The Trick To Getting A Mom

Funny, but Kit looked just as cool as Alex had imagined Cecil to be. Only he was a lady.

Still, her dad had taught her not to believe everything people told you.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she looked up at Kit and issued her challenge. “Prove it.”

Give her credit, Kit didn’t back down. “Did you ever look at the copyright page in any of the books?”

“Nope.” Alex shook her head. “We always got right to the good stuff.”

Kit smiled and Alex noticed her front tooth was just the tiniest bit crooked. She imagined it got that way when Kit had to open her emergency rations with her bare teeth. Maybe. It could happen. Cecil didn’t live like ordinary people.

“If I had a book here,” Kit said, “I could show you. It would say, ‘Copyright by Kit Darling.’ Me.”

A brilliant idea popped into Alex’s head. “We have Seafaring Cecil books at our house. Everyone.” She tugged on her dad’s pocket. “Can Kit come to supper tonight? We could check it out then.”

Dad looked like he’d been turned to stone with a voodoo curse.

“That’s okay.” Kit was acting funny, too. She probably wasn’t used to eating at a table with knives and forks. “I should be making supper for you. For your help. But I’m fresh out of duck for roasting. Plus the utilities are off.” She gave Alex a wobbly smile.

Alex felt a stab of disappointment. “I should have known a big shot like you wouldn’t—”

“Hey, it’s not like that. I’m no big shot.” Kit knelt before her on the porch. The rain all around made it feel like they were marooned in the middle of the jungle. In Brazil maybe. Or Thailand. Up close, Alex got to look at Kit’s cool vine tattoo. Had a rain forest tribesman given it to her?

“I’m only in town for a short while,” Kit explained. “I have a long list of appointments. Lawyers, mostly.” She made a face. “Then I need to get back on the road again. New places to visit. New things to write about.” She looked kinda sorry. “But I do want to thank you for your help. And for being a Cecil fan. Perhaps tomorrow you could bring me your books and I’ll autograph them. We could have a picnic lunch on the boulder out back while your dad’s working. It would give your aunt a break.”

Alex held her breath, looking at her dad. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t think so,” he said. Sean had pinched lines between his eyes. Like he had a stomachache. “You see…Alex has been suspended from school for two weeks. The suspension doesn’t include picnics.”

Now why did he have to bring that up? Just when she was about to make friends with Seafaring Cecil.

Kit inwardly cringed at the reluctance she heard in Sean’s voice. Of course he wouldn’t want his daughter associating with her. Kit the Pariah. In full view, at Babe Darling’s. Mother Pariah. Without her pseudonym, she was still a Darling. One of two town outcasts.

“I understand.” For Alex’s sake she wouldn’t make a scene. She smiled at the little girl with the big spirit. “You check that copyright page when you get home.”

She extended her hand to Sean, determined to show him his brush-off didn’t faze her. “Thanks. For your help.”

“Seems like you could use more,” Alex offered. “I could come down tomorrow and help you spread this stuff out to dry.” She stared up at her father. “That would be community service, Dad. Not a picnic.”

Kit looked around at Babe’s soggy possessions, now mostly piled on the front porch. She didn’t know if anything was salvageable, if it ever had been in the first place.

“What are you planning to do?” Sean asked, his voice brusque and his body poised to get the heck out of Dodge.

Kit glanced at him. She didn’t like the look in his eyes. Pity, maybe? She didn’t need anyone’s pity, least of all his.

“I’ll just call a junk man to haul it all off,” she declared airily. Maybe a junk man would give her something for the lot. Seafaring Cecil had only recently begun to make a real, if modest, living for Kit. She didn’t have a cushion to soften the fallout from her mother’s defection. “Yeah. A junk man.”

“See.” Sean looked at his daughter. “All taken care of.”

Kit got the impression he wasn’t only speaking of Babe’s junk.

Alex seemed unconvinced, but she remained silent. An interesting kid. There was more to her than met the eye.

The downpour stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving the yard awash in mud. The few stray belongings they’d failed to retrieve and the yard sale sign had been swept into the street. There was nothing to keep Sean McCabe and his daughter any longer, and Kit felt an unexpected and unwanted twinge of disappointment.

She tried to shrug it off by picturing an adoring wife and mother waiting for them back home. His high-school sweetheart perhaps. The one he’d stood her up for.

“Come on, Alex.” Sean put his hand protectively on the back of his daughter’s neck. “We have to check in with Aunt Emily. Then I’m taking you to the pound where Pop and Uncle Jonas can help me keep an eye on you.”

And where was the wife? Kit wondered, forced to remind herself she didn’t care.

Sean made a move toward the porch steps, landing on one of the cowboy boots Kit had kicked off earlier. There wasn’t much maneuverability in the heavy boots he wore and he grabbed at the rickety railing. It gave way under his weight. In seconds, he toppled backward off the porch and into the rain-drenched hydrangea.

“Dad!” Alex shrieked and flew off the porch, landing in the muddy front yard. She lost her footing, too, and slid down the sloping yard.

Kit didn’t know where to help first until Alex sat up with an enormous mud-spattered grin. Sean, however, lay flat on his back.

As quickly as she could without becoming a casualty herself, Kit made her way down the two shallow front steps barefooted. If she weren’t so concerned that he’d broken or ruptured something, she might find the situation funny.

Mud oozing between her toes, she slipped, then fell to her knees. She crawled the rest of the way to Sean. “Are you all right?”

“My ego’s shot to hell,” he muttered. Flat on his back and vulnerable, he looked far sexier than upright and in charge. He glowered at the offending red cowboy boot that teetered on the edge of the porch. “That nearly killed me.”

Gingerly, Kit stood, dug her bare feet into the mud, then extended her hand.

He eyed her doubtfully.

“I’ll help!” Alex materialized at Kit’s side.

Taking a hand each, Sean braced his boot heels in the mud.

“One, two, three!” Alex crowed.

They pulled as he heaved himself out of the bush, slamming against Kit. Gleefully, Alex danced away as the two adults fell once again.

Before they hit the ground, Sean grabbed Kit to him and rolled to his side. They slid like two harbor seals in a long mucky embrace down what once was—a very long time ago—a lawn. The wind knocked out of her, Kit couldn’t move, although she hated to think of the shape she’d be in if Sean hadn’t broken their fall—her fall—by flipping to his side. Pancake came to mind.

She felt the corded strength of his arms around her, felt the rise and fall of his rock-hard chest. Heard his ragged breathing and something else…something strange. The low, rusty beginnings of a laugh. The crinkles around his eyes told her she wasn’t mistaken. Holding her tightly, he threw back his head and roared. His teeth flashed stark white against his mud-daubed face.

His laughter proved infectious.

Return to Pritchard’s Neck had put Kit on edge, and the man who now held her hadn’t eased her sense of unbalance. This unintended pratfall pushed her over the brink. She flung back her head and gave herself over to a marvelous belly laugh as Alex performed a noisy dance around the two fallen adults.

“You’re a sight.” A broad grin lighting up his face, Sean brushed a clump of hair from Kit’s eyes. His mud-slick fingertips raised goose bumps on her flesh.

“No one’s about to ask you to tea at the Ritz,” she replied, picking a hydrangea blossom from behind his ear.

He caught her wrist, his merriment transferred into longing. A shiver of reciprocal desire ran down her spine.