Page 112 of Lawbreaker

“I like her, too. Especially now that she’s all done matchmaking,” he added darkly.

She grinned at him.

He made a face.

It was too cold to sit on the porch after supper, so everybody sprawled around in the living room, where logs crackled and spit in the huge open fireplace.

“Have you thought about names yet?” Cole asked.

“I’ve only been pregnant a few weeks,” Odalie pointed out.

Heather hit Cole with a magazine. “He started working on names the minute we knew I was carrying Tanner,” she pointed out. “He carried baby books around in his pocket. That was before cell phones,” she reminded them with a chuckle.

“There were some great names,” Cole mused.

“Murgatroyd. Rufus. Cornwallis.” Heather was glaring at him.

“Those were unusual names,” he said.

“Very.”

“Your mother has no sense of adventure,” Cole informed them.

“Alyson.” Heather almost spat it at him.

“If you’d named me Alyson, I’d be carrying a big bat around with me and I’d hit you with it twice a day,” Tanner informed his father.

“Your mother wanted to name you Merryweather,” Cole pointed out.

Tanner glared at her. “Two bats. You’d get a turn also.”

They all laughed.

But later, after the rest of the family turned in, when Odalie and Tony were sitting together on the sofa, he looked through one of the baby-name books Cole had left.

“You know, names really are important,” he said, his voice deep and soft in the silence of the room, broken only by the snap and crackle of the wood burning in the fireplace.

“Well, we have several months to think about them,” she reminded him.

He smoothed her head against his broad chest. “At least we have baby books online,” he mused as he put the paper book down on the table.

She laughed. “Imagine dad being so wrapped up in names.”

“Men get all gooey when we think about babies,” he teased.

She looked up at him. “You really thought you were sterile?”

He nodded. “It was one reason I drew back from you. Well, that, and that beautiful voice.” He grimaced. “I still feel guilty.”

“That I’m not singing at the Met? I would have spent every night of my life throwing up.”

He scowled.

“Stage fright,” she said quietly. “I have it to an alarming degree. Years of therapy, years of hiding it from my family. I love singing. But I hate singing in front of people. It’s why I didn’t do the regional competitions. I knew I’d never make it through them. One day, I might do recordings, or something like that. But life is too short to spend it going crazy over fear of performing.”

“You never told me.”

“I never told anybody,” she said. “People expected me to do great things.” She grimaced. “The only great thing I wanted to do was live with you and have babies.”