Free Undercover Father by Mary Anne Wilson Page A

least. “It doesn’t look too bad, actually.”
    “I take it everything’s okay?”
    “It is now. When we were on the phone, she screamed and the line went dead. Seems some huge orange cat got in and scared her to death.”
    Zane laughed out loud, then finally said, “That’s Joey. Someone should have warned her, I guess. He came with the loft, and we tried to bring him over here, but he runs away, and always shows up back there. I’ll have to tell Lindsey that he made it back again. He’s been gone for four days.”
    “He’s there, big, fat and scary.”
    “A perfect description,” Zane said with a chuckle. “I need to get going, but wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
    “Sure, everything’s fine,” he replied, the lie almost sticking in his throat. “Just fine.”
    “See you tomorrow,” Zane said, and hung up.
    Rafe tossed the cell phone onto the seat and gripped the steering wheel with both hands. “Fine,” he said again, just to hear the word and willing it to be so. It wasn’t, but he’d keep saying it, hoping that somewhere down the line, he might wake up one morning and things would be fine.
    By the time Rafe got home the boys were asleep and Carmella was ready to leave. She’d jumped at the chance to come to Houston so she could spend time with her sister. “A paid vacation,” she’d told him with delight. She’d been with the boys since they were born. She was a short, kind woman who had raised her own children, and now she was helping to raise his.
    She’d spent the day with the boys, getting them ready for the day care center tomorrow, explaining, as Rafe had instructed her, that they would be called Diaz. It was a game for them, and they’d fallen into it easily. They were excited about going to the center, about the game and being near Rafe. That was a relief. Rafe walked her out to her car so she could go to her sister’s, and waited until she was heading through the gates at the end of the driveway before he turned and went back inside the adobe ranch house.
    As soon as he closed the door, he started his routine, checking all the windows, all the doors, locking everything, then finally setting the alarm system he’d had upgraded the day he arrived. Compulsive, some called him, obsessed with the ritual, but he needed to do it. Needed to know his home was secure.
    He walked back through the darkened house, which was spread out on one level in a long U, with Spanish tile everywhere. The ranch house sat on a ten-acre property, with lots of room for the boys to run and play and have their dogs and horses. They’d never lived here before, and he’d only used it occasionally, when he had to be in the area. He’d bought it as a tax write-off, but now that he was here, he found he liked that it didn’t have a lot of memories built into it.
    He checked on Gabe and Greg in their bedroom, and found them in the same bed, the second one barely mussed. They were snuggled up together, sound asleep. He stared down at them, and could almost hear Gabriella saying they were his boys, looked just like him. He thought they looked like themselves. He pulled the covers up over them, kissed them both, neither of them stirring.
    He crossed and checked the windows, then finally went into the master bedroom right across the hall from them and flipped on the lights. The first thing he saw was the massive king-size bed on the wall opposite the French doors. It was made of heavy, rough-hewn timbers, dark and impressive, and looked very empty at that moment. He turned away, stripped off his uniform, put his gun in the lockbox in the closet, put on his bathing suit, then crossed to the door that looked out onto the terrace. He turned off the alarm for the doors, then went out into the softness of the night.
    Eschewing the pool beyond the security fence straight ahead, where he swam laps, he opted for the hot tub on the terrace. He slipped into the warm water, sank down and rested his head on the back