Remember the Dreams Page 19

  Toni placed a quieting finger on his mouth, her eyes filled with the love that had its beginnings five long years ago. "We take worse risks than that every day in the stockmarket." Kyle had taught her how to take those chances. "And even if we never have children, we'll always have each other."

  He swallowed convulsively and cupped her face between his hands. "You know something?" His thumb trailed over her bottom lip. "I think I'm going to like spending forever with my best friend."

  Epilogue

  The assistant Toni had hired four years earlier worked out remarkably well. Toni no longer worked on weekends and, as far as she was concerned, they were now the best part of the week. Kyle didn't play football anymore though. The game had fizzled out after Todd moved to California and a few of the other regulars had lost interest. Kyle had found other ways to occupy himself on Saturdays.

  "Is Kyle still downstairs?" she asked Madeline, who was bustling down the hall with an armload of laundry. The woman who had become one part housekeeper and nine parts family lived with them now.

  "Still in the weight room. Never have understood his preoccupation with those machines." Her gray curls bounced as she shook her head and walked off humming to herself.

  Kyle looked preoccupied all right. But not with the weights.

  Toni stood in the doorway of the mirror-lined room, taking in the clutter of firetrucks, Matchbox cars and building blocks scattered over the exercise mats. A GI Joe doll was playing paratrooper from the handle of the rowing machine. Three-year-old Gregory Kyle Donovan couldn't have rigged the doll up like that, so his father must have done it.

  "I thought you were supposed to be working out." The admonition in her tone was ruined by the catch in her throat. How supremely male he looked sitting there wearing nothing but a pair of sweatshorts and with his towheaded son nestled between his legs.

  Two pair of dove gray eyes smiled up at her. The owner of the younger pair knocked over the block tower that had just been built and scrambled to her. Kyle pulled himself to his feet.

  "We are," he returned smugly. "We're working out a small architectural problem." He looked back over at the fallen blocks and then at little Greg being lifted into his mother's arms. "Or, at least, we were. Are you sure you should be lifting him?"

  "Of course." She met the loving concern in his eyes, and a soft smile touched her lips. "He's not that heavy."

  "He's heavier than his sister."

  Eighteen-month-old Kimberly Sara Donovan had just been put down for her nap. Kim, the quieter of the two, was the opposite of her older brother in every respect—right down to her jet black hair and bright turquoise eyes.

  Kyle ignored his wife's assurance and hoisted his son to his hip. "Is the good doctor here yet?"

  Greg Nichols was coming for lunch. "Not yet. Do you know what he wants to talk to us about?"

  Toni had the sneaking hunch that Greg was on his way over to ask Kyle to be his best man. Greg had met Jana at Toni and Kyle's last Christmas party, and the two had been inseparable ever since.

  Kyle's eyes were teasing. They glittered over the healthy fullness of her face and slid to the smock covering the slight bulge of her stomach. "I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted to talk to us"—he tipped her chin up with his finger, then dropped a kiss to her lips and grinned—"about birth control."