by Arlene James
Ryan let go and ran to the door, where he paused and called back. “Better huwwy.” He shook his finger at Adam in a perfect parody of his older sister. “Wendy say if you don’t come, she gonna make breakfast herself.”
Adam’s eyes widened in alarm. Forgetting his shoes, he pelted toward the kitchen, bawling, “Wen-dy!”
He burst through the louvered swinging doors in time to see his daughter standing on a chair that she had pulled up to the counter and dumping flour into a glass bowl from a sack. The flour hit with a whump and rose in clouds around the bowl, which wobbled ominously near the edge of the counter. Adam threw himself across the cooktop island and snatched Wendy off the chair, just as the bowl shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Flour and glass sprayed the narrow aisle between the counter and the island. Wendy immediately burst into loud wails. Adam pulled her up onto the island, expecting to see blood running down her legs. He sagged with relief when all he saw was flour dusting her legs. At that moment, the boys pushed through the door, Robbie first, then Ryan, his hand in his mouth.
“Out!” Adam barked. Neither of them moved a muscle. “There’s glass all over the floor! Get out of here!”
Eyes wide, they backed through the swinging door, but then Robbie pushed them open again and stuck his head inside. “Wendy, you hurt?”
Wendy’s wails had subsided to sobs now, but she made no effort to answer. Adam answered for her, still miffed—pained, if he was to be honest—that his children always seemed to need a reason to obey him. “She’s not hurt, she’s just scared,” he said gruffly, pulling her to him and beginning to inch his way across the floor toward the door, on the lookout for the telltale sparkle of glass splinters.
Once safely on the carpet of the dining room, he set Wendy on her feet, went down on one knee and grasped her by her solid little shoulders. “What on earth did you think you were doing?” He hadn’t meant to shout, and he hadn’t meant to shake her, but the thought of glass embedding itself in her plump child’s body both horrified and angered him. She went off into screeching wails again, her face scrunched up and her braids shuddering, but Adam noted that her eyes were dry. He guessed she was more embarrassed than frightened. Truth to tell, he was somewhat shaken himself. He let her go and wiped a hand across his brow. “All right,” he muttered. “It’s all right, but don’t you ever do anything like that again. Do you hear me?” She nodded her head, sniffing phonily. Adam ignored the sham and schooled his tone to patience. “What were you doing anyway?”
“Making pancakes,” she said challengingly, sticking out that lower lip.
“Pancakes!” Robbie echoed, jumping up and down. “Yeah, yeah, pancakes!”
Ryan immediately picked up the chant, clapping his hands together.
Adam winced. They would settle on something as difficult as pancakes for breakfast. Even if he could find a recipe, he couldn’t begin to put together an edible batch of pancakes. Who was he kidding? He’d be lucky to get the milk in the bowl with the cereal—if he could find any. He wasn’t about to go looking in his bare feet, not now. He made a sudden decision. He was good at decisions. In fact, deciding was what he often did best, and this decision let him off the hook in several ways. For one thing, they’d actually get to eat, and for another, he wouldn’t have to face cleaning up the mess in the kitchen on an empty stomach. He pushed up to his full height. “All right, let’s get you dressed. We’re going out for pancakes.”
That elicited paroxysms of delight. Robbie danced around, whooping in circles, knees knocked together, lower legs flying out at odd angles. Ryan took a look at his brother’s improbable dance and settled for stomping up and down and hoo-hooing like a train. Wendy merely looked up at her father in that solemn way of hers, nodded sharply and spun away to drag her noisy brothers from the room. Adam smiled to himself. He might actually have scored some points with this one.
An hour later, Adam asked himself how a good idea could have gone so bad as he grabbed for the syrup pitcher yet again. He snatched it out of the way just as Robbie fell, chest forward, into his plate, his arms stretching out to knock salt and pepper shakers into ashtrays and ashtrays into toast baskets. Wendy snickered, one hand over her mouth, the other waving a fork bearing a speared piece of dripping pancake. Robbie giggled, looking down at the sticky mess on his shirt, and Ryan immediately went up on his knees, preparing to duplicate his brother’s antics. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Adam jumped up, trying to balance the syrup pitcher with one hand and grab Ryan’s shoulder with the other. His hip hit the table, and coffee sloshed out of the cup, over the rim of the saucer and onto his khakis. “Damn!”
The children descended into loud laughter. Adam felt the syrup pitcher lifted out of his hand. An instant later, it was replaced by a damp white towel. “Allow me,” said a soft voice. Adam caught a flash of pale blue uniform and brown hairnet as he bent to wipe at the stain on his thigh. He looked up in time to see a slender young woman tugging Wendy’s leg down into place and sliding her chair farther under the table, situating the hand with the fork over her plate. She smiled down at the girl, then moved on around the table, putting Ryan back into his booster seat and pushing his milk glass away from the edge of the table. She leaned down and whispered something to him before moving on to Robbie, and Ryan instantly picked up his fork and began to eat. Robbie required a bit more attention.
“Well, now, handsome, you’ve made quite a mess of yourself, haven’t you?” she said, going down beside his chair and ruffling his hair. “The food’s supposed to go in your tummy, not on it.” She dipped a paper napkin in his water glass and began carefully dabbing the worst of the syrup off his shirt. “What beautiful eyes you have,” she said, smiling into moss-green eyes mottled with yellow and tiny spikes of blue. Robbie grinned, clearly besotted, and when she turned her smile on Adam, he understood the sentiment completely.
She was really quite astonishingly lovely, with an oval face built of high, delicate cheekbones, a broad smooth forehead and a slightly blunted chin. The straight, thick bangs that brushed the peaks of naturally arched brows were the palest gold, and fine as corn silk. Her lips were wide and rather spare, but perfectly shaped and rosy pink beneath a small, patrician nose with two small depressions high up on the narrow bridge, indicating that she wore, or used to wear, glasses. But her eyes were her dominant feature. Large ovals, widest at the inner edge, they were a clear, brilliant green spiked and veined with rich blue and thickly fringed with tawny lashes. Heavy lids gave them a sultry look, and Adam suspected that she was somewhat nearsighted. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice that his mouth was hanging open. He snapped it shut and formed it into a smile.
“I think you’ve just averted a major disaster,” he said, bowing himself down into his chair. “Thank you.”
She turned the napkin in her hand, dipped it in the water once more and continued cleaning Robbie’s shirt. “No problem.” Her mouth quirked up at one corner. “You looked like you had your hands full.”
Adam amazed himself with a warm chuckle. “You could say that, yes. Our nanny quit last night, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this single-father thing yet.” Had he really said single?
She shot him a look that was part disdain and part curiosity. “What happened to your wife?”
“She dead!” Ryan announced at the top of his lungs.
Mortified, Adam felt the weight of gazes turning his way as colored heat climbed his neck and face. He shot his son a quelling glare and quickly looked back to the pretty blonde. “My, um, wife was killed in an auto accident eighteen months ago,” he said softly. “The boys were only about a year and a half old, and you know how kids are. They don’t always grasp the significance of—”
“You poor darlings,” she said, standing to loop an arm around each of the twins’ necks. “You’re so sweet, I could just eat you up!” She bent to kiss first Ryan and then Robbie. They soaked it up as if it were sunshine, gazing up adoringly and laying their heads back against
her arms. She rubbed noses with each of them in turn, making them giggle, before gazing across the table at a thoughtfully watching Wendy. “You probably remember everything, don’t you, sweetheart?” Wendy nodded, round-eyed, but Adam would have bet a small fortune that she had only the scarcest notion what the waitress meant. “I bet you miss her awfully, too,” the woman whispered, and Wendy’s lower lip trembled, more in empathy with the woman’s tone than from anything else. The blonde glided with a dancer’s grace around the table to loop her arms around Wendy’s shoulders. “What an angel! You must have loved her very much.” Wendy nodded solemnly as the young woman hugged her to her bosom—a firm and bountiful bosom, Adam noted.
The woman went down on her knees, her full attention focused on Wendy. “I remember something Sister Agnes used to say about a mother’s love. Do you want to know what it was?” Wendy nodded again, and the woman went on. “Sister Agnes said that a mother’s love never dies. It lives on and on in the hearts of her children, and if you close your eyes and stay very still, you can feel it beating there, strong and happy and comforting.”
Wendy said, “Who’s Sister Agnes?”
“The nurse at the place where I went to live after my mommy went to heaven. She was a nun—Sister Agnes, I mean. It was a Catholic place, you see.”
“How come you had to go to a Catholic place?” Wendy wanted to know.
“Because, you see, my daddy went to heaven even before my mommy did.”
Wendy looked at her father with wide, surprised eyes. “My daddy went to ’Rabia,” she said, “but he came home.”
The blonde smiled at Adam. “Well, you’re very lucky then, aren’t you?”
“He did the army,” Robbie said, tired of being left out.
A blond brow lifted at that. “Did he now?”
Adam cleared his throat. “I was in Saudi Arabia when my wife…had the accident. I hurried home to find my children with my aunt.”
“My grandma died, too,” Robbie announced.
The blonde gasped, a hand going to her chest. “Oh, my!” She looked to Adam for confirmation.
A shaft of pain speared through him. He resolutely pushed it aside. “Great-grandmother, actually,” he said tersely. “Plane crash.”
The waitress pulled in a deep breath, tears sparkling in her astonishing eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry.”
Adam, you’re a scoundrel, he told himself, even as he bowed his head and swallowed noisily, wringing every possible ounce of compassion out of her.
“My heart just goes out to you all,” she said, adding briskly, “Stop that right now, young man. We don’t allow our food to be thrown.”
Adam looked up in time to see Robbie drop a handful of soggy pancake onto the table. He rolled his eyes, leaning forward. “That’s it, Robbie Fortune. You are going to get it just as soon as we get home!”
The waitress chuckled, getting to her feet. “You really don’t know anything about children, do you?”
Just then a bald, portly man appeared at her elbow. “Laura, you have customers waiting.”
“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Murphy, I was just trying to help this gentleman—”
“I told you when I hired you,” the man said sternly, interrupting her, “no flirting with the customers!”
“But I wasn’t—”
Adam cut in. “She wasn’t flirting! She was trying to clean up after my son when he—”
The man pointed a finger at Adam. “I’ll thank you to stay out of this. We have rules here, and as manager, it’s up to me to enforce them. You don’t see the other girls ignoring their own customers to bat their eyelashes at married men.”
“I’m not married!”
“He’s not married!” she cried at the same time.
The manager smirked. “Not flirting, huh? You’ve already determined his marital status, but you weren’t flirting. I’m disappointed in you, Laura, very disappointed.”
Laura’s mouth fell open. “He was just telling me how his wife—his late wife—was in an accident while he was in Saudi Arabia.”
The manager glared at her. “I don’t like argumentative employees. You have five seconds to get back to your station or you’re fired. Five. Four.”
Adam got to his feet. “This is absurd! She hasn’t done anything to warrant this kind of heavy-handed bullying.”
“Three. Two.”
“Don’t bother!” Laura ripped off her hairnet, freeing a sleek cascade of hip-length blond silk. Adam’s breath caught. She threw the net on the floor. “I quit!”
The manager sneered. “I knew you wouldn’t last the day!”
“You’re just mad because the owner made you hire me!”
“It obviously wasn’t for your waitressing skills,” he returned snidely.
Adam threw his napkin on the table. “Mister, you’re asking for a broken nose!”
Laura gasped and threw up a protective hand. “No, don’t! I don’t want the job, honestly, and I can’t stand fighting. Please.”
Adam looked at the mixed desperation and hope on her face and felt his heart lurch inside his chest. He swallowed down the anger and glanced around the table. “Get your coats on, kids,” he ordered brusquely, digging into his pocket. “We’re getting out of here. And we won’t be back,” he added for the manager’s benefit.
The odious man snorted. “Now that’s a real tragedy.”
Adam fixed him with a narrow glance. “Tell your boss that he’ll be hearing from Adam Fortune.”
At the mention of the Fortune name, the man went pale. Adam nodded with satisfaction and helped Robbie down from his chair, while the woman named Laura hurriedly did the same for Ryan. Adam stepped to her side, reached out and grasped her by the arm. “Where’s your coat?”
Her eyelids lifted with surprise. “I-in the back, but—”
“Get it,” he said flatly, leaving no room for argument. “You’re going with us.”
“B-but I can’t just—”
“Look, you were just trying to help out an inept father when this jerk came storming over and fired you.”
“He didn’t fire me, I quit,” she pointed out, lifting her chin.
Adam smiled. Oh, he liked this woman, a lot. “Fine, you quit, but you wouldn’t have had to quit if it hadn’t been for us. So, in my book, that means I owe you. Now get your coat.” He turned her toward the back of the little café, then counted money out onto the table. “That should do it.” He looked up at her. “Go on!”
“I—I’ll have to change out of the uniform,” she told him over her shoulder, hurriedly threading her way through tables full of gaping diners.
“We’ll warm up the car,” he said, grabbing Ryan by the hand as he reached for a milk glass. He snagged the collar of Robbie’s coat as he dropped toward his knees, intending to crawl under the table.
“Uh, n-no need for this,” the manager stuttered nervously, scooping up the money and shoving it into Adam’s coat pocket. “Breakfast is on the house…sir. S-sorry for the, um, misunderstanding.”
“Nice try,” Adam said through perfect white teeth, “but I still think I’ll speak to the owner.”
The man gulped and mopped his brow with a shaking hand. “M-Mr. Fortune, c-couldn’t we, ah, discuss this?”
“No.” Adam hauled Robbie to his feet and moved him bodily toward the door, dragging Ryan behind him.
Wendy stuck her tongue out at the man and ran before them to hold open the door. It hadn’t even closed behind them when she launched into speech. “I like her, Daddy! Don’t you? Wouldn’t she be a good nanny? Wouldn’t she?”
Adam grinned down at his astute young daughter. Maybe she understood more about everything than he realized. Her happy, expectant doll’s face sent a surge of love through him. “Yeah,” he said, “I think she might at that, but she has to agree, hon, so don’t get your hopes up just yet.”
“Oh, but she needs the job!” Wendy assured him sagely.
Adam cocked his head. “Maybe so, but she might not want it. We’l
l see. Now get in the car. It’s cold out here.”
He opened the driver’s door, and Wendy scrambled inside. “Back seat,” he said, flashing her a grin, “just in case.”
Nodding, she crawled over and squeezed in between the twins’ car seats. Adam went through the laborious routine of getting the boys into their seats and buckling them in. Robbie hated being restrained in any way, but he stopped fighting when Adam told him that he had to check on her. Adam glanced at the front of the café, but he had learned a few things in the past eighteen months. Before he stepped away from the car, he fixed each one of the little heathens with a stern glare. “Don’t touch a thing!” Three little heads nodded eagerly. He closed the door and trotted over to the front of the café, flailing his arms against the brutal cold.
Just as he suspected, the manager had waylaid her to plead for clemency. Fat lot of good that would do him. Adam pushed the heavy glass door open and leaned inside. “Laura?”
She looked up in surprise at the mention of her name. “Coming.”
She threw on her coat and left the manager massaging his temples. Adam watched her graceful, long-legged glide with a dry mouth. She looked taller in those skinny blue jeans than she had in that dumpy uniform. And that hair! His fingers itched to get into it. His heart whammed in his chest as she slipped through the door and by him.
“It’s Laura Beaumont,” she said huskily, her smile suddenly shy.
“Laura Beaumont,” he repeated dumbly.
“And you are Adam, I think you said?”
He realized abruptly that he was staring and stuck out his hand. “Adam Fortune.”
The name didn’t seem to mean a thing to her. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fortune.”
Her hand felt delicate and weightless and utterly feminine in his. “Call me Adam.”
“Yes, of course, if you’ll stick with Laura.”
“Oh, I will,” he mumbled absently, warmed by the bright golden droplets of laughter that filled the cold February air. “Indeed I will.”
It suddenly seemed no burden at all to be single with children.
