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The stew was delicious, a rich combination of chicken and vegetables. Lilah tried to eat slowly, signaling to Jonathan not to gobble his food. But all the kids were eating as if they hadn’t eaten in months.
“Everything okay?” Daniel said.
She turned to look at him. “It’s excellent. Thank you,” she said, hearing the faintness of her voice. She felt overwhelmed by…
By what, she wasn’t sure. When she turned back to her plate, she saw that Jesse had refilled it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him putting not one but three pies into the oven to warm.
What overwhelmed her was the realization that this was a happier family than either she or Jonathan had ever known. Her parents had been poor and they’d resented it, never showing her the love they must have felt for her, their only child. They’d never shared a meal like this one, gathered around a table and laughing together. As for Jonathan’s life with her and Bruce…Lilah’s throat tightened, and she rose from the table.
“This has been wonderful, but we should go now,” she managed to say before Daniel leapt up just as rapidly.
He took her arm and turned her away from the boys, saying, “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. You guys get on with it. Save us some pie.” He closed the door on the chaotic scene and began to hurry her down the hall.
“No!” she said, tugging her arm away from him. “I’m fine. Let me go back to the kitchen.”
Taken aback, Daniel halted and turned to look at her. She glared back at him. “Why?” was all he could think of to say.
“I don’t want to leave Jonathan alone.”
“Alone with four other boys and a retired marine?”
“Alone without me. And I don’t want to be alone with you.”
He spoke as soothingly as he could. “Look, something upset you in the kitchen, and I thought you might like some privacy.”
“I would,” she said. Her voice was strained. “I really appreciate your hospitality, but now I want to take my son home.”
“As soon as we talk.” Lilah was chewing off her own foot, taking herself and her child away from something they’d both obviously enjoyed.
“All right. We’ll talk.” Stiffly, she followed him into the living room. And that was the right word for it—signs of living were everywhere, with books, games, bats and balls, this and that dropped here and there.
“Have a seat. How about some coffee? Relax a minute and I’ll bring you some.” Daniel knew she wouldn’t leave without her son, but he hurried out anyway, leaving her sitting straight as a fencepost on the cracked leather sofa. When he came back she was still sitting there, looking slightly less combative.
He handed her one of the coffee mugs, stretching out his arm as far as it would go and not coming any closer to her than he had to, as if she were a feral cat. Then he sat down in the chair that was farthest from her chosen corner.
“I suppose this means I’ve lost my chance to get the job,” she said as if she’d rehearsed the lines in his absence. “I did get a little…upset. I guess I’m tired and overemotional.”
He nodded. “Moving is stressful. But, no, you haven’t lost your chance. In fact, you seem to be exactly the housekeeper we’ve been looking for.”
It was painful for Daniel to see the relief that flooded her face. “So give me your address, and I’ll drop you a note.”
“As I said earlier, I’ll come to the clinic in a few days to find out what you decided.”
Daniel’s chest tightened. “You don’t have a phone, you don’t have an address—you’re homeless, aren’t you?”
She flushed with embarrassment. “That’s none of your business.”
“Lilah,” he said, “look around you. Making sure kids are being taken care of is my business.”
“I’m taking very good care of Jonathan,” she said. Her voice shook and her eyes glittered with tears. “He’s the most important thing in my…”
“Mom!” Jonathan ran into the room, so excited he looked as if he might pop. “Can I spend the night with Nick? He thinks I’d help the dreamcatcher work better.”
Aengus bounded in right behind Jonathan, and Nick followed with a precariously loaded tray holding wedges of apple pie. He pushed aside the things that already littered the coffee table and set down the tray. “Please?” Jonathan said. His eyes were shining.
Daniel desperately wanted Lilah to say yes—for Nick, who looked so happy, and for Jonathan, her homeless son. “That sounds like a great idea to me,” he said, raising a hand to warn Aengus against stealing the pie.
“Jonathan, we’ve imposed ourselves on these people long enough. It’s time to go home. So say goodbye and thank you and we’ll—”
“But Mom, we don’t—”
Lilah stiffened, and Jonathan grew quiet.
“Tell you what,” Daniel said easily, “your mom and I will discuss it. You guys can find something to do for five minutes, right?” He’d had a brilliant idea.
When the boys had left, he faced Lilah, whose face was pale and rigid. “You do understand that what I need is a live-in housekeeper,” he said.
Her expression changed. “Sure,” she said bitterly. “I knew there was a catch. No, thank you. I don’t need a job that badly.”
“Not living in this house,” he said. Exasperation rose in him, too, in response to her implication. “There’s an apartment over the carriage house—Jesse used to live there. You can stay there tonight and check it out.”
“I’d be very glad to take the housekeeping job,” she said. Her lips were drawn and white. “But not a live-in job.”
“I’m afraid,” he added, even more determined now, “that I’ll have to insist on the housekeeper living on the premises. With all these kids, she can’t help but be a housemother, too.”
“Thank you, but I’m going home, and tomorrow I’ll look for a job that won’t require us to live in.” She started toward the door.
“Think about Jonathan. Do it for him.”
She spun toward him and pushed back her hair. “I think about nothing but Jonathan,” she said. “And I think about how I’m never going to let him fall under the spell of a man who’s all nice and charming at first and then…”
When she pushed back her hair, Daniel saw the scar on her forehead—a jagged scar than ran from her temple to just above her eyebrow. It wasn’t a fresh wound, but it was too recently healed to have been the result of a childhood accident. A car wreck, maybe, or a serious fall on the ice, but somehow he didn’t think so. A blow from her deceased husband? A recent boyfriend? Daniel’s protective instincts boiled up inside him. Where had her son been when this happened to her?
“Then what?” he asked, saying it as casually as a shop clerk might say, “Anything else?” And all the while, his gut clenched and twisted, just as if the young, suspicious Daniel was struggling to get loose.
Her lips tightened. “Nothing. Goodbye.”
“The carriage house door has a lock. The apartment door has a lock. You’ll be safe, and Jonathan will be right next door. A night in a good bed, a hot shower, one of Jesse’s breakfasts, and you’ll be in much better shape for job-hunting.”
She hesitated, turned back, searched his face, and thank God, she must have seen only the calm adult Daniel. Or she’d thought about the good bed, the hot shower, a big breakfast. But he had a feeling she was seeing it for Jonathan, not for herself.
She loved her son, and he loved her. She could have faked it, but a child couldn’t. That, to Daniel, was the key to what she was as a person—a caring human being, a woman who’d somehow lost control of her life.
All at once she seemed to deflate. The embarrassment and anger were gone, and resignation took their place. “One night,” she said. “And Jonathan may spend the night with Nick.”
Daniel’s face still felt tight. “Fine,” he said. “Jesse has the carriage house keys. You can give Jonathan the good news. I’ll stay out of your way.” He stalked toward the door, then turned back to face her. “The job is yours if you want it.” He glanced at the coffee table. “Don’t forget your pie.”
It was a relief to turn his back on her startled face. When he got to his room, he sank onto the bed. It hadn’t been a pretty scene, but he’d gotten the result he wanted. Lilah would spend the night in the carriage house instead of her car, and Jonathan would be safe and warm and surrounded by boys who were delighted to have him there, especially Nick, who needed one more little leap of faith to help the dreamcatcher do its work.
Lilah’s scar lingered in Daniel’s thoughts, entered into his dreams and then kept him awake until the midnight call that meant he had to throw on clothes, alert Jesse that it was his watch and speed to the Dupras farm, where Maggie, the prize sow, had gone into labor.
A woman in distress always got him up and running, even when she was a pig.
WITH A FEELING THAT she was falling into a trap, Lilah made her way through the darkness to her car to retrieve the big trash bag into which she’d thrown her clothes before leaving Whittaker. She took note of the silver van and bright red pickup parked where a carriage would once have sat, then slowly climbed the stairs to the living quarters.
She unlocked the door, stepping inside to find a self-contained apartment, clearly a man’s world, but neat and clean. No coachman had ever lived in such splendor. Lilah set down her modest bag of possessions and put the wedge of pie next to the bed. She was stunned by all that had happened in just a few hours. She’d broken her own promise to herself and had put her life and Jonathan’s into someone else’s hands, even if it was only for a night. What had she been thinking?
Slowly she went toward the door that had to lead to the bathroom, opened it and looked inside. For the first time in two weeks, she could take a shower!
Giddy with excitement, she dug out her toiletries and arranged them on the granite counter, stripped off her clothes and turned on the water. She stepped under the steaming spray and let out a deep sigh of pleasure.
The water streamed through her hair, over her shoulders, down her back. She reveled in it, washing away all her worries, if only for a few minutes. She poured shampoo into her hand and lathered it into her hair. It smelled faintly of flowers. Flowers in the rain. She wanted to stay in the shower until everything was all right again.
The bathroom was warm when she stepped out, wrapped herself in a towel and looked in the mirror. She looked different, she felt different. Something buzzed through her body, making her feel alive again. With a start, she realized that what she was feeling was hope.
Chapter Three
Lilah woke early, more rested than she’d felt in years. She took another shower and spent a few minutes styling her hair as well as she could without a hair dryer—she’d forgotten hers, and why would an ex-marine with a buzz cut have a hair dryer? A swish of mascara, a bit of powder on her nose, lip gloss.
She didn’t want Daniel’s charity. He’d given her and her son shelter for the night. She had to pay him back, and she’d figured out how she might do it.
She dug into her bag of clothes and searched for something relatively clean and not as wrinkled as the sundress she’d taken off the night before. Tan trousers and a pale-blue shirt were the best she could do. Leaving the apartment in perfect order, she set off toward the main house.
Daniel’s big silver van was still in its spot, but the little red pickup was gone. She stepped through the dewy grass toward the house where Jonathan slept now, happier than he’d been in weeks.
Shivering in the chill of a June morning in Vermont, Lilah approached the kitchen door to find it locked. Inside, she could hear Aengus barking. In trying to surprise them, she’d probably awakened the whole household.
She spent a minute biting her lower lip, then circled the building, wondering which room was Nick’s. When she saw a Red Sox pennant taped to a window, she smiled. That was a clue.
She tapped on the window and called Jonathan’s name, softly at first, then a little louder. Apparently even Aengus couldn’t wake up these boys.
A tousled blond head appeared at last, and Jonathan raised the window. “Mom?”
“Good morning,” she said, smiling at him. “Unlock the kitchen door for me, okay? I want to surprise everybody and cook breakfast.”
A second tousled head appeared. “Can we help?” Nick asked.
“You really want to?” she whispered. “You don’t want to go back to sleep?”
“I’m not sleepy anymore,” Jonathan said.
“Me, either,” Nick agreed, looking both proud and surprised. “I slept all the way through the night.”
“What great news!” Lilah said. “Okay, meet me at the kitchen door and we’ll get to work.”
They met her so quickly that she wondered if they’d slept in their clothes. Jonathan was wearing shorts that weren’t his own. Nor was the oversize T-shirt, which said, Fair Meadows Soccer Camp. Her heart wrenched, but her optimism level steadied almost immediately when she entered the wonderful old kitchen. “Okay, Nick, help me out here. What do you guys usually have for breakfast?”
“We have four different breakfasts.” Nick recited them. “Eggs and sausage, pancakes and bacon, oatmeal and toast and French toast with ham.”
No cold cereal? “Which is your favorite?”
He sighed. “French toast, but we had that yesterday and ate all the ham.”
“Second choice?”
“Scrambled eggs and sausage. J.J., do you like eggs and sausage?”
J.J.? She’d ask about that later.
“Oh, yeah,” Jonathan said.
She opened the refrigerator. Three dozen eggs. Three wrapped rolls of sausage. She lifted an eyebrow. That should do it. A carton of buttermilk at the back of the shelf gave her a bright idea. “Where’s the flour?”
“In here,” Nick said.
In the cupboard she found everything she’d need. “Do you like biscuits?”
“Yeah,” Nick breathed. “Jesse makes ’em sometimes.”
“Okay, we have our menu,” she said briskly. “You two can set the table while I’m getting the biscuits started.”
Jonathan was cutting out biscuits and Nick was shaping sausage into patties when the door opened and Daniel walked in. His shirt and jeans were filthy. His hair was uncombed, and it seemed to have bits of straw in it. He looked exhausted. “What’s going on here?” he asked.
ALL HE’D SAID WAS “what’s going on?” But even that scared her. Her feet nearly left the ground.
“Sorry I surprised you.” He tried to smooth his hair. “I can see what’s going on here. You’re cooking breakfast.”
Then he took a second look at Lilah. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been the night before. Now, she looked clean, fresh and wholesome, well-rested. Pretty. Her hair swung around her shoulders, silky and shining, and her eyes, even bluer than her shirt, looked capable of sparkling. In fact, they probably had been sparkling until he’d walked in.
Lilah gave him a faint smile, then went back to whatever she’d been doing at the sink. Nick had apparently been too excited to sense the tension in the air. “We’re making eggs and sausage,” he said. “Lilah’s making biscuits—and I slept all the way through the night!”
Daniel leaned over to hug him. “I don’t know which one of those news flashes is the best one,” he said. Looking up at Lilah, he started to wink, then thought better of it.
“Were you in a car wreck?” Jonathan asked.
“Jonathan!” Lilah said.
“I look like it, don’t I? But,” he sighed, “it was just piglets.”
Jonathan swiveled with the biscuit cutter still in his hand, and a raw biscuit plopped onto the floor. “You were attacked by piglets?”
“Of course not!” Lilah reached down for the dough, tossed it in the trash and vigorously scrubbed her hands.
All at once, Daniel felt less tired. “No, I delivered them. Eight of them.”
Nick said, “Can we have one?”
“No,” Daniel said in synch with another “No!” trumpeted from the hallway. Daniel fell heavily into a kitchen chair and groaned. When Jesse saw his kitchen had been invaded, World War III was likely to break out.
“No pigs in this house,” he insisted as he came through the door. “We have enough—” He halted when he took in the scene, and Lilah seemed to tense, as if she were seeing it through Jesse’s eyes.
She was whipping eggs. Jonathan was cutting out biscuits. Nick occupied the remaining counter space with his sausage operation. This was Jesse’s kitchen, his biscuit cutter, his wire whip. Feeling as tense as Lilah looked, Daniel waited to see how it was all going to come down.
Right before his eyes, she changed. “Jesse,” Lilah said, giving him a sunny smile, “I hope it’s okay for me to help with breakfast. My goodness. The way you keep this kitchen puts me to shame. I thought I was neat, but your refrigerator is in perfect order, and I found all the biscuit ingredients lined up in the same cupboard, so it didn’t take me any time at all to make them. Everything is spotless, and I promise you it will be, well, almost as spotless when we’re through.”
Daniel nearly let out a whoosh of breath that would have given away his nervousness. Jesse grumbled a little, scraped his foot against the brick floor and said, “The military does that to you. Everything shipshape, you know.”
“The military does wonderful things for young men,” Lilah responded earnestly. “Teaches them routine, and order, and a sense of responsibility. I could learn a lot from you.”
“I’ll give you some kitchen management tips when we have some time,” Jesse said with the arrogance of a man who’s been told he’s perfect, which he knew anyway.
Daniel couldn’t believe it. The tough marine was melting like butter on a hot griddle. “The boys know,” Lilah went on, “that breakfast won’t be as good as if you’d cooked it, especially the biscuits, but I wanted to say thank you and this was all I could think of.”
“Mighty thoughtful of you,” Jesse said. “I have to admit my war injuries are kicking up this morning.”
“You got hurt in the war?”
Daniel figured Jonathan’s morning was getting off to a pretty exciting start. One man with piglet wounds and another with war wounds. Lilah was left to finish the cooking while Jesse entertained the two boys with a harrowing story of capture and escape due to the heroism of his buddies. Daniel wandered away to his room and made fast work of a shower and a change of clothes. The usual sounds of the morning began to fill the house, the clatter of footsteps, shouting, laughing, barking, and then the barbarian attack on the kitchen.
Joining them, he glanced down at the table. To the left of each place setting was a paper napkin folded into the shape of a pig. Lilah saw his expression. “Origami,” she said. “We had a few extra minutes while the biscuits baked.” She looked ever so slightly defensive, as if she expected the pigs might make him mad.
“Aw,” Daniel said. “You did it in Maggie’s honor.”
“Maggie?”
“Maggie the sow. You know, instead of cigars, piglet napkins.”
She laughed, actually laughed. Her face lit up and her eyes sparkled. “Of course,” she said. “Congratulations, Dad.”
He hadn’t felt this good since—since he’d delivered Maggie’s last piglet. It was fine, as all the others had been, and she was fine—which she wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t helped her out.
Maggie trusts me. Why doesn’t Lilah Jamison?
The boys were wedged in around the table, Jesse among them—any more boys and Daniel would have to turn this table into an oval—and when he pulled out his chair, he paused, looked around, counted and observed, “We need one more place setting.”
“Oh, no,” Lilah said. “I have to be running around serving. It’s what Jesse did last night…”
“But not what we’re doing this morning,” Daniel said. “Everybody crunch closer.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, when not a scrap of food was left anywhere except on the oilcloth and the boys’ shirts, Daniel said, “You guys have to get off to soccer camp, and I mean right now.”
They were all wearing Fair Meadows Soccer Camp T-shirts. Lilah felt her face flush. “Jonathan and I must be going as soon as we clean up the kitchen.”
“Jonathan’s going to soccer camp, too,” Daniel said.
“Hop to it, men,” Jesse barked, moving away from the breakfast table and herding the boys out the door. “Brush your teeth, comb your hair, get your gear.”
Three seconds from chaos to silence. Lilah was alone in the kitchen with Daniel. She got up and began to load the dishwasher with lightning speed. “Daniel, Jonathan, unlike every other child in Serenity Valley,” she said, cold on the inside and cold on the outside, “isn’t signed up for soccer camp.”
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