Dateline Matrimony (Hot off the Press! 3)

She seemed to have a great talent for falling in love with the wrong men.

The tap on her door was so quiet she barely heard it. Even though she knew who it would be, she checked the security viewer before she released the lock. After today, she wasn’t sure she would ever open her door again without a lingering uneasiness.

“I just wanted to make sure you and the kids are okay,” Riley said when she let him in. “How is Mark?”

“He’s okay. He was so exhausted he fell asleep almost before I turned off his light.”

“And Maggie?”

“Also sound asleep. I’ll listen for nightmares tonight, but they both seem to be okay.”

He glanced at the ugly, ragged hole in her entryway ceiling. “I can almost guarantee that I’m going to be having nightmares for a while. When Brannon grabbed Mark…”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Clasping her arms, Teresa swallowed hard and nodded. “I know. I was so scared. And then when you jumped at him…and I heard that gun go off…”

“I didn’t know what else to do. The way his face was flushing and his hands were beginning to shake, I could tell he was starting to lose whatever control he had. I knew I had to do something before he completely lost it.”

“I thought he had shot you.” She heard the starkness of her own voice.

He pulled her into his arms, laying his cheek on her hair. “I’m okay. We all are. It’s over.”

Burying her face in his throat, she drew a shuddering breath. “I know. It’s just going to take me a while to recover.”

“We’ll recover together.”

That brought her head up. He hadn’t meant that the way it sounded, she assured herself. He was only offering comfort. She wouldn’t let either of them get carried away by the aftereffects of terror. “I’m fine now, and so are the children,” she assured him, stepping out of his arms. “Thanks for checking on us, but we’ll be okay.”

“Just the three of you, right?”

She couldn’t quite read his tone, but she nodded. “Of course.”

“Sometimes I wonder if there’s any room for anyone else in the cozy family you’ve created.”

She had her arms wrapped around herself again, a purely defensive gesture. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Maybe I should be a bit more specific. Is there room for me, Teresa?”

Self-protective instincts drove her to take another step backward. “You don’t want to be a part of a family,” she reminded him, her throat tight. “You want to be completely unattached. Free to spend your evenings hanging out at Gaylord’s, having fun drinking and doing crazy, impulsive things.”

With a slight wince, he touched his left ear. “Have you once heard me say that I had fun last night? I had a miserable time. I spent the entire evening thinking about you and trying to pretend I wasn’t.”

“I can’t leave my children with sitters every night to go play with you. That’s not something I would be willing to do even once a week.”

“Nor would I ask you to,” he replied evenly. “Your kids deserve better than that.”

“Exactly. They deserve to come first with me.”

“No argument there. I’m asking if you think there’s a chance that I could come second with you, after the kids.”

She shook her head. “You don’t want to be talking about this now. You aren’t thinking clearly tonight. You’re getting carried away by everything that happened earlier—”

“What happened earlier scared the stuffing out of me,” he interrupted. “I would have willingly given my life to protect Mark and Maggie—and you. But that didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. I’d already decided how much you all meant to me.”

“When did you decide that?” she asked skeptically. “Before or after you pierced your ear?”

“Would you forget my ear?” he asked, sounding irritable and more like the Riley she knew so well. “That was an impulse. A souvenir, in a way.”

“A souvenir of what?”