Marine for Hire by Tawna Fenske Page A

had a quarter for every time I’d burned dinner, I’d have enough to buy kalua pork every night of the week for a year.”
    He grinned, looking a little less sheepish now. “I thought about ditching the takeout containers and trying to pass this off as my own,” he confessed. “Let me at least make a salad. I’m pretty sure I can do that without burning anything.”
    “I can chop veggies,” she offered. “Or set the table. Or—”
    “No, just sit. Drink your wine, tell me about your first day at the new job.”
    She hesitated, wanting to be useful. But hell, her knees still felt weak, and it was so nice to just sit down and relax, savoring the heady smell of pork and the sight of a muscular man moving around her kitchen.
    She dropped into a dining room chair and picked up her wineglass, taking another sip. “There’s not much to tell,” she said. “It was mostly orientation stuff. A lot of rules about dress codes and holidays and sexual harassment policies and stuff.”
    “That’ll be handy the next time you show up naked at the office on Easter and decide to sexually harass someone.”
    He grabbed a knife off the counter. It was a huge knife—much bigger than Sheri would have chosen—and he handled it with a lot more force than she expected. She studied his fingers, huge and deft around the thick shaft.
    She lifted her wineglass again, hoping to hide her flaming cheeks. “Right,” she said into the glass, remembering her conversation with Kelli earlier that afternoon. “No sexual harassment here. No siree.”
    Christ, she really needed to Google the laws on employee/supervisor relations. She shouldn’t be thinking this much about sleeping with a guy who lived here as her employee.
    Besides, she’d just extricated herself from one bad relationship. Did she really need to risk another one?
    She drained the last of her wine and set it down, watching him chop with rough, powerful strokes. It seemed like an odd approach for lettuce, not that she was any sort of expert in the kitchen. He was the one with culinary training, after all. She didn’t recognize the knife, so apparently he traveled with his own kitchen tools.
    “You wield that knife like you’re trying to kill someone,” she said. “You look downright lethal.”
    He froze in mid-cut, but didn’t look up. “It’s a special technique I learned when I was training at Gonsalves in Japan. It—um—helps keep the lettuce from bruising.”
    “I had no idea you could bruise lettuce,” she said, trailing the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “Amazing, the things you learn. Are the boys sleeping?”
    Shit, a normal mom would have thought to ask long before this. She should probably check on them—
    “They bounced themselves to sleep in those little chairs, so I put them in their cribs,” Sam said, dumping the lettuce in a bowl before reaching for a tomato. “Their morning nap was a little earlier than the usual routine, so it seemed smart to slip in another one now.”
    “They’re champion nappers. I can’t believe how much they sleep. I think they get it from their father.”
    “You spoken with him lately?”
    “No,” she said, feeling a pang of guilt about the ignored messages. Technically, she hadn’t spoken with him. Still, the calls were becoming relentless, as were the demands they get back together as a family.
    “Sheridan, a responsible parent would want her children to have both a father and a mother,” he’d growled in his last voicemail.
    She’d erased the message, wishing she could erase the guilt and worry building in the back of her mind.
    She studied Sam, wondering if it bothered him to be caring for another man’s kids. Probably not. He wasn’t like the macho military guys she’d been around. The guys who wouldn’t dream of diapering their own children, let alone someone else’s.
    “I can give them their baths later,” he said. “After they wake up.”
    “It’s fine if they miss it once in a