get used to having a baby in the house, but the tiny boy had been abandoned on the steps of the clinic with a note claiming he was a Maitland, too, and Megan’s heart had gone out to the infant. She’d been made his foster mother until the child’s real parents were found.

Ellie winced. Her brothers had become prime suspects as the baby’s father, though she couldn’t make herself believe any of them had really created the disruptive human being down the hall.

She rolled over again and tried to ignore the baby’s cries, but they grew louder, more urgent. And it suddenly dawned on Ellie why that was.

She was in charge.

Amy, the nurse her mother had hired to care for the baby, was out of town for a couple of days for a family emergency. And Beth and Megan were out, probably until dawn, at a high-profile fund-raiser Ellie had begged not to attend. With all of the negative publicity Maitland Maternity had suffered through in the past month, it was imperative that the family be represented. But not by Ellie. She was still under close scrutiny after her appointment as the clinic’s administrator, and with her lack of sophisticated wit, and no typical Maitland knock ’em dead looks to make up for the lack, she’d been afraid of doing more harm than good. Or at least, that had been her excuse. She’d really just wanted a quiet night at home to regroup after the day she’d had.

Ellie dragged herself out of bed and slogged down the hall to the nursery Megan had set up in the wing Beth and Ellie shared at Maitland Mansion. “I’m coming,” she called to the hostile baby, picking up her pace a bit. After all, it wasn’t the little guy’s fault he’d had such rotten luck in life.

Unless, of course, he’d carried on this way right from the start and his poor mother had been as hopeless as Ellie in knowing how to quiet him.

“Shh, Cody,” she demanded as she entered the nursery, the air warm on legs left bare by her cotton shorts and matching short sleeved pajama top. Heart picking up speed as she looked at the beet-red face of the baby, she softened her voice. “Hey, little man, what’s up?”

With arms trembling—from lack of sleep, she told herself—Ellie reached down to scoop up the hot bundle. He wasn’t only hot, he was soaked. And not just from sweat and tears, though there was plenty of both.

The initial bout of crying stopped the moment Ellie picked Cody up out of his crib. His tear-drenched eyelashes blinked as he stared up at her. As well he should. He’d have no idea who this stranger holding him might be.

In spite of his soggy state, Ellie stopped and stared right back at the miniature Maitland. She’d never been this close to him before.

From the moment he’d shown up on the doorstep of the clinic, and Megan had announced she would be taking temporary custody of him, Ellie had entered a new goal in the log book in her mind. She wasn’t going to hold him the way her sister Beth kept doing. She couldn’t. Ellie was much more intense than Beth. She’d never learned to live for the moment the way her more outgoing sister had done since birth. And it made no sense to grow attached to a child who was in their home only temporarily.

There was no point in torturing herself with something she knew she would never have. Which was also why she never visited the nursery at the clinic unless she was there on official business. She’d learned a long time ago that the way to be happy—or at least successful—was to avoid distractions.