Loe raamatut: «The Matchmaking Twins»

Chapter One

Officer Maria Carmen Delgado had once come under heavy fire while guarding some of the most remote military encampments in the world before leaving the Marine Corps to become a cop, patrolling the roughest gang neighborhoods in Las Vegas. But eight-year-old twins Aiden and Caden Gregson of Sugar Falls, Idaho, were certainly going to be the death of her.

“Boys,” she said as she unlocked the driver’s-side door to her squad car. “I told you that if you were going to ride along with me, you had to promise to stay in the backseat of the Explorer.”

“Sorry, Officer Carmen,” Aiden said, looking anything but remorseful. “Chief Cooper was calling you on the radio, and we had to tell him that you were ten-seven ’cause you were taking a leak. We couldn’t figure out the secret code for the leak part.”

When she’d volunteered for the after-school mentorship program at Sugar Falls Elementary, she’d expected to get assigned as a quasi-big-sister to some disadvantaged young girl. She hadn’t expected the director to pair her up with a couple of identical little boys with a penchant for mischief and a knack for speaking their overly bright minds.

Normally she only hung out with the Gregson twins when she was off duty. But the officer scheduled to relieve her had come down with the flu and the small-town police department was still new and slightly understaffed, so she’d volunteered to stay late and cover his shift. Since Carmen didn’t like letting anyone down, she’d gotten special permission to pick the boys up from school in her patrol vehicle and bring them back to the station. It would only be for an hour, she’d told herself. What trouble could they possibly get into in that amount of time?

She should’ve known better.

So far, they’d already locked themselves inside a jail holding cell, lost a week’s worth of their allowance money by betting the dispatcher she couldn’t finish their math homework and got kicked out of the local Gas N’ Mart.

And now they’d just told her boss that she’d been taking a leak. Actually, Carmen wished it was just that simple to use the restroom while wearing all her tactical gear along with her police uniform—especially since she went more frequently following her surgery.

Because she couldn’t very well take the boys inside the ladies’ room with her, she’d told them to stay put inside her cruiser and asked Scooter Deets, one of the older volunteer firefighters who was parked nearby, to keep an eye on the twins. Apparently, ol’ Scooter was no better at maintaining control than she was.

Carmen shook her head, thankful the bobby pins securing her coiled bun prevented her hair from being as frazzled as her nerves.

“I knew I never should have let you guys learn our radio codes. You two are in violation of ten-thirty and about to become ten-fifteens,” she said, referring to their unauthorized use of police equipment.

“Wait.” Caden pulled out the little notepad he’d started carrying in his pocket lately. “What’s a ten-fifteen again?”

“It’s a prisoner in custody,” his twin brother answered before flashing his cheeky smile, minus two recently lost incisors.

“Hey, Officer Carmen, will you teach us Spanish, too?”

“Vámanos, mi liositos,” she said before shooing them out of the front and using the handheld radio mic to respond to her boss.

“Sorry about that, Chief,” she said after his voice crackled on the other end. “The Gregson twins are officially on administrative suspension for disobeying a direct order to stay put in the backseat.”

“Roger that,” her boss said. “Tell them that their dad came by the station to pick them up, but since you all were still out, I told Luke that you’d meet him at the Little League fields. You can drop them off there.”

Her belly twisted and she resisted the urge to throw the mic out the window. Captain Luke Gregson, the twins’ father, was the last person she wanted to see today. Or, really, any day for the matter. But she couldn’t say that to Chief Cooper.

“Ten-four,” she replied instead, before clicking off. Then she turned to her two mischievous passengers. “Buckle up, kiddos.”

“Can we go Code Three with the lights and sirens and everything?” Caden asked as she pulled the vehicle back onto the main highway and headed toward the small park on the other side of town. “Dad’s gonna make us do extra laps if we’re late to practice.”

She should’ve just taken the boys to the ball fields after school and let them run wild. Maybe if they got more of their energy out, they wouldn’t be prone to getting into so much trouble. Not that anyone ever really disciplined the adorable rascals.

And speaking of their lack of discipline, by having to take them directly to baseball practice, she’d be forced to shoot the breeze with their father, the hunky and obviously heartbroken Captain Gregson. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the handsome and widowed Navy SEAL turned recruiter. Or that Carmen didn’t know how to talk to men. It was just that the man had this extremely frustrating habit of treating Carmen like she was one of the guys.

Of course, she couldn’t really blame him, or the rest of the males in the small touristy town of Sugar Falls. With her long black hair always pulled into a tight no-nonsense bun and a complete lack of makeup, Carmen was used to working in a male-dominated environment and having to fit in with the good ol’ boys.

It was difficult for people to see that beneath the Kevlar vest and the blue polyester unisex uniform, she was still one-hundred-percent female. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, she rested the other one underneath her sturdy leather duty belt and rubbed along her longest scar. Well, she was mostly female.

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and tried to focus on the innocent chatter of the eight-year-olds behind her. In her brain, she knew that she was a strong woman and her ability to have children, or lack thereof, should not define her.

But there was always that niggling sense of what she’d lost.

“Hey, Officer Carmen,” Caden said, breaking her negative reverie. “Are you gonna be at our game this Saturday? Dad and Coach Alex said I could be lead batter.”

Carmen sagged against her seat, wishing she could go to all the twins’ games. But no matter how much the two charming troublemakers were growing on her, she’d rather relive her emergency surgery than be faced with spending more time near their father, Captain Dimples.

Luke had returned to town only a month after she’d taken the position with the Sugar Falls Police Department. When she’d been in the Marine Corps, she’d heard about his elite Special Ops team who’d carried out some of the deadliest missions in Afghanistan. Of course, she hadn’t thought that one of its members would eventually end up living in the same small city. Or that said member would have such adorable kids, who needed more supervision than the single dad could provide.

She especially didn’t know that he’d be so damn good-looking.

“I’m not sure about this weekend,” Carmen said. “We’ll see what my schedule looks like.”

“Aw, c’mon, Officer Carmen,” Aiden chimed in. “Ever since Aunt Kylie had her babies, we’re the only kids on the team who don’t have someone in the stands cheering for us.”

Her chest grew heavy with guilt and she tugged on her weighted vest as if she could physically relieve the pressure. Here she’d been feeling sorry for herself and the fact that she’d never have a family of her own, yet these poor young children had to grow up without a mom. As much as she’d bonded with the two wild and wonderful boys, was she doing them all a disservice by allowing herself to get too close to them when what they really needed was a mother figure?

She was usually much more empathetic than this, which was why she’d been a good MP and an even better cop in Vegas. It was why she’d made the big move to a small town like Sugar Falls in the first place. She needed to find herself again.

And she needed to get her emotions in check.

She pulled into the dirt lot behind the bleachers and was saved from making any additional commitments by the sudden appearance of the tall, muscular, blond male walking toward them and waving.

Her stomach grew uncomfortable and she almost undid her seat belt, thinking the baton attached to her duty belt had shifted and was digging into her flesh. But she knew the feeling well enough to realize it wasn’t from anything she was wearing. She got that same tightening of her insides every time she saw Captain Luke Gregson.

“Hey, monkeys,” he said to his children as he leaned into the open driver’s-side window. “Did you guys catch any crooks today?” His face was close enough that she could see where he’d cut himself shaving this morning. And she could smell the lemon and oak moss scent of his aftershave.

Button it up, Delgado, she told herself.

“Well, we almost stopped a robbery at the Gas N’ Mart,” one of the kids said from the backseat. But Carmen was so focused on not attaching her nose to the tanned and fragrant skin on Luke’s neck that she couldn’t tell which of the boys was talking. “We were getting our slushies and a man walked in with his hat pulled down past his eyebrows and he was reaching into his back pocket, like he was gonna pull out a gun.”

Luke raised one brow, clearly aware of his children’s fondness for exaggeration. Carmen should interject here, but she was too busy commanding her tummy to relax to get any words out.

“So, me and Caden made a run for him, ’cause we were gonna karate chop him up before he could start shooting down the place.”

“Oh, crap,” Luke muttered, and she finally got her hormones under control so she could explain.

“Don’t worry.” She put her hand up as though she could physically stop his thoughts. Then she returned it to the wheel when she realized how close it was to touching his face. “It was only Scooter Deets, and he was reaching for his wallet, not a gun.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t recognize him ’cause he wasn’t wearing his normal Boise State cap. His new goat chewed a hole clean through it, and now he has to wear a diff’rent one until he goes into the big city next month.”

The big city was Boise. It was only an hour’s drive down the mountain, but it was probably a yearly excursion for a local like Scooter.

“So nobody actually got hurt?” Luke asked. Was it her imagination or was his sudden release of air a little too warm and minty? “There wasn’t any damage?”

“Well, Scooter didn’t really get hurt ’cause we landed on all those chips when we jumped at him. But Mrs. Marconi told Officer Carmen that someone was gonna hafta pay for a new display stand since hers is all bent up now.”

Luke drew his fingers through his short military-cut hair. Carmen had seen the exasperated mannerism several times just this past month and knew the poor dad was once again frustrated at his children’s antics. “Okay, boys. Hop out and go warm up for practice. I already put your gear in the dugout.”

“Do we hafta do extra laps?” Aiden wanted to know as they exited her car.

“You will if you don’t mind your manners and thank Officer Delgado for putting up with you two this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Officer Carmen,” Aiden said. Ever since she’d taken the job with the police department, the twins were the only people in town who called her by her first name. Well, actually her middle name, since Maria Carmen was a mouthful even to her.

“Yeah, thanks,” Caden added. “We’ll see you next Tuesday again. And maybe Saturday for the game, remember?”

After this afternoon, she was looking forward to a little peace and quiet. But would it really be almost a whole week before she’d get to see them again?

“I’ll see you next Tuesday, but I don’t know about Saturday, yet.” Unfortunately, her last sentence wasn’t even heard by the two boys who were now running toward their teammates.

“So, do I really have to pay for a new chip display at the Gas N’ Mart?” Luke asked.

Uh-oh. He was still there. And her little towheaded buffers had made a beeline for the field. She shifted her hips to the right, but because of her holster knocking into the seat belt buckle, she couldn’t scoot any farther away from him.

“It really didn’t look too busted to me,” she said, thankful she was wearing her mirrored aviator sunglasses. Hopefully Luke couldn’t tell that she was barely able to make eye contact with him. “I set it back up and the boys put all the bags that didn’t burst open back on the shelves. I was going to have them clean up the broken chips, but I think Elaine Marconi just wanted us to get out of there at that point. She was annoyed, but she has kids of her own so she didn’t seem too put out. I’ll have the chief let you know if she files a claim for damages.”

There. She’d directed any future conversation through her boss, who also happened to be Luke’s friend. While she loved spending time with his funny and impulsive children, being around the man himself caused the butterflies fluttering around in her stomach to migrate straight to her brain.

“Those boys are going to be the death of me,” he said, voicing aloud the exact thought she’d had forty minutes ago. His forearms now rested on her windowsill, as though he wasn’t planning to shove off anytime soon.

“Anyway, I’m sorry we’re late. It was my fault,” she said quickly, hoping he’d take the hint that she was in a hurry to finish the conversation.

“Don’t worry about it. Listen, I really appreciate you spending time with them after school. I’m sure you have much more important things to do around town than play big sister to a couple of little monkeys.” The way he smiled showed his dimples to advantage and indicated that he used the nickname for his kids out of affection.

But she wasn’t particularly fond of the way he classified her into his sons’ peer age range, as if she wasn’t just a few years younger than Luke, himself. At least he’d said sister, though, and not brother. That was something, right?

As much as she wanted to get far, far away from his sexy grin, politeness dictated she respond. “Actually,” she said, “you may find this hard to believe, but the Sugar Falls PD doesn’t see too much action on the weekdays. Foiling a nonrobbery at the Gas N’ Mart has been the most exciting thing to happen on one of my shifts since last January when those tourists didn’t check out of the Snow Creek Lodge by eleven o’clock.”

She clamped her lips tightly together after she spoke. Why did she do that? Why did she always downplay the importance of her job—the value of her abilities? Shrinks would probably say it was some type of residual defense mechanism from growing up in her oversize machismo family or trying not to stand out in a male-dominated profession.

“Still, I know they’re in good hands with you.” Did the man ever stop smiling? “Coop said you outwrestled half his force in defensive tactics training last week.”

“That’s not saying much considering we only have four other officers on staff.” There she went again. She should be proud that she was an expert in martial arts. But she didn’t want Luke to think of her as some juiced-up, studly gladiator. She wanted him to see her as…

Stop. It was this kind of foolish thinking that would seriously undermine all the work she’d put into getting her mind right and her head back in the game since she’d broken up with Mark and moved here. Man, she needed to get away from Luke and her AWOL thoughts.

Thinking quickly, she reached beneath the dashboard and double clicked on the mic of her bandwidth radio, causing the volunteer dispatcher to respond. Carmen clicked on the mic again, then leaned down toward the radio as though she was listening to something Luke couldn’t hear.

The resulting static probably wouldn’t fool a former SEAL, but she went through the pretense of answering a phony call out. “Ten-four. I’m en route.”

She looked back at him as she put the vehicle in gear. “Gotta run,” she said, barely waiting for him to move his arms off the window before tearing out of the dirt lot.

That was the worst fake radio call out Luke had ever seen. And he should know. He’d trained as a communications specialist before going through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training.

He watched Officer Delgado drive off, gravel crunching and dust flying. Why had she been in such a hurry to get away from him? Was he giving off that lonely “I need to talk to someone who understands kids” vibe again? He rubbed his forehead, then dragged his fingers through his hair before shoving his hands in his jeans pockets.

His twin brother, Drew, said it was obvious whenever Luke was missing the guys from his unit—or worse, when he’d been in the cabin all weekend with his squirrelly sons and he needed adult conversation—because it was the only time Luke uttered more than a few sentences.

But moving to Sugar Falls to become a full-time dad, changing assignments from team leader of an elite Special Forces unit to pushing paper at the naval recruiting office outside of Boise…well, it was all proving to be more challenging than he’d anticipated.

Luke poked his athletic shoe at some tiny rocks that had been kicked up from Carmen’s patrol car as she’d blasted out of the lot. The action was instinctive, as though his feet needed the physical reminder that he was actually standing on solid ground.

He thought back to the night before Samantha’s accident several years ago. Luke had been in a training exercise where the team was being hoisted from the ocean and into a hovering Osprey helicopter. It was dark and the water was choppy, with waves crashing over his head. When it had been his turn, part of his safety harness ripped and he’d had to hold on to the cable with his bare hands to keep from dropping. He’d dangled like that, with the chopper blades stirring up more wind force than the actual storm, for at least a minute before being pulled up to safety.

Ever since his wife had died, he hadn’t been able to shake that feeling of being suspended in the air, swinging above a raging dark sea and holding on as if his life depended on it.

“Hey, Dad,” Aiden yelled from the outfield. “Are ya comin’ or what?”

He waved at the boy and started to jog toward the dugout. He needed a good run tonight. Something that would clear his thoughts or at least make his mind too tired to think.

“How’s Officer Delgado today?” Alex Russell, the team coach, asked Luke when he finally made it back to the dugout. He liked Alex, whose family owned the local sporting goods store, but he didn’t like the sly half smile the man was now wearing.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Even Luke heard the unfamiliar agitation in his voice.

“I’ve just noticed that she’s been dropping the boys off at practice a few weeks in a row.”

“Yeah, that mentorship program at the school finally found someone who was willing to take them on. Once a week, I have to stay at the recruiting office later and can’t pick the boys up, so I think Delgado must’ve taken pity on them—the people who work at the after-school program, that is.”

“Some kids have all the luck.”

His kids? Lucky? No way. They’d already lost their mom before they could really remember her and they’d been bounced around with various relatives while Luke had played Captain Save-the-World. Now it was taking a whole ski resort village to raise the lovable little hellions. “What do you mean?”

“Not only do they get to hang out with a cop, which would be any boy’s dream, but they get to ride around with the hottest one on the force.”

“Officer Delgado?” Okay, so Luke was faking the surprise in his voice. The woman was naturally beautiful with those classic high cheekbones and full lips, but he’d quickly gotten the impression from the woman herself, as well as most of the other men in town, that she definitely was not on the market—not that he was, either. So then why was Alex bringing up her hotness?

“C’mon. Like you haven’t noticed the way she fills out that uniform.”

Sure he had, and he wanted to take the aluminum bat leaning against the fence and swing it at the head coach for even suggesting that he’d noticed, too.

Whoa. Shake it off, Gregson. What was up with the irrational jealousy?

“I try not to,” Luke said, his jaw locking around each word. And that was true. He felt guilty sometimes just for looking at her.

“Hell, we all try not to, Luke. She obviously isn’t the type to flaunt anything and probably wouldn’t appreciate it if we were noticing. She’s all business, that one.” Alex picked up a glove and patted his shoulder before walking out of the dugout. “Let’s get started, boys!”

Maybe Luke wasn’t the only guy in town who Officer Delgado wasn’t warming up to. He should be somewhat relieved that it wasn’t just him. Still, the woman turned into a block of ice whenever he spoke to her, and he didn’t know what to make of that. Luke wasn’t usually so chatty, but he’d tried to talk to her about things they could possibly have in common—like the military or martial arts. Once, he even asked her what she bench-pressed because, clearly, the shapely woman worked out. Yet, unless they were talking about the twins, she shut down completely every time.

She’d made it plain that she was indifferent to him, but for some damn reason, anytime he was within a few feet of her, he couldn’t get his mouth to stop yapping.

Not that he was actually interested in Carmen like that. Or in any woman, for that matter. When he’d been active on the team and going to bars with his single buddies, he’d had no problem charming the ladies. But those days were over soon after he’d met Samantha.

After his wife died, it had taken him a while to get his head back on straight, and he wasn’t entirely convinced he’d succeeded yet. He used to think that volunteering for the most dangerous missions and staring his fears in the face would make him feel more in control. Then, after a near-death experience last summer, he realized he couldn’t be so selfish as to put Aiden and Caden at risk of becoming total orphans. So he’d settled down and aimed for the safety net of Sugar Falls.

Now all his charm was exclusively used for smoothing over the trouble his children unintentionally caused. So far, neither his charm nor his commitment to his children had diminished that dangling, out-of-control feeling he still got. To make matters worse, when Carmen Delgado was around, his safety net seemed further away than ever—and he wasn’t sure he could survive another free-fall.