Page 69 of Castings & Curses

“I’m Sarina! Fooled you!”

He clutched his chest. “I’m so shocked, how will we ever tell them apart?”

“Whichever one of you is Liv, come here please,” I asked.

Liv danced over to me. I spun her around and pulled her single ponytail out and let her hair hang loose. “I think that will help. Now they don’t match exactly.”

“Mommy!” Liv whined. “We want to match. Please.”

Both of these children turned to me with the biggest puppy dog sad eyes that ever existed.

“Fine.” I put Liv’s hair back up, and then pulled an extra hairband out of my bag and put it on her wrist. “You have to wear this, so we can tell you apart.”

“I will.” She grabbed her new best friend’s hand, and they ran back into the fountain.

Nan had been right, this was a good park. Plenty of kids for Liv to play with, and she had already made a friend.

“It looks like our girls have decided to be friends. May I?”

I looked up and the man— he was just a man, if I told myself that he was a perfectly generic parent type, and not overly tall, maybe it would be true. He most definitely did not have rakish curls that fell across his brow— gestured at the bench.

“Sure.” I scooted a little closer to the edge, giving him plenty of room.

Did he not understand the etiquette of bench sitting? He sat close to me, as if there was a person on the other side and the only space left was in the middle.

“Eric Dupree.” He stuck his hand out to shake.

The name sounded familiar, then again every other name in this county would be familiar.

“Paisley Taylor— Owens,” I corrected. “Nice to meet you. How old is Sarina?”

“She just turned four in March,” Eric said.

I laughed. “They are even more alike than having the same taste in swimwear. Liv’s birthday is in March.”

“The thirteenth?”

His grin did not show off perfect teeth that had me thinking about playing dentist with my tongue. I was not thinking those thoughts. This was Sarina’s dad, not a man.

“No, Liv’s is the twentieth. That would have been entirely too much of a coincidence.”

I scanned out to where the girls and other kids were playing. There was a small pod of moms that kept glaring in our general direction. When I had arrived at the park, they had already been well established, and did not look very approachable. They were even less welcoming now.

I leaned a bit toward Eric as if I was going to share a secret. “What social faux pas have I done?” I nodded in the direction of the women as they hovered in a pod with their strollers and community snack effort. Maybe they were a mom’s group, and I was simply over tired and reading the whole thing wrong.

But I had seen them before at the other park. I recognized the one with the blue hair. It was a distinctive feature.

“Why do you assume it’s you who has done something wrong?” Eric asked. His voice was just a normal voice. There was nothing special about it, or him.

“Because I tend to do stupid things,” I confessed.

“Yeah? They tend to give me the stink eye, so I’m pretty sure it’s me they’re glaring at.”

“Why would they glare at you?” I managed to shut my mouth, and bite my lips together before I said anything more, like telling him he was gorgeous, and I would want to stare at him for different reasons.

He managed a shrug before Liv and Sarina came running back.

“Daddy, Liv doesn’t have a daddy. You need to be her daddy.”

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