No, no, no. She didn’t even know why she’d thought such a thing.
But that was the trouble—now that he’d kissed her, anything was possible.
Except that she wasn’t going to let anything be possible, she decided. She wasn’t going to let anything else happen.
But what did that mean exactly? Was she going to confront him? Tell him flat-out that he’d better never do that again?
That didn’t seem like a good idea. She couldn’t think of too many things that would make her more uncomfortable than that. And it would make everything that came after it uncomfortable, too. So uncomfortable that Cutty might not even want her help with the twins anymore. And that would defeat her main purpose for being here.
If he ever tried to kiss her again, she would put a stop to it before it actually happened, that’s all.
“And I mean it,” she said forcefully to herself.
Because when she got involved with a man it would be with a man who wasn’t carrying around someone else’s shoes for her to fill, and that’s all there was to it.
She took a deep, cleansing breath and blew it out, convinced that she’d reached the right conclusion….
Saturday was as chaotic as every other day so far.
That was good in that it kept Kira too busy to dwell much more on the kiss or have any time alone with Cutty to feel awkward.
But it wasn’t so good in that when Kira got the twins down for their naps that afternoon the house was so torn apart that she knew she should use the peace and quiet to clean rather than leaving to go shopping.
Cutty insisted, though, that she have that hour to herself, and since she really needed more practical clothes, she forced herself to turn a blind eye to the toys strewn everywhere; to the mud the twins had tracked into the kitchen; to the juice box Mel had dropped, Mandy had stepped on, and Kira had only superficially mopped up; and to the laundry that had yet to be done.
“Okay, but I’ll be back before the girls wake up and I’ll stay as long as I need to tonight,” Kira assured Cutty, concerned that she would still just be doing surface cleaning when she was dying to scrub the place from top to bottom the way she had no doubt Marla would have done by now.
“Take your time,” Cutty responded, handing over directions he’d written out for her to the department store near the college.
Kira was actually hoping she wouldn’t need to go that far, that between the two boutiques on Main Street she would be able to get what she needed. But she accepted the slip of paper anyway, careful not to touch his hand when she did to avoid the effect any kind of contact had on her.
The first shop stocked mainly gauzy, free-flowing dresses, skirts and vests that weren’t any more suitable for chasing the twins than the linens and silks Kira had packed. So that was a complete bust.
But the second shop had a wider selection of just what she was looking for.
She was only at the beginning of her browse when a saleswoman who looked to be Betty the housekeeper’s age approached her.
“Am I mistaken or are you Marla Grant’s sister?” the woman asked.
Kira stopped sorting through jeans to glance at the tall, slender woman with the gunmetal-gray hair cut short and compensated for with large onyx earrings dangling from her lobes. “Yes, I’m Marla’s sister.”
“I thought so. I know Betty Cunningham and she told me all about you coming in to help Cutty with the twins. I think that’s so nice.”
This really was a small town.
“I didn’t actually come in to help out,” Kira amended.
“But you stayed when you saw the need and that’s what counts.”
“It’s really nothing,” Kira demurred.
“We all think you’re just a godsend,” the woman insisted.
Kira didn’t know who we all was but she felt guilty for being considered a godsend when she was so bad at the job she’d undertaken. She also hated to think of the talk that would follow when Betty came back to work, discovered how inept she’d been and told we all.
“Are you looking for a gift?” the woman asked then, when Kira glanced back at the jeans.
“No, I’m just looking for a few things to supplement what I brought with me.”
“Well, these are the plus sizes and you’re no bigger than a minute. You need the other side of the aisle. Let me show you.”
As Kira followed her, the woman said, “My name is Carol, by the way. And Betty said you’re Kira.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You know, we just loved your sister,” Carol informed her as Kira chose two pairs of jeans in her size and moved to a rack of knit tops. “We all thought she was a saint, pure and simple. The nicest girl in the world and so beautiful on top of it all. Never a hair out of place on that one.”
Kira suddenly wondered if her own hair had slipped out of the rubber band that held it low on her nape today.
But what she said was, “I loved her, too.”
“We all were just heartsick about her,” Carol added. “That accident was a horrible, horrible thing.”
“Yes,” was all Kira could say. This was not an easy thing for her to talk about, especially with someone she didn’t know.
“But we all think Cutty is doing better now and it helps that he has those babies. They just couldn’t be cuter,” the older woman said on a lighter note.
“They are adorable,” Kira agreed, moving along the rack of T-shirts.
But as she did Marla was less on her mind than was the reporter from the night before. And she found herself drawn to a black tank top that was closer to what the reporter had had on than to anything.
No, that wasn’t a good choice, she lectured herself. Especially now, when she was doing so much lifting and carrying and bending over. Definitely not a good choice. She didn’t even know why she was considering it. It wasn’t as if she ordinarily wore things like that.
So back went the tank top to the rack and she picked up a V-neck with cap sleeves instead.
“I think I would have known you were Marla’s sister even if Betty hadn’t described you,” Carol was saying. “You’re every bit as pretty as she was. You girls must have come from good genes.”
Kira didn’t want to embarrass the woman by telling her she and Marla hadn’t been related by blood so she merely thanked her for the compliment.
Then, deciding that the jeans and the four T-shirts she’d picked out were enough, Kira let the saleswoman know she had what she needed.
But as Carol led the way to the cash register, Kira started to think about that tank top again.
She knew she really shouldn’t buy it. It would be tight fitting. And low cut.
But it would also be cool…
“Let me get you totaled up,” Carol said.
Now or never…
“Oh, just a minute,” Kira heard herself say before she realized she was going to.
Then, as if her feet had a will of their own, she made a quick dash to the rack and grabbed that black tank top anyway, bringing it back with her to the counter.
And all the while Carol was ringing her up and continuing to talk about how unbelievable Marla had been, Kira just stood there wondering if the saleswoman was thinking that the tank top was not only not something Marla would have bought, but that it was also something Kira shouldn’t be wearing around Cutty.
Or if that was just what Kira was thinking.
The house was quiet when Kira got back. She came in the front door and when she didn’t find Cutty in either the living room or the kitchen, she assumed he was upstairs dealing with the end of nap time.
But in case the twins were still sleeping, she didn’t call for him. Instead she put the bag that held her new clothes out of Mel’s and Mandy’s reach on top of the refrigerator and went up the stairs.
When she got to the second floor, though, she didn’t find Cutty in the nursery. In fact the nursery door wasn’t open at all. But another door was. The door that hadn’t been open the entire tim
e Kira had been there. The door Betty had pointed out to her as the door to Anthony’s room.
Kira wasn’t exactly sure what to do. She was already there and if Cutty had heard her coming it would seem weird now for her to slink back downstairs without saying anything. But she was also worried that if he was in that room, he might not want to be disturbed.
In the end she decided to make a beeline past the open bedroom door to the laundry closet as if doing the wash was the reason she’d come up in the first place. She thought it would give Cutty the opportunity to close the door for privacy if he didn’t want to be interrupted.
The trouble was, she couldn’t keep herself from sneaking a peek as she neared that room.
Sure enough, Cutty was inside, holding a very raggedy stuffed dog and staring at it so remorsefully that Kira’s heart just ached for him. Too much to ignore him and merely do laundry, even if she was disturbing him.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
He raised his gaze slowly from the stained and soiled toy and gave Kira a sad sort of smile. “Oh, hi. I didn’t know you were back.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. I—”
“It’s okay. You aren’t bothering me. I wasn’t really doing anything. I heard one of the girls waking up and I didn’t think I should wait to start the climb up the stairs since I’m so slow at it. By the time I got here things were quiet again but you know that won’t last long. I didn’t want to go all the way down the stairs again and have to come back up them, so I thought I’d take a look at what needs to be done in here while I waited for them to wake up completely.”
Kira nodded, understanding that he needed to keep his trips up and down the stairs to a minimum.
“If you’d rather be alone—” she said then.
Cutty shook his head. “No, that’s okay. Come on in.”
She accepted the invitation and went into the empty room with him, taking a look around.
If someone had said a war had been waged in the small space she wouldn’t have been surprised. There were holes in the walls, pieces of wallboard had been peeled off and scratches and scuff marks marred the paint everywhere.
“Betty told me this was Anthony’s room,” she said somewhat tentatively because she wasn’t sure she should bring it up.
But Cutty didn’t seem to mind. “Yep, this was it. Not a pretty picture, is it?”
Kira didn’t answer that but he continued anyway. “Anthony was kind of tough on his surroundings,” he said, sounding as sad as his smile had looked. “We kept a football helmet on him for when he would bang his head. Steel-toed boots for when he’d be in kicking mode. There was only a mattress on the floor so he wouldn’t get hurt. But there wasn’t much we could do for the walls or the paint.”
“Did he bang his head and kick often?” Kira asked.
“It wasn’t unusual,” Cutty said.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then Kira confessed, “I wonder about him. What he was like.”
“He was…I don’t know. He was Anthony. A little boy locked in his own world. A world he didn’t like disturbed.”
Kira wasn’t sure Cutty wanted to talk about this when he paused for a long while so she didn’t say more to prompt him.
But then he went on anyway, as if he’d just been trying to think of other ways to let her know her nephew.
“Anthony never spoke a word. Ever. But he loved music. In fact, he loved it so much that sometimes when he would get into one of his…rages…I’d sing to him and it would calm him down. Of course the flip side of his loving music was that he would get on these humming jags. One song. Every waking hour. For days on end.”
“Oh dear.”
“Oh dear is right.”
“Was the dog his favorite toy?” Kira asked then, nodding at the ratty stuffed animal.
“That’s kind of hard to say. Anthony didn’t form attachments to much of anything. But repetition is an element of autism. Like the humming, there were things he just did—for no reason—over and over again. One of those things was that he’d sit in the corner and rub the dog back and forth on the floor—like a scrubbing sponge. For Anthony that was as close as it came to being his favorite toy.”
“So, if he didn’t form attachments to anything, does that mean he didn’t form attachments to you or to Marla, either?”
“That’s what it means. He didn’t like to be touched. Physical contact was one of the things that would set off the self-harm, so we had to keep it strictly to bathing him, washing his hair—only what absolutely had to be done. The music helped there, too, though,” Cutty added.
There was a note in his voice when he said it that told Kira that no matter how difficult it had been to care for Anthony, Cutty had done it lovingly.
“You miss him, don’t you? In spite of the bad things,” she said then.
“Sure,” Cutty said simply. “In spite of everything he was still my boy.”
Cutty’s voice cracked almost imperceptibly and he turned his back to Kira to set the toy on the window ledge, making sure it was just so—maybe the way Anthony had wanted it. Or Marla.
For a long moment he stayed there, staring at the stuffed dog, and Kira could only hope he had some good memories to help ease the obvious sorrow of his loss.
When he turned back to her again his expression was more serene. “Sounds like the girls are awake.”
The soft baby chatter Mel and Mandy sometimes engaged in was coming from the nursery but it hadn’t penetrated Kira’s thoughts as she’d witnessed Cutty’s grief. Now that he’d brought it to her attention, she dragged herself out of her own reverie.
“I’ll get them. Go ahead downstairs and get off your ankle.”
“I’m a slave to the ankle,” he said wryly. “What do you say we break free of our chains for a little while tonight?”
She didn’t know what he was suggesting, and her expression must have given her away because he explained.
“If I didn’t have this bad foot I’d be playing softball tonight. How about if we pack up the girls and go watch the game? There’ll be plenty of hands to help out with them once we get there, and it’ll do us all good.”
“I shouldn’t,” Kira said in a hurry.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go. She did. She really did. Which was reason enough not to do it because then she’d be giving in to the desire to spend time with Cutty. Plus there was the fact that if she went she wouldn’t get her work around the house done and she would have yet another day of housekeeping failure under her belt.
“I was going to get this place cleaned up, remember?” she said. “And maybe even actually dust and vacuum.”
“Work instead of play,” he summarized, sounding disappointed.
Kira assumed his disappointment was for himself, that he was figuring if she didn’t go, he couldn’t, either. So she tried to fix that. “That doesn’t mean you can’t go. I can keep the girls and just clean after they go to bed.”
“You’d actually miss a softball game on a beautiful summer night—a Saturday night—to clean?” he countered as if that were unthinkable.
“The place really needs it. I’m living in fear of someone dropping by and seeing what a bad job I’m doing.”
“Everybody needs some recreation,” Cutty persisted with all his charm.
Kira wasn’t a sports fan by any stretch of the imagination, but the thought of an evening out in the summer air, with Cutty, was pretty appealing.
Still, she repeated, “I shouldn’t,” and reinforced it with thoughts of Betty and Carol realizing how inferior she was to Marla.
“The messes aren’t going anywhere. They’ll all be here when you get back,” he reminded.
“Exactly.”
“Come on,” he cajoled in a sort of singsong.
There wasn’t a doubt in Kira’s mind that Marla wouldn’t have gone off to a softball game and left her house in the shape it was in. It was something their fath
er would never have allowed. Something Kira would never have done herself at home. But oh, it was tempting.
“Will you go even if I don’t?” she asked.
He grinned as if he’d seen the loophole. “No, I’d stay cooped up here, going stir-crazy. And it would be all your fault.”
Kira knew he was teasing her, and that he could very well go without her just the way he’d been able to go on his own to see Ad the day before. She also recognized that going to a softball game with him was hardly in the line of duty for her. That it was almost like a date. And that dating Cutty was the last thing she should be doing.
“Come on,” he repeated, “The house will wait. But this is your only chance today to see a game.”
There he was, standing so tall and gorgeous and sexy, and he was just so difficult to say no to…
“Okay,” she finally conceded. “But if word gets around that I’m slacking off on the job it’s your fault.”
He laughed. “My lips are sealed.”
And soft and smooth and warm…
But that was definitely not a thought Kira wanted to have so she pushed it aside.
It was bad enough that she’d just agreed to overlook the job she was supposed to be doing for an outing with him. The last thing she needed was to start thinking about that kiss again, too.
“Who’s playing this softball game tonight?” Kira asked Cutty as they worked on opposite sides of the family station wagon to get Mel and Mandy into the car seats in the back seat after dinner that night.
“We’re the Northbridge Bruisers,” he answered with an exaggerated cheerleading quality to his tone.
“Is it Little League?”
That made him laugh. “No, we’re all big boys. There’s about twenty of us—all grown-up—who have a sort of league of our own, I guess you could call it. What we do is divide up into two teams by picking names out of a hat—so the teams vary every game to keep it interesting. Then we play softball in the spring and summer, flag football in the autumn and basketball during the winter. It’s just for fun and exercise.”
“Who are the twenty guys?”
“I’m one. And Ad and his brothers—he has three of them—play. The other fifteen are…well, just Northbridge guys. They run the gamut—we have the younger of our two doctors, our dentist, the local contractor, one guy and his brother who own a ranch outside of town. We’re all just—”
Babies in the Bargain Page 8
