Читать книгу Mothers In A Million - Michelle Douglas - Страница 13

SUNDAY MORNING, Wyatt wanted nothing more than to stay in bed. He looked at the clock, saw it was only seven, and pulled the covers over his head. Then a car door slammed and he realized he’d woken because he’d heard a vehicle pull into the drive. He bounced out of bed, confused about who’d be coming to his Gram’s house at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. But when he walked to the kitchen window and peered out, he realized the caller had parked in Missy’s driveway.

Who would visit Missy at seven o’clock on a Sunday?

With a sigh he told himself not to care about her. Ever. For Pete’s sake. She’d rebuffed him twice, and the night before out-and-out told him she didn’t want anything to do with him. She even made him shake on it.

Did he have no pride?

He ambled to the counter, put on a pot of coffee and opened the back door to let the stale night air out and the cool morning air in.

Leaning against the counter, he waited for his jolt of caffeine. When the coffeemaker gurgled its final release, he poured himself a cup.

Turning to walk to the table, he almost tripped over Owen.

Still wearing his cowboy pajamas, the little boy grinned. “Hey.”

“Hey.” He stooped down to Owen’s height. “What are you doing here?”

“There’s a man talking to my mom.”

Even as Owen spoke, dark-haired Lainie opened Wyatt’s screen door and stepped inside. Dressed in a pink nightgown, she said, “Hi,” as if it were an everyday occurrence for her to walk into his house in sleepwear.

“Hi.”

Before he could say anything else, Claire walked in. Also in a pink nightgown, she smiled sheepishly.

Still crouched in front of Owen, Wyatt caught the little boy’s gaze. “So your mom’s talking to somebody and I’m guessing she didn’t see you leave.”

“She told us to go to our woom.”

At Wyatt’s left shoulder, Lainie caught his chin and turned him to face her. “He means room.”

“Your mom sent you to your room?”

Owen nodded. “While she talks to the man.”

Wyatt’s blood boiled. For a woman who didn’t want to get involved with him, she was engrossed enough in today’s male guest that she hadn’t even seen her kids leave.

Maybe he’d just take her kids back and break up her little party?

Telling himself that was childish, he nonetheless set his coffee cup on the counter and herded the three munchkins to the door. Missy would go nuts with worry if she realized they were gone. Albeit for better reasons than to catch her in the act, he had to take her kids back.

“Let’s go. Your mom will be worried if she finds you gone.”

Owen dug in his heels. “But she’s talking to the man. She doesn’t want us to sturb her.”

His eyebrows rose in question and he glanced at Helaina, the interpreter.

Who looked at him as if he was crazy not to understand. “Yeah. She doesn’t want us to sturb her.”

“Sturb?”

“Dee-sturb.” Claire piped in.

“Oh, disturb.”

Lainie nodded happily.

Well. Well. Little Miss I-Don’t-Want-A-Fling didn’t want to be disturbed. Maybe his first guess hadn’t been so far off the mark, after all? She might not want a relationship with him, but she was with somebody.

Wyatt corralled the kids and directed them to the porch.

When they were on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, Helaina caught his hand. “We stay together when we walk.”

Claire shyly caught his other hand.

Warmth sputtered through him. He seriously wasn’t the kind of guy to hang out with kids, but not only was he playing in dirt and organizing Wiffle ball games, now he was holding hands.

Owen proudly led the way. He skipped to the hedge and pulled it aside.

Lainie stooped and dipped through. Claire stooped and dipped through. Owen grinned at him.

Wyatt took one look at the opening provided and knew that wasn’t going to work. “You go first. I need to hold it up higher for myself.”

Owen nodded and ducked down to slip through.

Wyatt pushed the hedge aside and stepped into Missy’s backyard, where all three kids awaited him.

He pointed at the porch. “Let’s go.”

But only a few feet across the grass, Missy’s angry shout came from the house, as if she was talking to someone on the enclosed front porch.

“I don’t care who you are! I don’t care what you think you deserve! You’re not getting one dime from me!”

Wyatt’s blood ran cold. That didn’t sound like the words of a lover. It didn’t even sound like the words of a friend.

Could the man in her house be her ex? Returning for money? From her? After draining their accounts?

His nerve endings popped with anger. He dropped Claire’s and Helaina’s hands. “Wait here.”

But when he looked down at their little faces, he saw Claire’s eyes had filled with tears. Owen’s and Helaina’s eyes had widened in fear. The shouting had scared them. He couldn’t leave them out here alone when they were obviously frightened.

“Oh, come on, darlin’. You know I should have gotten this house when your grandmother died. I’m just askin’ for what you owe me.”

Wyatt’s mouth fell open. That was Monty.

“I heard you’ve got a sweet deal going with this wedding cake thing you’re doing. I just want what’s coming to me.”

“What should be coming to you is jail time!”

“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

“Melodramatic? You beat Mom to within an inch of her life so often I’m not surprised her heart gave out. And you beat me and Althea.” She stopped. A short cry rang out.

Then Missy said, “You get the hell away from me! Now. Mom may not have wanted to call the police, but the next time you show up here I’ll not only call the police, I’ll quite happily tell every damned person in this town that you beat us. Regularly. They’ll see that the happy-go-lucky diner owner everybody loves doesn’t really exist.”

“You’d never get anybody to believe you.”

“Try me.”

By now the kids had huddled around the knees of Wyatt’s sweatpants. No sound came from the house, but the front door slammed shut. With his hands on the kids’ shoulders, Wyatt quickly shepherded them to his side of the shrubs, where Monty couldn’t see them.

As her father screeched out of the driveway, Missy came barreling out the kitchen door. Standing on the porch, she screamed, “Owen! Lainie! Claire!” as if she’d gone looking for them after Monty left, found them gone and was terrified.

Wyatt quickly stepped out from behind the thin leafy branches, three kids at his knees. “We’re here. They came to get me to play in the sandbox.”

She ran down the porch steps and gathered her children against her. “They haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”

“I didn’t know that or I would have given them cereal. I have plenty.” Not knowing what else to do, he babbled on. “Gram had enough for an army, and most of it still hasn’t hit the expiration date.”

She looked up at him. Tears poured from her blue eyes, down her cheeks and off her chin.

He stooped down beside her and the kids. “Hey.” His heart thudded against his breastbone. What did a man say to a woman when he’d just heard that her dad had beaten her when she was a child?

Wyatt didn’t have a clue. But he did have a sore, aching heart. She’d had a crappy husband and a rotten father. While he’d had two perfect parents, talent, brains and safety, she’d lived in fear.

The knowledge rattled through him like an unwanted noise in an old car. He couldn’t deny it, but he didn’t know how to fix it.

And the last thing he wanted to do was say the wrong thing.

He set his hand on her shoulder. “You go inside. Take a shower. I’ll feed the kids.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re crying.” He hated like hell stating the obvious, but sometimes there was no way around that. “Give yourself a twenty-minute break. I told you I have lots of cereal. We’ll be okay for twenty minutes.”

Owen broke out of her hug. “We’ll be okay, Mommy.”

Fresh tears erupted. She gave the kids one last hug, then rose. Her voice trembled as she said, “If you’re sure.”

“Hey, we’ll make a game out of it.”

Owen tugged on the leg of his sweatpants. “Can we wook for tweasure?”

Wyatt laughed. “Yeah. We’ll wook for treasure.”

She’d never abandoned her kids.

Never handed them over to another person just to give herself time to pull herself together. But she also hadn’t had a visit from her dad in…oh, eight years?

And he’d decided to show up today? Knowing she had money in her checking account? Demanding that she give it to him?

How the hell did he know she had money?

She put her head under the shower spray. Now that she’d had a minute to process everything, she wasn’t as upset as She was surprised. Shocked that he’d shown up at her house like that. But now that she knew she was on his radar again, she wouldn’t cower as her mom had. She’d stand her ground. And she would call the police. If he touched her or—God forbid—her kids, he’d be in jail so fast his head would spin.

She got out of the shower and dried her hair. In ten minutes she had on clean shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair was combed. Her tears were dry.

She headed outside.

She expected to find Wyatt and the kids in the yard. Instead, they were nowhere in sight. When she knocked on his kitchen door there was no answer, so she stepped inside.

“Wyatt?”

“Back here.”

She followed the sound of his voice to the large corner bedroom, the 1960s version of a master suite, just like the one in her house. Old-fashioned lamps and lacy curtains reminded her of the room she’d inherited herself.

But the bed was covered in boxes, and more boxes were piled on the floor. Taking a bite of cereal from a bowl on the bedside table, Owen saw her. He grinned. “Hi, Mommy.”

Lainie popped up from behind the bed. Claire peeked around a tall stack of shoe boxes. “We’re looking for treasure.”

Missy walked into the room. “In the boxes?”

Owen said, “Yeah. But Lainie spilled her milk.”

Wyatt came running out of the bathroom, holding a roll of toilet paper. “Okay, everybody stand back… .” Then he saw Missy. “Hey.”

She took the toilet paper from him and rushed to the other side of the bed, where rolling milk rapidly approached the edge of the area rug. She spun off some tissue and caught the milk just in time.

Wyatt rubbed his index finger across his nose. “Things look worse than they really are.”

On her way to dump the milk-sodden tissue in the bathroom, she said, “What is all this?”

“This,” Wyatt said, following her to the bathroom, “is everything I found in the closet.”

“Are you kidding me? How’d your gram get all that in a closet?”

“She was quite the crafty packer.”

“I suppose.” Missy glanced around. “So it looks like you haven’t found the jewelry from Scotland yet.”

“Nope. And the kids were fine. Great, actually, until Lainie spilled her milk.”

“She gets overeager.”

He laughed. “She wants to do everything at once.”

“I can take them home now.”

“Why? We’re having fun. And I’m actually getting through three boxes a minute.”

“Three boxes a minute?”

“They open, dump, get bored and move on to the next one. And that leaves me to collect up everything they dumped, and get it back in the box. As I’m collecting, I’m checking for jewelry. At this rate I’ll have this whole room done by noon.”

She laughed.

And he sighed with relief. But the relief didn’t last long. With her tears dry and her mood improved, he knew she’d never tell him about her dad. And he couldn’t just say, “Hey, I saw Monty running out of your house this morning.” It would be awkward for her, like dropping someone in an ice-cold swimming pool.

Still, he couldn’t let this go. He’d been the one to tell Monty she was doing well. He’d thought he was doing her a favor. Turns out he had everything all wrong. And somehow he had to fix it.

“So what happened this morning?”

She strolled back into the bedroom and walked over to Helaina, who’d dumped out a box of panty hose.

“What is this?”

He grabbed the ball of panty hose and stuffed it back into the shoe box. “My grandmother never met a pair of panty hose she didn’t want to save.”

“My grandmother saved them, too. She used them as filler when she made stuffed animals or couch pillows.”

“Thank God. I was beginning to think my grandmother was nuts.” And he’d also noticed Missy had changed the subject. “So what happened this morning?”

She sucked in a breath, ruffling Lainie’s dark hair as the little girl picked up another shoe box, popped the lid and dumped the contents.

Bingo. Jewelry.

He swung around to that side of the bed. Beads and bobbles rolled across the floral comforter. “Well, what do you know?”

Missy caught his gaze. “Don’t get your hopes up. Most of this looks like cheap costume jewelry.”

He picked up a necklace, saw a chip in the paint on a “pearl.”

“Drat.”

“Finding jewelry is a good sign, though. At least you know it’s here somewhere.”

He dropped the string of fake pearls to the bed. “Yeah, well, she has three furnished bedrooms. I found clothes in the drawers in the dressers in each room. All the closets are full of boxes like these.” He sighed. “Who wants to go play in the yard?”

Missy laughed. “Is that how you look for jewelry? In the yard?”

He faced her. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m sort of, kind of, the type of guy who doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

Shaking her head, she laughed again. “So how do you intend to find the jewelry?”

He shrugged. “Not sure yet. But I’m an idea guy. That’s how I got rich.” It was true. Even his writing was a form of coming up with ideas and analyzing them to see if they’d work. “So eventually I’ll figure out a way to find the jewelry without having to look through every darned drawer and box in this house.”

“Well, I’d volunteer to help you, but I have some thinking of my own to do today.”

“Oh, yeah.” He sat on the bed, patted the spot beside him. That was as good of an opening as any to try again to get her to talk to him. “I just told you I’m a good idea man. Maybe I could help you with that thinking.”

“No. You and I have already been over this. Your idea to solve my financial problem was to give me money.”

He remembered—and winced.

“So this morning I need to go over my books again, think through how I can get a van and an assistant.”

“Why the sudden rush?”

She shrugged. “No reason.” She clapped her hands. “Come on, kids. Let’s go.”

A chorus of “Ah, Mom,” echoed around him.

He rose from the bed, suddenly understanding that maybe she didn’t want to talk about her dad because the kids were around. Which meant they wouldn’t talk until the triplets took their naps. “I promised them time in the sandbox.”

She sighed. “They’re not even out of their pajamas yet.”

“How about if you go get them dressed while I clean up some of this mess? Then I’ll take them when you’re done.”

“I do want that thinking time this morning.” She blew her breath out in another sigh. “I don’t know how to pay you back for being so good to them.”

“I already told you it makes me feel weird to hear you say you want to pay me for playing. So don’t say it again.”

She laughed. Then she faced the kids. “All right. Let’s go. We’ll get everybody into clean shorts, then you can go out to the sandbox with Wyatt.”

Owen jumped. “Yay!”

Lainie raced to the door.

Claire took her mom’s hand.

Wyatt watched them go, then fell to the bed again. She’d been beaten by her dad, left by her husband with three babies, and now struggled with growing a business. It didn’t seem right that he couldn’t give her money. But that ship had sailed. Worse, he had to confess that he was the one who’d told her dad how well she was doing.

Wyatt looked at his watch, counting down the hours till naptime, feeling as if he was counting down the hours to doomsday.