Single with Children

Three

Adam used a piece of toast to wipe up the last of the egg on his plate, popped it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and followed it with a mouthful of coffee, his pleasure evident. He touched his mouth with his napkin, then laid it on the table in the large, welcoming kitchen, where he sat with Laura.

“Tell me again why these are low-cholesterol eggs?”

Laura balanced her chin on an upturned palm, smiling. “It’s really very simple. Say you want to scramble a dozen eggs. You just whisk up nine egg whites and three whole eggs, add a drop or two of food coloring, heat a nonstick pan, put the eggs in and stir them around. It makes enough for us and the kids.”

“You put something else in these,” he accused teasingly.

She inclined her head. “You can add almost anything to them. I used some of the leftover mashed potatoes from last night—any are okay, as long as they’re already cooked—and some fat-free cheese I found in the refrigerator. It’s a real high-protein, low-fat, low-cholesterol breakfast, especially with toast and a little apple butter—which isn’t butter at all, actually.”

“So that’s how you keep that marvelous figure,” he said, eyes crinkling at the edges with his grin.

Laura felt heat sweep upward from her chest. For Pete’s sake! What was wrong with her? She’d been told that she had a nice figure before—but not by him. Dismayed at her own reaction to a simple compliment, she quickly averted her gaze. “Th-thank you. Uh, now, if you would stop by the grocer’s today and pick up some turkey bacon, we could have that, too.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin and tossed it on the table, then got to his feet, shaking his head and reaching into his back pocket. “Not today. Sorry. But the roads are clear, so you might as well go and take the kids.” He opened his wallet and extracted a bill, which he thrust at her. “Get whatever you need.”

“Oh, no, it’s not…” Mechanically she glanced at that bill, and then she stared. “A hundred dollars! For turkey bacon?”

“For whatever you need,” he said, laying the bill beside her plate.

She looked up at him with her mouth hanging open. “You can’t go around handing out hundred-dollar bills like that!”

His mouth twitched and his eyebrows rose. “Oh? And why not?”

“It’s too much money!”

He shrugged. “So you have some left over for the next time you need something.”

She shook her head. “I don’t need anything, and if I did, I wouldn’t let you pay for it.”

“No? Okay, then use it for things the family needs, like turkey bacon.”

Laura gulped. “I don’t know if I should.”

He put his foot up on the seat of his chair and leaned over it, his arm crossed over his knee. “What’s the matter, Laura?” he asked lightly. “Can’t I trust you with cash? Is money some kind of great temptation for you?”

She knew then that it was a kind of test. He was willing to pay a hundred dollars to find out whether she was honest or not. In other words, he didn’t trust her, and that hurt more than it should have.

“I’ll give you an accounting,” she said softly, picking up the bill and folding it until it fit snugly in her palm.

He neither moved nor spoke for a long moment, and Laura kept her gaze stubbornly averted, not wanting him to see the sheen of disappointment in her eyes. Well, what had she expected? This whole thing had been an impulsive move on his part, and he would understandably regret that, given time to think about it. She shouldn’t be so bothered by it. She hadn’t been trusted by very many people in her life—and she knew better than to trust anyone else, especially with the truth. If he knew about her…

He took his foot down from the chair and straightened. “Look, you have to go into town anyway. Wendy’s school starts at nine, and I need to be in the office before then. Do you know where it is? The school, I mean.”

“Yeah, I think so. Anyway, I can find it. St. Cloud’s a pretty small town, after all.”

“Right. You can use the station wagon. We keep the boys’ car seats in it. I prefer to drive the truck, anyway. It’s four-wheel-drive.”

“Fine.” Laura nodded without looking up.

“You can drive, can’t you?” he asked, his voice teasingly light, and yet she knew he had reason for concern.

“Certainly. I had driver’s training in high school, and I’ve never had an accident or ticket of any kind.”

“How old are you, Laura?” he asked gently, surprising her into looking up and blurting the truth.

“Twenty-two.”

He smiled apologetically. “I knew you were young.”

She bit her lip, but she couldn’t keep from asking, “How old are you?”

He laughed, his eyes sparkling fondly. “Thirty-one.”

“That’s not exactly ancient.”

“No, it isn’t. To hear my father tell it, I’m practically a teenager still.”

She heard the faint tone of bitterness. There was definitely trouble there, and she hated fighting or discord of any kind, especially between family members. She remembered what she’d overheard the night before, and it occurred to her that she might owe Adam an apology. “Um, about last night… I wasn’t eavesdropping on your argument with your father. I was just coming down the hall, and I couldn’t help hearing.”

“Yeah, well, as to that,” he said lightly, withdrawing eye contact, “we always wind up shouting, and your timing was excellent. Thanks. You didn’t have to step in.”

“I didn’t mean to, actually,” she admitted. “I’m afraid I did it without thinking. I hate conflict, just hate it.”

“Well, conflict’s about all there is between me and Jake,” he said.

That was so sad to hear that the awfulness of it nearly choked her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “I never knew my father.”

“Oh, say, I’m sorry.” He sat down again. “It’s not that we don’t care about each other, Jake and I,” he said after a pause. “It’s just… I don’t know, maybe we’re too much alike. The big thing is, though, he got pushed into the family business, when what he really wanted to do was be a doctor. He was firstborn, and it was like this huge family-responsibility thing, you know? I don’t think he even tried to fight it, and I’ve seen what it’s done to him. Well, I made up my mind a long time ago that it wasn’t going to happen to me, even if I am firstborn of the firstborn, and he just can’t accept that.”

“I see. It’s just a shame that you can’t avoid the issue or something.”

Adam chuckled. “Avoid the issue with Jake Fortune? That’ll be the day.”

Laura bit her lip. “It’s none of my business, anyway. I have this thing about family, that’s all. You know how it is, when you don’t have something that everyone else does, it seems like the most important thing in the world to have.”

Adam nodded. “My grandmother was like that. She was raised in an orphanage back before the Second World War.”

“They don’t call them orphanages anymore,” Laura said slowly. “They call them group homes or halfway houses, but they’re still the last stop for a kid with no one and no place to go to.”

Adam seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Isn’t there any family?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Both of my parents were only children. My grandparents were already gone when I was born. My dad died in some kind of farming accident when I was just a baby, and my mother…” She was surprised how difficult it was to broach the subject. “Well, we never knew if she took too many pills by accident or on purpose. Anyway, I was five then.”

“Wendy’s age,” Adam mused solemnly.

“Just about.”