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He studied her for a long moment and Nicole had to force herself to stand still under his steady stare. Finally, though, he said only, “Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Now that we’ve got that settled, why don’t you get Connor and I’ll bring the burgers to the table?”
He was giving in too easily, she told herself, even though his voice was tight and his eyes were grim. He wasn’t happy about this, but Nicole told herself his happiness wasn’t her issue. Griffin was just going to have to learn that not every woman in the world rolled over when a King spoke.
She’d been standing on her own two feet for a long time now and she wasn’t about to let anyone—not even a well-meaning, would-be Knight in Shining Board Shorts—take control of what she did and didn’t do.
She turned around sharply and left him standing there, staring after her. By the time she had Connor’s hands washed and the boy secured in his booster seat, Griffin had already poured lemonade for all of them, including filling Connor’s sippy cup. He handed it to the boy and smiled when Connor snatched it and sucked at the straw.
“Apparently moving dinosaurs through the desert is thirsty work,” he said.
Relieved, Nicole smiled. Good, she was glad they’d left their previous conversation behind. Maybe he really was going to accept that she was in charge of what happened in her and her son’s lives.
“Everything he does is thirsty work.” She reached out and smoothed Connor’s hair back from his forehead before breaking up a burger and laying a few bite-sized pieces on his tray. “He’s never still. Always interested in new things, that’s Connor.”
“All boys are like that, I think. At least, my brothers and I were,” Griffin said, using a spatula to slide a burger onto her plate. “Our mom used to swear that one of us broke something every day.”
She spooned potato salad onto Griffin’s plate and then her own. “How many brothers do you have?”
He piled tomatoes onto his burger, added lettuce, then slapped the bun into place. Glancing at her, he smiled.
The power in that smile slammed into her and had Nicole’s insides squirming.
“I thought you had all of us Kings figured out by now.”
“I try, but you’ve got to admit, it’s hard to keep track.”
He laughed and something inside Nicole sizzled.
“Tell me about it. Hell—” He caught himself, glanced at Connor with a wince, then continued. “None of us are sure how many of us there are but as for brothers...I’ve got five.”
She blinked. “Seriously?”
Since she was an only child and her last living relative, her grandmother, had passed away several years ago, Nicole couldn’t even imagine having that much family. And oh, a part of her really envied Griffin his brothers, his cousins, all of them. Most people thought about the Kings and the first thing that came to mind was their fortune, or the power they all seemed to wield so easily.
But Nicole had seen the Kings at family barbecues, at christenings and weddings, and she knew that they were much more than just the powerful Kings of California.
They were a family.
Griffin laughed. “Yeah. My dad always said that as soon as one of us started walking, our mom wanted another baby.”
She looked at Connor and could totally understand. Nicole had wanted a lot of kids, too. But now it looked as though Connor would grow up as she had. An only child.
“But no matter how many of us there were and what we were into—football, baseball, basketball or scouts—Mom was always on top of things. We never could outwit her.”
“You were a Boy Scout?”
Her tone must have conveyed her disbelief, because he straightened up as if insulted and said, “I was. Garrett and I went all the way to Eagle. If you need to know how to survive in the wilderness with a piece of string and a pocketknife, just call us.”
Nicole looked at him and tried to imagine him as a kid, but couldn’t quite pull it off. His own fault, she thought, since he was far too overpowering as an adult to allow her to think of him as anything but an amazingly tempting man.
“Right. Eagle Scout. I’ll remember.”
He shrugged and took a bite of his burger. When he groaned in appreciation, that flutter inside her leaped into life again.
