Destined To Be A Dad (Welcome To Destiny Book 9) by Christyne Butler Read Free Book Online

he gave a quick shake of his head. “No can do. The inn is full. So are the two hotels out by the highway. With the rodeo in town, there isn’t an empty room anywhere. People are staying as far away as Laramie. Even Cheyenne.”
    “Well, we have to stay somewhere. I doubt we’ll be able to do anything about a test until Monday.” She released Casey and turned back for the phone she’d left on the table. “Let me do a search and see what I can find—”
    “How about we stay here? Who’s living in those?”
    “Cassalyn Dobbs!” Missy spun back around, surprised by the boldness of her daughter, who was pointing at the nearby log homes. “How cheeky of you.”
    “She’s not being
cheeky
, just curious.” Liam again shook his head, this time with a slight smile on his face. “Sorry, but those are only model homes. They have electricity, as you can see, but no plumbing. Since your mother mentioned wanting a bubble bath—”
    “I didn’t say anything about bubbles,” she cut him off, her gaze on her phone, positive she hadn’t spoken that desire aloud. “And we can’t stay here.”
    “Of course you can.” Elise Murphy’s voice carried from the doorway as she came back out to the porch. “You’re more than welcome.”
    Stay here in the Murphy family home? Not bloody likely!
    Now it was Missy’s turn to shake her head. “Oh, we wouldn’t want to impose—”
    “It’s no imposition, dear.” Elise hurried to join them. “We’d love to have you. Now, we do have an empty guest room in the main house, but it only has a queen-size bed. Much too small for the two of you. Nolan’s place is out—what with the four of them, it’s already crowded and why he turned his guest room into an office I’ll never understand.”
    “He likes to work late,” Liam said. “Really late.”
    “And he can’t walk across the yard to his office here in the main house?” Elise harrumphed. “Bryant and Laurie’s cabin is too small. And you—” she paused to swat at her son’s chest “—if you’d bother to furnish any of the rooms in your new place beside the master suite—”
    “My place has furniture,” Liam interrupted his mother. “Just not in the bedrooms.”
    “And aren’t you sorry about that now?”
    The flash of awareness in his gaze caused Missy’s already hastened heartbeat to race out of control. Pressing a hand to her chest, as if that would ease the wild thumping, she tried to put a stop to this. “I appreciate your offer, but we’ll be fine in a hotel.”
    “Wait, I have the perfect place!” The older woman’s eyes lit up as she clasped her hands together. “You can stay in the boathouse.”
    “The boathouse?” Casey asked. “What’s that?”
    “It’s down back, on the lake. Above where we store the boats and canoes and stuff. It used to be a storage area, but a few years ago I came up with the idea of...”
    Missy’s gaze locked with Liam’s, his mother’s chatter fading to a dull buzzing. The boathouse. A private sanctuary in the middle of the Murphy family madness she and Liam had often sneaked off to whenever they wanted to be alone.
    They’d discovered the secluded setting by accident one cool and stormy spring afternoon after hurrying back from a canoe ride, soaked to the skin and looking for shelter.
    Filled with cast-off furniture, old toys and boxes and trunks filled with everything from books to clothes to holiday decorations, the place had had a faint musty smell, but it’d been warm and dry. After realizing no one had found out where they’d gone off to, they’d returned often. Just being together, away from everyone, had been wonderful.
    Of course, the intimacy of the space had lent itself to kisses...and so much more. It’d been the first place they’d made love. On a warm night with moonlight streaming through the windows, both unsure of what they were doing, but secure in their feelings and what they wanted.
    A wanting that deepened and