Third Time's The Bride!

“Dawn and I,” Brian corrected.

Tommy made a face but echoed his dad, “Dawn ’n I hit the water first try. Didja see us?”

“I saw.” Smiling, Brian ruffled his son’s hair. “Good job, buddy. You, too, Dawn. Now we’d better say our goodbyes and head for the airport.”

Tommy shook hands and Dawn gave hugs all around. A flirtatious one for the prince who’d tried his damnedest to get her to jet off to Corsica or Cannes or wherever with him. A friendly one for Joe. And one that came with a warning for Travis.

“You and Kate have spent too much time apart, Westbrook. Get your butt home quick and start working on that baby you guys have decided to produce.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The hugs for her two friends were fiercer and much longer. Brian waited patiently but Tommy’s forehead puckered into a worried frown when all three women teared up.

“I can’t believe our Italian adventure is over,” Callie sniffed. “We’ve dreamed about coming here for so long.”

“Ever since we watched Three Coins in the Fountain all those years ago,” Kate said gruffly.

“But we’ll be back.” Dawn gulped, tears flowing. “Someday.”

As worried now as his son, Brian shot Travis a quick glance. Kate’s husband merely rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry. They do this all the time. They’ll get it together in a moment.”

Sure enough, the tears stopped, the sniffles dried up and the smiles reemerged as Kate began planning an imminent reunion.

“It’s so awesome that Brian and Tommy live in Bethesda. Travis and I will be less than a half hour away. We can get together regularly. And Callie can come stay with us, too, until she lands a new job.”

“I don’t think so,” the brunette said with a flash of unexpected humor. “You two have that baby to work on. I don’t need to listen to the headboard banging—” she gave Tommy a quick glance and finished smoothly “—when you put the crib together.”

* * *

After another round of hugs, Brian finally ushered his two charges to the waiting limo. Moments later they were threading through Rome’s insane traffic on their way to Ciampino, the smaller of the city’s two airports.

The corporate jet was fueled and sitting on the ramp. The Gulfstream G600 with its twin Pratt & Whitney engines and long-range cruise speed of five hundred plus mph had been retrofitted by an avionics package specifically designed by EAS.

The sight of the sleek jet stirred familiar feelings of pride and a secret amazement in Brian. Hard to believe just twelve years ago he’d set up a small avionics engineering firm using his entire savings and a five-thousand dollar loan from his father-in-law. The first years hadn’t been easy. He was fresh out of the Corps with a new bride and more enthusiasm than business smarts.

Thank God for Caroline, he thought with an all-too-familiar ache. She’d provided long-range vision while he supplied the engineering muscle. Together, they’d grown Ellis Aeronautical Systems from the ground up. She hadn’t lived to experience the thrill when EAS hit the Fortune 500 list, though. She’d barely made it to their son’s first birthday.

Smothering the ache with a sheer effort of will, Brian greeted his chief pilot at the jet’s rear steps. “Thanks for the quick turnaround, Ed. Mrs. Wells made the flight back to the States okay?”

“She did,” the pilot confirmed. “So did the Italian medical team you hired to attend to her during the flight. They said to thank you for the extra week in California, by the way. After they got her settled, the first stop on their agenda was Disneyland, followed by the vineyards in Napa Valley.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Brian drawled while the pilot bent to bump fists with Tommy.

“Hey, kid. How’d you like Italy?”

“It was great! Me ’n...” Nose scrunching, he made a quick midcourse correction. “Dawn ’n I took a gondola ride in Venice ’n I went to the Colosseum in Rome with Dad. He got me a sword ’n helmet ’n everything.”

“Cool.” The pilot straightened and held out his hand to the third passenger on his manifest. “Good to meet you, Ms. McGill.”

“Dawn,” Tommy corrected helpfully. “She’s, like, a hundred years younger than Mrs. Wells so it’s okay for us to call her Dawn. She’s gonna come live with me ’n Dad.”

“She is, huh?”

“Until Mrs. Wells gets back on her feet,” Brian interjected smoothly.

Ed Donahue had flown executive-level jets too long to show anything but a professional front, but Brian knew interest and speculation had to be churning behind his carefully neutral expression. One, the auburn-haired beauty could get a rise from a stone-cold corpse. Two, she was the first living, breathing sex goddess to fly aboard EAS’s corporate jet.

As she demonstrated when she followed Tommy up the steps and ducked into the cabin. The slinky, wide-legged pants she’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain clung to her hips and outlined a round bottom that made Brian’s breath hiss in and Ed’s whoosh out.

Gulping, the pilot made a valiant recovery. “I’ll, uh, recompute our flight time once we reach cruising altitude and give you an updated ETA.”

“Thanks,” Brian said grimly, although he’d already figured that no matter what the ETA, he was in for a long flight.

* * *

He’d figured right.

Over the years he’d worked hard to minimize his time away from his son by combining business trips with short vacations whenever possible. They’d taken a number of jaunts to Texas, where EAS’s main manufacturing and test facility was located. Several trips to Florida so Brian could meet with senior officials in the USAF Special Ops community, with requisite side trips to Disney World. The Paris Air Show last year. This summer’s excursion in Italy.

As a result, his son was a seasoned traveler and very familiar with the Gulfstream’s amenities, every one of which he was determined to show Dawn once they’d gained cruising altitude. Brian extracted his laptop and set it up on the polished teak worktable while the eager young guide started his tour by showing her the aft cabin.

“It’s got a shower ’n toilet ’n the beds fold down,” he announced while Dawn surveyed the cabin through the open door. “Watch.”

“That’s okay, I... Oh. Cool. Twin beds.”

“One for me ’n one for Dad. There’s another bunk up front. Ed ’n his copilot take turns in that one on long flights. But you kin have my bed,” he offered generously. “I sleep in my seat lotsa times.”

Brian glanced up from the spreadsheet filling his laptop’s screen and met Dawn’s eyes. The laughter dancing in their emerald depths invited him to share in the joke. He returned a smile but for some reason didn’t find the idea of sharing the aft cabin with her quite as amusing as she obviously did.

“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on,” he told his son. “Why don’t we let Dawn have the cabin to herself and we guys will hang here tonight?”

“Okay. C’mon, you gotta see the galley.”

When Tommy led her back up the spacious aisle, Brian caught her scent as they went by. It was faint, almost lost in the leather and polished teakwood of the cabin, but had teased him from their first meeting in Venice. It drifted to him now, a tantalizing mix of summer sunshine and lemons and something he couldn’t identify. He tried to block it out of his senses as Tommy gave her a tour of a well-stocked galley that included a wide selection of wines, soft drinks, juices, snacks and prepackaged, microwavable gourmet meals.

The pièce de résistance, of course, was the touch screen entertainment center. On every long flight Brian gave fervent thanks for the video games, TV shows and Disney movies that snared his son’s attention for at least a few hours.

“You just press this button here in the armrest ’n the screen opens up.” Buckled in again, Tommy laughed at Dawn’s surprise when a panel in the bulkhead glided up to reveal a sixty-inch flat screen TV.

“We’ve got bunches of movies.” He flicked the controls and brought up a menu screen with an impressive display of icons. “If you want, we kin watch Frozen.”

“Right.” She gave a small snort. “And how many times did we watch it in Venice? Four? Five?”

Tom looked honestly puzzled. “So?”

“So let’s see what else is here. Ah! Beauty and the Beast. Do you like that one?”

“It’s okay.”