Linda Markowiak - And Baby Makes Six

“If you don’t mind.” The animal might be smiling, but she didn’t need paws on her good silk blouse.

He put the dog in the laundry room, and Jenny quickly recovered her composure.

He came back into the kitchen. “Okay, time to talk. Would you like to sit down? Would you like a cup of coffee? Hey, how about some breakfast? I bet you didn’t have breakfast, and if the kids have left any cereal, or eggs, I could take a stab at frying a couple of eggs—”

Even the thought of something frying in the morning was enough to send her looking for the bathroom. “Thank you, but I’m fine.”

It occurred to her that Mitch might be nervous, too. But he had little reason to be. He had Crystal, and this incident, bad as it had been, would be hard to prove. The girl’s e-mail had arrived at Kyle Development yesterday, a few hours before the door had been shut on orders of the bankruptcy court. Lord only knew where her computer had gone. Besides, she was pretty sure this one incident wouldn’t be enough to get a judge to change custody.

“Would you like to sit here or in the family room?” Mitch asked now.

Was he stalling? “Here’s fine,” she replied.

“Oh, okay, now about that coffee…” His voice trailed off as he stood in the kitchen, looking around with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “Did you clean up?”

“A little.”

He frowned. “You didn’t need to do that.”

“Somebody needed to.”

The frown got deeper. “I was going to handle it.”

She felt her eyebrow rising.

He noticed. “Okay, we’ll skip the coffee and get right to it.” He came over to the table and took the chair opposite hers. “You’ve obviously got your back up about this. I understand you were upset, and I know the trip up here isn’t easy—I just made it myself two weeks ago. I feel bad you felt you had to come, and I sure wish Tommy hadn’t left the phone off the hook all night long, or you could’ve called, and a five-minute conversation would have taken care of everything.”

His voice picked up speed. “The kitchen was a mess this morning. But we weren’t expecting visitors.” His back was straight, his broad chest rising above the table, his hands resting, palms down, on the surface.

She was very aware of him, but she forced herself to respond calmly. “It’s none of my business how you live, except that it has an impact on Crystal.” Her own voice was crisper than his. His had had a sort of reasonable, aw-shucks quality to it, as if he was inviting her to make light of what was a very serious situation. “This is a very serious situation,” she told him. She sounded good and prim, just like her mother, but good and prim was called for in a…serious situation like this.

A line formed between his eyes.

“I don’t think the kitchen was actually unsanitary, but added to the real problem here—”

“Crystal is okay,” he said quickly.

“This time, but that’s not the point. There are, as I see it, two points here. First, that the boys were too rough with her. Either they haven’t been told what the rules are for playing with a little girl, or they disobeyed them.”

He started to speak, but she lifted a hand and cut him off. “The other issue is more important. How is it Crystal got that upset and you didn’t know about it? She’s just lost her mother. She’s scared and vulnerable. Are you talking to her?”

“I talk to her.”

“Then how come you didn’t know that she was this upset? She was bleeding, she felt bad enough to send me an e-mail, of all things, and you didn’t even know about it.”

He got up abruptly. The chair skidded hard on the floor. He turned and walked a couple of paces toward the window. Instead of looking out, he turned to face her. She realized again just how tall he was.

“Look.” He shoved a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “It happened after school yesterday. Like most people, I work in the afternoons. It’s no different than if she got hurt after school and you were at work. It was such a nothing incident that she’d forgotten about it by the time I got home last night. She ate dinner, she did her homework, she didn’t mention a thing. I’m not a mind reader.”

“Was she quieter than usual?”

“Crystal’s always quiet.”

No, she wasn’t. Crystal was a chatterer. She chatted about Barbie and books, about the sunshine and the smell of a hot screen door after a rain, about lightning bugs and princesses with diamond tiaras. “Oh, Mitch,” Jenny said softly.

She saw him take in a breath before he turned quickly toward the window. In the little silence that followed, he noticed where she had replaced the drapery. His hand ran along the tieback in a gesture that seemed oddly vulnerable. And that vulnerability mixed her all up inside. One part of her wanted him uncaring, unfeeling, so that she’d have to find some way to take Crystal back with her.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Mitch wasn’t about to give up the child, so Jenny had to set him straight. “You’ve got to be talking with her. You’ve got to try to understand her, give her a chance to express herself. You work, but you’ve got to make time for her, you’ve got to make sure the boys aren’t making so much noise that you can’t check on her.” Her voice started to shake. “You owe her that, after bringing her here and changing her life, and if you can’t see that, or if you can’t handle that—”

“I’ll handle it. I am handling it.” His grip tightened on the tieback. “This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. The kids didn’t mean anything. Crystal will adjust, she’ll see that the kids just play a little rough.”

She heard the conviction in his voice, and she was puzzled. He had everything money could buy, he had three teenagers and a younger son, a life that might be easy materially but was hard in other ways. Surely he didn’t need a little girl.

What drove him to insist on claiming Crystal? Despite herself, she couldn’t help admiring his unexpected commitment when it came to Crystal.

He turned from the window and shrugged, as if he hadn’t been white-knuckled on that tieback after all. “If it would make you feel better, why don’t you stay a few days?”

“If that would make me feel better.”

“Yeah.” He put a hand back in his pocket, a casual pose again. “I don’t think this is a big deal. But you do, so why don’t you stay a few days and look us over? Maybe you’ll see we aren’t that bad.”

Everything about this place was that bad. Worst of all was that she was so conscious of him as a man. Conscious in a way she didn’t remember feeling about Delane, or even about her first love as a teenager. That puzzled her, too. She’d always been attracted to the smoothly handsome type, the kind who knew how to dress and what wine to order. She had a feeling Mitch would be happiest with a beer.

He gave her a grin and said, “After all, we’ve got a dog that smiles, so how could we be that bad?”

He paused, but before she could speak, he added, “You could spend time with Crystal. I know she’d really like it if you stayed. I realize you have a job with a lot of responsibility, but maybe you could get a few days off, now that you’re up here.”

She decided she didn’t want to tell him she was out of a job. “Sure. I could set things up. While I’m at it, if I could use your telephone, I could make reservations at the nearest hotel.”

That would cut into her suddenly constricted budget, but Mitch was right; she should stay. Crystal had been traumatized, whether he wanted to admit it or not. The social worker was supposed to be submitting her report, but Jenny would just as soon see with her own eyes how things were really going in this household.