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“From my father,” she said simply, tightening her hands a little more around his neck, breathing in his scent a little more than she had any right to. “Where’d you get those children?”
They’d nearly reached the porch by now; the scrapes and bruises groused a little when he shifted her weight to carry her up the few steps, giving the lilac a wide berth. “I’m their guardian,” he said, his soft words conveying the weight of all that word implied. “Think you can make it into the house on your own?”
“What? Oh, yes, I’m sure I can.”
He gently let her down, bracing one hand on the screen door handle a moment before opening it. “Ted MacIntyre, their father, was my best friend all through school.” He shook his head, his breath escaping in a slow sigh as he looked out over her head for a moment, then back to her. “Sometimes, you just do what you gotta do, you know—?”
The door pushed open, knocking Steven out of the way. The littlest one stood there—still in her nightgown, Sophie now noticed—holding out a small, colorful box. “I found ’em, Unca Teev. My bandy-aids. For the lady.”
Touched more than she could say, Sophie reached out and took the box from the child. “Oh, my goodness—” She clutched the box to her midsection, smiling for the little girl. “Are these your very special bandy-aids that nobody else can use?” The baby nodded. Sophie hesitated, then touched the silken hair. “Thank you, love. Thank you very, very much.”
The little girl gave her a shy smile, then ran back inside the house. “What’s her name?” Sophie asked, then looked up to find Steven’s gaze riveted to hers, his expression unreadable, but intense all the same.
A second passed before he answered. “Rosie. Well, Rosita, actually. The children’s mother was Honduran,” he added with a hint of a smile as he finally led her inside, the screen door slamming shut behind them. From the depths of the house, she heard what sounded like a small battle. Seemingly oblivious, Steven led her through a very cluttered, minimally furnished living room to a hallway off to one side. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the bathroom down here,” he said, only to halt when he realized Sophie wasn’t exactly zipping along behind him. “Sorry—”
“No, no.” She made herself smile, only to flinch when the wall shook underneath her hand. “It’s all right, really. Do you need to—?” She carefully nodded in the direction of the fracas.
“I’ve probably got another thirty, forty seconds before things get seriously out of hand,” he said. But still, she caught the tension hardening his features, as he showed her into the bathroom, turned on the light, then stepped inside only long enough to pull a first-aid kit out of a cupboard over the toilet. She managed not to gasp when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over the sink; between her still not having the hang of how to use the hair gel and the events of the morning, she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. And did she have a comb on her person? She did not.
“If you can just get started,” Steven began, apology swimming in his eyes.
Sophie laughed over her wince as she first lowered the toilet lid, then herself down onto it. “I doubt whether there’s anything here that requires triage. Go ahead.” She shooed him out with one hand, already surveying the contents of the well-stocked kit. With five kids, she didn’t wonder. “I’ll be fine….”
When she glanced up again, he was gone.
Twenty minutes later, he’d somehow gotten the right sandwiches, drinks and fruit—Bree only ate Gala apples, Courtney golden delicious, Dylan bananas—into the right bags, all shoes located and on the correct feet, all permission slips signed and trip money dispensed, and all the kids out the door in time to catch the school bus. With a weary sigh, George flopped down on the worn linoleum at Steve’s feet.
“Yeah, that was a rough few minutes, wasn’t it, boy?”
George managed, barely, to thump his tail in agreement.
And the murk cleared from Steve’s brain long enough for him to remember he had an accident victim in his bathroom. He strode down the hall, knocked on the closed door. “How you doing in there? Need any help?”
“Not at all,” came the chipper reply. “Only three more wounds to go. But I’m afraid I’ve put a severe dent in your iodine supply.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He thought a moment, then said, “I’ve got a couple of calls to make, then I can drive you back into town on my way into work. That okay?”
“Yes, that would be lovely.”
He wandered back out toward the living room, hand on back of neck.
Yes, that would be lovely?
Nope. Something was way off, here. The clothes and makeup did not jibe with that accent. Or her manner. Even in black bicycle shorts and a tank top, even made up like Elvira’s sister—and what was with that hair?—she was classier than any woman he’d ever known.
And maybe when he had a spare couple of minutes—ten, twenty years from now—he’d try to figure it out. Now, however, he had about a million phone calls to make, and so was extremely grateful that Rosie, still in her nightgown, he realized, had plopped herself down in the middle of the debris-strewn living room floor, giggling at Mr. Noodle’s antics on Sesame Street.
Sighing, he glanced around the room. The house was a lot like the dog: sorta this, sorta that. Somebody’d decided to add a few rooms to the original two-story structure, probably ten years before Steve’s birth. The result was not what one would call aesthetically pleasing. Or particularly well built. Floors slanted, door didn’t always shut tight, that kind of thing. But he could afford the payments, it was out in the country, and it had six bedrooms.
The house was furnished, if you could call it that, with whatever anyone had seen fit to foist off on him. On them, now. All donations were welcome, as long as they didn’t smell like someone’s basement or weren’t too pukey a color. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like places that were all fixed up and nice-looking, as much as he simply didn’t have the energy to be bothered. If someone wanted to give him their cast-off sofa, and it was still in reasonable condition, well, that saved him from having to go to some furniture store and pick one out, didn’t it?
Not to mention having to buy one. Ted and Gloria had both had life insurance policies, but those had gone into a trust fund for the kids’ education. And Steve had quickly discovered just how fast five kids could eat up the cash. Still, between his working for his father and his steadily increasing income from his photography, they did okay.
Ignoring yet another twist to the old gut, Steve walked back to the kitchen and called his folks, both to ask his mother to baby-sit and to tell his father he’d be late. Then, leaning with his back against his tornado-stricken kitchen counter so he wouldn’t have to look at it, he picked up the phone to call—yet again—the employment agency. He’d just gotten through to the director when he saw Lisa make her way slowly down the hall, her legs and arms pockmarked with assorted bandages and Pokemon “bandy-aids,” but otherwise moving fairly well for someone who’d just done a forward vault off a moving bicycle.
He lifted a hand in acknowledgment, then pointed to the phone. With a little smile, she nodded, then lurched off toward the living room. In sensible little white sneakers, he noticed.
Just as he noticed that the bicycle shorts left little to the imagination—
“Mrs. Anderson! Hi!” He tore his gaze away from things he had no right to be gazing at and concentrated on the subject at hand. “It’s Steve Koleski…”
The conversation went straight down from there. Five minutes and a great many sighs later, all he had was a half-assed apology for Mrs. Hadley’s behavior and the possibility of a wonderful woman (an adjective Mrs. Anderson used with great frequency and with scant regard to reality) in her mid-fifties whose employer’s youngest child was graduating from high school and thus would be seeking a new position in about two weeks. Other than that, though, Mrs. Anderson was sorry to say, she had no one. No, she insisted, no one.
Steve hung up and groaned loudly enough to make George lift his head. Two weeks? How the hell was he supposed to work full-time and manage five kids on his own for two weeks? Granted, the older kids still had a month of school, so at least they were otherwise occupied most of the day, but he couldn’t impose on his mother to sit for Rosie that long. Not that she minded, but Rosie wasn’t his parents’ responsibility. She, and her siblings, were his. A responsibility he’d willingly accepted when he’d told Ted and Gloria he’d be thrilled to be the children’s godfather, even though, like most people, he never dreamed—
“Excuse me?”
Lisa’s perky accent jarred him out of his musings. She stood at the kitchen doorway, holding Rosie’s hand, a pair of creases nestled between her heavy brows. “Are you all right?”
Between the gentle, obviously genuine concern in Lisa’s voice and the way she and Rosie had clearly bonded in such a short period of time, it was everything Steve could do to keep himself together. But he did. He had to. “More or less,” he said with a shrug. “It’s just been a doozy of a morning, that’s all.”
Lisa quirked her bright red mouth. “And having a cycling casualty to tend didn’t help matters any, I’m sure.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said softly, and the quirk twitched into a smile.
“No, I don’t suppose it was. Well, except for being foolish enough to not think anyone else might be on the road, at least. Anyway,” she said on an exhaled breath, “if you tell me where sweetie’s clothes are, I can get her dressed for you.”
Steve was around the counter in three strides, shaking his head. “Forget it. You…sit somewhere. I’ll get her dressed—”
A tiny glower met his attempt to pick Rosie up. “No.”
Now down to his last milligram of patience, Steve squatted in front of her, matching her glower for glower. “Lisa’s not feeling very well, honey,” he tried, except, naturally, Lisa pulled the rug right out from under him by announcing in that prim little way she had that she was feeling just fine, thank you, and if he’d simply tell her where the child’s clothes were, they could get on with it.
“See?” Rosie said, and Steve gave up.
“Fine, fine.” He got to his feet. “She and the twins share a room, upstairs. Her clothes are in the small, white dresser under the window. Her shoes, however, could be in Alaska for all I know—”
“No, silly!” the child said, yanking her sandals up to her shoulders. “They’re right here!” Then she strutted out of the room, shaking her head.
They both followed the baby out into the hall, standing at the foot of the stairs and watching her ascent for a moment before Steve heard himself say, “Their parents were killed in a fire, last August.” He felt Lisa’s gaze zip to his face, heard the soft “oh” of surprise and sympathy fall from her lips. “I got this call, two-something in the morning. Mac, in hysterics, calling from the hospital.”
For the rest of his life, he’d remember that night. That call. The devastating feeling of utter helplessness that swept through him when he tore into the ER to find a scared, filthy, thirteen-year-old boy trying to keep it together for the sake of his younger brothers and sisters, a kid refusing to let the social worker the police had quickly gotten on the case take them away, insisting his Uncle Steve would be there, his Uncle Steve would take care of them….
“Steven?”
He glanced over, nodded. Continued. “They’d just bought this old house, over in another township. We knew the wiring was bad…” He paused, collected himself. “I was supposed to go up there the next weekend, start working on it. The fire started in the wall between the kitchen and Dylan’s bedroom, in the middle of the night. Ted and Mac—he’s the oldest boy—woke up first, got the twins and the baby out, then realized Gloria had apparently gone in to Dylan sometime during the night and fallen asleep on his bed. Ted tried to get to them, but a wall collapsed, trapping him.”
He stopped, tried unsuccessfully to quell the nausea that swamped him everytime he had to explain. “He never had a chance. But before the fire department got there, Mac…Mac went back in. He managed to get Dylan out through a window, but his mother…” He shook his head. “That ratty old quilt Rosie drags around? That’s about all that was left, only because she took it with her when Ted grabbed her from her crib.”
“Oh, God,” Lisa whispered. When he dared to look at her, he saw something in her expression that soared far beyond compassion. Light from the living room windows slashed across features he could only liken to the stark, pure beauty of a desert landscape as emotion, naked and raw, writhed in her enormous blue eyes. “How horrible for them. For you.”
And in that moment, even though he didn’t know who the hell this woman was, he was sorely tempted to believe he could trust her with his life.
A temptation that scared the hell out of him.
Deliberately looking away, Steve leaned against the wall at the foot of the stairs and let out a sigh. “It’s been…hard, to say the least. Hell, my life has been about as uneventful as a human’s can be, I suppose. Oh, there’ve been the usual disappointments and heartaches, but nothing like…”
He lifted his hand, let it fall with a slap to his thigh. “Criminy, Lisa, I’m in so far over my head with this, it isn’t even funny. Dylan nearly died, too, from smoke inhalation. And even though he won’t talk about it much, I know Mac blames himself for not being able to save his mother. Each kid reacted, is still reacting, differently. Some days seem fairly normal, you know? And I think, okay, maybe we’re moving on, maybe the worst is over. And then, bam! We’re right back where we started and all I know is if there was any way in God’s earth I could take away their pain, I would. But I just don’t know how. And why the hell am I telling you all this?”
She’d been standing apart from him, just listening, her arms folded underneath her breasts. Now those breasts rose with the force of her sigh as she shook her head. “Because you needed to,” she said, just as a very indignant little girl appeared at the head of the stairs, demanding to know where “lady” was.
For at least a full minute, Sophie barely heard Rosie’s chatter.
Her work brought her into constant contact with human trials. Yet, for all the horror stories she’d heard, the aftermaths she’d witnessed, none had pierced her heart more than this. But why? Certainly, as tragic as this situation was, the plight of these particular children was no more poignant than the thousands of others she’d been privy to over the years.
But it was, she realized, much more personal, somehow. And rekindled memories she’d thought long since faded and worn and harmless.
Not to mention stirred all sorts of highly inappropriate feelings for the man who’d taken all this on, feelings she had no business entertaining, even for a few minutes. Still, when was the last time she’d met a man strong enough to admit he didn’t have all the answers?
And who would have guessed that masculine vulnerability could be so appealing?
Seated on Rosie’s toddler bed—which was so close to the girls’ bunk beds, there was barely any room to move—Sophie took in the heaps of scattered clothes, the open, jumbled closet, the pop star posters covering most of the wall space, the PC set up on somebody’s desk. Her closet was twice the size of this room, she thought in amazement as she helped the toddler into a pair of patterned shorts and a bright blue T-shirt. She imagined the cramped quarters bred a fair number of fights, whether the girls had chosen to live like oysters in a tin or not. But she also imagined, despite everything the girls had gone through, there was a lot of giggling in here at night when they were supposed to be asleep, a lot of secrets shared and promises made. A sense of normalcy Sophie had always craved but never known.
And never would. Not really.
Tenderness stirred languidly through Sophie as Rosie showed off an obviously new collection of stuffed animals, snapping into something no less tender but far sharper when she remembered the fierceness of Steven’s gaze when he spoke of the children, the haunted, hungry shadows in his eyes whenever he looked at her. Oh, she doubted he had any idea of the shadows’ existence, that anyone else could see them, but they were there all the same.
It was, however, not her place to even begin to identify those shadows, let alone attempt to dispel them. Because if she let herself get close enough to do either, they would surely suck her in.
So she smiled instead for her new little friend, tentatively touching her sleek, dark hair even though she knew just how dangerous it was to allow herself that simple luxury of touching, of making a connection which would, inevitably, have to be broken. “Shall we go find Steven?” she said, and Rosie nodded, spinning around to grab the drab, precious little quilt off the bed.
Chapter 4
The little girl’s resumed chatter as they returned downstairs momentarily obscured the fact that Steven was in the middle of a very heated argument with someone on the phone.
“Look, Ms. Jefferson, I appreciate Family Services’s position.” His voice at once soft and feral—Papa wolf protecting his pups, Sophie realized—Steven shifted to haul Rosie up into his arms, cradling the phone between his jaw and shoulder. “But consistency, they’ve got. I’m the constant in their lives, okay? Maybe I can’t help it that the Fairy Godmother hasn’t been doing so hot when it comes to doling out housekeepers who have a clue how to handle a batch of kids, but nobody—nobody—is going to take them away from this place. From me.”
Brittle silence followed, during which Sophie was afraid to breathe.
After a moment, Steven said, “I’ve been warned, in other words…yeah, I understand. Two days.” He came within a breath of slamming down the phone, then jerked to attention when he realized Sophie was standing there.
“You ever feel like the world’s pulling you in seventeen different directions?”
Her heart knocked in recognition. “Often,” she said, earning her a curious glance. But before that curiosity had a chance to form a question, she formed one of her own. “And which direction is yelling the loudest?”
He shifted the baby in his arms. “Guess.”
The phone rang; he snatched it up, leaving her to survey the living room.
Despite the messiness, she liked it. She liked it very much. It was a crazy house, she’d decided, the rooms rather stuck onto each other as need, not any sense of design, dictated. The floors creaked, and the wind probably seeped through like water through a sieve in the winter, but who cared? The furniture was basic and well-worn, the kind that invited you to go ahead and eat in the living room if you wanted to, it didn’t mind. A person—a woman—could feel very much at home here.
Not that she could be that woman, but still.
She brushed back her hair from her face as a breeze, soft as a toddler’s kiss and scented with roses and new-mown grass, floated in through the open, curtainless windows. A thousand watts of sunlight flooded in as well, bouncing off unevenly-plastered walls the color of vanilla custard.
It was then that she noticed the photographs, mostly black-and-white and framed in simple white mats and dull silver frames, lining the far wall of the room. Portraits, mostly. But not just of people. Of life. Family life. She recognized Steve’s brood in several of them, although most were of people she didn’t know. In one, a pretty blonde laughed at a man with a ponytail and earring as he tossed a little girl in the air. In another, water droplets sparkled like frozen diamonds across the shot as a family with two tall teens and a pair of toddlers splashed each other in a swimming pool.
But the one that most caught her attention, at which she simply stared for a full minute, was one in which a man, his dark hair mussed like a bad wig, sat slouched in a restaurant booth with his chin in his hand, the light from the window slashing across his handsome face as he watched a woman and a little girl “talking” to each other a few feet away, their hands flying so fast, part of the picture was a blur. The pair were signing to each other, she realized. But the love shining from the man’s eyes, the adoration tilting his lips into a gentle smile as he watched who Sophie assumed were his wife and daughter so leapt from the photo, she almost felt like a voyeur.
She could feel Steven watching her.
Sophie turned, her eyes stinging, to see him buttoning up a blue-and-green plaid cotton shirt over the white T-shirt. “These are incredible,” she said softly. “Anybody can take pictures, but these…” She gestured toward the photos, shaking her head. “It must be very difficult to capture the emotion behind a photo.”
His fingers stilled on the buttons, his gaze bouncing off hers before it floated over to the photos as if he’d forgotten they were there. “It always amazes me, what the camera sees. How incredible the everyday stuff can seem, you know?”
She smiled. “Did you study with someone?”
“I minored in photography in college.” He finished up the buttons, then tucked the shirt into his pants. Frowning. As if there was more he wanted to say.
“Minored? So it’s a hobby, then?”
The colors in the shirt, the wash of sunlight trembling in the air, turned his eyes into a pair of glittering tourmalines when he looked at her. “No. It’s a passion,” he said quietly, and she wondered if she imagined the frustration vibrating beneath his words. “Come on,” he said then. “We can go, if you’re ready.” Before she could even nod, he’d called Rosie, who came skipping to him, the dog nearly knocking her over in his determination not to be left out.
“Yeah, you mangy mutt, I guess you can go, too,” Steven said, striding to the front door and swinging open the wooden-framed screen. Minutes later, all of them piled into his extended cab pickup truck—a minivan sat on the other side of the driveway, she assumed for family outings—Rosie and the dog in the back seat, the bike in the truck’s bed, Sophie carefully strapped in on the passenger side. Which, as luck would have it, put her far too close to both Steven’s scent, which wasn’t even identifiable enough to put into words, and his mood, which she had no trouble identifying at all: rotten.
True, she barely knew Steven Koleski, but she’d never met anyone she’d felt deserved a leg up more than this man did. Not that she thought money was that much of an issue—poverty was easily identifiable by the sense of hopelessness in its victims’ eyes—but this was clearly a man with far too many plates up in the air. Thus far, she guessed, he’d been able to keep them from crashing—through sheer bullheadedness, if nothing else—but for how long?
And, typically, she found herself desperately wanting to help.
But how? As Princess Sophie, she had any number of resources at her command. For one thing, she could easily procure a housekeeper for him, even if it meant “borrowing” one of the palace staff for a few weeks. She could even, with her connections, have his photographs placed in a London or Paris or New York gallery like that. But revealing her identity might cause more problems than it would solve. For one thing, she’d lay odds that Steven Koleski had more pride than blood running through his veins. While she doubted he’d be adverse to any avenue of help that would enable him to keep these children, somehow she suspected he’d eat worms before he’d accept anything he could even remotely construe as charity.
Especially from a princess.
But, as Lisa Stone, what did she have to offer?
Sophie dared to sneak a glance at the set features of the man sitting barely two feet away, an ordinary man with the extraordinary power to capture some part of her that no man ever had before. He made her feel…connected, somehow, to the rest of the human race. She frowned down at her bloodred fingernails, then shifted her gaze out the window.
When she’d come up with this crazy idea, she hadn’t really thought about whatever personal benefits she might enjoy as a “regular” person. She hadn’t known how much fun it could be to be treated as an equal, to have someone tease her, even laugh at her, as if she were “one of the guys.” That felt good. Extraordinarily good. And she’d be kidding herself if she didn’t admit that she had no desire to jeopardize these stolen moments of anonymity by revealing a truth which might cause more harm than good.
But her yearning to help this man, these children, stemmed from something far deeper. For all her dedication to children’s issues, her involvement thus far had always been peripheral, if not downright theoretical. Yes, she’d helped set up the Children’s Home, and she’d done the usual hospital visits, the de rigueur tours of refugee camps, but she’d never been actually involved. Suddenly, here she was, faced with the first real opportunity she’d ever had to personally make a difference in five children’s lives, even if only for a couple of weeks. And she didn’t exactly find the prospect of perhaps being able to help ease the stress lines in Steven Koleski’s handsome face wholly unpleasant, either.
She was taking a tremendous risk, letting herself get close enough to care. But this was an opportunity that might never come her way again.
He’d known Lisa Stone for, like, five seconds, and already he knew to be leery when she got too quiet.
Of course, he wasn’t being exactly loquacious, either. Steve wasn’t sure which of them itched to asked questions more, although he was sure neither of them had a clue how to go about it. And it rattled him the way this complete stranger could sear through his defenses with a pointed question, an astute observation, a simple smile.
No woman, he realized with a little jolt, had ever looked at him like that before. Not so’s he’d remember, anyway. As if she saw…him. Not who she imagined she could eventually turn him into, but who he was.
