Page 38 of Protecting What's Mine

Both women skimmed their gazes over the man who was grazing at the food table and keeping up an animated discussion with Sadie.

It didn’t mean anything. They were flirting. Flirts flirted.

“Well, thank you both for making me feel so welcome,” Mack said lamely.God, her small talk was rusty.

“We’ll have you feeling smothered in no time,” Aldo predicted.

“How’s the firm doing?” she asked him.

“Good. Swamped. We’re bringing on another engineer. This bridge project turned out to be a massive undertaking.” As he talked, he draped his arm around Gloria’s slim shoulders. It was a casual gesture, one Mack wasn’t sure if he was conscious of. His wife curled into him as if she had always belonged in his arms.

It was…sweet. Romantic. Beautiful to see a man who’d sacrificed so much finally be rewarded.And what the hell was in this beer? A love potion?

“Daddy!” The tiniest Vietnamese toddler raced over to Aldo, heedless of the giant smoking grill behind him. She threw herself at the man with the confidence of a little girl who knew that her dad would always catch her.

“There’s my girl,” Aldo said, swinging her up on his hip and giving her a noisy kiss between her lopsided, black pigtails. “Lucia, say hello to Dr. Mack.”

“Hi! Do you like dinosaurs or ponies better?” Lucia demanded.

“Hi. Um. Dinosaurs?” Mack answered.

Lucia gave an approving nod. “Good. Me, too. Daddy, can I have a snack?”

“Listen here, snack weasel,” Gloria said, tickling her daughter under the arms and then transferring her to her own hip. “Dinner is in fifteen minutes. You may not have a snack, but you will eat every bite of your delicious dinner, and you’ll say thank you to everyone who made the food.”

Lucia’s brow furrowed. “Okay.ThenI can have a snack?”

Mack smothered a laugh.

Aldo watched his wife and daughter wander off, still arguing. “Ain’t life something?”

“This side of five years, and I was hauling your ass across the desert in a helicopter,” Mack mused. “And now here you are.”

“And now here we are,” he said. “Come meet the newest member of the family.”

She followed him across the yard to where the stocky woman was bellowing sweet sentiments into a wide-eyed baby’s face.

“You are just the cutest little baby in the whole wide world,” Mrs. Moretta shouted.

“Ma! Avery’s not deaf. You’re piercing her eardrums,” Aldo said, sweeping the baby out of his mother’s grip.

“I’m not piercing her eardrums! She loves when I talk to her!”

“Ma, this is Mackenzie O’Neil. I believe you screamed at her on the phone once.”

Mrs. Moretta gave Mack a formidable stare. “You the one who saved this dumbass’s life?”

“Uh. One of them,” Mack said.

The woman wrapped her in what apparently was the Moretta family back-breaking hug. “You’re okay by me, doc.”

“Ma, please stop strangling her,” Aldo said, trying to wedge his way between them.

Reluctantly, Mrs. Moretta released Mack from her death grip. “You’re a good girl, honey,” the woman said at an almost conversational level.

“Now that you can breathe, this is our daughter Avery,” Aldo said, holding up the round-cheeked baby. She had Aldo’s complexion, Gloria’s eyes, and, so far, she hadn’t demonstrated Mrs. Moretta’s vocal cords. But Mack wasn’t ruling out the possibility.

The baby gave her a toothless, drooly grin, and Mack felt a funny, mushy sensation in her chest.