“Not everybody…people kiss without getting married.” Oh, man. “Marriage is a really important thing. You should know somebody really well, and understand them, and like them.”

“You know Kate, and you like her.”

Brody distinctly felt a single line of sweat dribble down his spine. “Sure I do. Yeah. But I know a lot of people, Jacks.” Feeling trapped, Brody pushed away from the table and got down two clean glasses. “I don’t marry them. You need to love someone to marry them.”

“Don’t you love Kate?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again. Funny, he thought, how much tougher it was to lie to your son than it was to lie to yourself. The simplest answer was that he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what was building inside him when it came to Kate Kimball.

“It’s complicated, Jack.”

“How come?”

Questions about sex, Brody decided, would have been easier after all. He set the glasses down, came back to sit. “I loved your mother. You know that, right?”

“Uh-huh. She was pretty, too. And you took care of each other and me until she had to go to heaven. I wish she didn’t have to go.”

“I know. Me, too. The thing is, Jack, after she had to go, it was really good for me to just concentrate on loving you. That worked really well for me. And we’ve done all right, haven’t we?”

“Yeah. We’re a team.”

“You bet we are.” Brody held out his hand so Jack could give him a high five. “Now let’s see what this team can do with dinosaurs.”

“Okay.” Jack picked up his crayon. His eyes darted up to his father’s face once. He liked that they were a team. But he liked to pretend that maybe Kate was part of the team, too.

Chapter Eight

Brody set the first base cabinet in place, checked his level. He could hear, if he paid attention, the whirl of the drill from downstairs as one of his crew finished up the punch-out work on the main level. Up here there was the whoosh and thunk of nail guns and the whirl of saws, as other men worked in the bedroom of Kate’s apartment.

It was going to be a hell of a nice space, Brody thought. The perfect apartment for a single, or a couple without children. It was a little too tight to offer a family a comfortable fit, he thought as he crouched to adjust his level.

Then he just stayed there, staring into space.

Are you going to marry her?

Why the devil had Jack put that idea into the air? Made everything sticky. He wasn’t thinking about marriage. Couldn’t afford to think about it. He had a kid to consider, and his business was just getting off the ground. He had a rambling, drafty old house that was barely half finished.

It simply wasn’t the time to start thinking of adding someone else to the mix by getting married.

He’d jumped into that situation once before. He didn’t regret it, not a minute of it. But he had to admit the timing had been lousy, the situation difficult for everyone involved. What was the point of heading back in that sort of direction when his life was still so much in flux?