The Sweetheart Rules by Shirley Jump Page B

this house. You have to eat healthy food before you can have dessert. Healthy food like chicken and—”
    “Strawberries!” Ellie piped up. “I gots strawberries!”
    Diana laughed. “That’s fabulous, Ellie. Add a little chicken and maybe some potato salad and we’ll call it even. You, too, Jenny.”
    Jenny looked at her plate, her lips twisted into indecision.
    “Besides, I think I heard your tummy rumbling,” Diana whispered into Jenny’s ear. “That way, you get that healthy stuff out of the way so you can have the Kisses. To the victor go the spoils.”
    “What’s that mean?” Jenny asked.
    Diana reached for the chicken and put a small piece on Jenny’s plate, then grabbed the potato salad and dished up some of that while she talked. “Well, it means the winner gets all the good stuff. Like in a battle. With a bad guy, not your sister.” She gave Jenny a wink.
    Jenny smiled. “Yeah, I get that.”
    Diana slid Ellie’s plate over and put some potato salad and chicken on it. Before she gave it back, she stripped the drumstick meat from the bone and cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces, something Mike hadn’t even thought to do, and arranged the berries in a little smiley face with a strawberry nose. Ellie giggled, the plucked the strawberry nose up first, plopping it into her mouth with a victorious grin.
    When the girls started in on their food, Mike caught Diana’s gaze. “Thanks.”
    She shrugged. “It was nothing.”
    “For you, maybe. Not so much for me.” He grinned. “I’m still a rookie at this.”
    “You’ll get the hang of it. That’s the thing about kids. They’re sink or swim. Instant education.”
    Lord help him, the word
education
had him thinking down a whole other path, one that had nothing to do with kids at all. One that spiraled him back six months in the past, after a whirlwind couple of weeks of stolen kisses and racy flirtations, peaking when he’d crushed Diana to the wall of her bedroom and she’d turned that pert little chin up toward his and dared him to expand her carnal knowledge. Never had anyone made the words
teach me
seem so sexy. In the end, she’d been the one who’d surprised him with her inventiveness and intuitive knowledge of what made him go weak in the knees.
    “Seems I still have a lot to learn,” he said, his gaze locked on her mesmerizing green eyes. “Maybe there’s a class I could take.”
    She laughed. “You’d be the one sent to the principal’s office for causing a ruckus.”
    “I’d much prefer to be the teacher’s pet.”
    She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Diana’s cheeks flushed a pretty shade of pink, a blush that Mike knew also cascaded down the valley between her breasts and came with that shy little smile of hers that both tempted and teased him. What he wouldn’t give to see that sight again, to see her in his bed, beneath his body, not just here, sitting across a picnic table in his best friend’s yard.
    Luke and Olivia returned to the table, and relief flooded Diana’s features. The blush faded, the simmering tension dissipated, and they all went back to being a bunch of friends at a barbecue. Mike told himself he was glad. Hell, relieved even. He already knew where flirting with Diana led. To the bedroom—and hot damn, he wanted that again, but he knew as well as he knew his own name that before the sheets cooled, something else would invade the space between them.
    Expectations.
    Diana was a woman who didn’t want a fling. She wanted permanence; a man to grow old with. And Mike wasn’t the kind to sit on a porch and sip lemonade for the next fifty years. In the end, Mike was going back to Alaska, just like he had before. Better to do that without regrets this time, and without memories that haunted his nights and ached in his gut.
    I love you.
    She’d whispered those words in his ear when she’d been curled up in his arms, still caught in the warm afterglow of amazing sex. The words had surprised him,