Protecting What's Mine(27)

Harper hurried over beaming. She appeared to be immune to Luke’s scowl. “Linc! I’m so glad you could make it. Don’t mind Luke,” she said to Mack. “He hates Linc.”

“I don’t hate him,” Luke grumbled. “I just don’t like him.”

“Well, that’s definite progress,” Linc said. He held up a platter. “I made a fruit tray. Where do you want it?”

A guy with thighs like that, with a smile like that, showing up with a homemade fruit tray? Mack felt her sexual interest emerge from hibernation.

Harper swooned over the artful display and carried it and Mack’s potato salad and ice cream sandwiches over to the food table.

“Kiss-ass,” Luke muttered to Linc. But he held his hand out.

“Asshole,” Linc said, amicably shaking his hand.

“Ignore them.” Gloria enveloped Mack in another breezy hug. She wore a flowy red top over high-waisted shorts. Her sandals wrapped around her ankle in multicolor threads. “It’s so good to see you, Mackenzie.”

“Hi, Dr. Mack,” Ava shouted from the top of the swing set in the corner of the yard.

“Hiiiiiii!” Sadie sprinted at Mack and threw her body into the doctor’s legs.

Mack leaned down to gingerly hug the kid.

“Up!” Sadie said gleefully, and Mack felt rather heroic as she hefted the girl onto her hip.

Sadie smashed her face against Mack’s cheek. “Muah! Okay, your turn!” She reached for Linc, and Mack gratefully handed her over. She had delivered a baby once and had done a pediatric rotation in med school.

That was the sum total of her kid experience.

Linc, showing off his prowess with small humans, tossed the little girl in the air. She giggled and the sound drew the attention of the rest of the kids.

“Me next!”

“No, me!”

Gloria grinned and tugged Mack in the direction of the grill and her husband. “I love it when Linc is at these things. He’s a built-in babysitter. Kids adore him.”

“I saw him with his nieces and nephew last weekend. He appears to be a natural,” Mack said.

“He certainly taught me a few things.” Gloria grinned.

Aldo ditched the tongs and picked up his beer. “How was your first week on the front lines of small-town health care?”

“Well, I didn’t know pinkeye could spread that quickly,” she joked.

“Dreamy, get you a drink?” Linc called from the cooler.

She gave him a thumbs-up, and he handed one of the kids a beer and directed her toward Mack.

“Dreamy, hmm?” Gloria said. “I heard our handsome fire chief sent you flowers this week.”

“He was being funny,” Mack insisted.

“Nothing says hilarious like a bouquet of wildflowers.”

It clicked then. Gloria managed the floral shop in town. “And you made the arrangement.”

Her smile was quick. “Guilty as charged. Linc swung by to personally sign the card, you know.”

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. Then I 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.