Babies in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  “Da? Da?”

  Kira followed the sound of the tiny voice to Cutty’s bedroom. Mel was apparently looking there for her father.

  “He’s not here, honey,” Kira informed the little girl from the doorway.

  Kira didn’t want to go into Cutty’s room with it’s mahogany furniture and the king-size bed he’d already made up for the day and covered with a plain blue spread. It was his bedroom after all. Where he changed his clothes. Where he slept. Where he put on that clean-smelling aftershave that reminded Kira of the ocean and still lingered in the air. It just seemed too intimate a place for her to trespass.

  But of course Mel wouldn’t come out when Kira asked her to and Kira was left with no choice but to go all the way into the room and catch the baby who made a dash for Cutty’s bathroom when she saw Kira coming.

  With Mandy in her arms and Mel by the hand, Kira hurried out of the bedroom and back to the nursery for Mandy’s diaper change.

  This time Kira closed the nursery door, locking herself in with both girls protesting just the way they had the day before anytime she’d tried to take care of them.

  “So much for bonding with me when there’s no one else around,” she muttered to herself.

  Fully aware that this was only the beginning of the day.

  And that she hadn’t miraculously gotten any better at baby wrangling overnight.

  “Oh, no, Mandy, how did you get up there?”

  Kira’s whisper was a lament as she turned in response to the thud she heard behind her.

  After an entire day of more mishaps with the twins, the fact that Mandy had climbed from one of the kitchen chairs onto the table and knocked over a gallon of milk was one more rung on the ladder of frustration that evening.

  Kira made a dive for the milk carton and for the baby, but by the time she’d righted the container, a good portion of it had flooded out onto the table, run over the side and was dripping onto the floor.

  But Kira could hardly get mad at the baby since it was her own fault. She’d been putting Mel in one of the high chairs—a task which ordinarily would only have taken a minute. Only rather than doing it quickly, before Mandy could get into mischief, Kira’s attention had wandered—along with her eyes—through the archway that connected the kitchen to the living room.

  The living room where Cutty was with the Northbridge College newspaper reporter who had come to interview him. And Kira was having trouble keeping herself from being nosy about it even though she was supposed to be giving the twins crackers and milk to occupy them.

  Now she had no choice but to focus on the girls. And the latest mess that had left the kitchen looking every bit as bad as it had before she’d cleaned it spotlessly at dawn this morning.

  With Mandy in tow, Kira grabbed a dish towel and tried to staunch the flow of milk onto the floor, leaving it like a dam on the table while she put Mandy into the second high chair.

  As she did she couldn’t keep her gaze from drifting once more out to the living room where Cutty sat on the couch and the very attractive graduate student was half interviewing him, half flirting with him.

  Of course Kira knew it shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to her. So what if some woman was flirting with him? So what if the woman was tall and thin enough to be a model, or had full, wavy platinum-blond hair that fell to the middle of her back, and breasts at least two cup sizes bigger than hers? It meant nothing to Kira. She was only here for the twins. What Cutty did was Cutty’s business. She just hoped he could see through that phony little giggle. And that overly rapt interest.

  Who did that woman think she was fooling with those coy glances from under her lashes? And that slow smile with all those ultrabright white teeth?

  “I’ll bet she practiced that in the mirror for weeks before she had it just right,” Kira muttered.

  Was Cutty buying it?

  He was smiling back. Laughing at something she’d said. That laugh Kira liked so much.

  He’d spruced himself up in anticipation of this— that didn’t sit well with her, either. He’d gone upstairs after dinner and put on a clean, pale blue sport shirt with his jeans. He’d shaved, too. And come back down smelling of aftershave.

  Kira wished she’d been able to do that. Well, not shave and splash on aftershave. But she wished she’d been able to change out of the wrinkled linen slacks and equally creased camp shirt she’d had on since five-thirty this morning.

  Yes, she’d managed to keep from having food spilled on her today, but that was the best she could say about her appearance. Even if she’d made sure her hair would stay in the ponytail at her crown by putting a rubber band on it rather than merely tying it up with a scarf, it would still have been nice to have had the chance to smooth it a little.

  Plus, what harm could there have been in refreshing her blush? Or applying some lipstick for the evening? But no, there she was, bare lipped, probably pale, dressed in wilting clothes, while the other woman looked as if she’d just come from a spa.

  And wasn’t she using it all to good effect? Flipping that remarkable platinum hair around. Bending over to brace her elbows on her knees as if she was so fascinated with Cutty’s every word. Showing eye-popping cleavage from the scoop neck of her tank top.

  “We don’t like her,” Kira whispered to the girls as she finally broke a graham cracker in half and gave one to each of them.

  “Mik,” Mandy reminded then, and only then did Kira recall the spilled milk.

  It had soaked through the dish towel and continued to run down the table leg onto the floor. It had also spread to the center of the table and dripped through the crack where the table separated to accommodate a leaf, adding a second puddle underneath, too.

  Kira sighed. “She’s out there being Miss Wonderful, and I’m in here just messing up again.”

  “Who’s being Miss Wonderful?”

  Kira nearly jumped out of her skin.

  She spun around and discovered the source of her fright—there was a man standing on the other side of the back screen door.

  “You scared me to death,” she said.

  Apparently feeling at home here, the man opened the screen and came in without an invitation. “Sorry.”

  He was a tall, good-looking son of a gun with a blinding smile that said he wasn’t all that sorry.

  He held out his hand to her to shake and said, “Ad Walker. I promised Cutty I’d stop by tonight to help you keep the twins corralled.”

  Kira accepted his hand and replied, “Kira Wentworth.”

  “Marla’s sister. I know.”

  She knew who Ad Walker was, too. He was the man who had rushed into the burning house with Cutty. The man who Cutty had dragged from the inferno after Ad had been knocked unconscious.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Kira said. Then, to let him know she was aware of who he was, she added, “I read about you and Cutty in a Denver newspaper. I’m glad to see you don’t have any lingering effects of the fire.”

  “No, no broken bones. Just a bump on the head,” he said as if he’d taken it in stride when Kira knew he’d spent two days in the hospital.

  He pointed his chin in the direction of the living room then. “I did my part of this interview a few days ago so I recognized Sherry when I saw her through the front window. I came around back so I wouldn’t interrupt them.”

  “Ah.”

  There was something about the way he was looking at her that convinced Kira he was comparing her to Marla. And just that quick she was once again the geeky, awkward younger sister with braces on her teeth.

  Trying to escape feeling inferior, she turned away to pour the babies two sippy-cups of milk.

  That seemed to draw Ad Walker’s attention away from her, to the milk mess, and then to the rest of the kitchen.

  “Holy smoke. I thought Cutty said you were in here early this morning cleaning this place?”

  “I was. And I had it in good shape, too. Believe it or not.” It was just that then th
e twins had been turned loose for the day and breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes had ended up stacked in the sink and on the counters because Kira had been so overwhelmed once again by her young charges. And now the milk had spilled, so it didn’t seem as if she’d done anything.

  But Kira was less interested in explaining all that than in the fact that Cutty had talked to his friend about her.

  “So why would Cutty tell you I was here early this morning?” she said as she wiped off the milk container and put it back in the fridge.

  “He just mentioned it in passing.”

  Kira had been hoping to learn what exactly Cutty had said about her—if he’d said she didn’t compare to Marla in the housekeeping department—and why he’d been talking about her at all.

  But Ad Walker didn’t seem inclined to say any more. Instead he turned to Mel and Mandy and greeted them with an affectionate and enthusiastic, “How’re my girls?”

  Both babies tilted their heads back so he could bend over and give them each a kiss on the cheek.

  It was cute and funny and it made Kira laugh. “Have you trained them or have they trained you?”

  “What can I say? They’re just two little flirts,” he responded.

  As he pretended to taste the soggy cracker Mel offered him a bite of, Kira began working on the spilled milk.

  Whether to escape or merely to help out, he excused himself from the twins, left them to their snack and pitched in.

  “How long has Sherry been here?” he asked in the process.

  “Only about fifteen minutes,” Kira answered.

  “And already you think she’s Miss Wonderful?”

  Back to that.

  But Kira could tell he was teasing her and she wasn’t about to let him get the best of her.

  “Well, from a man’s point of view, isn’t she?” she countered with a nod toward the living room.

  Ad craned his neck for another look. “I don’t know if wonderful is the word.”

  “What word would you use? Hot? Gorgeous? Built like a brick house? Or just stacked?”

  Why had she said that?

  It was his turn to laugh. “You sound a little jealous.”

  “Me? That’s crazy.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said as if he knew better. “You can relax. She isn’t his type.”

  “Whose type?” Kira asked, pretending she didn’t know he was referring to Cutty.

  “Our boy out there.”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference to me if she was,” she said, careful to make it sound as if she meant it.

  But Ad Walker didn’t seem convinced. He just said another knowing, “Uh-huh.”

  “Really. I’m not jealous. I just hate to see Cutty sucked in by someone who obviously has more on her agenda than an article for a college newspaper.”

  For the third time Ad Walker repeated, “Uh-huh.”

  Kira decided it was easier to change the subject than to fight this.

  “I think we better move the table so I can clean under the leg. If I only clean around it, it’s going to stick to the floor.”

  Ad obliged her, tipping the table so she could also wash the leg itself and under the center where the milk had dripped through.

  Then he moved the table completely out of the way so she had free access to both puddles on the floor.

  When she was finished she helped him slide the table back where she thought it had been originally.

  “Marla said it had to be exactly under the overhead light,” Ad explained, adjusting it from two angles before he was satisfied.

  Kira thought it would leave more room if it was centered in the room rather than under the light but she didn’t say anything. Marla’s house. Marla’s things. Marla’s way.

  “More cacker,” Mandy demanded then.

  Kira gave her one half of a second cracker and gave Mel the other half.

  “How long does this interview take?” she asked her assistant.

  He shrugged a shoulder and went to the sink to rinse some of the dishes piled high there. “I was with Sherry for about an hour and a half but I guess it depends on how deep into Cutty’s background she wants to go. He might have more to tell. He’s an interesting guy, you know.”

  Kira opened the dishwasher and began to load the rinsed dishes. “Actually, I don’t know anything about him. Marla didn’t bring him around or even confide in me. The first time I knew he existed was the night they both came to the house to tell our parents she was pregnant. Then they eloped and from that point on my father referred to him as the…person…who had ruined Marla.”

  “Person?” Ad repeated. “I’m guessing you deleted the expletive?”

  “Many,” Kira admitted. “The nicest thing he ever called Cutty was trash.”

  “Cutty is anything but trash,” Ad defended as if he couldn’t believe anyone had ever thought such a thing about his friend.

  “I know. But to my father—”

  “Things happen, that’s what makes us all human,” Ad interrupted, still in Cutty’s defense. “I didn’t know him before he was seventeen but since then the Cutty I’ve known is a guy who’s worked hard—under circumstances that might have broken anyone else—to make the best of himself and tough situations.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Kira assured him, meaning it. From what little she’d seen of Cutty in the short time she’d been in Northbridge she already knew he wasn’t the depraved degenerate her father had always made him out to be.

  But still Ad seemed to feel the need to convince her. “For my money, you won’t find a better man anywhere. People around here give most of the credit to Marla for everything but the truth is, if it hadn’t been for Cutty—”

  Ad cut himself off this time, as if he might be on the verge of saying something he’d had second thoughts about.

  Then, instead, he said, “I don’t want to tell tales out of school. Let’s just say that Marla and Cutty had a rough go of it, but Cutty had a rough go of it even before he met Marla.”

  “He did?” Kira said with uncamouflaged surprise as it struck her for the first time that not only didn’t she know anything but the basics about Marla and Cutty after they’d eloped, she also knew absolutely nothing about Cutty before that. About his family or where they’d stood on the whole teenage pregnancy issue or if they were still in his life.

  And she suddenly realized she wanted to.

  But it didn’t look as if she was going to be filled in by Ad because just then Mel shouted, “Wan down,” and held out her arms to the big man.

  “I think I’m being paged,” he said in response. “How about if I take them into the yard to play for a few minutes and then we’ll get them to bed?”

  “Wanna pay,” Mandy chimed in to make sure he knew she wouldn’t stand for being left out.

  “Sure,” Kira agreed.

  She helped him take the twins from their high chairs and watched as he herded them outside, pleased to see that despite the fact that they obviously liked Ad, they didn’t want any more of his assistance than they did of hers, that they were just independent little things.

  But once Kira was alone in the kitchen she again began to wonder about Cutty.

  Particularly about why he’d had a rough go of it even before he’d met Marla.

  And out of that was born a determination to have her curiosity satisfied.

  Ad helped Kira get the twins to bed but that was too big a task to allow for any opportunity to question him about what he knew of Cutty. And once the girls were snugly tucked in for the night, he said he had to get back to his restaurant and he left the way he’d come in—through the kitchen door.

  Kira could have slipped out, too, and gone to the garage apartment for what remained of the evening. But that was about the last thing she wanted to do because it meant that the few words she’d exchanged with Cutty during the day, the little time she’d had with him, would be all she ended up with.

  Not to mention it would also mean that she would have no chance of
learning more about Cutty and that she would be leaving him alone with Miss Wonderful.

  So she didn’t follow Ad out the back door and go to the garage apartment.

  Instead she folded the day’s laundry and finished cleaning the kitchen, all the while willing the reporter to leave.

  She didn’t get her wish until nearly ten o’clock but by then the kitchen was sparkling.

  “Wow,” Cutty said when he limped in after letting the reporter out the front door. “You worked overtime in here.”

  Kira could hardly say she’d done it to avoid ending the day without getting to talk to him, so she didn’t acknowledge the comment at all.

  In lieu of that she said, “You must be dry after so much talking. Can I get you a glass of iced tea?”

  “Only if you’ll sit and have one with me.”

  It pleased her more than she wanted to think about that he’d come from being with the other woman and still seemed to want to be with her.

  “Sounds good,” she said, taking two glasses from the cupboard and pouring tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator.

  “The girls got to bed without too much problem?” Cutty asked then.

  “With the help of your friend.”

  “Ad—yeah, I saw him come and go through here.”

  “He didn’t want to interrupt your interview,” Kira said.

  “I wish he would have. I think that woman was hitting on me.”

  “And you wanted to share the joy?”

  “No, I could have used the protection,” Cutty said with a laugh. “Getting married at seventeen doesn’t leave you experienced at this stuff. Besides, I think she was a barracuda.”

  Okay, so maybe what Kira had been experiencing was jealousy, because hearing that Cutty hadn’t been taken in by the other woman went a long way in improving her mood. And giving her a surprising sense of relief that she was a little afraid to explore.

  She brought the two glasses of tea to the table, pulled out a second chair for Cutty to prop his foot on, and then sat across from him on a third ladder-back chair.