The Housekeeper's Daughter

by Laurie Paige

  “Yeah. I wrote down the words I didn’t know and looked them up after I got through each chapter, like you said. It made reading easier.”

  “Good.” They went into the classroom where she privately tutored the kids who were way behind. “I got your test graded. You aced it. Wow!” she exclaimed softly, giving him the praise he deserved.

  His dark eyes lit up. She noted the golden flecks in them and thought of Drake’s dark eyes that flashed golden when the light hit them.

  “Okay, let’s see your list of words,” she requested when she was at her desk and ready to start.

  For the next two hours she worked with Johnny, then a group of students who were further advanced. At three, she rushed home to check on Joe Junior and Teddy and make sure they did their homework correctly. Ms. Meredith was a stickler about that, too.

  Drake was in the corral, working with one of the young cow ponies when she arrived. She stood by the car and watched him for a few minutes.

  He had a firm touch on the reins and made sure the gelding knew what was expected and performed the task correctly before he went on to something else. He would make a good teacher for the students at the children’s ranch—

  Reality check, she interrupted herself. Drake didn’t need her advice on what to do with his life when he grew tired of risking it on daring rescues in places where he could get himself shot on sight. It wasn’t her business.

  Just as she turned to head inside, Drake stopped his mount beside the fence. He dipped his head toward her in greeting, then simply watched her, making her think of lunch and the way he had looked at her then. There was an invitation in those dark depths, but she didn’t know what it was an invitation to.

  The baby stirred and kicked vigorously as if sensing her agitation. Flustered, she rushed into the house.

  Three

  “Maya, come with us,” Joe Junior shouted as soon as she stepped in the door. “Drake’s gonna teach us how to rope.”

  “Yeah, we’ll be rodeo champions someday!” Teddy said.

  “Indoor voices, please,” Maya reminded them, going into her room and storing her book bag before swapping her flats for sneakers. “What about your homework?”

  The boys vowed they’d do it before dinner and give up their hour of television if need be.

  “Okay.”

  “We can?” Joe looked disbelieving, then he let out a whoop, quickly suppressed. He and Teddy took off.

  Maya’s heart did a somersault. Drake was good to his younger brothers. He obviously cared for them. They needed love and approbation from someone other than her. Their mother was too unpredictable in her love.

  Their father loved them, but there was a sadness in him that Maya thought the youngsters sensed, so they tended to be subdued around him. Besides, Joe was deeply involved with all the other problems in the Coltons’ lives at present—the shootings, the disappearance of Emily.

  With Drake, the boys could do “guy” things. The shared companionship was good for all of them, Drake included. The boys touched a soft spot in him. He needed that.

  Not that she was concerned with his needs, she reminded herself. Pulling on a jacket, she headed outside to keep an eye on her two charges. Ms. Meredith had made it very plain that she paid Maya to be with the boys and keep them from harm. That meant keeping them within view at all times.

  Arriving at the paddock, Maya found Drake had set up two sawhorses with brooms for heads and was showing the boys how to hold their lariats. She couldn’t help but laugh. He turned his intense gaze on her with a quickness that dried up the merriment.

  “Your laughter makes the day brighter,” he said.

  Maya was aware of the boys looking from one to the other, then at each other. They giggled in the way kids do when grown-ups say funny things.

  “Is this right?” Joe asked, directing his brother’s attention to their concerns once more.

  Leaning on the fence, Maya watched Drake start the two youngsters close to the sawhorses. Joe, being older, caught on quicker than Teddy. Drake moved him back to ten feet, then worked with Teddy until he got the hang of tossing the rope over the broom.

  After an hour, Maya called out, “Ten more minutes, guys.”

  “Then what?” Drake asked.

  He gave her a sexy once-over that startled her thoughts right out of her head. “Then it’s time for homework,” she said, gathering her wits.

  When the boys protested, Drake shushed them. “You have to plan your time carefully to get everything done. That’s what a good SEAL does. You’ve done roping, now it’s time for the next item on the agenda, right, teacher?”

  “Uh, right,” she echoed.

  “Vamoose!” Drake ordered, then grabbed a sawhorse in each hand and left the paddock.

  Joe and Teddy climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground beside Maya. “Drake’s really good,” Joe told her. “He could be a rodeo champion if he wanted.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m gonna be,” Teddy decided.

  Joe gave him a shove. “Ha!”

  “I am!”

  “Enough, guys. Don’t argue. Discuss—that’s the rule. And don’t touch another person without permission. Joe, ten minutes earlier to bed.”

  “Aww,” Joe started to complain.

  Ms. Meredith opened the door and glared at all three of them. “You will lower your voices at once,” she ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” both boys intoned simultaneously.

  Maya felt like echoing the boys’ subdued manner. She had stopped “ma’am-ing” Ms. Meredith a year ago upon realizing that, in order to be taken as an equal, she must act as one. She would not be subservient.

  “Have the boys done their homework?” Meredith asked her with a severe frown.

  “We’re on our way to do that now. Drake was teaching them how to rope. It’s excellent training for eye-hand coordination,” she said in a firm teacher-knows-best voice.

  She smiled with an assurance she was far from feeling and hoped she didn’t get a dressing-down in front of her young charges. They tended to take her side, ending with all three of them getting a lecture.

  To her relief, the other woman nodded and left them in the hall while she went into the living room to speak to her husband. Maya quickly herded the boys to her room where she set them to work on their lessons. She got out her own books and studied the physical, mental and emotional development of children from kindergarten to sixth grade.

  Drake peeled out of his clothes, took a quick shower, dressed, then hurried to the kitchen. Maya wasn’t there.

  “Where…are the boys?” he amended his question.

  Inez Ramirez, longtime housekeeper, friend and confidante to the Colton family, studied him for an uncomfortable five seconds before answering. “Maya took their dinner to her room. They aren’t finished with their homework yet.”

  Disappointment hit him. He tried to keep it from showing. Growing up, he and all the kids on the ranch had decided Inez could read minds. She always knew when they had done something they shouldn’t as soon as they walked into the house. At the present moment, he felt as if she knew of each and every tryst he’d had with her daughter last summer…and of the lustful dreams he’d been having of Maya every night since then.

  “Thanks,” he said politely and headed for the living room where he’d seen his parents earlier. He paused when he got within earshot.

  “You simply have to pay it. It’s been months,” Drake heard his father say.

  “Really, Joe,” Meredith said in obvious annoyance. “It’s only a couple of thousand. You’d think I’d asked for your life savings.”

  “Precisely why I did what I did with your credit cards. You have an allowance. I suggest you pay your bills with it.”

  “But some of these charges were for your birthday party!”

  Drake winced at his father’s laughter. He’d never heard that tone before—cold and harsh and cynical.

  “Not one of the family’s better days,” Joe Sen
ior continued in the same vein.

  “I…no, it wasn’t,” his mother agreed, her voice going soft. “It frightened me, that you might have been killed, or at the least, incapacitated.”

  Drake waited for his father’s reply, but heard nothing. In another second, he heard the tap of his mother’s heels. He stayed in the dining room until she went down the hall toward her room. He heard her door shut with a brittle slam.

  After another minute, he ventured into the other room. His father stood at the window, his face expressionless as he stared out at the deepening twilight. He turned when Drake entered, then smiled in greeting.

  Drake felt a tightening in his chest. No matter what his father’s disappointments or trials were in life, Joe always had time for children, whether his own or the foster kids that stayed with them at the ranch. Drake admired that quality in his sire and tried to emulate it with his younger brothers.

  “How are things with you?” Joe asked.

  “Fine, sir,” Drake began, then stopped. “Well, maybe not so good. I’m not making much headway with Maya.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows in question.

  “She won’t tell me who the father of the child is,” Drake admitted.

  “A brandy?” Joe asked, pouring one for himself.

  “Please.”

  Drake accepted a snifter, then sat on the sofa after his father settled in a chair. The feel of leather, the shine of the furniture and faint scent of lemon oil were familiar and comforting.

  His father swirled the brandy in his glass, then fastened a piercing gaze on him. “Does that matter?”

  Drake was startled by the question. “Well, yes,” he began. “That is… If it’s mine, then naturally I’ll do the right thing.”

  “What if it isn’t?” Joe persisted. “Joe Junior was left on our doorstep. Your mother and I adopted him and raised him as if he were our own flesh and blood.”

  Drake nodded. It was such ancient history, he’d truly forgotten that little Joe was a foundling.

  “If Maya’s child couldn’t be yours, I assume you would have said so and not come home.”

  Drake met his father’s level gaze. “It could be. I think…actually, I’m sure it is. But she won’t say so,” he finished in frustration.

  “Have you asked her to marry you?”

  Drake smiled in irony. “We haven’t gotten that far.”

  “I take it that you don’t want the marriage?” Joe questioned dryly.

  Drake fought the storm of emotion that rushed through him. “I didn’t plan on having a wife and family. My life is uncertain at best.”

  “And extremely dangerous the rest of the time,” Joe concluded. “Yet women and children do manage when husbands and fathers have tough jobs that take them away from home for long periods. It’s all in how the family handles it. Love makes a big difference.”

  Drake knew his father was questioning his feelings for Maya. He stared out the window at the dark shadows cast by a tree swaying in the night wind. The darker shadows in his soul shifted painfully. Maya was like the sun. She was all the bright, good things in life, the things forever out of his reach.

  “Dinner,” Inez called softly from the dining room.

  Joe observed the flicker of emotion pass through his son’s eyes. Drake was a man, with a man’s needs. Sex was part of that, but so was love. A life without it was desolate indeed.

  Suppressing a sigh, he rose and led the way into the dining room where the family was gathering for the evening meal. It should have been a joyous time of the day.

  He sat at the head of the table, Drake at his left. River and Sophie, now married and expecting—his and Meredith’s first grandchild!—joined them. Their new house which River had designed and built himself, was a beauty, but Joe loved when they visited the main house.

  Meredith entered, nodded graciously when the children greeted her, and took her place.

  Glancing at Drake, Joe thought of young Teddy. He’d had an impulse to confide to his older son that the youngest Colton wasn’t his but he loved the boy as if he were.

  That fact wasn’t something a man could tell his child. However Meredith had changed, she was still the mother of their children. That she adored Joe Junior and Teddy, Joe couldn’t deny.

  A sadness reaching clear to the depths of his soul rolled over him. Drake was struggling to realize just what his relationship was with Maya, but Joe had had no doubts the first time he’d met Meredith. Neither had she. They had known they were in love from the first.

  Where had it all gone?

  Maya was relieved when she walked out of the doctor’s office. She and little Marissa were doing fine. Her wild ride hadn’t harmed the baby, thank goodness. She backed out of the busy parking lot next to the medical building and nearly ran over Peggy Honeywell who ran the bed-and-breakfast, Honeywell House, in Prosperino.

  They grinned and waved at each other. When the coast was clear, Maya ran a few errands and drove carefully to the high school. She met Andy Martin in his classroom.

  “How’s it going?” he greeted her cheerfully, his eyes sweeping over her blossoming figure as if to check her progress.

  Just the way every person she met looked her over nowadays. She sometimes felt like a beached whale with a curious crowd milling around, trying to figure out what to do with her.

  “Great,” she assured him. She got out some test papers. “Here are Johnny’s latest exams. I really appreciate your looking them over for me. He needs more help in math than I can spare him, I’m afraid.”

  Andy studied the papers and made some notes in the margins beside the wrong answers. “Mm,” he said once in a while. “Ah, yes.”

  Maya thought his comments sounded promising. The boy was smart, precocious in the way of many children who’d had to raise themselves, but he was sadly lacking in basic skills such as reading and arithmetic.

  “Okay, I think I can come up with a program of study for him that will bring him up to par.” Andy squinted and gave her an assessing look.

  “What?” she asked.

  “How about I come out to the ranch Saturday morning? Could you fit that into your schedule? I’d like to work out some word problems, then check with you on his vocabulary level. We’ll see how well he does on reading comprehension when it relates to problem solving.”

  “That would be perfect. Thanks, Andy. You have no idea what a load this is off my mind. I think Johnny has college potential, but he’s going to need extra help to get him up to speed.”

  “No problem.” He checked his watch. “You feel like an early supper or maybe a snack?”

  When she’d realized she was pregnant with Drake’s child, she’d broken off entirely with Andy, refusing even the most casual of meetings with him. When he’d learned of the child, he’d sought her out and offered marriage.

  No questions asked.

  Not like Drake, who apparently wanted to know exactly when she’d became pregnant and with whom. She would never forgive him for that, no matter how sorry she might feel for him because of his parents’ problems or his sad past.

  “I think not.”

  “I hear Drake Colton is back in town,” Andy murmured, a speculative note in his voice.

  She stared at the chalkboard, unable to totally lie and unwilling to admit she’d been a fool. “Yes, he’s home for…for a vacation, I suppose.”

  “Maya—”

  She jumped to her feet—well, okay, it was more of a lunge—and smiled brightly. “I really have to go. The boys are on their own and probably ignoring their homework.”

  Andy walked out to the car with her. He opened the door, then lightly clasped her arm. “I’ve been your friend for a long time. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded unhappily. She’d never meant to hurt him.

  “You can come to me at any time. To talk. To just get away. Whatever. Okay?”

  “Thanks.” Impulsively she kissed his cheek, then quickly got in the car and left before she bawled like a
motherless calf right there on the main street of town. That would start a buzz on the old grapevine!

  Andy watched, his eyes filled with kindness and worry, until she’d turned the corner and was out of sight.

  Maya sniffed, sighed and turned her mind to her duties at the Colton estate. She had a paper to finish, then she had to e-mail it to the professor. That was after she supervised the boys and got them to bed.

  Heavens, but she was tired. And her back hurt. Also her feet. For a second, she wondered how she’d gotten into such a situation.

  “By being stupid,” she muttered sarcastically. “By falling in love,” she added on a sadder note as she parked near the house and pushed herself wearily out of the car.

  She went from one task to another for the next few hours, checking Joe’s and Teddy’s homework, helping her mother finish getting supper on the table, making sure the boys had their baths and were in bed at lights-out, then doing her own work. She saw Drake briefly in passing. He gave her a narrow-eyed scrutiny and barely spoke.

  Okay, she could handle that, she assured herself as she slipped into a clean nightgown. After all, she’d handled that brief, shattering note—

  A soft knock sounded on the door.

  “Not tonight,” she called out.

  Drake opened the door.

  “I’m really going to have to remember to lock the door from now on,” she said in protest.

  “Why? Are men lining up to get inside?”

  She closed her eyes and spoke to the room at large. “Do I have to take these kinds of insults? No.” She glared at Drake. “Please get out before I scream bloody murder.”

  He had the grace to look slightly remorseful. He paced the room, then took up his usual position straddling her desk chair. “I saw you in town today.”

  She frowned. “So?”

  He slapped his hand on the back of the chair. “Dammit, you were with another man, kissing him right out on the street. What gives?”

  Maya stared blankly at Drake. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.”