“It will be noisy tonight. Even if it is only Wednesday night, the children won’t be used to that level of noise. You’ll have to make do at your apartment.”
“I will, Honey. We’ll be out of your hair tonight.”
As he passed her to go to the kitchen, she snagged him. “Cole, stop. You aren’t in my hair. I’m thinking of what’s best for the children.”
Evan said, “I want to keep staying here.”
Madeline had twisted around on the kitchen chair and stared at Honey through the rungs, her expression a picture of absolute betrayal and reproach.
Oh, darling, don’t look at me like that.
“Let’s face this all later,” she whispered to Cole. “We can still have fun today.”
“Yes.” He picked up Madeline.
Honey smiled for her sake. “Let’s go to the diner for breakfast. It’s fun there.”
Of the child in his arms Cole asked, “Madeline, do you want to go out for pancakes?”
“I’m Maddy,” she whispered.
Cole’s eyebrows rose, but then he smiled. To Honey, he said, “That’s a really nice idea. Let’s do it.”
Before they left, he called Maria and set up the afternoon. Honey wished he didn’t look so unhappy about it.
At the diner, they found a rare empty booth in the window. Evan slid in to sit beside the window, Maddy followed and Cole moved to sit on the other side with Honey, but Maddy made a sound of distress.
He changed direction and sat beside her. She settled.
They ate pancakes and then left the diner, intent on filling in time until Maria arrived.
They walked slowly, because all that waited for them at Honey’s was an empty apartment.
“I need to find things for them to do,” Honey said.
Cole chewed on his lower lip. “They have only a few of their favorite toys and books here.”
“What about the other toys they owned? What happened to their parents’ things?”
“I took only what I could carry on the plane with the two little ones. I sorted the rest and packed up the stuff I thought should be keepsakes for them. It’s being shipped here.”
He frowned. “I guess I should buy games? What kinds of games? And anything else?”
“We should have asked Rachel.”
“Yeah. Do you want to call her?”
Honey got out her cell phone. When she asked her question, Rachel turned out to be a font of information, of course.
“Pick up children’s playing cards. Go Fish, especially. Coloring books. Craft supplies. Large, sturdy jigsaw puzzles. Lego.”
Honey relayed all of the information to Cole.
“I’ll go to the toy store at the mall and see what they have.”
“Video games!” Evan shouted.
Rachel must have heard him, because she said, “Don’t start them early on that kind of thing. Keep their hands and minds busy. Keep them active.”
Honey thanked Rachel and hung up. They continued their walk down Main.
Beside her, Cole came to an abrupt halt. His sudden rigidity puzzled Honey. She followed his gaze across the street to a couple standing in front of the cop shop, being given directions by one of Cole’s deputies.
Spotting Cole, Deputy Mortimer became animated, as though saying, “There he is.”
The older couple he spoke to followed his pointing finger and watched Cole, expressions carefully neutral.
Even so, Honey picked up a subtle disapproval.
Of Cole? How could that be? Everyone loved Cole.
Uptight and old-fashioned in their conservative clothing, they started across the street toward Cole.
Tension arced from him like sheet lightning. An urge arose in Honey to take his hand, to console and, strangely, to protect him from the ill will radiating from those two people.
As they came closer, she realized they weren’t as old as they seemed, possibly mid-sixties, but they gave the impression of being from an even older generation.
Odd. Most people wanted to look younger, not older.
Honey sidled close to Cole and asked, “Who are they?”
Cole, not happy at all, said, “My parents.”
Chapter Eight
Rage blinded Cole.
They’d come here. To Rodeo, Montana.
To his safe haven.
His place.
He’d told them, had ordered them not to come to town. But when had they ever respected his wishes?
Rampaging memories engulfed him, of his mother and grandmother, lecturing. Always lecturing.
He was six years old and wondering why he couldn’t play with the other children.
He was nine and resisting his exalted standing in the community.
He was twelve and hemmed in on all sides by his mother’s ambition.
He was sixteen and rushing home after school wondering why the other members of the football team were riffraff.
He was eighteen and chafing against the pressure of an advantageous relationship with his mother’s friend’s daughter.
He was twenty and fighting against his parents’ choice of college and career and wife for him.
He was twenty-one and running away with Shiloh, the antithesis of his mother.
His hemmed-in and controlled life, from which his sister had also escaped, had never been more than a memory away.
Now, here it came racing back in the flesh.
When Frank and Ada Payette reached his side of the street, Cole went on the offensive. “The will was final and clear.”
He wasted no time on civilities.
No hello.
No why have you come.
He already knew why they were here.
“It isn’t right,” his mother said, lipstick bleeding into small lines radiating from tight lips. “You’re a single man.”
“Last time I checked, yes.”
“Show your mother respect,” his father barked.
Maddy cried, and Cole lifted her into his arms. Evan sidled against Cole, wrapping his arm around his leg and leaving not an iota of space between them.
“This is helping how?” Cole asked his parents.
“If you would just give the children to us to raise, there wouldn’t be all of this tension.”
“If you would stay home and leave the raising of them to me,” Cole countered, “there wouldn’t be this tension.”
He stepped around the couple and said, “Come on, Honey. Let’s take Evan and Maddy home.”
Damn. That hadn’t sounded the way Cole had meant it to. It sounded like he and Honey were living together. While that might have figured in a few of his daydreams, it wasn’t anywhere close to true, or even possible considering his resistance to her.
“And where exactly is home?” his father asked as they fell in behind him on their journey toward the end of the street.
“My home is an apartment above the sheriff’s office, as I’m sure my deputy already informed you.”
Cole kept walking forward, hoping he could lose them as he might a curious cat following him home.
No such luck, of course.
“So why are we walking toward some other home, as you just mentioned?” his father asked.
“I’m taking them to a temporary home while I find a larger place for us.”
“Are they staying with your girlfriend here? Your honey?”
Honey stopped and confronted him. “My name is Honey Armstrong. It is neither a nickname nor an endearment.”
It had figured in many of Cole’s more graphic dreams as an endearment.
“It is my given name,” she continued. “Use it with respect or don’t use it at all. I am not Cole’s girlfriend and never have been. We are a close-knit community in this town. We help out our neighbors.
I’m helping Cole because I have the space for these children that he doesn’t have at the moment.”
She stopped to open the door to the staircase that led to her apartment.
When his parents noticed it was above a bar, his mother gasped. It gave Cole no small amount of satisfaction.
“You live here? Above a bar?”
“Yes,” Honey replied. “I own the bar.”
His mother shot him a scathing look. “You are entrusting the care of Alexandra’s children to a bar owner?”
“Alexandra and Dennis’s children. Don’t forget about Dennis, as you were wont to do when he was alive, poor guy. Sandy told me all about your treatment of him.”
He felt Honey staring at him. The change in his language, he guessed. When he was with his parents, it became more formal and harked back to another time. Another life.
“Sandy chose Dennis as her husband because she loved him. He was a good man.”
“Her name was Alexandra.” His mother used what he called her forceful voice. She didn’t raise it and yet, it came out stronger.
“Sandy wouldn’t allow you to control her choice of husband as you did every other aspect of her life while she was growing up.”
“I did what was best for both of you.”
“No. You did what was best for you. Against all odds, Sandy and I had enough backbone to get out from under your thumb. We wanted our own lives. To make our own choices, not yours.” He gestured around Main Street. “This town has been good to me. And for me.”
He liked it here in Rodeo. If he had his way, he’d never have another thing to do with his past. But here it was in the form of his overbearing mom and his spineless dad who would do anything his mother and her mother ordered.
No wonder Cole had had his fill of controlling women. No wonder he’d run off with Shiloh.
His reactions as an adult made perfect sense considering where he’d come from.
He’d chosen not to be a carbon copy of his father who had moved onto the Ducharme family estate upon marrying Ada. Frank might not have minded being under the matriarch’s thumb, but Cole had gotten out of his grandmother’s house just in time. He hadn’t returned for her funeral.
Another strike against him.
He refused to be molded in the way his father had.
He would be damned if he let his mother kill Evan’s and Madeline’s spirits as she had tried to do with him and his sister.
“Both Dennis and Sandy gave the children into my care,” he said. “They trusted me enough to do that.”
“We’ll see what a judge thinks when he finds out they are living with a bar owner above a bar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Since you’ve been unreasonable about this,” his father said, “we’ve hired an attorney to get custody.”
“Unreasonable? What’s unreasonable about following Sandy’s wishes?”
“We have more to offer the children.”
“Financially. That’s it. There isn’t one ounce of warmth or motherly instinct in you.”
“Nevertheless,” his father cut in, “we have the financial advantage. Any judge in the country, even in this county, will see it our way.”
“Especially given where these poor children are being forced to live.”
At that moment, Cole hated his mother. He’d always disliked her. He’d always been angry. But he’d never hated her.
Now he did.
All the satisfaction he’d taken in Sandy and Dennis’s airtight will evaporated from him like a cool mist on a hot day, leaving him parched and scared.
Could they take the kids?
When he gazed down at his children, dread settled in his chest.
Evan clung ever closer to his leg.
Madeline tried to burrow into Cole’s chest.
Aware of listening ears, he couldn’t deliver the stinging rebuke his parents deserved, but he could make clear to them in no uncertain terms that Maddy and Evan were his and always would be.
If they wanted a fight, he would fight tooth and nail.
“You’re welcome to have a role in their lives, but you can’t have them. Show your daughter’s memory the respect she deserved in life. She wanted them with me. Here is where they will stay.”
He turned away to usher them indoors.
“Didn’t you hear me?” His mother raised her voice. “In this, we will win.”
Why was it so important for her to raise two young children? Because she’d lost control of him and Sandy? So what? That had been fourteen years ago.
“Why do you still need control? Why take Sandy’s children? What can they possibly mean to you?”
“They deserve to be raised in the manner to which they should have been born. We can give them everything. They can go to the right schools. Choose the right careers. Take their place in society.”
Now they were getting down to the heart of the matter. The Ducharme family was Georgia’s version of royalty, and revered for miles around. They could trace their family tree back to pre-Revolutionary France. They had produced most of the lawyers and judges who ran the district in which Cole grew up.
Upon graduation, he had been slated to enter the law firm founded by his great-grandfather. Instead, he’d run away with Shiloh and now served in a different branch of the law.
With Sandy now dead, and Cole out of reach, and with no cousins left, their family influence was over. His choice to leave had been a death knell for the Ducharme family of Georgia.
Was that the reason his mother looked almost desperate?
“I get it,” he said. “You didn’t get your dynasty out of Sandy and me, so you want to do it through her children.”
His mother’s knuckles turned white on the strap of her handbag. He’d hit the nail on the head.
He set Madeline down beside her brother and leaned close so the children wouldn’t hear. “I knew you didn’t want them because you loved them.”
Her face twitched, the merest suggestion that it had been a direct hit. Was she even capable of love? He’d stopped believing so years ago. He hated to think so badly of his parents, but the evidence in his life, during his vulnerable formative years, had been indisputable.
Never in the past had he thought of them as evil. This behavior? Coming here like this? Working directly against Sandy’s wishes and trying to steal the children from him?
Yeah, he would call that evil.
“We’ve hired a lawyer,” his mother repeated. “We will get custody.”
Over Cole’s dead body.
“You can try,” Cole said before entering Honey’s stairwell and closing the door behind the four of them, blocking out the sight of his parents, but also the sunlight and warmth of what had been a glorious day.
At the top of the stairs, Honey set up the children in their cave with the sticker book Tori had given them yesterday.
“Call Maria and tell her I’ll need her here by two thirty at the latest,” Honey said. “Go get toys for the children. Then get on with your life as usual. Forget about them.”
He should object to her bossing him around. It was exactly the kind of behavior his mother pulled, but at the moment it served its purpose.
He straightened his spine. “You’re right. I’ll be back soon.”
He turned and left.
Forty-five minutes later, he returned with all of the kinds of toys Rachel had recommended. When he dropped the bags on the floor in the middle of Honey’s carpet, Evan and Madeline riffled through them.
Their joy and appreciation lifted Cole’s spirits.
Honey smiled at him and gave him a thumbs-up.
Her optimism boosted him further.
He smiled.
His parents would never get control of Sandy’s children.
* * *
MARIA TRIPOLI ARRIVED at two thirty on the dot.
“Thanks so much for coming,” Cole said.
“You know I’m happy to be here. Children, do you remember me? We met the other day. Call me Maria.”
Evan nodded, but Madeline turned away and hid her face in a pillow.
Sorry, Honey mouthed.
Maria shook her head. “We will be fine. Go to work and don’t worry about a thing. Cole will help us to become acquainted.”
“Let me get changed.” In her bedroom, Honey took off the blouse that was covered with smears and splotches of ketchup from the grilled cheese sandwiches she’d made for lunch.
Madeline had sat on her lap. Evan had touched her often. Honey was left to realize how much the children needed to touch and to be held.
They were becoming comfortable with her and liked to hug her, even when their hands weren’t as clean as they should be. A small price to pay, in Honey’s estimation, for their comfort.
When ready, she slipped into the living room.
“Cole, try to get the children into bed by eight for a good night’s sleep.” She gave both Evan and Maddy kisses. “Also, Maria, could you share with Cole whatever motherly advice you have?”
Maria laughed. “I have plenty of that. Free of charge.”
Honey left knowing the children were in good hands.
She rushed through dinner service. On Wednesday evenings, the crowd wasn’t too large, so only she and Chet worked.
She didn’t have time to think much about Evan and Madeline until it slowed down later in the evening and patrons came in for a beer or two and not much food.
Only then did her thoughts wander to Cole and the children, wondering how they were doing.
She checked her watch. Nine o’clock already.
So they wouldn’t be upstairs. Cole would have taken them to his apartment. Maria would have gone home hours ago. How had the children reacted to her?
Funny that after only three days Honey missed the thought of them in her apartment. Strange to think of going upstairs later tonight and finding it empty.
Curiously, she would miss not only the children but Cole, too.
Honey cleaned dirty glasses at the bar while Chet read the local paper at a booth.
Chet spoke up so everyone could hear. “Nadine wrote a great article about the fair and rodeo.”
Rodeo Sheriff Page 10