Page 56 of A Dream for Daphne

He laughed over the forced appalled look on her face.

“Not me,” he said. “I’m old school. I like to know what I’m getting.”

He was scrubbing his face and pulled the cloth away to see the red on it. “It’s gone,” she said. “I don’t even want to know what it is.”

“Spray paint,” he said. “The wind must have kicked up when I was marking things. We’re moving to the path toward the dock now.”

“I spent some time there yesterday with Poppy,” she said. “She knows about us.”

He nodded his head. “That’s fine. I doubt she has an issue with it. She was trying to set us up.”

“She was. She’s taking some credit for this. I let her. I don’t need or want anyone to know about before.”

“That’s fine,” he said. No way he was admitting that Easton knew. “I did tell my cousin and Laurel about you. I had them over for dinner last night. Laurel said she met you.”

“She did one day in the plant.”

“She wants us to have dinner together at some point. Says she can totally see us together.”

He knew his smile was filling his face. “It seems everyone is saying that. I’m not sure I like the pressure of it.”

His smile dropped. The last thing he needed was some other roadblock in their way.

“Don’t think anything of it.” He handed back the dirty cloth since he didn’t want to put it in his pocket. “Hi, Holly.”

“Can I ride on that?” Holly asked, pointing toward his bucket loader making its way past the house to the other side where they’d start digging.

“I don’t think it’s meant for little girls,” he said. “Maybe when you’re a bit bigger.”

“I can sit on your lap,” Holly said. “Daddy lets me sit on his lap when I’m too small.”

He looked at Daphne and saw the tender look in her eyes. He liked kids and always knew he’d have some one day too.

“That’s a work machine,” Daphne said. “It could hurt you. I don’t even want to get on it. You have to be the right person to drive it and I’m not.”

“But I want to,” Holly insisted. “I want to pick up dirt and dump it.”

Holly ran back to the box, picked up a shovel full of dirt and threw it in the air.

“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’ll get sand on the baby and then he’ll cry. We don’t want that, do we?”

“I like dirt,” Holly said, tossing more in the air.

“I think I’ll take my leave,” he said, grimacing. “Sorry.”

“Geez, thanks,” she said. “Good to know you run when the going gets tough.”

He saluted her. “You betcha.”

He took off in a walk toward his men while he heard Daphne calmly explain why throwing dirt wasn’t a good thing.

“What’s going on over there?” Mac asked.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“You talking with the nanny,” Mac said. “She’s sweet on the eyes. You trying to get a piece of that?”

He knew Mac was joking, but it still set an avalanche of emotions cascading down his body to hear Daphne talked about like that.

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