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“And there are men who are just as prejudiced against women.” Logan drew Kit close. “Haven’t you ever heard of the battle of the sexes? It’s been around since time began. It’s just getting better press.”
“I suppose so.” Melody sighed. “Maybe men aren’t endangered after all.”
“Thank you,” Emmett said tersely. “I’m glad to know that I won’t have to stand guard at my front door to ward off women death squads.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Melody advised.
“Wouldn’t you?” Emmett muttered. “And I thought you were a little shrinking violet.”
“More like a Venus flytrap, actually,” she replied brightly. “I thought you were going to the airport to get tickets home?”
“Notice how much enthusiasm she put into that question?” Logan asked with pure relish. “And you said women wouldn’t leave you alone. This must be refreshing for you.”
Emmett didn’t look refreshed. He looked as if he might explode momentarily. “Let’s go, Guy. Have a nice honeymoon, you two,” he added to Logan and Kit. “I don’t think much of marriage, but good luck anyway.”
“Our mama ran off and left him,” Amy volunteered. “Emmett doesn’t want to marry anybody.”
“But he must,” Polk said with a serious frown. “Isn’t he always bringing those real glittery, pretty ladies home?”
“Don’t be silly,” Guy said urbanely. “Those are good-time girls. You don’t marry them.”
“What’s a good-time girl?” Amy asked.
“Just the same as a good-time boy, only shorter,” Melody said with icy delight, and she smiled at Emmett.
He went two shades darker.
“Time to go,” Kit said quickly. “Emmett, can we give you a lift? We’re going straight to the airport.”
“Yes,” Logan said, taking his tall cousin’s muscular arm in a big hand. “Come along, Guy. See you in a week, Melody. If you have any problems, call me. And if you could check on Tansy in the hospital, I’d appreciate it. Chris is watching out for her, but you can’t have too many observers where my mother is concerned.”
“Certainly I will,” Melody agreed. “I don’t have much to do in the evenings, anyway.”
“I didn’t think there would be a man that brave,” Emmett agreed.
Melody reached for her purse. Emmett spared her a glance that promised retribution before he made a quick exit with the others.
The chaos began to calm with Logan’s exit. The telephones rang for an hour or two. After that, there were only a few calls and two clients who came in person to ask about their investments. Melody had the figures. It was only a matter of pulling them up—her boss had given her permission before he left—and showing them to the visitors.
The kids were amazingly good. They watched educational programming without a peep, except to ask for change for the soft drink machine. Melody gave it to them and then listened worriedly for sounds of the machine being mugged. Fortunately there was no such noise, and she settled down to the first peace she’d had all day.
She managed to clear her desk of work before Emmett showed up, late, to pick up the kids.
“Aw, do we have to go?” Polk groaned. “Mr. Rogers is coming on!”
“Yes, we have to go. We’re leaving for home in the morning, thank God. Only one more event to go tonight—bareback bronc riding.”
“Isn’t that one of the most dangerous events?” Melody asked.
His eyebrows arched under the wide-brimmed Stetson he hadn’t bothered to remove from his dark hair. “Any rodeo event is dangerous if a contestant is stupid or careless. I’m neither.”
She knew that already. He was something of a legend in rodeo. He wouldn’t be aware that she’d followed his career. She was a rodeo fan, but Emmett’s attitude toward her had kept her silent about her interest in the sport.
“Thank you for letting us stay with you, Melody,” Amy said, smiling up at her.
Melody smiled back. She liked the little girl very much. She was open and warm and loving, despite her mischievous nature.
Emmett saw that smile and felt it all the way to his toes. He couldn’t have imagined even a minute before that a smile could change a plain face and make it radiate beauty. But he saw the reality of it in Melody’s soft features. Involuntarily his eyes fell to her body. She was what a kind man would call voluptuous, her form and shape perfectly proportioned but just a tad past slender. Adell had been bacon-thin. Melody was her exact opposite.
It irritated him that he should notice Melody in that way. She was nothing to him except a turncoat. She and her brother had disrupted and destroyed his life. Not only his, but his children’s, as well. He could easily have hated her for that.
“I said, let’s go,” he told the children.
“Okay.” Polk sighed.
“I’ll wait in the hall,” Guy murmured. He avoided even looking at Melody.
“Guy hates you,” Amy told her with blunt honesty. “But I think you’re wonderful.”
“I think you’re wonderful, too,” Melody replied.
Amy grinned and walked up to her father. “We can go now, Emmett. Can I write to my friend Melody?”
“We’ll talk about it,” Emmett said noncommittally. “Thanks for watching them,” he said as an afterthought.
“Oh, it was my plea…sure!” She tripped over a tomahawk that someone had left lying on the floor and ended up on her back. Guy picked up the weapon, and the kids and Emmett made a circle around her prone body. She glared up at them, trying not to think how a sacrificial victim in an Indian encampment might have felt. In those Indian costumes, the kids looked eerie.
“Whose tomahawk?” Emmett asked as he reached down and pulled Melody up with a minimum of strain. His hand made hers tingle. She wondered if he’d felt the excitement of the contact, too, because he certainly let go of her fast.
“It’s mine, Emmett,” Amy said, sighing. She looked up at him, pushing back her pigtails, and her green eyes were resigned. “Go ahead and hit me. I didn’t mean to make Melody hurt herself, though. I like her.”
“I know you didn’t mean it,” Melody said, and smiled. “It’s okay, nothing dented.”
“Next time, be more careful where you put that thing,” Emmett muttered.
“That’s right, Amy,” Melody said, nodding. “Between your father’s ears would be a good place.”
He glared at her. “You didn’t hear that, Amy. Let’s go, kids.”
He herded the children out the door and closed it. Melody sat by herself with no ringing phones, no blaring television, no laughing children. Her life and the office were suddenly empty.
She closed up precisely at 5:00 p.m. and went by the grocery store to get enough for the weekend, which was just beginning. Thanksgiving Day had been quiet and lonely. She’d had a turkey breast, but she and Alistair had finished it off for supper the night before. So she bought ground beef for hamburgers and a small beef roast and vegetables to make stew and, later, soup. She lived on a budget, which meant that she bypassed steak and frozen éclairs. She would have loved to indulge her taste for both. Maybe someday, she thought wistfully…
She fed Alistair, her big marmalade tabby, and then made herself a light supper. She ate it with little enthusiasm. Then she curled up with Alistair on the sofa to watch a movie on television. During the last scene, a very interesting standoff between a murderer and the police, the telephone started ringing. She grimaced, hating the interruption. If she answered it, she’d surely miss the end of the movie she’d been watching for two hours. She ignored it at first. The only people who ever telephoned her were people who were selling things. But whoever was calling wouldn’t give up. It stopped, briefly, only to start ringing insistently again. This time she was afraid not to answer it. It might be Kit or Logan or Tansy or even her brother.
She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Is this Miss Melody Cartman?” a crisp, professional voice asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Nurse Willoughby. We have a Mr. Emmett Deverell here at city general hospital with a massive concussion. He’s only just regained consciousness. He gave us your name and asked us to call and have you pick up his children at the Mellenger Hotel.”
Melody stood frozen in place. The only thing that registered was that Emmett was hurt and she’d become a babysitter. She could hardly say no or argue. Concussions were terribly dangerous.
“The children are…where?”
“At the Mellenger Hotel. Room three hundred and something. He’s very foggy at the moment and in a great deal of pain.”
“He will be all right?” Melody asked, hating herself for being concerned.
“We hope so,” came the crisp reply.
“Tell him that I’ll look after the children,” she said.
“Very well.”
The phone went dead before she could ask another question. She stared around her like someone in a trance. Where in the world was she going to put three renegade children, one of whom hated her? And how long was she going to have them?
For one insane moment, she thought about calling Adell and Randy, but she dismissed that idea at once. Emmett would never forgive her. At the moment, he deserved a little consideration, she supposed.
She got her coat and took a cab to the hotel. It was very late to be driving around Houston, and her little car was unreliable in wet weather. Houston was notorious for flooding, and the rain was coming down steadily now.
She asked at the desk for Emmett’s room number, quickly explaining the circumstances to a sympathetic desk clerk after giving Emmett’s condition and the hospital’s number, so that management could check her story if they felt the need to. In fact, they did, and she didn’t blame them. These days, one simply couldn’t turn over three children to a total stranger who might or might not intend them harm.
When she got to the hotel room, there were muffled sounds from within. Melody, who knew the kids all too well, knocked briefly but firmly on the door.
There was a sudden silence, followed by a scuffle and a wail. The door flew open and a matronly lady with frazzled hair almost fell on Melody with relief.
“Are you their mother?” the elderly woman asked. “I’m Mrs. Johnson. Here they are, safe and sound, my fee will be added to the hotel bill. You are their mother?”
“Well, no,” she began.
“Oh, my God!”
“I’m to take charge of them,” Melody added, because it looked as if the woman might be preparing to have a heart attack on the spot.
A wavery smile replaced the horror on the woman’s lined face. “Then I’ll just be off. Good night!”
“Chicken,” Amy muttered, peering around Melody to watch the woman’s incredibly fast retreat.
“What have you three been up to?” Melody asked, glaring at them.
“Nothing at all, Melody, dear,” Amy said sweetly, and grinned.
“She just wasn’t used to kids, I guess,” Polk added. He grinned, too.
Behind them there were the remains of two foam-filled pillows and what appeared to be the ropes that closed the heavy curtains.
“We had a pillow fight,” Amy explained.
“And then we went skiing in the bathroom,” Polk said.
Melody could barely see the bathroom. The door was ajar and the floor seemed to be soaked. She was beginning to understand her predecessor’s agile retreat. Days and days…of this. She wouldn’t have an apartment left! And all because she felt sorry for a man who had to be her worst enemy.
“Why are you here?” Guy asked belligerently. “Where’s Dad?”
That brought her back to her original purpose for being there. Emmett’s accident.
She sat down on the sofa, tossing her purse beside her, while she struggled to find the right words to tell them.
“Something’s happened,” Guy said when he saw her face. He stiffened. “What?”
Even at such a young age, he was already showing signs of great inner strength, of ability to cope with whatever life threw at him. Amy and Polk looked suddenly vulnerable, but not Guy.
“Your father has a brain concussion,” Melody told them. “He’s conscious now, but in a lot of pain. He’ll have to stay in the hospital for a day or so. Meanwhile, he wants you to come home with me.”
“He hates you,” Guy said coldly. “Why would he want us to stay with you?”
“Because I’m all you’ve got,” Melody replied. “Unless you’d rather I called the juvenile authorities…?”
Guy’s massive self-confidence failed. He shrugged and turned away.
Amy climbed onto Melody’s lap and clung. “Our daddy will be all right, won’t he?” she asked tearfully.
“Of course he will,” Melody assured her, gathering her close. “He’s very tough. It will take more than a concussion to keep him down.”
“Yes, it will,” Polk said. He turned away because his lower lip was trembling.
“Let’s get your things together and go,” Melody said. “Have you had something to eat?”
“We had pizza and chocolate sundaes.”
Melody could imagine that the elderly lady in charge of them had agreed with any menu that would keep them quiet. But she’d have to get some decent food into them. That would give her something to work toward. Meanwhile, she found herself actually worrying about Emmett. The first thing she was going to do when they got to the apartment was phone the hospital and get an update. Surely Emmett was indestructible, wasn’t he?
She looked at the children and felt a surge of pity for them. She knew how it felt to be alone. When their parents had died, Randy had worked at two jobs to support them, while Melody was still in school. She’d carried her share of the load, but it had been lonely for both of them. She hoped these children wouldn’t have the same ordeal to face that she and Randy had.
Chapter 2
The nurse on duty in Emmett’s ward told Melody that Emmett would have to be confined for at least two days. He was barely conscious, but they were cautiously optimistic about his condition.
Melody was assured that she and the children would be allowed to see him the next day, during visiting hours. In the meantime, she scoured her apartment to find enough blankets and pillows for three sleepy children. She put two of them in her bed, and one of them on a cot that had belonged to Randy when he was a boy. She slept on her own pullout sofa bed, and was delighted to find that it wasn’t terribly uncomfortable.
It was fortunate that she had the weekend to look after the children. Having to juggle them, along with her job, would have been a real headache. She’d have coped. But how?
They had a change of clothing. Getting them to change, though, was the trick.
“This isn’t dirty—” Guy indicated a shirt limp and dingy and smelly from long wear “—and I won’t change it.”
