Home with You

by Shirlee McCoy

  “A former marine?”

  “No.”

  “A glutton for punishment, then? You know the kind: dour. Mean-looking. Has a dozen cats and a couple of those yappy little dogs.”

  “Not even close. She’s a teacher.”

  “Of what? Primates? Does she work at a zoo?”

  “No, but in a couple of days, she’ll be able to add that to her résumé.”

  Porter laughed. Full-out. Bold. Just like he’d always been. Out of the four Bradshaw brothers, he’d been the most daring. Not the oldest, but usually the leader. At least when it had come to getting into trouble. “Good point. You hired her quickly. Afraid she’d figure out how bad things were and run?”

  “Desperate,” he admitted, meeting Rumer’s eyes.

  She smiled. Just a quick curve of her lips, but it caught his attention. Held it. Because, the angle of her jaw was perfect, the curve of her cheek, the misty blue-gray of her eyes—they were a Renaissance painting, alive with detail and texture and color.

  And, suddenly, he wanted to cross the room, run his palm up her nape, let his fingers tangle in her hair. He wanted to drink in every detail of her, explore every angle and curve and plane.

  “You still there, Sullivan?” Porter asked, breaking the spell, chasing away the quick heat that had been flooding through him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you hear the question?”

  “I missed it.” He turned away, irritated with himself. Frustrated that he was in the middle of a mess of problems, and had been thinking about creating another one.

  “Did you check her credentials?”

  “Whose?”

  “The new hire?” he asked.

  “I haven’t had time. Things have been crazy here.”

  “They’re probably not going to be any less crazy anytime soon. Send me her résumé. I’ll run a background check through the system at work. Actually, I’m at the office. Give me her name. I’ll get things started. I don’t like the idea of her spending nights in the house with the kids, if we’re not sure of who she is or where she came from.”

  “She doesn’t look like a knife-wielding lunatic to me, so I think we’re good.”

  Rumer laughed.

  Porter did not.

  “I’m not worried about knives or lunatics. After growing up the way we did, I’ve got no doubt you can handle yourself. I’m worried about pedophiles, child traffickers. Basic scum-of-the-earth evil that should never get within two hundred miles of a kid.”

  “I don’t think she’s any of those things, either,” he said. “She was a teacher until a couple of months ago. She had to have a background check for that.”

  “Why’d she leave teaching?”

  “Her grandmother had a heart attack. Look, Porter, I know how you are. Every rock turned, a light shined in every corner and closet and hole, but we don’t have time for that. The kids need someone. She’s here, and—”

  “How about I explain things to him?” Rumer asked, suddenly beside him, her curls brushing his shoulder as she grabbed the phone, held it to her ear. “This is Rumer Truehart. The Bradshaws’ new housekeeper and nanny. Can I help you?”

  She listened for a moment. Nodded. Listened some more.

  Finally, she shrugged. “That’s fine by me. Run whatever kind of background check you want. My juvenile record is sealed, so I doubt you’ll turn up much dirt.” She paused. “No. I’m not kidding. I was a wild child with an attitude. Just like one of your nieces. Maybe I can teach her to have some sense, so she doesn’t make the same mistakes I did.”

  She paused again. Smiled. “Yeah. I make a mean apple pie, a to-die-for pound cake, and fried chicken even the pickiest eater will love. Mashed potatoes. Fresh green beans. Grilled corn with lots of melted butter. Unfortunately, the terms of my contract stipulate that I have the weekends off. You and your brothers will have to cook for yourselves while you’re here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go polish my knives and check in with my parole officer.”

  She handed the phone back to Sullivan, winked, and sashayed out of the room.

  And, God help him, he was smiling as he watched.

  Because, it took a ballsy person to go up against any of the Bradshaw men. They’d been raised hard, and they’d become hard. Only Matthias had been gentle. He’d been like their mother—kind to a fault, easy to talk to, a rule follower who toed the line.

  They’d all expected him to do what their father wanted—go into software development and make a fortune before he turned thirty. Instead, he’d married his high school sweetheart and helped run her family farm. As far as Sullivan knew, the day Matthias married, Robert had cut all ties with him. Just like he’d cut ties with his other three sons. Utter disappointments. Every last one of them. Or, so he’d said dozens of time while they were growing up.

  Fun memories, and he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  Robert Bradshaw had been a bastard. Maybe, he’d been raised by one himself. Sullivan didn’t know. His father had never talked about his past or the family he came from. He’d been too busy using his fists and his tongue to control his sons.

  That had only worked for as long as they’d allowed it.

  Eventually, they’d become too big, too strong, and too hard to be beaten down by an aging man with an anger problem. Robert must have known that. By the time they’d reached high school, the physical abuse had mostly stopped. All that remained were the verbal slings and arrows. Those had been easy enough to ignore. It wasn’t like he and his brothers spent much time at home. By that point, they’d created their own closed group. The four Bradshaw brothers against the world.

  He supposed they were still like that.

  No matter the trouble, they were there for one another.

  Even now. Even in this. Even with Matthias dead, they had his back. They’d do what they had to for his family. For as long as it took.

  He walked to the bed, lifting Sunday’s hand and giving it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry. We’ll do right by your kids. I may not be able to promise much, but I can promise you that.”

  She didn’t give even a hint of a response.

  He set her hand back on the mattress, eyed the machines that blipped along with her heart rate. God willing, she’d recover. In a week or two or twenty, she’d be back at home with her children, gluing the pieces of their shattered lives back together.

  If she wasn’t . . .

  They’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

  For now, he’d be thankful for the small things—the tiny movement of her hand after surgery, the cake that hadn’t burnt to a crisp, and the help-wanted ad in the Benevolence Times that had somehow made its way to the exact place it needed to be at just exactly the right time.

  Sullivan had never been much for believing in miracles. He’d spent too much of his early years hoping for and never getting one. He’d listened to his mother pray to a God who didn’t seem to hear, and he’d wonder why she kept believing and hoping. Miracles, it had always seemed, were for other people and other families. Not for his broken one.

  This though? It seemed like the real deal, the answer to unspoken prayers, the life preserver thrown to the drowning man. The thing he hadn’t even known he needed until it walked right out in front of him wearing bright yellow bell-bottoms and a gauzy white shirt.

  Chapter Six

  So...

  Caring for six kids and a huge house was a lot harder than teaching third grade. It was also harder than mucking stalls, cleaning pigsties, and herding sea monkeys. Rumer was only guessing about the latter since she’d never actually attempted to herd brine shrimp.

  She might be tempted, though.

  After this gig, just about anything seemed possible.

  She finished scrubbing the last of the dinner dishes, the glass casserole finally free of the weird mixture of noodles, mystery meat, and red sauce it had contained. It hadn’t been quite as bad as Minnie’s spaghetti pie, but it had come darn close. The meal train co
nductor had dropped it off after school, offering a quick explanation before thrusting it into Rumer’s hands. She’d left a cloth grocery bag, too, filled with wilted salad in ziplock baggies, tomatoes with bits of molded flesh, and a store-bought cake that had been about as hard as the rock Milo had begun carrying around.

  Yeah.

  A rock.

  That he’d named Henry.

  Apparently, Milo had been wanting a dog for a couple of years. His parents had promised that he could have one on his birthday if he proved that he was responsible enough. A pet rock, according to Milo, was the first step in proving that he was.

  Not that his parents were around to see it.

  And, maybe that was the point.

  Maybe he just needed to feel like he was still connected to them, that somehow, despite the fact that they weren’t there, they would follow through on the promise they’d made to him.

  Just thinking about it made Rumer’s throat tight and her eyes sting. She’d only been working for the Bradshaws for three days, and she was already getting a little too attached.

  But, that was the point, right? To love them exactly the way their mother did until she returned to them.

  She dried the dish and slid it into a cupboard, wiped down the counter, and grabbed the bucket of slop from the mudroom. Carrying it out to the hog was supposed to be Heavenly’s job, but she was in her room with the door closed and locked, fuming because Milo had cut up one of her teeny-tiny shirts to make clothes for Henry.

  She’d been mad as a hatter, her eyes flashing, her cornrows vibrating with fury. She’d wanted him punished, and she’d wanted it to happen STAT. Rumer would have been happy to give some consequences if Milo hadn’t found the shirt lying on the floor in the mudroom. He’d assumed it was an old rag. He’d explained the entire thing in excruciating detail as he’d clutched the cloth-covered rock like it was his best friend.

  In Rumer’s estimation, a teeny-tiny shirt left on the mudroom floor could easily be mistaken for trash or rags. She couldn’t punish him for making a mistake. She’d told Heavenly that and suggested that the tween’s attitude was a great way to get out of eating the mystery meat casserole they’d been gifted, because if she didn’t cool it with the death glare, she’d be dismissed to her room.

  Heavenly hadn’t waited to be dismissed. She’d pushed away from the table and stomped to her room, slamming the door for good measure.

  Not a bad show, but Rumer would have done a lot better at that age.

  She unlocked the back door and stepped out into the cold night air. It was quiet here. Peaceful in a way she’d never found the homestead. Maybe because they were farther from the highway. There were no visible house or streetlights. No noisy traffic passing by. Nothing but the velvety darkness and the quiet.

  She made her way across the yard, opening the gate that led into the pasture. Bessie’s pen was a quarter mile away, its dirt floor layered daily with fresh hay. She’d helped the twins do that, the same way she’d helped Twila fix fence posts near the west edge of the pasture, helped Moisey make lunches for all her school-age siblings, and helped Heavenly with her math homework.

  Keeping the kids busy was part of the plan.

  So far it was going as well as could be expected.

  She made it across the field without sloshing too much of the mystery casserole goop. Too bad for the hog, because Rumer had tasted a piece of mystery meat, and she’d nearly gagged. Hopefully, Bessie wouldn’t get sick and die from it.

  She approached the pen as quietly as she could. Bessie seemed sweet enough, but she was a hog, and she might squeal and bellow if she was woken from a sound sleep. Rumer had managed to get all the kids in bed on time, and she didn’t want to give any of them an excuse to get up again. After three long days of kid and housekeeping duty, she needed a little peace.

  She also didn’t want Sullivan to emerge from his room.

  He’d been there most of the day, working on his research paper. He’d come out once or twice to check on Oya and to ask if the school had called yet.

  They’d both known that a phone call was inevitable. Rumer had been up to the school three times in three days. Currently, Moisey was back at school and Maddox was out—suspended for tackling another little boy who’d told him his mother was going to die.

  The elementary school teachers and principal were being as patient as anyone could be expected to be, but Benevolence Elementary wasn’t a haven for troubled kids. It was filled with middle-class students from middle-class backgrounds. Most of them went home to people who cared about them. Those who didn’t hid their troubles with façades of polite civility. No fights in the halls. No shoves off swings. No throwing a handful of crumbled cookie into a rival’s hair. The Bradshaw bunch had done all those things and more. Rumer had seen the files. The trouble the kids were having hadn’t begun with the accident, and it wasn’t going to end when Sunday came home.

  Obviously, the problems—whatever they were—needed to be dealt with, but Rumer had no background on the kids, no idea where they’d come from or what they’d experienced before joining their family. She’d asked Sullivan, and he’d seemed just as clueless. He wasn’t even sure which child had joined the family first.

  She’d figured that out by asking Twila. The boys had been first, adopted through foster care. Then, Moisey, who was from Ethiopia. Twila had joined the family three years ago, and a year after that the Bradshaws had taken in Heavenly as a foster. Oya was Heavenly’s half sister, and she’d joined the family three days after she was born. That adoption had been finalized before Oya was a month old. Right after that, adoption paperwork was filed for Heavenly. She’d become an official member of the family a few months before the accident.

  Rumer might not have case files and backgrounds, but she could imagine what their lives were like before they’d become Bradshaws. Their heartbreaking beginnings should have had a great ending. Everyone she spoke to mentioned how loving Sunday and Matt were, how determined they’d been to provide a loving home for their children.

  That was great. It was even noble. Sometimes, though, love wasn’t enough. Sometimes kids needed firm rules and set boundaries. She wasn’t sure if that’s what Sunday and Matt had done, but it was what she was attempting.

  Excusing behavior because of background and circumstances would only set the kids up for failure. That was Rumer’s opinion, and the school shared it. You punch, kick, or tackle another student and you’re suspended. Three suspensions, and expulsion was possible. It didn’t matter what your reasons were, it didn’t matter how justified you felt. Do the crime, do the time. Period. No exceptions.

  Moisey was on suspension number one.

  Maddox was on his second.

  At the rate they were going, they’d be expelled before Christmas break.

  She shuddered, opening the gate that led into the pigpen.

  “Hey, Bessie,” she called. “It’s just me, bringing you some dinner. Hopefully, it won’t kill you off.”

  “Is there a reason why you think it would?” Sullivan asked, his voice so unexpected, she jumped. The slop splashed her shoes and jeans.

  “Dang, you scared the stuffing out of me. Again,” she muttered, trudging over to Bessie’s trough. She’d have dumped the slop in, but Sullivan had followed her through the pen.

  He took the bucket, poured the slop into the trough, and stepped away as Bessie nosed her way toward the food.

  “Is something in here I should be worried about feeding her?” he asked. “Because, if she dies, Twila will never get over it.”

  “Nothing but the casserole someone from the meal train brought.”

  “Is that what I smelled cooking?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Did the kids eat it?”

  “A few bites each, then I relented and let them have sandwiches.”

  “And, they’re still alive?” he asked.

  It took a moment for the question to register. When it did, she laughed. “God!
I hope so. I didn’t think to check their pulses before they left the table.”

  “Assuming they are—and since I heard the twins whispering in their rooms before I came out here, I think that’s a safe bet—Bessie should be fine.”

  “The twins are awake? Last time I checked on them, they looked sound asleep.”

  “They’re good actors.” He rubbed the back of his neck, watching as Bessie chowed down on the slop. “Then again, based on how badly that stuff stunk when it was cooking, it’s possible they passed out for a few minutes.”

  “You could smell it?”

  “Couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, but it’s a big house. I was hoping it hadn’t permeated the walls.”

  “It had, and it was bad enough to turn my stomach.”

  “Is that why you didn’t come down for dinner?” She’d sent Moisey up to tell him it was ready. Moisey returned saying that he’d eat later.

  “No. I’d finally made progress on my research, and I didn’t want to stop. Of course, if the food had smelled as good as last night’s dinner, I probably would have stopped anyway.” He smiled, and her heart skipped a beat.

  Literally. It beat and then nothing. Just an empty feeling in her chest and the odd thought that in all her years of dating, she’d never had a guy’s smile stop her heart.

  “Maybe I should ask for the recipe. I could make it every time you’re feeling unproductive. The smell might motivate you to stay in your room and keep working.”

  He chuckled. “That won’t be necessary. With you at the house, I’m getting a lot more done.”

  “You never told me what you were writing about.”

  “I didn’t want to bore you.”

  “Who says I’d be bored?”

  “My experience tells me that most people aren’t nearly as interested in art as I am.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said so quietly she almost didn’t hear.

  Almost, but she did, and she wasn’t sure if she should feel complimented or criticized.

  “So, tell me,” she prodded, anxious to move past his words, to put them out of her head and forget them, “what are you working on?”