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He shook his head. “I’m just sorry you got caught up in the mess.”
“It’s okay. How are your arms?”
He glanced down at the bandages. “They’re fine. Looks like we all are.”
Luna was busy scooting her way over to him. When she clim
bed up on his leg, he lifted her to sit next to Harper and then ran his fingers through each girl’s hair by turns.
“She liked you from the start.” Willow pointed to her daughter.
“What can I say? You have a smart baby.”
“She also was right about you.”
He’d wanted to hear words like those from her, but now he found them unsettling. Had she come to him only because he’d rescued her child?
“I don’t want you to feel beholden to me about Luna. In different circumstances, you would have done the same thing for Harper.”
Willow shifted. This wasn’t going the way she’d planned it at all. She needed to make him understand.
“I’m grateful to you, but if you think that’s why I’m here, then you’ve got it all wrong. I came to you because—”
“Lemonade,” Marlowe called out from outside the tent.
“Lousy timing.”
At his whispered words, Willow grinned.
Instead of Asher’s sister, Genevieve crouched outside the tent entry. “We also thought two little girls might need diaper changes.”
“Good idea,” he said.
Genevieve reached in, and he handed Harper out to her. Marlowe set the tray with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses on the cement outside the tent before her mother passed off the first baby to her. Then Asher shifted Luna into Genevieve’s arms.
With a few chuckles, the two women were gone.
Asher shook his head. “I can’t believe we were interrupted. Again.”
“I’m hoping we’ll have the chance to get used to interruptions. Big ones. Tiny ones. Hundreds of funny, sometimes annoying disruptions.”
“What are you saying?”
“That it’s something the parents of two infants—nearly twins—would have to deal with regularly.”
He cleared his throat. “Two?”
Willow nodded and gripped her hands together. She could do this. “So, before we’re interrupted again, I want to tell you that I came because... I’m in love with you.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but she couldn’t give him the chance to reject her until she’d said everything in her heart.
“Maybe we never should have met. We wouldn’t have, if not for a pair of grifters. You’re a Colton, for goodness’ sake.” She chuckled, but tears filled her eyes. “I’m not sorry. And I won’t be no matter what happens. Luna and I will be okay, but I did this for me. Loving you... It was worth it.”
She stared down at her hands and waited, a lump forming in her throat. It was so quiet in the tent that the sound of her own tight breathing filled her ears. Her heart squeezed. Well, at least she’d taken her shot. She’d had to know the truth.
“We were interrupted the night of the fire, too.”
She swallowed. “Yeah, I guess we were.”
