by Arlene James
Mattie smiled at the girl. “Hello, Jean Marie. What beautiful hair you have.”
Jean Marie gaped and shoved at the unruly mess. “I don’t, neither.”
“Yes, you do. I think it’s very pretty.”
Jean Marie pulled a face at her father, all but sticking out her tongue, as if to say, “So there!”
Chaz edged into the room with the baby on his hip, an apologetic look on his face. Candy Sue rubbed her eyes sleepily, and Orren hurried to introduce her. “This here is Sweetums, uh, Candy Sue. She’s three, and Jean Marie here is six.”
“What a doll!” Mattie exclaimed, holding out her arms. Chaz gratefully delivered Candy Sue, who went to Mattie without the slightest hesitation. Why should she balk when she’d been passed from stranger to stranger her whole little life, Orren mused, fighting back the anger such thoughts always brought with them. Just then Yancy bolted into the room, bounced off the edge of the armchair and threw her arms around Chaz’s hips to stop and steady herself. Her thumb went immediately into her mouth. Her golden-blond hair had been pulled ruthlessly back from her face with a green plastic barrette, Jean Marie’s handiwork, no doubt. Chaz scolded her softly.
“You were s’posed to wait!”
“Ah wai’ed,” she said around her thumb.
“You were s’posed to wait till I come and got you!” he hissed desperately.
Orren cast an anxious glance at the prospective baby-sitter. Mattie, however, laughed and rocked forward onto the edge of her chair, Candy Sue cuddled in her lap. “And what’s your name, sweetheart?”
Yancy pulled her thumb from her mouth and answered importantly, “I’s Yancy Kay.”
“And how old are you, Yancy Kay?”
Yancy held up four fingers, carefully folding back her wet thumb.
Mattie spread a smile over them, saying, “Is this everyone?”
Orren nodded morosely. “This is the lot.”
Mattie squirmed in her chair as if just barely able to contain her glee. “Let me see if I’ve got everyone down.” Her gaze lit on Chaz. “Chaz is the oldest at eight, and a very good big brother, too, I’m guessing.”
Yancy threw both arms around him again, exclaiming worshipfully, “Bubby!”
Mattie laughed. Orren joined her belatedly, wondering what she found so delightful. Chaz just looked confused. Mattie turned her smile on the sulky one.
“Jean Marie of the beautiful hair is six,” she recited, “and I’m guessing she has a temper to go along with that blaze of red.”
Jean Marie stuck out her bottom lip and folded her arms emphatically, proclaiming Mattie correct, but her vivid blue eyes gleamed with secret delight. Orren shook his head. Mattie went on to the thumb sucker.
“Miss Yancy Kay is four and loves being babied by her big brother.”
Yancy responded by trying to squeeze Chaz in two.
Mattie wrapped her arms around placid Candy Sue and tickled her lightly, saying, “And Candy Sue is everybody’s three-year-old Sweetums.” Candy Sue giggled that delightful baby laugh that could still lift Orren’s beleaguered spirits. Mattie laughed with her, then hugged her hard.
Jean Marie got up and walked over to Mattie’s chair, leaning against it in disarming familiarity. “If you come work for us, will you try to make me brush my hair?” she asked challengingly.
Mattie smiled. “Nope.” Jean Marie gaped for a second time. Mattie added, “But you won’t get my special snacks if you don’t.”
Jean Marie clamped her mouth shut in a frown. “What special snacks?”
Mattie shrugged. “Brush your hair, and you’ll see.”
Jean Marie scowled. Maybe this one wasn’t quite so easily managed, after all.
Orren had to hide a smile. He waded through the children toward the table, saying to Chaz, “Son, take the girls out back to play while I talk to Miss, um, Mattie.”
“Is that your name?” Jean Marie demanded, eyes narrowed. “Mattie?”
“Yes, it is,” came the smooth answer. “Miss Mattie to you. It’s short for Matilda.”
Put firmly in her place, Jean Marie brought her hands to her hips and announced baldly, “I don’t like her.”
Orren glared and opened his mouth to lay down a scathing scold, but Mattie Kincaid, in her cool, unflappable style, beat him to it. “Now, Jean Marie,” she said calmly, “you might as well know right now that those bullying tactics won’t work with me. My father’s a policeman, you see, and he taught me that bullies are usually more scared than anyone else and they act all tough to hide it. So what are you scared of, Jean Marie, a little old hairbrush? Or maybe you’d rather have some warty old witch who’d spank you and put you to bed without your dinner instead of making you delicious snacks and keeping things neat around here, hmm?”
Jean Marie’s mouth was hanging open again. Clearly at a loss, she spun and ran out of the room. Chaz’s eyes were big as saucers, but no bigger than his father’s. Orren had seldom seen his prickly daughter routed so easily, and he frankly didn’t know whether to be optimistic or worried about it! He turned away, trying to make up his mind about the confounding Matilda Kincaid, his hand lighting on the back of his neck.
Mattie, meanwhile, smoothly took control. Calling Chaz forward with a crooking finger, she put Candy Sue on her feet and motioned for him to take the two younger girls out as his father had instructed. Casting curious glances in his father’s direction, Chaz silently complied, herding the girls ahead of him. When Orren turned back around, Mattie was sitting alone at the table, her hands folded in her lap. He shot a surprised look around the room, frowned, and leaned forward to place both hands flat on the table.
“How old are you?” he asked bluntly, determined to maintain control this time.
Mattie smiled serenely. “Nineteen, the same age you were when you made Chaz.”
Orren’s frown deepened. “Nineteen’s young to watch over four kids—and to be so damned direct!”
Her smile never faltered. “I’ll be twenty soon, if it really makes any difference. And it’s true, isn’t it? You were just nineteen when Chaz’s mother was expecting him.”
He couldn’t deny it, so instead he got defensive about it. “Girl, you’ve got some brass!” She ignored him, craning her neck to get a good look around, though what there was to look at, he couldn’t guess.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
Her gaze was completely undisturbed. “Your wife.”
He felt like he’d been coldcocked. “I don’t have one!”
She looked askance at that. “Those children didn’t spring out of the ground.”
Orren threw up his arms. “She ran away with a rodeo bum! Anything else you want to know?”
She shook her head, but whether in answer to his sarcastic question or in response to his ill-natured revelation, he didn’t know. She looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I can start right away.”
Defeated, he plopped down in the chair he’d vacated earlier and sighed. “I bet you lead your daddy a merry chase.”
Mattie nodded unrepentantly. “He thinks I’m still twelve, which is how old I was when my mother died.”
Orren put his head in his hands. “I don’t know whether to slit my throat now or hold out a few years in hopes my own girls will run off with circus performers.”
“You don’t mean that,” Mattie told him, as if he didn’t already know it.
He dropped his hands and gave her a hard look. “Does your father know you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“How do you suppose he’ll feel about you working for a single man my age?”
She shrugged. “Hard to tell. He might assume you’re too old to be attractive to me.”
He couldn’t believe he’d heard that right. “What?”
She ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken and went on. “Or he might assume you’re too old to be attracted to me. Either way, I’ll be too young in his mind. But, it’s a baby-sitting job, and he’ll thin
k that’s appropriate, so it shouldn’t be any problem, really. If he hedges, I’ll enlist my stepmother’s aid. She’s never had children so she doesn’t have these parental hang-ups. And if he outright forbids it, we’ll have a screaming fight. Then I’ll take the job anyway, because it’s what I want, and I am, after all, over eighteen. I have two years of college, by the way.”
Orren just stared at her for a second. “I think I will cut my throat.”
She got up from the table and said, “Can I look around?”
“No!”
She threw out a slender hip and propped her hand on it. Yes, indeed, she was over eighteen. But she was still a baby. Especially compared to Gracie. He frowned. Now why had he done that, compared her to Grace? She folded her arms and asked baldly, “So how long has she been gone?”
He nearly hit his chin on the table. Little shocker. Well, if she wanted the dirty details, he’d give them to her. He got up and put his hands flat on the table, drilling her with his baby blues. “Two years and seven months.” He waited a beat and added, “A week and three days.”
She batted her lashes at him. “Candy Sue was just a baby.”
“An infant,” he admitted. “I had to put her on a bottle.” Let her digest that.
She was outraged. A nursing mother had abandoned her baby, not to mention three other children and a husband! Then she started looking for acceptable reasons. “She must’ve been young when you married.”
“Older than me,” he said flatly, “but that didn’t keep me from getting her pregnant. Four times.”
Miss Matilda Kincaid lifted her chin a notch. “You’re trying to embarrass me.”
“And succeeding,” he admitted, looking at the splotches of color spreading across her cheeks. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to go around asking nosy questions.”
“Is there a better way to find out what I want to know?” she retorted saucily.
He grinned. Damned if she didn’t have him there. “You ever hear that curiosity killed the cat?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s pretty obvious I’m not a cat, and it wouldn’t be very responsible of me to walk into a situation blind, would it?”
He scratched his chin at that. “Guess not. You’ve just got an awful frank way about you.”
“Yes, I do. Now, is the job mine or not?”
He shook his head, chuckling, and said the one thing guaranteed to get her dander up. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to your dad first, clear it with him.”
The color in her face blossomed to full red as she struggled to tamp down her temper. It took several seconds, actually, of breathing through her mouth and working her jaw, but she finally got it in hand. That hip flew out again, and she was clearly fuming, but she managed a nearly polite, “Fine.”
He went to the phone, figuring it would be dangerous for him to laugh outright. “What’s his name?”
“Evans Kincaid.”
“I want you to know I’m doing this because you said earlier that he’s a police officer, which seems a good recommendation. Are you really nineteen?”
“Yes!”
“What’s the telephone number?”
She ground it out through bared teeth, and he punched it into the telephone. The conversation was fairly short. Kincaid was obviously pleased that he’d been consulted. It marked Orren, he said, as a conscientious father himself. Orren politely but honestly explained that he was divorced and fairly desperate as he hadn’t generated much interest in the position, the hours being tricky and some housekeeping being required. Actually he was hoping for more than some housekeeping, but he wouldn’t mention that. He couldn’t exactly demand it, considering the wages he was able to pay, and he knew he had no right to expect it. Since his days off as manager of the car repair shop were Sunday and Monday, he pointed out that he would expect Mattie to work Saturday. He didn’t say that he could easily keep her busy seven days a week by taking small jobs on the side, but he was hoping Mattie would welcome the extra money as much as he did. At any rate, Kincaid made it plain that he would not approve of Mattie working Sundays, and Orren made special note of it, figuring that Kincaid was a religious man who wouldn’t take kindly to having his little girl’s ears scorched more than they already had been.
Mattie, her father promised, was great with kids and a hard worker. She knew her way around a house, too, having pretty much taken over the domestic duties after her mother died. “She’s a great little organizer,” he said proudly, “and neat as a pin.”
Orren looked around at his hastily cleared combination kitchen and living room and wondered if Mattie would last a week here in this madhouse with her penchant for order and neatness. He could only hope.
“Between you and me,” Kincaid went on, “I think, she’s felt a little displaced since I remarried. She and Amy are fast friends, but I’ve noticed that Mattie is a little restless and uncertain when she’s home from school. This might be good for her.”
“I hope so,” Orren said warmly, but privately he had his doubts. He loved his kids, but sometimes he thought he’d go stark raving mad. It was always one crisis after another around this place, and there was never enough money, what with the cost of child care and all. Sometimes he wanted to just walk out, not forever, but maybe long enough to get blind drunk on occasion. Still, he couldn’t afford that much beer, and he sure couldn’t afford the hard liquor for it, not with someone constantly outgrowing shoes or coming up with ear infections and such. He hung up the phone and turned to take the new sitter’s measure one more time.
“You heard?”
She nodded. “When do I start?”
He was surprised, really, that she still wanted to. Maybe she didn’t understand everything involved. “I work ten to seven, five and sometimes six days a week. I’ll try to get breakfast for the kids before I go, but lunch and dinner are part of your job.”
“All right.”
“I can fend for myself,” he went on, “but the kids have got to eat regular meals.”
“I understand. I don’t see any reason for you to do without, though, considering I’m going to be cooking anyway.”
That was good news. “Well, dinner, maybe,” he conceded gratefully. “I usually skip lunch, though sometimes someone will take me out.”
She shrugged. “What about the grocery shopping?”
He hedged that. “I try to do it on Mondays, but sometimes it’s Tuesday evening before I can get to it.” Or Wednesday, he thought. Or Thursday. If at all.
“I’d rather do it myself, if you’ll give me a budget,” she said. “I prefer to make out weekly menus and shop with a list. It cuts down on impulse buying and makes use of things that might otherwise go to waste. I do the shopping on Mondays, floors on Tuesday, bathrooms on Wednesday, dusting on Thursday, and laundry on Friday, though I suppose my Monday will be Tuesday, so we can push everything back a day, if you want.”
He couldn’t believe it, not coming from this small, delicate girl. He put his hands together and said in a dramatic voice, “Oh, Lord, if this is Your idea of a practical joke, I’m going to become an atheist, I swear.”
Mattie frowned. “That’s not very funny. I’m trying to tell you what you can expect from me, and if that’s not what you have in mind, well, then, the whole thing’s off.”
Orren shook his head and clapped a hand over his heart. “Miss Mattie, my love, you’ve already exceeded my expectations by far. I’d be happy as a hog in slop if you just fed my kids and kept Red from stringing up her sisters. But since you have a system you want to use, you just go right ahead. I’m tickled pink. And if it doesn’t work out quite like you have planned, well, then, we’ll just make do. That’s mostly what we do anyway. Now, I hope you’ll go before those four hellions troop back in here and scare the daylights out of you. They can, and they probably will, but I’m hoping you’ll at least get the grocery shopping done before you quit. See you in the morning at nine-thirty.” He grabbed her backpack from the back of the chair
and shoved it and her toward the door.
Mattie dragged her feet, but he got her through the door before she could tell him to take his job and shove it. He didn’t get it closed, though, because she beat him to the doorknob. She glared up at him from the doorstep and said, “You are insane, you know.”
He smiled benignly. “And you’re going to join me a lot sooner than you realize.”
She rolled her eyes at that and pulled the door shut in his face. He couldn’t hold back the relief that flooded him, though he knew it was much too early to celebrate. Chances were the poor thing wouldn’t last a week, but then again, she just might. She had fortitude, that girl, and she was young enough to take the punishment. Maybe Miss Matilda Kincaid was the answer to his prayers. He hoped so. He very fiercely hoped so.
Chapter Two
Mattie carefully made no mention to her father of the utterly gorgeous Orren Ellis. She said nothing about his well-muscled six-foot frame and carefully kept her thoughts to herself concerning his finely honed, square-jawed face with its sculpted lips and gold-tipped brows. She made no comparisons with bronze and gold and platinum and his slightly curly, sun-streaked hair, which, in her opinion, could use a good cutting. Most of all, she kept secret how shocking were the electric depths of his light blue eyes, fringed lavishly with gold and bronze lashes.
She spoke instead about his four adorable children, about Chaz, the little man, and the challenging Jean Marie of the wild red hair, and golden Yancy who adored her big brother, and the picture-perfect little doll baby Candy Sue, whom everyone called Sweetums. They were bright children. They were beautiful children. They were sweet and fun and exciting and just a little needy, and she couldn’t wait to get started with them. She just didn’t expect to get started with them two hours early the next morning.
