“Absolutely. I can even pay you in advance, if you want.”
Surprise flickered in blue eyes he suddenly noticed were the same shade of blue as Lake Haven in afternoon sunlight. “I don’t need the money right now, but I will before I go back to Colombia.”
Again that curiosity raced through him, along with a little uneasiness. She needed cash and she was going to Colombia. It wasn’t hard for his mind to jump to some obvious conclusions. Call him suspicious, but that didn’t sound like a great combination.
He had made a few assumptions about the woman, considering she’d taught at the local elementary school. Now he wondered if he should have run some sort of background check on her before he offered her a job caring for a vulnerable child.
After the chaos of his childhood, he had absolutely no tolerance for anyone involved in narcotics in any iteration.
No. He wouldn’t believe it. He was going to go with his gut on this one. Her father had been the much-beloved chief of police, and she had a brother who was an FBI agent. He had pieced that together after she told him who she was.
Whatever she was involved with in Colombia, he couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with drugs.
She obviously needed the money for something, but it wasn’t his business. He didn’t probe into any of his other employees’ personal lives.
“Half now, half when you’re done, then. That seems fair. Come inside and I’ll write you a check.”
Her eyes lit up with a raw sort of relief that she quickly concealed. “That’s fine,” she said. “Thanks. I appreciate it. And while you do that, I’ll make lunch for the hungry kiddo here.”
“Sounds good,” he said as he led the way into the house. “You should find plenty of options. I have a housekeeper who comes in three times a week to stock the fridge and prep some easy meals I can throw together.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Usually. Until I forget to add things to the list and end up having to go to the grocery store myself for a couple of items when they run out.”
He wouldn’t be sorry, even though he had been frustrated with himself the day before. If he hadn’t gone to the store with Milo, he wouldn’t have met Katrina and might be stuck for the next few weeks trying to juggle everything himself.
CHAPTER FIVE
KATRINA OPENED THE subzero refrigerator and took in the bounty of food that was entirely too much for one man and one small boy. “What kind of sandwich do you like?” she asked Milo.
The boy looked at the offerings inside the refrigerator for a long moment, brow furrowed, and finally disregarded the ham and turkey slices, instead pointing to a plain purple jar.
“Grape jelly. Good choice. A personal favorite. Do you want peanut butter with that?”
He nodded with an enthusiasm that made her smile. A boy after her own heart. “What else? You can’t have one without the other. Okay, then. Any idea where I could find the peanut butter?”
He nodded again and hurried over to a covered pantry door. Milo tugged on the door but couldn’t open it. When she joined him, she noticed the pantry door was fitted with a hook and eye latch that was out of his reach. Another safety precaution, she assumed.
She flipped the hook and opened the door. A quick scan revealed a jar of gourmet peanut butter on one of the shelves, along with an unopened loaf of bread.
There was more food in here than all the children in Gabi’s orphanage would eat in a week. Katrina grabbed the bread and the jar, then returned to the kitchen island.
Milo stood watching with interest while she laid out several pieces of bread and started spreading the peanut butter from edge to edge on each piece.
He craned to watch each movement while she finished spreading peanut butter. “Want to help?” she asked. “I would love it. Let’s wash your hands first. You always wash your hands when you work in the kitchen.”
He obviously wasn’t crazy about hand-washing, but he didn’t make a fuss when she squirted soap and helped him rub it around on his skin before rinsing while she sang the alphabet song through twice.
“That’s what my students at school have to do while they’re washing their hands,” she told him. “We’ll get a timer for you so you know how long to wash your hands.”
Something told her he would respond better to numbers than letters.
Milo was a complete puzzle. He obviously understood far more than he could communicate back. He could nod or shake his head to indicate yes or no, and she had watched him employ other rudimentary signs with Bowie to get his point across.
She wished she had more experience with language delays so she might know the best way to tackle his particular issues. If she had been his teacher, speech therapy and some sort of augmentative communication device would have been her first priority. A person had to be able to express his needs and wishes.
In her limited time here, she would have to do some research to figure out if she could help him.
“Okay, now that your hands are clean, I’ll grab a chair for you so you can help me with the sandwiches.”
He seemed eager to give her a hand—or maybe he was simply hungry and wanted her to get on with it. She couldn’t quite tell. But after she scooped out some jam onto the middle of a slice of bread, she handed him another knife and showed him how to spread it across the peanut butter. With his bottom lip tucked between his teeth, he focused on making sure a little purple smear covered the entire peanut butter landscape.
“That’s perfect,” she said. “Good job. Now, can you do a few more?”
He nodded and turned to the task with gusto after she scooped out more jam and plopped it onto the bread.
“You are one excellent PB&J chef,” she told him when they finished. “Now comes the fun part. Now we eat.”
She hadn’t had lunch either, and the humble sandwiches made with so much fierce concentration looked completely delicious.
To Milo’s plate, she added some baked chips she had found in the pantry and a couple of baby carrots from the vegetable drawer, and he attacked the food with the same enthusiasm he had thrown into making the sandwiches.
She was finishing the last bite of hers—every bit as good as it had looked—when Bowie came back into the kitchen.
Oh man. If she was going to work here for the next few weeks, she really needed to do something about the way her palms started to sweat and her breath seemed to catch in her chest every time she was around him.
He was just so darn gorgeous. It wasn’t fair that she should meet him now, when she absolutely didn’t have time for men.
“Sorry I took so long. I had four texts and a phone call from work that needed my attention.”
He set a check next to her plate and the amount still staggered her.
“Thanks,” she managed to say without sounding completely breathless, then folded the check in half and tucked it into the pocket of her shorts.
“I’m the one in your debt and we both know it,” he said. “You’re doing me a huge favor. I’m more grateful than I can say.”
She wasn’t so certain, but she didn’t argue with him. This arrangement would give her a desperately needed cushion in case her attorney came up with some other expensive fee she needed to pay before she could become Gabi’s mother.
He took in their plates and the jars still open on the island “PB&J. Looks delicious.”
“Milo and I made you a sandwich, too. That one on the work island is for you.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes. “That wasn’t necessary. I could have grabbed something. Heaven knows, Mrs. Nielson stocks enough food to feed half the neighborhood.”
“We were already making them for us. It was no problem to make one more. Milo spread the jelly, didn’t you, bud?”
Milo seemed to have gone somewhere in his
head, or at least he wasn’t in the mood to respond.
“Thanks,” Bowie said after a moment. He looked surprised at the small gesture. Almost...touched, as if the courtesy was out of the norm for him. That was ridiculous. He had a housekeeper who did his shopping, for heaven’s sake. Bowie had to be used to women falling all over themselves to take care of him.
She found his reaction absurdly appealing.
Oh, she really hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake by agreeing to help him out. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Money wasn’t everything—or so she tried to tell herself, anyway.
She probably would have stuck to her guns and continued to refuse him, if not for the phone call she’d received that morning from Angel Herrera, the inaptly named attorney representing her in the adoption process. She had found nothing angelic about him from the moment they met. Though he had come recommended by the local representative from the Colombia national adoption agency, he was loud, abrasive, and made her feel stupid every time she talked to him, either because of her halting command of the Spanish language or because she struggled to understand the complicated and unwieldy international adoption process.
It didn’t help that he constantly seemed to approach her with his hand out.
The latest conversation had been the same. He had insisted he needed an extra two thousand dollars because of unexpected costs associated with filing some of the necessary paperwork.
She didn’t understand. How much could it cost to make duplicates of her adoption petition and run them to the adoption office? Did he have to cut down the trees and mill his own paper or something?
After working with him for three months, she was beginning to understand the meaning of the word extortion. Angel knew how desperately Katrina wanted to adopt Gabi, knew that she would pay any cost, try to conquer any obstacle.
She felt completely out of her depth, trying to negotiate the complex process and receive approval from two countries to bring Gabi to the United States.
Herrera made her feel like she was eight years old again, forced to repeat the second grade because of a combination of missed classes and the strong medication that mostly controlled her epilepsy making it tough to focus.
StupidKat. TwitchyKat.
The weirdo.
You can’t invite her to your birthday party. What if she has a fit or something?
No. I’m sorry. My mom says you can’t stay overnight because of your medical condition.
My nana says kids who have seizures shouldn’t be allowed in school with normal kids because you could hurt somebody.
She had spent most of her life trying to quiet those damn voices, with varied levels of success.
She didn’t want to continue playing Angel Herrera’s game, but she didn’t know what else to do. At least with Bowie’s help, she would feel a little more secure if the attorney came to her again with his hand out.
“Wow, that was a good sandwich,” Bowie said, wiping away a little grape jelly at his mouth with a napkin. “I haven’t had one of those in years. Thanks.”
“See? I told you,” she said to Milo. “You’ve got mad PB&J skills, kiddo.”
The boy just gazed at her, obviously not impressed with her assessment. Bowie, on the other hand, smiled for a moment, then looked uncomfortable. “Uh, I know this is a lot to ask, especially on such short notice, but I need to run into the office and sign a few papers that resulted from our meeting today. I was going to take Milo with me, but if I can avoid it, I would rather not. He doesn’t like it there.”
She thought about the check in her pocket and the peace of mind it provided. “I can stay with him the rest of the afternoon. No problem.”
“Are you sure?”
She ought to say no so he didn’t completely take advantage of her. Begin how you want to go on, right? But Bowie looked so relieved, she didn’t have the heart to disappoint him.
“Sure. I can stay until six. After that, I’ve got a thing.” She didn’t really. She just didn’t want him to think she had nothing better to do than get him out of a bind.
“Thanks. Hey, mind if I take that other sandwich you and Milo made? I’m still hungry, and it tasted delicious.”
“It’s yours.”
His smile was sweetly genuine and made her toes curl inside her sandals.
Oh, she did not want to be attracted to him. That was exactly the sort of thing that always seemed to lead her into trouble.
Something told her it was going to be a long three weeks.
* * *
BIG SURPRISE, BOWIE wasn’t back by six.
Katrina glanced at her watch for about the twentieth time in the last five minutes and tried not to let her annoyance filter through to Milo.
They sat on the floor of his bedroom with a whole fleet of little cars in every color scattered around them like little shiny insects. They were his favorite toys, apparently, at least judging by the purple race car that was obviously his favorite. Most of them looked shiny and new, but the purple one he pulled out of the pocket of his shorts was battered, dented in places with the paint worn off.
He lined all twenty-five cars on the floor, then drove the purple car through them, scattering the others in all directions.
“That purple car is tough,” she observed. “Does it have a name?”
He ignored her, driving it in circles around the carpet mat.
“What other car do you like?” she asked. “Do you like this blue race car or this red pickup truck?”
He looked at them briefly, then continued driving the purple car around the floor with a low humming sound that resembled a car engine.
He could make sounds. The afternoon had amply demonstrated that. So why couldn’t he form words? Katrina needed to know his background and any actual diagnoses so she could do a little research to find out the best way to reach him.
Yes, Bowie had hired her simply to be a nanny to the boy, not come up with an individualized education plan for him, but she was a trained elementary education teacher. It was second nature to her to want to find solutions.
Before taking off with Carter, she had actually been working on her special education certification. Probably because of her own learning difficulties, she had always been drawn to the children who struggled more than their classmates. While she cared for all her students, Katrina found a greater degree of satisfaction in helping those who had to work harder to learn.
It was one of the things that had first drawn her to Gabi when Katrina first decided to volunteer at the orphanage near the school where she found a job teaching English after she had been stranded in Colombia. Some of the children had been apprehensive around Katrina, but Gabi had come right up to her, handed her a flowering weed she’d plucked from the garden and started jabbering away in a combination of Spanish and her own Gabi-speak. Katrina had fallen in love instantly.
Now she watched Milo make sounds with the car, then hold another car, headlight-to-headlight, against the purple one as if they were talking to each other.
He had receptive language skills, he could make sounds and he understood the concept of language. Why didn’t he speak? What she really needed was a long conversation with Bowie so she could figure out how best to help his brother during her time with him.
As if her thoughts had conjured him, she suddenly sensed movement by the door, and she glanced up in time to see Bowie walking into the room.
Again, her stupid heart rate kicked up a notch and her palms went clammy with nerves. Her thoughts seemed to scatter like those cars Milo had plowed through.
Her instinctive reaction to him both embarrassed and dismayed her as she rose to her feet, needing to be on a little more equal level.
So the man was gorgeous. She wasn’t in the market for gorgeous anymore, especially since it usually came hand in h
and with arrogance and conceit.
His mouth twisted into a regretful frown. “I told you six and it’s half past. I’m sorry. I was helping one of the software engineers work out a problem and we both lost track of time. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
Somehow she doubted the veracity of that particular statement. Most gorgeous men of her acquaintance seemed to think the world existed for their convenience—though, okay, that might be a gross generalization. She didn’t know Bowie Callahan well enough to automatically make that assumption.
“It was fine this time,” she said. “We had fun, didn’t we, Milo?”
The boy ignored both of them, busy lining up all his cars again in the same carefully ordered row.
“How did it go?” Bowie asked.
With a careful look to make sure Milo was still occupied, she rose and walked out into the hallway, out of earshot.
“Fine, for the most part. He seemed happy to have me there for the first few minutes and then ignored me most of the afternoon. We had one meltdown when I tried to have him leave his car out with the other toys when he had to use the bathroom, but we made it through.”
“He doesn’t do anything without that stupid, manky purple car. I tried to give him a bunch of new cars with no luck. That’s still his favorite. I don’t have actual proof of this, but I’m guessing he loves it because Stella gave it to him.”
“Stella. Is that your mother?”
“Yeah. That’s Mom.”
A hundred questions flashed through her mind at his sudden hard tone. Why did merely the mention of his mother’s name upset him? And why hadn’t he known about his brother until the last few weeks?
“I’m puzzled about why he doesn’t speak,” she said slowly. “Do you know what sort of speech therapy he’s had in the past?”
Bowie shook his head. “That seems to be the big mystery to the specialists we’ve seen. To be honest, I’m not sure whether he’s had any therapy. Knowing Stella, I highly doubt it.”
Katrina frowned at the bitterness in his tone. What sort of history did those seemingly casual words conceal?
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