Free The Real Father (Twins) (Harlequin Superromance No. 927) by Kathleen O`Brien Page A

Liza’s earnest little face as she went over her work, gluing the glamour onto her wonderful fantasy moon, and the urge to laugh faded. This was an amazing child.
    But what had he expected from Molly’s daughter? He remembered Molly herself at that age, bent over a frostbitten lilac, focused, intense, determined, as if this were the last flower on the planet, as if she could somehow will life back into the blackened petals.
    â€œOkay, let’s see if we can make it stay. Where’s the hook?” He took the large white-iron hanger from Molly’s hand, climbed on the chair and pressed the screw end of the metal into the beam. Nothing. Molly was right—the wood had hardened over thepast hundred years, and it was almost like trying to break through metal.
    But if she believed he could hang the moon, then he’d hang the thing or die trying. He pushed harder, refusing to let the strain show on his face—God, was that adolescent show-off still lurking in his psyche? “Look, M! No hands!”—and finally the oak surrendered, and the point pierced through.
    After that, it was easy. She handed up the slender fishing line that almost invisibly extended from the ball, and he slipped it over the curve of the hook. A thousand twinkling gold moonbeams shot across the walls, across the sleeping little girl, across Molly’s happy smile, turned up toward him like a gift.
    â€œVoilà,” he said softly. “Let there be moonlight.”
    She put out her hand, sweetly—though irrationally—offering to help him down, as if her fragile form could possibly hold his weight. But he took it, because it would have been rude not to. Because it would have been impossible not to. It had always been impossible for him not to take whatever she offered.
    The chair rocked as he descended, and she inhaled, startled, putting her hands on his shoulders while he got both feet back on the floor.
    â€œCareful,” she said, running her fingers along his sleeve, checking to be sure he was stable.
    He couldn’t have been less so. Though the ground was solid beneath his feet, his brain was reeling, trying to find center. But she was too close. Herhand was on his arm, her warmth seeping into him. Her eyes were so liquid-blue in the lamplight that, looking into them, he stopped breathing. He felt his interior shift, as if his whole body had been constructed over a dangerous, unseen fault line.
    He didn’t speak, and neither did she, but something passed between them anyway. Slowly, over long, elastic seconds, her lips parted, and her eyes widened. Her fingers tightened on his sleeve, and her breath hitched, tight and shallow.
    â€œMolly,” he whispered. He touched her cheek. “God, Molly—”
    At the sound of his voice, she blinked. She frowned. And then she pulled away.
    â€œMolly—”
    â€œI’m— Oh, God, I’m sorry.” She ran her hands through her hair, then wiped them across her face, as if trying to wake herself up from a confusing sleep. “Oh, Jackson, I am so sorry.”
    She faced him, her eyes pinched with distress. “I didn’t mean to—” She took a deep breath. “I think it’s just that… Being here, you know? After all this time. And you—” She shook her head helplessly. “You understand, don’t you? It’s just that, for a minute there, you looked so much like Beau.”
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    â€œI MUST HAVE BEEN CRAZY ,” Molly muttered under her breath as she tried to make her way to the one remaining empty park bench. “Mad, roaring crazy. If you hadn’t looked at me like that, with your eyes all big and pitiful, you’d still be at home with your head in a flowerpot.”
    Stewball, the thirteen-year-old springer spaniel who had always belonged to the Forrest family, didn’t hear her, of course. He was slightly deaf, and he was not interested anyway. He didn’t know he was