“Oh God,” Heather said, but there was no true dismay in her voice. “And I thought the paint was bad.”
“Stickers come off easy.”
“Here’s hoping.” She raised her voice. “Mills, no more decorating the guest, okay?”
“’Kay, Mom.”
Cady leaned across the basket of stickers and carefully placed one over Millie’s mouth before breaking into giggles.
Xander was pretty sure he should say something parental. “Cady, don’t be mean to your...um...semicousin.”
Something that sounded like strangled snorts emerged from behind Millie’s mouth covering.
“Come on,” Heather said with a laugh. “Let’s get out of here before they start slapping stuff on us.”
She led him to the living room, pausing at a coffee table piled high with books, papers and art supplies. In contrast to the rest of the house, the only word to describe it was chaos.
“How do you find anything in that?”
“Easy. I know where everything is.” She shot him an impish grin. “Now turn around while I demonstrate how well I know the locations.”
He snickered but did as requested, rotating to face a line of photos marching across the top of a bookcase. Since he’d been banished, he figured he might as well take advantage of the opportunity to do some snooping in plain sight.
The bulk of the shots, of course, were of Millie. He saw her in a number of poses: dressed up as a mad scientist, wearing a parka and a red reindeer nose, showing off a front-toothless grin. There were some of Millie and Heather together, usually in a garden. One of Heather with a group of women he would bet were her coworkers. And one of Millie, Heather and a gaunt man who shared Heather’s caramel hair and Millie’s slightly pointed chin.
“Is this a brother?”
He felt, rather than saw, her approach from behind. “Yes. Travis.”
“Older or younger?”
“Three years older.”
There was a guarded quality to her responses that had his curiosity piqued. “Where does he live?”
“It varies.”
That was a “go no further” answer if ever he heard one. He risked a sideways glance and saw that she was holding herself rigidly, arms clasped tight over a notebook squashed against her chest.
Lucky book.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to give you the third degree.” He pointed to the shot of her with a group of women. “Are these people you work with?”
“Used to. They’re in the Vancouver office. And it’s okay, you weren’t prying. It’s just...” She fingered the edge of the book. “Travis...my brother...the thing is, the only time I’m sure where he is, is when he’s, um, in jail.”
Holy shit.
Two things struck him at once. The first was that now he got why Heather never flinched when he mentioned his time in the slammer.
The second was that this was the first time he’d ever seen her uncomfortable. And he wasn’t quite sure why. Surely she knew that he, of all people, wasn’t about to judge her brother.
“He have a long history with the prison system?”
“Since he was a teenager.”
Long enough.
“I didn’t run into him, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“I—oh. No. I hadn’t thought about that.”
Yeah, she had.
“We don’t talk a lot. That was the last time I saw him.” She nodded toward the photo. “It’s the only time he met Millie. He always wants to know about her, though. I guess in most ways he’s your typical adoring uncle.”
“Can’t blame him.”
Her smile was small but grateful. “He does his best,” she said softly, and Xander was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about Millie anymore. At least, not Millie alone.
“I don’t have any brothers,” he said, trying to ease the tightness around her eyes. “Just Bethie, and she’s almost seven years older than me.”
“So you were the baby. Were you the prince?”
“Nah. I was too much of a troublemaker for that. Mostly I was the easy target when Beth didn’t want to own up to something.”
“That, I can believe.”
A squeal from the other side of the house caught his attention, but as it was followed by a shriek of laughter, he was pretty sure Cady was fine. “How about you? Were you the princess?”
She snorted. “Oh please.”
Yeah, he didn’t think so.
“So do I get to see your work now?”
“Oh, right. I forgot.” Heather rolled her eyes and thrust the notebook in his direction. He took it automatically. Awkwardly, too, as he’d been so busy not letting himself look right at her. She pulled back a bit too fast, he grabbed again and his hand ended up closing over her wrist.
For a second they stood frozen, his fingers circling her wrist and her eyes wide. He saw surprise on her face, yes, but more. There was uncertainty and a hint of what sure looked like pleasure to him.
Though maybe that was just his own emotions reflecting back at him.
“Heather,” he began, only to be cut off by the shrill tone of the doorbell.
Heather startled and stepped back.
“The pizza!” That came from Millie, who had to be setting a new land speed record for racing from one end of the house to the other. Cady followed in her wake.
“Pizzi! Pizzi! Daddy! Pizzi!”
Heather patted her pocket. “I can’t believe I forgot. I placed the order before we started painting, just in case we got caught up in it, but I totally lost track of time and...”
She was nervous. Because he had touched her? Because she didn’t want him touching her, even by accident?
Or could it be the same reason his own senses had jumped to long-deprived life the moment his skin made contact with hers?
“Mom! Are you gonna come pay? Because I’m hungry.” Millie appeared, clutching the pizza box in front of her. “Mr. Sorenson, you and Cady can sit at the table while Mom pays. And maybe you could help me get some, because I always grab the piece with the cheese that stretches and stretches and never breaks, so it pulls off the piece beside it. Do you like cheese? If you don’t, you can have the piece that gets wrecked.”
“Thanks, Millie, but Cady and I should get going.” There. Contrary to what his grandmother had always insisted, he did have some manners.
“Seriously, Xander.” Heather appeared at his elbow, tucking a credit card into her pocket. “Pull up a chair. Cady can eat pizza, right?”
As if on cue, Cady slapped his thigh. “Daddy? I hungy.”
“It’s still raining.” Millie pointed to the window. “And we got a big one so I could have leftovers for lunch, but there’s still enough for you to have some as long as you’re not too hungry.” She frowned, eyes narrowing behind her glasses. “You’re not super starving, are you?”
“Millie!”
“Not at all.”
“Good. Then we’ll have enough. You sit there.”
Heather shook her head. “You might as well give in, Xander. There’s no escape.”
“In that case, let me get my little monkey cleaned up, and we’ll be glad to join you.”
He swung Cady onto his shoulder and carried her to the sink, pausing for a second to wink at the rain hitting the windows.
Thanks, Mother Nature. I owe you one.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS, HEATHER THOUGHT, one of the most enjoyable meals she’d had in a long time.
That probably wasn’t a good thing.
Millie and Cady dominated the so-called conversation, with songs and silliness that had her and Xander snickering behind their hands. Millie made her pizza crust fly through the air. Cady, perched on Xander’s lap, pic
ked up the grapes that Daddy had halved so carefully and tossed them across the table like she was skipping a rock across the water. Xander started laughing, lost control of his slice and sent a glob of cheese onto Cady’s head, which made Millie cackle so hard that milk came out of her nose.
In short, it was barely a step down from chaos. But that wasn’t what kept Heather from laughing quite as heartily as the rest of the diners.
It was all too easy. Too relaxed. And that scared the crap out of her.
Parenting Truth Number 316: The line between delight and disaster is very, very skinny.
She felt on edge. Like something was pushing at her from beneath her skin, poking over and over in search of an opening. After all these years, she could finally name it. Her old buddy anxiety had decided to pay a visit.
In the first years of Millie’s life, when Heather had still been in residence, she and anxiety—and his big brother, fear—were pretty well constant companions. She’d existed in a constant state of nervousness. The really fun part had been that her anxiousness had come in two flavors: certainty that she would do something wrong and hurt Millie, and certainty that if anyone knew how lost she was at caring for her child, they would take Millie away from her.
Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
She had learned how to manage her fear in the years after it drove her away from Millie. She had taken so many classes in child development and parenting, spent so much time in counseling and workshops, that she could have earned a second degree in Motherhood. It had taken years, but she was finally the parent she wanted to be, instead of trying to imitate Carol Brady while tamping down memories of her own mother’s lessons in neglect. She would never completely master the uneasiness, but she knew that it would never again build into the blind panic that had made her run.
Tonight, though, the pitchforks of anxiety were definitely poking. It wasn’t until the meal was almost over that she figured out the jabs had nothing to do with Millie.
They were because of Xander.
And hearing another adult voice—a deep one, the kind that commanded attention by virtue of its difference—at her table.
And seeing the way he listened to Millie, carefully and attentively, especially when the topic turned to how astronauts sleep in space.
And how it felt to look across the heads of two giggling girls and see her own mix of exasperation and wonder reflected in someone else’s eyes. Especially when the touch of that someone’s hand around her wrist had sent her pulse soaring and skidding.
Soaring and skidding had their place, but not for her. Not now. Not when Millie was counting on her.
She just wished to hell that having Xander at the table didn’t feel so good.
* * *
HEATHER WAS SO focused on breathing through the pitchforks that when Xander said something to her—her, not one of the kids—she had to blink and give herself a mental wake-up call.
“Sorry. I was still figuring out the logistics of space stuff. What was that?”
He pulled Cady’s hand off his face. “Ow. I said, we got distracted and I never got to see what you have planned for your presentation.”
“That’s right. Mills, can you get my notebook for me? The one on the table in the living room? And bring my laptop, too.”
“Sure, Mom. Can Cady come, too?”
“For the whole minute it will take you to go there and back?” Heather laughed. “If it’s okay with her dad.”
“Sure.” Xander gave Cady’s hands and face a fast wipe and set her on the floor. She waddled beside Millie, singing something about ducks and rain.
“They’re cute together,” Xander said. “Millie’s really patient with Cady.”
Jab jab jab.
“She’s had lots of practice with her new baby brother.”
The corner of his mouth edged upward. “You know, I missed Cady’s first year, but even I’m pretty sure that someone who’s—what, four months?—can’t be sitting around slapping stickers on his sister already.”
She was saved from needing to reply to her own inanity by the return of the girls.
“Here you go, Mom.” Millie handed over the laptop. Cady, who had been entrusted with the notebook, offered it up with a heart-melting shy smile.
“Thank you, sweetie.” Heather touched one finger to Cady’s cheek, reliving for the briefest moment the memory of Millie’s peach-fuzz cheek, Millie’s toddler smile. “You did a great job.”
She raised her head and caught Xander watching. God help her, it seemed he approved.
Stab stab stab.
“Didn’t I do a good job, too, Mom?”
Thank Heaven for mood breakers. “Of course you did, my goofy girl.” Heather grabbed Millie by the shoulders and bestowed a loud kiss on her forehead. “Now do me another favor and bring in that package of cookies, will you please?”
“The peanut butter ones? Yeah!”
“So here’s what I have in mind.” She grabbed the notebook quickly, before Xander could say or do anything that would fire up her jitters. Or anything else, come to think of it. “I’m going with an undiscovered treasures theme. You know. To capitalize on the story of Charlie and Daisy.”
He raised his hand. “Excuse me, teacher, but may I ask a question?”
“You may.”
“I’ve seen those names on places around town, but I’ve never figured out the back story. Can I get an explanation?”
“Oh, sorry. I assumed...okay. Back in Prohibition days, a lot of locals took advantage of the river and the islands to get contraband booze to all those thirsty Americans on the other side. One of them, Charlie Hebert, managed to meet up and fall in love with the daughter of one of the rich Yanks.”
“That would be Daisy?”
“Yes indeed. Young lovers being what they are, Daisy ended up, uh, in a family way.” Heather nodded toward Millie, running in to set the cookies on the table before grabbing one for herself and another to jam into Cady’s outstretched hand. “There was no way Papa Big Bucks would let his princess marry a rum-running Canuck, so Daisy and Charlie arranged to escape. But they knew they would need help getting away. Lucky for them, Charlie had an ace in the hole.”
“The treasure!” Millie called from the sofa, where she and Cady knelt in front of the window.
“Exactly.” Heather registered what she’d seen and turned back. “Mills, are you guys planning to draw on the windows?”
“Yes, Mom. But I double-triple checked. These are the safe markers.”
“Okay. Carry on.”
“Draw on the windows?” Xander’s hand hovered in midair, as if he’d been reaching for a cookie only to be frozen by fear.
“Don’t worry. They’re special markers. They wash right off.”
“Every time I think I have this parenting thing down...”
“Trust me, Xander. It’s a never-ending learning curve.” Heather grabbed a cookie. “Anyway, as you can imagine, the American authorities weren’t too fond of Charlie and his buddies. But at some point during his exploration of the area, Charlie found something.”
“A treasure?”
“So they say.”
“What was it?”
“Nobody—” Heather began, but Millie jumped off the sofa to join them.
“See, nobody knows for sure. But he found something, and he gave a piece of it to the police, and said, if you help me get away with Daisy, I’ll tell you where you can find the rest of it.” She sighed. “Except he got shot.” She formed her thumb and forefinger into a handgun. “Boom. Dead, just like that.”
“Boom!” Cady echoed, with a clap of her hands.
“Dead, eh?” Xander seemed suitably impressed. “Who shot him?”
Millie shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“No one was ever certain,” Heather said. “There was a shoot-out on the river. It was the middle of the night, and he pushed Daisy down in the boat, so she could hear but not see.” Heather spared a thought for poor terrified Daisy and what she must have gone through. “In any case, Daisy managed to get them here, to Comeback Cove, but he was already dead.”
“Let me guess.” Xander brushed crumbs from Cady’s shirt. “He died before he could reveal the location of the treasure.”
“Right,” Millie said. “He didn’t even get to tell Daisy. So it’s still out there.”
“Well, that seems unlikely.” Heather broke off a piece of cookie. “Those islands have been combed over and mapped and explored a lot since then. If something was there, it would have turned up by now.”
“It’s out there, Mom. I know it is.”
Xander raised an eyebrow. “Someone didn’t inherit your skeptical streak.”
Hadn’t had it drummed out of her by life and experience, more likely. And thank God for that.
Heather leaned down and grabbed a marker from Cady’s hand before it connected with Xander’s leg. “There’s a lot of legends and rumors around town, and every once in a while it will make the news or get featured in some article, and the loonies will descend. But mostly, people file it in the urban legend category.”
“After all this time, I can see why,” Xander said. “So what happened to Daisy?”
“She was taken in by Charlie’s family. Charlie Junior arrived a few months later. Her granddaughter still lives here. She runs Daisy’s Place—that bed-and-breakfast on Trillium Street.”
“I know that place.” He pointed to the laptop. “Okay. I like the idea. So show me what you’ve got.”
Heather pulled up a file. He scooted closer.
Purely so he could see better, she told herself.
“Here you go,” she said. “But I can’t make the margins and pictures line up the way I want. It should look like this.” She flipped through the notebook until she found her drawing. “I found tutorials on Google and YouTube, but I still can’t get it to come out right.”
“Let me see. You’re designing a trifold, right? Your layout looks clean. The balance is a bit off, but the rhythm is good. What are you putting in these spaces?” He pointed to empty boxes she had drawn in. “Photos? Treasure maps?”
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