Five Kids, One Christmas (The Brannigan Sisters) Read online

  "Please."

  The word sighed against his lips when he released hers. Smiling crookedly, he nuzzled her mouth.

  "I thought sin was what you’d taste like, but I was wrong. You taste a lot more like Eden."

  "Adam and Eve were tossed out of Eden and had to put on clothes because of what they knew."

  "Yeah, and now I know why Adam didn’t mind knowing or going."

  He cupped her head and bent to her again. The taste was richer, sweeter, headier than before, her arms around him, her mouth opened to his inviting him deeper.

  He went there and knew immediately that he shouldn’t. Not yet. Not while the danger still lay in them being single.

  The soft purr of need from the back of her throat, the intense, instantaneous tightness in his jeans, the groan of desire in his chest told him everything he’d wanted to find out and then some. He should stop this now, take his tongue out of her mouth, his hands off her bottom, and push her away. He should also convince her to marry him as soon as possible, take their mutual desires out of the public eye and bring them legally into the bedroom. It was the only way—for the kids’ sake—to remain in the house with her without turning himself into a sexual time bomb.

  Pulling together reserves of strength he hadn’t been aware he possessed, he broke the kiss and moved Helen to arm’s length, shut his eyes against the uneven breath shuddering in his lungs. As though in a dream, Helen eased herself toward him, let her hand rest on his cheek.

  "Nat?" Her voice was thick and curious, drugged with desire.

  He resisted her with everything he had in him. "Marry me, Helen."

  "What?" She was a sleeper awakening, disoriented, pulling away from him, trying to figure out where she’d been. "What did you say?"

  He swallowed, a little disoriented himself, trying to keep his priorities in order when all he could think of was opening her robe, taking her down to slate and losing his mind. "Will you marry me?"

  "Will I what?" Fully awake now, she shoved out of his reach, saturated with disbelief. "Are you out of your mind?"

  "Yes," Nat said, "and no."

  Helen snorted, disgusted.

  "No, that’s not exactly what I meant." He held out a hand. "Please, it’s for the kids. Let me explain…"

  * * *

  Three heads bobbed behind the parted curtains on the French doors.

  "What are they doing?" Cara whispered, trying to peer around Libby’s head into the sun porch.

  "Kissing," Libby whispered back.

  "Kissing?" Cara asked, shocked. "I didn’t think they were supposed to do that if they’re not married."

  "No, that’s sex, you stoop," Libby informed her. "Kissing doesn’t have anything to do with sex."

  "Huh," Zach grunted above her head. "If you think kissing doesn’t have anything to do with sex, then you either need to watch more eight o’clock TV or have a talk with your mother."

  "I’ve talked with my mother," Libby whispered, "and I know exactly what kissing has to do with sex—it’s called foreplay—but just kissing doesn’t make babies. Besides, you heard Dad—they’re getting married."

  "The Colonel doesn’t seem to think so."

  "Oh, the Colonel." The whites of Libby’s eyes gleamed when she rolled them. "Trust me, the Colonel will marry him. My aunts will see to that."

  "How do you know?" Zach was skeptical as ever. "Dad—your Dad, I mean—said nobody ever made the Colonel do anything she didn’t want to."

  Libby grinned. "You don’t know my aunts very well. They’re good at revenge. Besides, my guardian angel will take care of anything they don’t, she told me."

  "How—" Zach started to argue, but Cara put a hand over his mouth, interrupting him.

  "Shut up," she hissed, pulling him away from the French doors. "They’ll hear you." She caught Libby’s arm, drew her back into the living room. "You really think it’s working?" she asked.

  Reluctantly Libby turned away from the porch, headed for the front staircase. "It’s working." She nodded, hiked up her over–long pajama legs and started up the steps. "I hope." Fingers crossed, her voice trembling, she added, "It has to."

  Chapter Five

  ~VETERAN’S DAY AND TEACHER IN–SERVICE DAY, NO SCHOOL—5:06 P.M.~

  "Marry him?" Helen’s oldest sister, Alice, sat at the Crockett–Maximovich’s big dining room table, mouth gaping. "Is he out of his mind? Does he have any idea what he’d be getting himself into if you said yes?"

  Helen’s other sisters—all six of them had shown up uninvited bright and early with their children "to play" while they went to work or whatever, and were now back to pick them up—nodded agreement.

  "He’s lived in the same house with me for more than a week," Helen snapped, defensive and irritated. "I think he probably has some idea of what I’m like by now."

  "I lived in the same house with you for eighteen years," her second–oldest sister, Meg, pointed out, "and I wouldn’t marry you if you paid me."

  Helen sniffed, dismissing Mary Margaret’s observation with a flip of her fingers. "You’re only saying that because you and Tim are separated right now and marriage of any kind is way down on your list of things to write home about. Besides, we’re too closely related. You can’t marry me—it’s against the law."

  "Law, schmaw." Edith, fourth in line and right behind Helen in the Brannigan birth order, rolled her eyes. "Marrying you would be like trying to give birth to a barrel cactus without anesthetic, and none of us would do it if we were men, not related to you and desperate for female companionship after ten years in prison with only sweaty bodybuilders to look at, and that’s a fact."

  "Nobody asked you," Helen said smartly.

  "No," Sam—Samantha to anyone who wanted to lose an ear or any other unprotected portion of her anatomy—concurred. She was fifth of the girls. "But according to you, Nat asked you to marry him, which leaves us with a little doubt as to his overall sanity and, consequently, his suitability to be our next brother–in–law and uncle to our children—"

  "Like Kevin was completely in his right mind when he married you."

  "—and as I recall," Sam continued, unperturbed by the aspersion cast on her husband’s mental fitness; his alleged lunacy was a good part of the reason she’d married him in the first place: it helped keep people from noticing her own, "the last man you brought into the family didn’t work out all that well."

  "Ah ha!" Helen slapped a hand on the table and rose. "That’s it exactly! I’m glad you agree. John didn’t work out, and you all were behind him marrying me one hundred percent."

  "Well…" Twink, Brannigan number six, waved history aside with a flutter of her fingers. "Everybody makes mistakes when they’re desperate."

  "And we were pretty desperate," Grace, youngest of the sisters, confirmed. "You kept thinking up scenarios and making us act in them. We had to do something to make you stop screwing up our lives for a while."

  "So you screwed up mine?"

  Grace shrugged. "Not intentionally. Besides, if I remember, you were a willing participant in the crime."

  "And you did get Libby out of the thing," Twink reminded her. "It couldn’t have been all bad."

  "The lust was great," Helen admitted cautiously, not sure where they were headed with this, but knowing that, if she herself were on the giving instead of receiving end of this situation, the danger would lie both in fessing up to the truth and in not doing so. They had a tendency to get you both coming and going, Brannigans did. "But—"

  "But it wasn’t the end–all it might have appeared to be at the time," Meg finished for her with a touch of pain.

  Silent, the sisters eyed Meg, troubled and sympathetic at once. They would meddle in her heartache when her bruises were less fresh, her sense of humor on the mend and her first holidays apart from Tim gotten through. For now they would distract her as best they could, not let her wallow too deeply in the mud pit she was digging herself into and try to appreciate their own sometimes imperfect, but al
ways there husbands a little more.

  But at the moment they had Helen’s life to rummage around in, and the complications contained therein were, without doubt, delicious enough distraction for any of them, including Meg.

  "But…" Helen cleared her throat, drawing attention from Meg. Verbal harangues aside, they cared about each other deeply, after all. "But what I was going to say is that Nat’s proposal has nothing to do with lust."

  Alice choked.

  Sam snorted involuntarily.

  Edith rolled her eyes.

  Meg swallowed a disbelieving snicker and looked at Grace, who coughed and eyed Twink, who said it all in a succinct, incredulous, "Ha! We’ve seen the way he takes notice when you’re in the room. Not to mention vice versa."

  "But it doesn’t." Helen was working hard to convince them. The muscles near her right eye twitched with guilt. "We’d only be getting married for the sake of the children, anyway."

  "Oh, right," Twink agreed dryly. "Like I’m so sure. Then why’s your eye ticking like mad?"

  Helen opened her mouth, shut it with a snap. Blasted tick gave her away every time. Still, what could she say that wouldn’t sound like further bluster—or that would change the truth? Never trust women you grew up with to let you lie to yourself when you needed them to, she thought gloomily.

  Still, she’d be damned if she cried uncle yet.

  "Well, it doesn’t," she repeated. Stubborn to the core.

  She rose, busied herself with the seemingly endless preparation of food to feed a crew that apparently required a different amount of fuel every day. Some days more, some days less—she couldn’t get a handle on their needs. And she was too chicken to leave the kitchen to Nat despite his assurances that he knew his way around a kitchen blindfolded, cooked for himself all the time and was healthy as a horse.

  She wasn’t sure if it was some kind of minor bigotry against his blindness that made her feel she had to manage the cooking along with the laundry because of his "handicap," or if it was some kind of long–buried gender guilt acquired through her genes that made her keep herself in the kitchen because "men hunted, women gathered"—she glared at her sisters—in droves.

  Or maybe it was cowardice, pure and simple, because she didn’t want to taste some of the throw–it–in–a–pot–and–pour–it–over–pasta "surprises" Nat had told her were his specialty.

  "How do they taste?" she’d asked him dubiously, considering the offer. "Will the kids eat them?"

  "Taste?" he’d responded, drawing his eyebrows together quizzically and raising them. "Kids?"

  He’d probably been laughing at her, but it was difficult to guess without a light in his eyes to confirm or belie the assumption, and she hadn’t, at that point, had the gall—or the forethought—to ask, so that had been the last discussion she’d had with him about who would fix the meals. She rationalized it to herself now as a civilian extension of her military duties: Gastro–intestinal Defense as opposed to Global Defense. Simple.

  Now, if only she didn’t feel she’d been had….

  She turned her back on the stove when a minor commotion broke the lull in her sisters’ conversation.

  "Me do it, me."

  Moving as fast as her chubby legs would carry her, Jane burst through the kitchen door, a brace of Brannigan cousins hot on her heels and Toby in close pursuit.

  "No, I get to do it."

  "No, me!"

  "Hey, hey!" Helen stepped in front of Jane, stooped and brought her to a stop, nieces, nephews and dog piling up behind her. "What did I tell you guys, huh? No running in the house. Somebody’ll get hurt." Oh, for pity’s sake and horrors above, she sounded just like her own mother. Ah well, no way to take it back now. "Now…" She settled on her haunches, caught Jane about the waist and tickled her. "What’s up, short miss? Where’re you goin’ so fast?"

  Jane giggled, but still managed to eye her competition aggrievedly. "Toby—"

  Hearing his name, the dog attempted to wedge himself into the huddle between Helen and Jane, lavishing kisses on them both. Helen lifted the dog’s chin out of the way to no avail. Struggling and sputtering, Jane shoved at his head, stamped her foot.

  "Toby, sit."

  Toby sat, then shoved his muzzle forward, snuffling Jane. She pushed his nose out of her way.

  "No," she said severely. "Not now." Still aggrieved, she looked at Helen. "Tern’l, Toby needsta doe out, Nat say me do it."

  "No he didn’t." A cousin, two years older and male. "He said we could do it."

  "Yeah."

  "Nat’s home?" Helen asked no one in particular, knowing he must be, since Toby was here. She wished her pulse would stop hammering with the knowledge. Was glad that the children, at least, were too concentrated on their own affairs to pay attention to hers. She brought her focus back to Jane.

  "No, me." The three–year–old shook her head vigorously, earnestly placed her hands on either side of Helen’s face, willing her to hear. "My job, Tern’l, my job."

  "Your job," Helen agreed, hugging her, "because in a big family like we have, everybody is important and everybody has to help and nobody is too little to do something, right?"

  "Not too little." Jane nodded emphatically. "My job."

  "Absolutely." Helen straightened. "You do it, but let Ben, Chris and Erin help."

  Jane wiggled out of Helen’s grasp. "Okay."

  "Can you get the door all right?"

  Already twisting the dark brass knob on the door that separated the kitchen from the basement landing and the door to the backyard, Jane nodded.

  "Be careful on the stairs." Oh, God, Helen was a mother, wasn’t she? Born to be the sayer of don’ts or be carefuls or not, she was saying them and meaning it.

  But of course, that had never really been the problem at all, had it? No, the problem wasn’t that she was afraid of being a mother, it was that she was afraid of having children she couldn’t send home, afraid of the awesome responsibility of raising them to be well–rounded, healthy adults. That was what bothered her most of all: she questioned her ability to raise happy, healthy children who would eventually become happy, healthy, fully functional adults.

  Disturbed by revelations she hadn’t intended to become acquainted with, Helen missed the looks her sisters gave her, the compressed lips that smothered smiles, the knowing eyes, the thoughtful faces that recognized opportunity when they saw it—and knew what to do with it.

  "Well." Edith cleared her throat, whether covering laughter or another emotion, Helen couldn’t tell. "Jane seems to be adjusting to the new order around here."

  "Most of the time." Helen nodded, craning her neck to watch her toddler carefully negotiate the stairs and the doors. "She’s pretty great."

  "How’re the others doing?" Alice asked gently.

  "Oh, you know…" Helen shrugged. "Some days better, some days not. Zach’s on an emotional roller coaster that’s starting to be fueled by hormones. He’s the hardest. I never know what to do, where Nat and I stand—" She stopped, regrouped. "Libby, of course, was born to stand on her head and have her world turn upside down every now and then. She charges forward without looking back the same way she’s always done.

  "Cara’s trying, but it’s not easy for her. I don’t do things the way Amanda did, and sometimes I forget to check and make sure Cara knows that I know she’s the oldest daughter and that I depend on her as much as her own mother did. I catch Nat looking like he’s trying to…" she paused, sought out the word "…see Cara sometimes, then looking like he’s glad he can’t. She looks so much like Amanda already, I think he’s half–relieved he can’t see her grow even more so.

  "And Max…" She smiled. "Nat has Max reading the calendar to him every day so he knows who’s got what appointments, and Max knows he has a very important job to do because if he doesn’t, Nat won’t know about stuff and gets left out of things. It seems to be good for them both, because I think Max wants to trust us, but he’s afraid we’ll leave him the way all his other paren
ts have. I haven’t said yes or no to Nat yet re The Marriage, but—" she slapped a fist into a palm for emphasis "—that’s a real reason in favor right there."

  "Yes, well, hmm." Meg coughed, cleared her throat. "Marriage is a huge commitment to make because of a kid who’ll grow up and be out of here in twelve or fifteen years," she suggested at last. "If you and Nat find out too late that you can’t get along and split up, it’d be even harder on Max and the other kids. At least if you’re only living in the same house, you don’t have to make the same… pledge to each other, you don’t have the same reasons to grow to hate each other. The kids might actually be happier. You ought to think about that."

  "I know, but well…" Helen hesitated, sorting through reasons that sounded like excuses, excuses that sounded like a car salesman’s snow job.

  In a pan on the stove, tomato sauce bubbled and spit, splattering red dots across the ceramic range. Glad for distraction, Helen turned, stirred, then absently dipped a spoon into the marinara, touched it to her upper lip, concentrating a moment on the taste. Needed a dash of… She rolled the flavor around on her tongue. Cilantro, maybe a smidge of… Worcestershire, yes that was it!

  Opening the fridge, she scanned the contents standing on the shelves in the door, found the Lea & Perrins; opened it and added a bit to the sauce; tasted again. Shut her eyes and savored. Ah, perfecto.

  Behind her, her sisters nearly choked to death, holding in their laughter. She ignored them; it was the only defense.

  "I mean," she continued, as though there’d been no gap in the conversation, reaching for an offhandedness that didn’t fool them—or her—for a minute, "as long as we’re supposed to… to raise the kids together, it’d be more… convenient to be married, that’s all. We could adopt them, they could all have the same last name, there’d be less confusion and fewer questions to answer all ’round, and…"