Page 85 of Secret Triplets for Christmas

Olivia looked up at me. "You can have yellow if you want."

I shook my head. "You should have yellow."

"Here, you can have green. That's what Grandpa usually uses.” Georgie thrust the green plastic piece toward me.

I took the player and set it at the beginning of the route. Georgie handed me a stack of cards. "You have to shuffle them and then put them down on the board."

My lips quirked up, remembering how Liam used to be so bossy like this.

"I’ll leave you all to have fun." Lindsay left the room, and the minute she wasn't there, I started to panic. What if I didn't know what to say? What if I didn't know what to do?

Luckily, it was clear that the girls knew what to do. Or at the very least, Georgie did. She was a take-charge kind of girl.

"Where do you live?" Georgie asked me as she fixed the placement of the cards I’d set on the board.

"Well, I'm from Boston, but I live in California now." Suddenly, I wondered how this was going to work. How was I going to be their father when I lived 3,000 miles away?

"Is that why you didn’t know about us?" Cassie asked.

Remembering that it would be wrong to speak poorly of their mother, I nodded. "I think that was part of it."

Georgie frowned at me. "So when you go home, will you forget about us?"

I looked at these girls who just a few hours ago I didn't know existed, but now, I knew without a doubt, I would love until my last breath. "Not at all. I want to be your father."

"Are you going to move in with us? Because mommies and daddies are supposed to live together," Georgie said.

I cleared my throat again, not knowing what to say. I looked toward the doorway that Lindsay had disappeared through, wishing she'd come back in and save me.

"Not all mommies and daddies live together," Cassie said as she lifted a card that had two green squares on it and started to move her man.

"So you'll be like our weekend dad. That's what Joseph Little has,” Georgie said.

I didn't like the idea of that either, but I didn’t have an answer. I wouldn’t until Lindsay and I talked.

I decided maybe it was time to change the subject. "Besides Candyland, what do you girls like to do?"

"I like to do all sorts of things," Georgie said, drawing her card and moving her gingerbread to a blue square.

"I like to do art. I asked Santa for art stuff today," Cassie said. It was another piece like her mother.

"And Olivia likes—"

"Mommy says you're not supposed to talk for Olivia," Cassie interrupted her. That also seemed like something Lindsay would have done. Cassie turned toward her sister. "You tell him, Olivia. You tell him that you like computers."

Olivia looked up at me and nodded.

"You like computers?"

She nodded again.

"I do too. Matter of fact, my job has to do with computers."

Olivia's eyes rounded, and she looked at her sisters and then at me.

"What do you do?" Georgie asked.

"I have a business that creates apps. But what I really like is to program.”

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