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“They were my sister’s kids.”
Honey gasped. Were.
Grief rolled from Cole in dark waves.
After staring at Honey with wide eyes for unrelieved moments, the girl closed her eyes, rested her head on Cole’s shoulder and stuck her tiny thumb into her mouth.
Honey’s heart went out to her.
Help, Cole mouthed. One word. So much said.
She started to rush forward, but he stiffened, resisting her sympathy.
Okay. As always with Cole, she got mixed messages. He would help her out at the bar on the weekends, but outside of that, hands off.
You got it, Cole. Message received.
And yet here he was in her empty bar with a pair of children.
Okay. Today he needed her, but no physical displays of sympathy. Maybe he was too close to the edge. Given her experience with her mother’s and Daniel’s deaths, she understood.
“What can I do?” she asked briskly.
“The kids will need someone to take care of them. I have to get organized. I—Maybe I have to get them... I don’t know. What? A nanny?”
Ordinarily, Cole would know that kind of thing, but shock had a firm hold on him. “A nanny, yes,” she confirmed. “What do you need from me?”
“Can you take care of the children while I interview people?”
“Today? Now? That’s so soon. You just brought them to town.”
He didn’t respond, but his hard jaw flexed.
Honey went on, “Can you take time off work to get them settled in? If you give them over to a nanny too soon, won’t that be hard on them?”
He shrugged helplessly, this normally rock-solid guy. “I’m taking this week off, but I need to get as much as possible settled right away.”
Maybe a gradual transition was a good idea, kind of acclimating the children to the new nanny before Cole left them with her full-time.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m in over my head.” A massive admission from a man most often in control. “I can’t do this alone.”
“I’ll help, of course, but I don’t understand. Why come to the bar? Why come to me?”
“You’re good with kids,” he said. “You love them and they love you.”
Yes, true. She was crazy about kids. No secret there. Everyone in the surrounding Montana countryside knew that. Children gathered around wherever Honey went, drawn like bees to...well, honey.
“Can I do the interviews here?” he asked.
“Cole, this is a bar. I know I’m closed today and tomorrow, but still. It’s hardly an appropriate spot.”
Cole released the boy’s hand. A couple of backpacks fell from his shoulder to the floor. Given half a chance, maybe he would follow suit.
“There’s room here for me to ask questions without anyone hearing.”
Anyone. The children.
“You know my place,” he said. “It’s dim and dismal.”
“Actually, I don’t.” She’d never been in the apartment above the sheriff’s office. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
She glanced around her bar. “While it’s spacious, I would hardly say this is a suitable spot for entertaining children.”
He stared around, but Honey had the sense he wasn’t seeing much. Oh, my lord, he looks so lost.
Right. Let’s get on with it.
“Upstairs.” Brisk in her movements, she locked the front door of the bar. “We’ll use my apartment.”
He nodded. “Makes sense. Yeah. Thanks.”
Cole Payette, as predictable as a finely wound clock, as handsome and rugged as the Rocky Mountains—and as quiet as a monk when in her presence—had reached the end of his rope.
No problem. Honey had enough coping skills for both of them.
“Follow me,” she said.
She led them to the interior stairs at the back of the building.
A sudden tug on a huge hank of her hair had her pulling up short.
“Ow!”
“I’m sorry!” Cole sounded distressed.
Someone hung onto her hair with a strong grip. Honey turned around as far as she could. It was the girl in Cole’s arms. He was trying to loosen her grip, but the child wouldn’t let go.
Cole stared at the child in his arms. “Madeline, let go.”
The child’s deep, hollow gaze broke Honey’s heart.
“What’s going on?” she asked Cole.
“Her mother had long blond hair. I guess... I don’t know... Maybe she sees a bit of her mother in you?”
Tentatively, Honey held out her hands. The child practically jumped into her arms, where she clung like a monkey.
She drew hanks of Honey’s waist-length, curly hair around her shoulders as though donning a protective cape.
Honey’s heart broke a little more. She raised her eyebrows at Cole, but he shook his head, also confused by the girl’s behavior.
If this was what she needed, this was what Honey would give. She carried the child up to her apartment, leading Cole and the boy down the hallway to her living room.
Honey liked big comfy furniture—big comfy everything—and her space reflected that, with plenty of generous pieces for seating and lots of colorful afghans thrown around. The apartment as large as the bar below, Honey had all kinds of living space.
While Cole conducted his interviews in privacy by the windows, Honey could play with the children at the opposite end of the room.
Cole led the boy to the sofa, where he sat obediently and hugged one of her puffy pillows. When Honey tried to put down the girl, she clung hard, her tiny fingernails digging into Honey’s shoulders.
Honey straightened. The girl wrapped Honey’s hair more tightly about herself. Okay, this could be a problem.
She indicated the girl and boy. “Is this why you’ve been missing from town the past week?”
Cole nodded.
“No one knew where you went.”
“Didn’t tell them.” His voice rasped as drily as day-old bread without a trace of butter.
The children made not a peep. The girl still had her thumb in her mouth, even though she was too old for it.
The boy played an imaginary game walking his fingers along the seams of the pillow on his lap.
This was silly. She couldn’t keep calling them the boy and the girl.
“What are their names?”
“I’m Evan Engel,” the boy piped up.
“Evan, I’m Honey.”
“Like the stuff you put on toast?”
She smiled. “Exactly like that.”
The girl didn’t make a sound.
“That’s Madeline,” Cole said. Oh, yes, he’d used the girl’s name when she’d grabbed Honey’s hair.
Honey placed a hand on Cole’s arm. Tension ran along his muscles.
His body reacted when she touched him with not quite a jerk, but more like—Well, she didn’t know.
She dropped her hand and motioned him toward the far end of the room, to her small home office set up with desk, chair, her computer and a printer.
She ran Honey’s Place from her office downstairs, but she’d designed this corner up here strictly for pleasure. Well...to be honest...to play her computer games.
Voice pitched low, she asked, “What happened to their parents?”
Stark vulnerability clouded his handsome face. His gaze flickered to Madeline.
“My sister—Her husband—” His voice broke. He hissed in a breath. “In their will, they left guardianship of the children to me.”
Before she could ask for more, he rushed on, “Can we leave it at that for now?” A pain-laden plea if she’d ever heard one.
She’d always wanted a sister.
“Was she your only sibling?” she asked.
He tightened his lips and nodded.
God. To have only one sister and to lose her so early in life, and then to have an instant family. How was he to deal with this?
And Evan and Madeline, poor children.
No! She would not use that awful, inadequate, destructive word poor.
From personal experience, starting with her father’s death when she was only six, she knew too well the damage a word like that could do to a child...and how dangerous pity was. She would not treat Madeline or Evan with that most useless of emotions, pity.
They should never think of themselves as poor.
How could she help them?
Perhaps by making the day as normal as possible.
“Before you use the phone to set up your interviews, I need to call Rachel to come over.”
“Go ahead and use your phone,” Cole said. “I’ll use my cell. Why Rachel?”
“We need to make the children comfortable. Rachel will bring Tori. If anyone can put them at ease it’s that little girl.”
The tension in Cole’s shoulders eased a fraction. “Yeah. Good idea.” He stretched his neck to one side and then to the other. Bones popped. “Who should I call in town?”
“To hire as a nanny?”
He nodded.
Honey tapped her lips with her forefinger. “Of the women who would suit, there are Ellen Clarkson, Tanya Mayhall and Maria Tripoli.”
“All older women. Why?”
“They’ve been stay-at-home moms, and their chicks have flown the nest. They’re helping to organize the teenagers for the food and beverage stands at the revival fair. They love children and are good with them.”
Cole nodded and collapsed into her office chair. “Sounds good.”
He pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and stared at it as if it were alien to him.
