Free Yours to Keep by Serena Bell Page B

company? Getting her own students couldn’t be easy. He guessed that she didn’t have a teaching degree. Maybe she didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree. Her family sounded painfully poor; it probably hadn’t been in the cards. But if she wasn’t going to volunteer that information, he wasn’t going to pry. “You must be really good at it, if what I’ve seen is any indication.”
    She smiled. “Thank you. I love teaching.” She handed him a dripping spatula. His fingertips touched hers. He almost grabbed her hand. He’d draw her close and—
    He could. He could do it. He knew how much he liked her now. And Theo obviously adored her.
    That was part of the problem, of course. Things had been good since she came into their lives, and now he owed it to Theo not to mess everything up. Not to rock the boat. What if he made a move on Ana and she reacted the way she’d reacted to Ed Branch, and refused totutor Theo anymore?
    He pulled his hand back and took a deep breath that did nothing to cool the burn he was feeling. He dried the spatula and slid it into the drawer.
    “What about you?” She submerged her hands again, seeking another dish. “What do you do?”
    “I’m a pediatrician.” He watched her closely. Women usually reacted, one way or the other, to that piece of information. Some of them had been raised to think that marrying a doctor was a legitimate personal goal. Others believed that doctors were snobby. Or too busy for families. They were rarely neutral on the subject.
    All she said was, “I bet that never gets boring.”
    “Never.”
    “Sometime I’ll make you tell me stories. When I’m not up to my elbows.”
    “I will. You’ll have to shut me up. I could talk all night.”
    That left a hollow moment of silence in the kitchen, while Ethan contemplated the idea of a conversation with Ana that went on all night.
    “Any hobbies?” she asked.
    “I watch football. Does that count?”
    She laughed, a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. “You like football? Marco and Angel, my nephews, both play. My brother was hoping they’d play baseball—it’s more Dominican, and he’s a crazy baseball buff—but no such luck.”
    “It’s probably a good thing Theo doesn’t play,” Ethan said. “I played in high school, but now that I’m a pediatrician it would scare the heck out of me. I’ve seen too many head traumas.” He’d tried never to show any outward disappointment at Theo’s lack of interest in the game, but he’d always secretly wished for a son who played.
    “Scares me a little,” Ana admitted. “Every time I go to one of Marco’s games. All those helmets cracking.” She’d finished washing the last of the dishes and had let the water out of the sink. She swiped at the sides with her sponge and bent over to empty the drain stopper into the trash. An enticing crescent of bare skin slipped into view between her shirt and her jeans, and his groin tightened painfully.
    What the hell had they been talking about? He shook his head to clear it. Football. “There shouldn’t be helmets cracking in high-school football. There shouldn’t be helmetscracking in the NFL, for God’s sake.”
    He saw her eyes flicker to the clock behind him, and turned to look. It was seven-fifteen. “We’d better get going,” he said.
    “The thing is, I don’t mind questions if the person asking them is honestly, genuinely interested in who I am,” Ana told Ethan.
    They were in his car, barreling along Route 50 toward Hawthorne, and she’d been thinking about their conversation in the kitchen.
    “I don’t like it when I feel like people are asking me questions because they’re hoping to catch some juicy gossip or because they’ve convinced themselves that showing concern is the right thing to do,” she said.
    He was as beautiful in profile, driving, as he was face-to-face. His features appeared to have been chiseled by a sculptor from the darkness. His hair, despite the chaos that the waves