Marrying a Delacourt

Chapter Three

Michael had never been so relieved to see anyone in his life as he had been to see Grace pull into the driveway the night before. The fact that his heart had done a little hop, skip and jump had been gratitude, nothing more, he assured himself. The woman was far too prickly for him to consider another run at anything more, especially when there were plenty of willing women who’d be grateful for his attention and who wouldn’t grumble if he had to cancel a date every now and again.

Not that he didn’t understand why Grace had been furious when he’d missed her law school graduation years ago. He’d known exactly how important that day was to her. She had struggled and sacrificed to go to college, worked herself to a frazzle to succeed. She had earned that moment of triumph, and he should have been there to witness it.

Even understanding all that, he’d gotten caught up in a tough negotiation and hadn’t even glanced at a clock until it was too late to make the ceremony. He’d apologized in every way he could think of, but she’d been unforgiving. Still was, as far as he could tell.

At the time, he’d told himself it was for the best. After all, how could a man in his position be expected to work nine to five? If he followed the workaholic example set by his father, his career was destined to be time-consuming. If Grace was going to be unreasonably demanding, it would never work out. Better to find that out before they were married.

He winced when he thought of how he’d tried to deftly shift all of the blame to her, tried to make her feel guilty for his neglect, as if it were her expectations that were at fault, not his insensitivity. No wonder she’d taken every opportunity since to make him squirm in court. He was amazed that she’d shown up here at all, much less stayed. But, then, Grace had too much grit, too much honor, to let her distaste for him stand in the way of helping someone truly in need.

One glance at those two boys and Michael had seen her heart begin to melt. Despite her tough exterior, she was a soft touch. Always had been. Even when she’d been struggling to pay tuition, refusing to accept so much as a dime from him, she’d never been able to turn away a lost kitten or a stray dog. She’d craved family the way some people needed sex. He’d counted on that to work in his favor when he’d called her.

And speaking of sex, being in such close proximity to her was going to be sheer torture. Just because he’d recognized that they weren’t suited for marriage didn’t mean that recognition shut off his hormones. The minute she’d stepped out of that rental car, looking annoyed and disheveled, he’d promptly envisioned her in bed with him, and in this scenario he was doing some very clever and inventive things to put a smile back on her face. He doubted she would have been pleased to know the direction of his thoughts.

He was none too pleased about them himself, since he’d been in an uncomfortable state of arousal ever since his first glimpse of her the night before. He figured an icy shower was going to be his only salvation and, if Grace was sticking around, he might as well get used to taking them. Uncontrollable lust or not, he had no intention of strolling down that particular dead-end road again. He had trouble enough on his hands with Jamie and Josh under his roof—or Trish’s roof, to be more precise about it.

He considered hanging around upstairs for a while longer, giving her plenty of time to solve the problem of the runaway kids, but guilt had him showered and dressed and on his way downstairs just after dawn. To his surprise, he was the last one up.

When he wandered into the kitchen, he found Grace blithely flipping pancakes for two wide-eyed and eager boys, whose blond hair had been slicked back and whose faces had been scrubbed clean. Grace’s influence, no doubt.

They were currently falling all over themselves to get the table set for her. Given the fact that she was barefoot and had chosen to dress in shorts and a T-shirt, he could understand their reaction. He was pretty darned anxious to do whatever he could to please her, too. Unfortunately, his ideas would have to wait for another time, another place…probably another lifetime.

“Grace says as soon as we eat, we’re going to talk about what to do with us,” Josh announced, sounding surprisingly upbeat about the prospect. Obviously he was crediting Grace with the good judgment not to do anything against his will.

“We’re not going back,” Jamie inserted direly, his gaze pointedly resting first on Michael, then on Grace. “So, if that’s what you’re thinking, you can forget it.”

Obviously he was not as willing to assume Michael’s good will or Grace’s powers of persuasion as his little brother was.

“Back to where?” Michael asked, hoping to get a quick, uncensored response.

Grace shot a warning look at him. “That’s enough for now. We’ll talk about it after breakfast,” she soothed, a hand resting gently on the boy’s shoulder. “We’ll all be able to think more clearly after we’ve eaten. How many pancakes, Jamie?”

“Four,” he said, his distrust clearly not extending to the matter of food.

“I want five,” Josh said.

“You can’t eat five,” Jamie countered. “You’re littler than me.”

“Can so.”

“How about you both start with four and see if you want more?” Grace suggested, deftly averting a full-scale war between the two boys. She turned her attention to Michael for the first time since he’d entered the kitchen. “And you?”

“Just coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.”

“The pancake offer only goes around once,” she advised him. “I’ll give you four, too. You look like you could use a decent breakfast for a change. You probably have the executive special back home.”

“What’s that?” Josh asked.

“Half a grapefruit and dry toast,” Grace said with obvious distaste. “Keeps them lean and mean.”

“Oh, yuck,” both boys agreed in unison.

It was too close to the truth for Michael to contradict Grace’s guesswork or the boys’ disgust. “Whatever,” he mumbled, pouring himself a cup of coffee and taking his first sip gratefully. It was strong, just the way he liked it.

When they were all seated at the round kitchen table, plates piled high with pancakes that had been drowned in maple syrup, Grace regarded Michael with interest. “In all the confusion last night, I forgot to ask. Where exactly are we? You said Los Piños on the phone. The pilot neglected to give me any details about our flight plan.”

“And we all know your sense of direction is seriously flawed,” Michael teased. “Los Piños is in west Texas. That’s the opposite side of the state from Houston, in case you were wondering.”

“How exactly did Trish manage to lure you over here before deserting you?”

“She didn’t. Tyler came into my office and nagged until he got me on the company jet under the pretense of bringing me over here for a big family reunion.”

“And you bought that, after what they did to you last time?” she asked, looking incredulous.

“What happened last time?” Josh asked, his face alight with curiosity, his overloaded fork hovering in midair.

“They took him off to a cabin in the woods and left him,” Grace said with a certain amount of obvious delight. “One whole week.”

“Cool,” Jamie declared.

“No cell phone. No TV. No newspapers. No financial news,” Grace added cheerily, as if she knew exactly what had driven him up a wall during those seven endless days. “Did they stock the refrigerator, or were you expected to catch your dinner in the lake?”

Michael scowled at her but didn’t bother to reply. He was not about to discuss his lack of expertise with a fishing rod or the fact that Trish had left him with a freezer filled with meals prepared and labeled, complete with microwave instructions.

“No TV?” Josh asked with evident shock. “What did you do?”

“Cursed my family for the most part,” Michael said. He’d also read half the books on the shelves, even the classics that he’d avoided back in school. “Could we drop the sorry saga of my sneaky relatives, please? Just thinking about it is giving me indigestion.”

“What amazes me is not their sneakiness, but your gullibility,” Grace said, ignoring his plea to end the topic. “Once, maybe, but twice? That radar of yours must be slipping, Michael. You’ve obviously lost your edge. I hope none of your competitors get wind of that.”

He frowned at her taunt. “My edge is just fine, thank you. I got you over here, didn’t I?”

She laughed. “Touché.”

“What does that mean?” Josh asked.

“It means he got the last laugh, at least for now,” Grace told him. “Now eat. Your pancakes are getting cold.”

Jamie regarded Michael worriedly. “If you’re here on some kind of vacation, does that mean this place ain’t yours?”

“No, it isn’t mine,” Michael said, in a probably wasted attempt to correct the boy’s pitiful grammar. “It belongs to my sister.”

“Oh,” Jamie said flatly. He looked as disappointed as if Michael had revealed that there was no Santa Claus. Of course, these two probably hadn’t believed in Santa for quite some time, if ever.

“Does that bother you for some reason?” Grace asked Jamie.

“It’s just that it’s real nice, the nicest place we’ve been in a while. Even the barn was real clean.”

“Were you hoping to stick around?” Grace inquired casually.

“Maybe,” Jamie admitted, clearly struggling to keep any hint of real hope out of his voice. “For a little bit. Just till we figure out what to do next. I gotta get a job if I’m gonna take care of me and Josh.”

Michael was about to question what sort of a job he expected to get at his age, but Grace gave him a subtle signal, as if she knew what he’d been about to say and wanted him to keep silent.

“Where’s home for you guys?” she asked instead, sneaking in the very same question she’d wanted Michael to back away from earlier.

“Ain’t got one,” Jamie said, returning her gaze belligerently.

“Okay, then, where did you run away from?” When they didn’t answer, she said, “You might as well tell us. Otherwise, we’ll just have to call the police so they can check all the missing persons reports.”

Josh regarded them worriedly. “If we say, can we stay here? I can do laundry and make my bed. We won’t be any trouble. Honest.”

It was already too late for that, Michael thought. He was harboring two runaways and a woman he had a desperate desire to kiss senseless. Talk about a weekend fraught with danger.

“No,” he said a little too sharply. He saw the look of betrayal in their eyes and felt like a heel. Before he could stop himself, he moderated the sharp refusal. “Tell us the truth and then we’ll talk about what happens next.”

“You’ll really listen to what we got to say?” Jamie asked skeptically.

“We’ll listen,” Grace promised.

“We gotta tell,” Josh said, regarding his big brother stubbornly. “Maybe they’ll let us stay.”

“I say we don’t,” Jamie insisted. “They’re grown-ups. They’ll just make us go back. They’ll say they gotta, because it’s the law or something. You want to be separated again, like last time?”

He seemed unaware of just how revealing his question was. Michael was uncomfortably aware of an ache somewhere in the region of his heart. These two were getting to him, no doubt about it. As for Grace, they’d clearly already stolen her heart. She was regarding them sympathetically.

“You were in foster care, weren’t you?” she guessed. “And not together?”

“Uh-huh,” Josh said, shooting a defiant look at his brother. “Nobody would take both of us last time or the time before that. They said we were too much trouble when we were together.”

“I’m old enough to look out for my own kid brother,” Jamie said, regarding them both with his usual belligerence. “We’ll be okay. You don’t have to do nothin’. Soon as we eat, we’ll go.”

“Go where?” Michael asked, feeling as if the kids had sucker punched him. He tried to imagine being separated from Dylan, Jeb and Tyler when they’d been the ages of these boys. He couldn’t. They were bound together by a shared history, by family and by the kind of fierce love and loyalty that only siblings felt despite whatever rivalries existed.

He focused his attention on Jamie, since he was clearly the leader. Josh would trustingly go along with whatever his big brother wanted. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Jamie said, drawing a shocked look from his brother.

“I’d guess thirteen, tops,” Michael said, turning to gauge Josh’s reaction, rather than Jamie’s. The boy gave him a subtle but unmistakable nod. “How about you, Josh? Eight? Nine?”

“Eight,” Josh admitted readily. He was apparently eager to provide any information that might persuade Michael and Grace to keep the two of them at the ranch. “Last week. That’s when Jamie came for me, on my birthday. We’ve always been together on our birthdays, no matter what. We promised.”

“And that’s a very good promise to try to keep,” Grace said. “Families should stick together whenever they can.”

As she said it, she kept her gaze locked on Michael. He got the message. There were now evidently three against one in the room should he decide to fight for an immediate call to the proper authorities. Grace wasn’t going to turn these two over to anybody who would separate them again, though how she hoped to avoid it was beyond him. There were probably a zillion rules about how to handle this, and he’d brought her here precisely because she knew them. Now she was showing every indication that she might just ignore all zillion of them. For the moment, however, it had to be her call. She was the expert.

“How long have you been in foster care?” she asked, apparently inferring from Michael’s silence that he was willing to withhold judgment until all the facts were in.

“Since Josh was four,” Jamie finally confessed. “We were together in the first place, but then they got mad at me, ’cause I wouldn’t follow all their stupid rules, so I got sent away to another family. They kept Josh till he ran away to find me. When they dragged him back, he cried and cried, till he made himself sick. Then they said they couldn’t cope with him either.”

Michael swallowed hard at the image of a little boy sobbing his heart out for his big brother. Instead of being treated with compassion, he’d been sent away. What kind of monsters did that to a child? He glanced at Grace and thought he detected tears in her eyes.

“How many places have you been since then?” she asked gently.

“Four,” Jamie said without emotion. “Josh has been in three.”

“Because you keep running away to be together?” Grace concluded.

“Uh-huh.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“We don’t got any,” Jamie said flatly. His sharp gaze dared his brother to contradict him.

Even so, Josh couldn’t hide his shock at the reply. “That’s not true,” he protested, fighting tears. “We got a mom. You know we do.”

“For all the good it does. She’s been in rehab or jail as far back as I can remember,” Jamie said angrily. “What good is a mom like that?”

“I’m sure she loves you both very much, despite whatever problems she has,” Grace said. “Sometimes things just get to be overwhelming and people make mistakes.”

“Yeah, like turning her back on her own kids,” Jamie said with resentment. “Some mistake.”

Michael was inclined to agree with him, but he kept silent. This was Grace’s show. She no doubt knew what to say under very complicated circumstances like this. He didn’t have a clue. He just knew he wanted to crack some adult heads together. The vehemence of his response surprised him. Grace was the champion of the underdog, not him. He’d wanted to distance himself from this situation, not get drawn more deeply into it. But with every word Jamie and Josh spoke, he could feel his defenses crumbling.

“Where are you from—I mean originally, back when you lived with your mom?” Grace asked the boys.

The question surprised him. He’d just assumed the boys had to be from someplace nearby. How else would they have wound up in Trish and Hardy’s barn? Realistically, though, how many foster homes were there likely to be around Los Piños? How much need for them would there be in a town this size, anyway?

“We were born in San Antonio,” Jamie said. “But we moved around a lot, even before Mom ditched us. I can’t even remember all the places. She liked big cities best because it was easier to get…” He shrugged. “You know…stuff.”

Michael was very much afraid he did know. He held back a sigh.

“And your last foster home?” Grace asked. “Was it near here?”

The boy shook his head. “Not really. When I got Josh, I figured this time we’d better get far away so they could never find us. I figured they’d just give up after a couple of days. It’s not as if anybody really cares where we are. We’ve been hitching rides for a while now. Like a week, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “We must have gone about a thousand miles.”

“It’s only a couple of hundred, doofus,” Jamie said.

“Well, it seems like a lot. We didn’t get a lot of rides, so we had to walk and walk. Jamie wouldn’t get in a car with just anybody. He said we could only get in pickups where we could ride in the back.”

Michael listened, horrified. He saw the same sense of dismay on Grace’s face. Clearly, they both knew all too well what might have happened to two small boys on the road alone. Obviously Jamie, at his age and with his street smarts, understood the dangers as well, but it was also clear that he thought those were preferable to another bad foster care experience or another separation.

“We told the truth,” Jamie said, looking from Grace to Michael and back again. “You gonna let us stay?” He didn’t sound especially hopeful. His expression suggested he was ready to run at the first hint that Michael and Grace might not agree to let them stick around.

“Why don’t you boys go and check on the feed for the horses?” Michael suggested. “Grace and I need to talk things over and decide what’s best.” He scowled at Jamie. “And don’t get any ideas about taking off while we do, okay? We’ll work this out. I promise.”

He meant that promise more than he’d ever meant anything in his life.

Unfortunately, he had a feeling that the solution to this particular problem wasn’t going to come to them over a second cup of coffee. And judging from Grace’s troubled expression, she knew it, too.

Chapter Four

Grace wanted to cry. As the boys straggled dejectedly out of the kitchen as if the weight of the world were on their narrow shoulders, she couldn’t bear to meet Michael’s gaze. She was afraid if she did, the tears would come and she wouldn’t be able to stop them.

She identified with Josh and Jamie a little too much. She could remember exactly what it felt like to have no one around she could count on. After her father’s departure, her mother had sunk more and more deeply into a depression from which she never recovered. Grace had been eighteen when her mother died, a sad, lost woman.

Because for so many years Grace had been as much caregiver as child, she had felt the loss even more deeply, felt even more abandoned and alone. She blinked back tears at the memory of that time. She had been so frightened and so determined not to show it.

That was when she had met Michael and, for a time, she had felt connected. She had leaned on him, drawing strength from the attention he had showered on her, envisioning herself a part of his large family even though at that time she’d never met them.

But, in the end, he hadn’t been able to give her what she desperately needed—a storybook family in which she would come first with him, just as he did with her. Graduation day had been a brutal awakening for her. She had realized then that the only person she could truly count on was herself. She’d clung to her independence ever since, not wanting to risk more disillusionment with another man.

But while her lifestyle suited her now, she didn’t want that for Jamie and Josh, who were already far too used to fending for themselves. She wanted them to be surrounded by people who cared, people they knew would be there for them always.

“Grace?”

Michael’s concerned voice drew her back to the present. “What?” she said without glancing up.

“You okay?”

“Of course,” she said, forcing a brisk, confident note into her voice. It was her courtroom tone, the one she drew on so no judge or jury would ever sense a hint of vulnerability. Even so, she wasn’t quite ready to look him in the eye.

“This is a hell of a mess, isn’t it?” he said.

“Now there’s an understatement, if ever I heard one.”

“What are we going to do?”

Her gaze came up at that. “We?” she echoed, not bothering to hide her surprise. “I thought you intended to dump this into my lap.”

“Look, if you don’t want my help, that’s fine by me. Believe me, nothing would please me more that to turn this over to you and get on with my nice, peaceful vacation.”