The Real Father (Twins) (Harlequin Superromance No. 927) by Kathleen O`Brien

game, one lousy high school football game. It was wrong. It was a terrible, terrible mistake.”
    â€œBut it was your mistake, Riser. And you used my brother to fix it for you.”
    Ross let loose a short bark of harsh laughter. “What, your saintly brother? Have you been telling yourself that I corrupted him? Well, I’m sorry to disillusion you, but Beau was delighted to do it,Jackson. He thought it was funny. God, how he laughed in the locker room! I wish you could have seen him laugh.”
    â€œRoss,” Jackson said, still softly. “Shut up.”
    â€œNo.” Ross couldn’t stop himself. “Goddamn it, I’ve earned a reprieve. It’s been fourteen years. Aren’t you ever going to let me off the hook?”
    Jackson palmed his keys, and something in the way his knuckles whitened around them proved that his temper was just as close to slipping its reins as Ross’s.
    Jackson shouldered past him roughly, without apology, as if he didn’t trust himself to stand so close. With the truck between them, he turned.
    â€œNo,” he said. “I’m not. Not where Tommy is concerned.”
    He stared at Ross over the rusted flatbed, his green eyes as hard and dangerous as a snake’s. “Listen carefully, Riser. I don’t give a damn whether you gamble or not. Lose your truck at the poker table and walk to work. Bet your kidneys at the dog track and pee through a machine for the rest of your life, for all I care. But know this—if you let your problems come within a hundred miles of that little boy, I’m going to bring you down.”
    Â 
    M OLLY KNELT in the empty garden bed, sifting the soil through her fingers, searching for stray roots. She had been working this bed for nearly two hours, and finally she was almost finished. She had long ago flung her sweater across an overhanging branch, working too hard to notice the chill. She had abandoned her gardening gloves so that she could feel the resistance of weeds as she pulled them. Her cheeks felt gritty where she had wiped away sweat with blackened fingers, and her knees were numb where the cold, damp dirt had penetrated her jeans.
    She rocked back onto her heels, satisfied. This was the sort of job she generally left to hired hands these days—in fact, there were three day workers even now doing similar clearing at other spots on the Everspring grounds and two whole crews at the park grounds. But she had needed to do some big-time thinking this afternoon. And, as she had learned years ago, she thought better with dirty hands.
    As usual, the earth had not disappointed her. While she had knelt here, rhythmically sifting and pulling, she had come up with a new, fully formed vision for the Everspring landscaping.
    The proposal she had submitted to Lavinia when she bid for the project had been done from memory. The reality of Everspring, after ten years of storms and disease, bad pruning and uncontrolled growth, was somewhat different. The stately, spreading oak out back, for instance, the centerpiece of the family sitting garden, had been taken down yesterday, the victim of a lighting strike that had left the core dead, vulnerable to disease.
    With the oak gone, she had seen instantly that she was going to need new plans.
    Which thankfully had come to her. She could hardly wait to start sketching, taking her ideas, which right now existed only in her mind, as fragileas bubbles of air, and giving them a substance, a color, a tangible reality.
    Dirt and imagination. What more could a person ask from a job? She lifted a handful of the rich black soil to her nose and inhaled its loamy scent with a sensual appreciation. She let her gaze roam across the bed of bulbs, which were just now beginning to sprout tender green shoots above the dirt.
    Her heart beat a pleasantly rapid rhythm high in her chest, as it always did when she was exhilarated.
    She loved this work. She loved this plantation.
    â€œHi,