by January Rowe
Someone was standing on the porch, too. The agent’s partner? A woman, for sure. Well-dressed, pretty. As they approached, Jill figured out who it was.
It was her sister Kim.
She let go of Tern’s hand and ran toward her, suffused with surprise and delight. She bounded up the porch stairs. She hadn’t seen Kim in years. Kim had occasionally sent them postcards. Jill always responded, but by then Kim had moved on. Jill’s letters were returned, undeliverable, unknown addressee.
Kim was “a seeker.” A restless, contemplative soul, Kim was always looking for ways to connect with God. Psychedelic drugs, Christianity, Buddhism, the occult.
They hugged each other tight.
Drawing away from their embrace, Jill looked her sister up and down. Kim was so elegant. Her red hair was cut short and asymmetric. Large diamonds twinkled at her earlobes. She was smiling. Had Kim finally found God or had she given up on her religious quest?
“Do you live in the city now?” Jill asked.
“No. Business trip. We’re up from Palm Springs.”
“Well, come on in. I’ve got some sun tea in the fridge. Let’s catch up.”
“I wish I could. But we’re heading off to Vegas.”
“Vegas?” Why had Kim bothered to come if she couldn’t spare the time to have an iced tea? Jill was hurt.
Tern ambled up the porch stairs. “Hey, Kim.”
“Hello, Tern,” Kim said. “How’s life treating you?”
“Pretty good. So is Mr. Mercedes with you?” he asked.
“Yup.”
The gray-haired man was now sitting in his car, looking up at them.
“Well, ask him in,” Tern said. “Any friend of yours is a friend of ours.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t,” Kim said. “Duke’s got an early-morning meeting in Las Vegas. We’ll be driving most of the night.” Her gaze settled on Jill. “I was wondering if you might watch Poppy for a couple of days?”
Still stung by Kim’s eagerness to leave, Jill scanned the porch. She expected a designer pet carrier with a fancy froufrou dog inside. Instead, she saw a child. The little girl sat on their rustic rocking chair, cradling a tiny plaid suitcase. She resembled Kim, but with darker hair and skin. All those postcards and Kim had never mentioned she had a child? Why?
Jill was dumbfounded.
“Poppy,” Kim said gently. “Come and meet Auntie Jill and Uncle Tern.”
The girl walked over, dragging her suitcase behind her. She couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. She looked vulnerable and shaky, with her shoulders hunched and eyes scouring the porch floor.
Despite the questions crowding her mind, Jill’s heart had melted. The little girl needed somebody to take care of her.
But it wasn’t Jill’s choice to make. Tern was the head of their household. All the major decisions were his.
She gazed at him, silently hoping he would sympathize with the child. She prayed he’d notice how desperately frightened the little girl was.
Already he was bending over, gently shaking the little girl’s hand. “Hi, Poppy. I’m Tern. Auntie and I are happy you’re going to stay with us for a little bit. How about I carry that suitcase of yours, and we head into the kitchen to see if we can’t find us some ice cream?”
Chapter Two
Poppy was still with them ten days later. Tern felt a catch in his heart as he watched Jill and Poppy from the threshold of the front door. His wife and niece were sitting out on the porch steps, their heads bent over a scrap of fabric. Jill was teaching Poppy to hand sew. The little girl giggled and poked at the fabric. He experienced a weird yearning to sit next to them and learn to make stitches, too. His own childhood had been devoid of such tenderness.
“Anybody interested in going to a movie later on today?” he asked.
They both turned around to look up at him.
Jill smiled. Poppy shrugged her narrow shoulders, indifferent. He’d been trying to get the little girl to warm up to him to give Jill a break. But so far Poppy had refused all of his invitations. Once he’d even asked her if she wanted to get a McDonald’s meal with him. And he couldn’t stand the place. “No thanks,” she’d said. Even an hour away from Jill was too long for Poppy. The little girl continued to follow Jill around like a lost dog. Even to bed. Jill ended up sleeping in Poppy’s room to help her through her frequent night terrors.
“Okay. Maybe tomorrow.”
Tern was a patient man. He’d keep trying to get Poppy to do something with him. At least until her mother returned. Whenever that was.
Tern headed back inside the house to work.
* * * *
The drawing room of Aunt Alice’s old house was Tern’s workshop. The large, light-filled space, wallpapered in a pink floral was once feminine. Now it was scattered with man-debris. Wood, worktables, his table saw, tools, and furniture projects in various states of completion all crowded the room.
Everything he built was his own design. Nobody produced better dungeon furniture. It was because he refused to hurry, or use inferior materials.
He started sanding the sides of a sex seesaw. He planned to give the piece a couple coats of oil later on that afternoon. After the seesaw was dry, he’d upholster it. He generally stayed away from stuffing things. He was a carpenter, not a taxidermist. But since he was making it for friends, he’d agreed to upholster. They were paying a pretty penny for the furniture. Six hundred dollars.
The money would come in handy for their upcoming trip to Africa. He and Jill had arranged to build houses in Ethiopia for Global Village. After a month of construction duty, they’d head up to North Africa. Morocco had long been on Jill’s bucket list.
They were both looking forward to a new adventure.
If Jill’s sister ever came back to get her little girl. It had been ten days. Kim was supposed to have returned three days ago. There was no sign of her. No calls. No letters. No nothing. What kind of woman just abandoned her kid to random relatives and then didn’t bother to come back when she promised? He felt bad for Poppy. What if she asked why her mother hadn’t come back?
He despised selfish parents. He’d been on the receiving end of that sort of neglect. He and his brothers had practically raised themselves.
Sanding harder and harder, he attempted to scrub away his own bad memories, his fears for Poppy. Once Kim did show up, he’d blast her with a few choice words.
He stopped to examine at his handiwork. It was a good thing the seesaw was made of oak. Had it been a softer wood, the thing would have been ground down to nothing by now. He had to get his emotions under control before he wrecked the piece. Taking an agitated breath, he reminded himself that Poppy wasn’t in any danger right then and there. She wasn’t hungry or cold or alone.
The little girl was being taken care of. By them.
He returned to sanding. Gently this time.
* * * *
Two weeks later Kim still hadn’t bothered to come back.
Jill and Poppy were getting closer and closer. His efforts to make friends with Poppy were rebuffed. On the plus side, it gave Tern a lot of time to build furniture.
Late evening, Jill slipped into Tern’s workshop. She wore a simple floral shift. He loved her that way most of all. Natural, guileless, effortlessly beautiful.
“I just tucked her in,” Jill said. “She’s getting more comfortable here. Happier. Adjusted. I think she might sleep through the night.”
Tern doubted it. They had spent the afternoon at the park and Poppy rarely moved away from Jill. Jill probably reminded Poppy of her mother. Only in looks, he’d thought angrily. They got Poppy to try the swing, but she just sat there, watching other kids play. She didn’t even want to be pushed, though Tern offered more than once. The little girl never even said hello to the other kids. The only time she ever connected with anyone was with a dog they passed on their way home.
But he didn’t voice his worries. He wanted Jill to stay optimistic. “Come here.”
> She approached him with a smile. Taking in her clean floral fragrance, he drew her down to sit down crosswise on his lap. She laid her head on his shoulder. A shockwave of carnal pressure exploded into his groin at the contact. They hadn’t had sex since Poppy had arrived. It was his fault. He didn’t believe in quickies. An in-and-out fuck was about gratification. He had higher standards than that.
“I cancelled our flight to Africa today,” he said, caressing her back. “We can’t very well abandon Poppy.”
“Are you upset?” she asked, pulling up to look into his face.
“No. Not with you or Poppy.” The most vulnerable came first with him. And they always would. “I’m not impressed with Kim, though.”
“Do you think Kim got into a car accident? Is she in a hospital somewhere? What if she’s in a coma?”
Jill was always so willing to believe the best of people. Tern wasn’t. “I don’t know where Kim is, Jillie. I have a gut feeling she’s just having a good time with Mr. Mercedes.”
“You think so? That would be so awful! To forget your own kid? All Poppy brought with her were some clothes in that little suitcase. All summer stuff. No toys, nothing. What are we going to do?”
“We’ll just take it as it comes, heart,” he said. “And we’ll do the very best we can.”
“I did try to make that little room upstairs nice for her, but I thought she’d be staying a week. Tern, Poppy doesn’t even have a proper bed.”
“No kid ever died from sleeping on a beanbag.”
He should know. He and his three brothers shared a bare mattress on the floor when they were kids. Certainly he and Jillie had also slept on far worse than a home-sewn beanbag during their exotic travels. They considered themselves supremely lucky if their sleeping bags didn’t get wet or bedbugs hadn’t attacked them.
Jill’s eyes glistened with unshed tears and her voice cracked with emotion. “Children need a bed.”
“Children need love,” he corrected.
She looked stricken, her shoulders sagging. He couldn’t understand her sentimentality over a physical object like a bed. Jill was not a materialistic creature. Still, it was his duty to attempt to shield his woman from any outside misery.
He had it in his power to solve this particular problem.
“I’ll make her a bed,” he said. “How about a light maple?”
“Oh, Tern, she’ll love that!”
He scanned his workshop, zeroing in on his wood supply. He had enough of the maple to make a flush headboard. Perfect. But as for the rest? The power saws, the lathe, all the random wood leaning against the wall, the sharp hand tools, the clamps, the glue? Not so perfect. He’d have to rig up some sort of barrier so Poppy wouldn’t wander into his workshop from the central hall and hurt herself. Assuming the little girl could ever separate herself from Jill.
“Can I fix up her room, too?” Jill asked. “Maybe paint it?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve been so understanding, Tern. Thank you.”
“I’m going to do my own fixing up. Like I have to put in a door to my workroom. Soon as I can,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because the stuff in here is heavy and sharp. Too dangerous for a little girl. It’s certainly too dangerous for a woman.” He pinched her ass through her thin cotton dress.
“Sir,” she breathed, pressing into him.
Her soft “Sir” was something she said only when they were alone. It was an invitation, a hope that he’d give her a good fucking. He was instantly hard. Jill’s sexual power over him made him wonder, despite all of her deference toward him, if she wasn’t actually the one in control.
“Do you really think she’ll get along without you tonight?” he asked.
She nodded.
God, his wife was so desirable. He squeezed her waist. “I’m finished with the prototype of the turntable. It needs a test-drive. Want to help me figure out if the dimensions are correct?”
“Oooh, yes!” She slid off his lap, and went to go investigate the raw pine-veneered plywood apparatus.
The turntable was like a giant old-fashioned record player, about hip high, rotating on a center axis. The circumference of the turntable was dotted with restraints. When he finally made the real thing, he’d do it in oak, not plywood. The restraints would be fashioned out of fine leather, not plastic.
She spun the turntable. “It turns smoothly.”
“Not a true test.” He laid her on the dungeon equipment. He buckled her wrists, one by one, high above her head.
She looked up at him. Her brown eyes were nearly black, her lovely mouth slack with desire. Her chest rose up and down rapidly. His Jillie adored testing the furniture. She was especially fond of the ones with restraints, since they didn’t use restraints in their regular play.
He twisted the table to attach her ankles. It wouldn’t work. Her long shift was too tight to spread out her legs. He could shove her dress up to her hips of course, but it amused him to attach both ankles to one of the buckles.
“Hmm, interesting.”
He walked around the turntable, enjoying the way she struggled to keep eye contact with him. “You are such a lovely creature. But I do believe the softest, juiciest part of you is hidden.”
He stretched over her, laughing at her sweet little thrusts. He stroked the inside of her splayed arms. She groaned, bucking against his iron hard-on, desperate for relief. His own tension mounted.
She stopped her frenzied movement. “Tern. Do you hear Poppy crying?”
He stopped his tender molestations. He discerned a delicate footfall on the stairs, along with soft weeping. How in the world had Jill, so frantic with lust, heard that?
“I hear her. She’s crying for you.” He slid off his wife and released her. She flew out of the workshop.
So much for Poppy sleeping through the night. And so much for sex. With a deep groan, he set to constructing Poppy’s bed. A tenoned bed frame would do nicely. And as he worked, he came to feel certain that nothing had happened to Kim—she’d simply abandoned her child. Forever.
Poppy was theirs.
* * * *
He woke up the next morning sensing Jill nearby. As was her habit, she knelt on the floor next to their brass bed. She was still wearing the flowered shift. She’d spent the night with Poppy.
He heard her whisper, reaffirming her devotion to him, committing to their partnership. He wasn’t supposed to hear it. It was a vow to herself. Her submission stirred him—in all ways. He reached over, intending to pull her down on top of him. But before he could, she gave him a kiss on the cheek and bounded off.
He got up to take a shower. After no sex for so long, he was agitated. He wanted his woman badly, but she had other responsibilities. And so did he. They’d been living the life of horny teenagers for almost ten years. They had been hedonists, roaming the earth, fucking at will.
It was time to man up.
Today he’d finish putting together Poppy’s bed, start on a barrier for his workshop, and he’d ask for some advice from his brother Jaeger.
* * * *
Tern headed over to meet Jaeger at St. Vincent’s Bar. The seedy space benefited from the dim light. It stunk of scalded grease and chili fries. Jaeger was waiting in a booth. He was in uniform, nursing a bottle of beer and a scowl. His frown was pretty much permanent. Jill called it his “cop face.”
Jaeger and Tern both had the family looks, but Jaeger was three years older, burlier, and hopefully wiser.
“So what’s the big secret? Why can’t we meet at your house?” Jaeger asked.
“Because I don’t want to scare Jill.” Tern told him about Poppy and how she’d come to live with them. “What can we do to protect her?”
Jaeger leaned back in the wooden booth, his leather gear squeaking. “Was the girl abused or neglected by her mother?”
“No. Maybe. I hope not. She’s sure acting like a scared little puppy, though. She won’t talk to anyone but Jill. You have
to consider abandonment neglect, right?”
“I’m no expert, Tern. I only see the extreme cases. Where the kid’s been brutalized. Where I arrest the abuser. Where the child is taken to foster care by CPS.” Jaeger’s normal hard look intensified. Child abuse was a hot button with him. “Your situation might feel the same, but it’s not.”
“Yeah,” Tern said. “I’m probably in panic mode. I just don’t want Kim to come grab Poppy, keep her for a day, and then drop her off at somebody else’s house. I’ll be damned if anyone is going to hurt that little girl again.”
Jaeger nodded, taking a swig of his beer. Even as a kid, Jaeger was hyper-responsible, a protector. By force of will he’d kept Tern and his brothers out of the system after their father took off, abandoning them to their drug addict mother.
“My advice is to talk to a family law lawyer,” Jaeger said. “The lawyer can get a judge to grant temporary custody. It should be fast and easy. Courts are willing to step up to the plate, and quickly, for that sort of thing.”
“I don’t want temporary custody. I want to make absolutely certain that Kim can’t get Poppy back.”
“That means you’ll have to adopt her,” Jaeger said. “You’ve got a long, complicated road ahead of you, bro.”
Lawyers? Courts? Adoption? Tern assumed protecting his own niece would be pretty much a rubber stamp deal. “Even for a blood relative?”
“Yeah, even for a blood relative. I’m sure the family lawyer will tell you that, too. Just because Kim was a shit mom doesn’t automatically mean that she gives up her parental rights. And it doesn’t make you suitable parent material, either. You and Jill will be investigated. Maybe even get home visits. And here’s something the lawyer won’t tell you. You’d better look vanilla from top to bottom. Don’t be bragging about the great dungeon furniture you make. Don’t be leaving your toys around. Hide all that stuff.”
Despite the solemn subject, Tern was amused. Jaeger was a walking, talking, scowling role-play scene with his handcuffs and leather. He’d never have to hide his toys. Not that Tern had ever known Jaeger to indulge in kink.
