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“Hey, you’re cold,” Alec said. Sidestepping, he drew up behind her and put his arms around her body, bringing her back against his heat.
This time she reacted with a full-body tremble. “I must have gotten chilled,” she said, breaking free of him. “I think I’ll go to the cabin until we dock.”
Naturally, he came with her.
But it was safer there, where almost all of the other sightseers now congregated, taking up hot or cold drinks and partaking of a buffet of appetizers and desserts. Alec snagged them both another glass of wine and then they found a small space to stand.
Still too close, Lilly thought, grimacing. But she couldn’t really make a big fuss about it when it was she who had claimed there was no reason they couldn’t be friendly.
Directing her attention away from him, she saw the same kids from earlier sitting at a nearby table, now drawing what she supposed might be dolphins and whales on blank sheets of paper. Her little friend glanced up and gave her a wave.
Smiling, Lilly waved back, and the kid held up her artistic creation for her appraisal. Blue squiggles and a couple of enthusiastic but sloppy green circles. She put two thumbs up, now grinning.
“Cute,” Alec said.
She glanced at him, noting he was looking at her instead of the child. Flushing again, she stared into her glass of wine as if she found it fascinating.
“I can see you as a mom. You’d be great.”
Aghast, her chin shot up, her head swiveled, and she gawked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. I have absolutely no maternal skills.”
“You don’t need skills. I bet you can get skills from YouTube videos or a What to Expect book. You need instincts, Lilly. And you’ve got those in spades.”
“Huh?” The notion that she’d be any good at all with small persons continued to flummox her.
“You’re loyal. Sympathetic. And I bet you’re great with details.”
“That’s motherly?” she questioned. “It sounds more like a dog who can also fill out tax forms.”
“It’s a damn good start on motherly. Throw in an adorable infant with your sweet face and hopefully the daddy’s less thorny personality and you’ll be in family heaven.”
She wanted to retort that most people didn’t find her particularly thorny, but that was a lie, and then she thought of the phrase “family heaven” and got sidetracked. Family had never meant heaven to her, but she could see why Alec would use that phrase, coming from Thatcher perfection.
“It’s you who should have kids,” she replied. “Be a dad like the one you have, smart and also wise in the ways of living.” Raise two point five secure, sheltered-from-hard-knocks kids who would strut through life without chips on their shoulders or barbed wire around their hearts or danger in their DNA. This is how Durands love.
Alec looked away this time. “My dad used to spend a lot of time at the office. He wasn’t always as…present as he is now. I don’t know that I’d do any better.”
Suddenly Lilly hated the turn of this conversation. How had it come to this? Imagining Alec procreating with some woman to produce a nursery full of little Thatchers put her in a sour mood.
“You know, Audra and Jacob were talking about having children right away,” she said, her bad temper evident in her voice. “He agreed with her they should start trying during the honeymoon. But that didn’t turn out to be, did it?”
It felt good, in a weird way, to poke at the wound of the wedding-that-wasn’t. To remind them both they were here together in this moment because a romance had gone awry.
Alec made a noise suspiciously like a snort. “And her walls rise up again,” he murmured.
If her throat hadn’t tightened right then to the size of a straw, she might have ground out some home truths to explain her bone-deep instinct for self-preservation. My mother abandoned me to people who never loved me. A man has never taken my side in anything. Every day I look in the mirror and I look at my best friend and I see object lessons in all the reasons not to get into a relationship and surely not to dream of a husband or something as impossible for Lilly Durand as family heaven.
