Fiancé In Name Only

“Uh-huh.” Way too much information, Micah thought and wondered idly if the kid had an off switch.

“I like the dark and only get scared sometimes.” Jacob shifted impatiently from foot to foot.

“That’s good.”

“Do you get scared?”

Frowning now, Micah watched the boy. For a second he was tempted to say no and let it drop. Then he thought better of it. “Everybody gets scared sometimes.”

“Even dads?”

Micah had zero experience with fathers, but he suspected that the one thing that would terrify a man was worrying about his children. “Yeah,” he said. “Even dads.”

“Wow.” Jacob nodded thoughtfully. “I have a rabbit I hold when I get scared. I don’t think my dad has one.”

“A rabbit?” Micah shook his head.

“Not a real one,” Jacob assured him. “Real ones would be hard to hold.”

“Sure, sure.” Micah nodded sagely.

“And they poop a lot.”

Micah hid the smile he felt building inside. The boy was so serious he probably wouldn’t appreciate being laughed at. Did all kids talk like this? And whatever happened to not talking to strangers? Didn’t people tell their kids that anymore?

“There it is,” Jacob said suddenly, and pointed to the garden as he hurried to the gate and waited for Micah to open it. Once he had, Jacob raced across the uneven ground to one of the dozen or more pumpkins.

Micah followed, hands in his jeans pockets, watching the kid because he couldn’t very well leave him out here alone, could he? “Which one?”

“This one.” Jacob bent down to pat the saddest pumpkin Micah had ever seen.

It was smaller than the others, but that wasn’t its only issue. It was also shaped like a lumpy football. It was more a pale yellow than orange, and it had what looked like a tumor growing out of one side at the top. If it had been at a store, it would have been overlooked, but here a little boy was patting it tenderly.

“Why that one?” Micah asked, actually curious about what would have made the kid pick the damn thing.

Jacob pulled a weed, then looked up at Micah. “Cuz it’s the littlest one, like me.” He looked at the vines and all of the other round, perfect orange blobs. “And it’s all by itself over here, so it’s probably lonely.”

“A lonely pumpkin.” He wasn’t sure why that statement touched him, but he couldn’t deny the kid was getting to him.

“Uh-huh.” Smiling again, Jacob said, “None of the other kids liked him, but I do. I’m gonna help my mom draw a happy face on him for Halloween and then he’ll feel good.”

The kid was worried about a pumpkin’s self-esteem. Micah didn’t even know what to say to that. When he was a kid, he’d never done Halloween. There’d been no costumes, no trick-or-treating, no carving pumpkins with his mom.

Micah had one fuzzy memory of his mother and it drifted through his mind like fog on a winter night. She was pretty—at least, he told himself that because the mental picture of her was too blurred to really tell. She had brown hair and brown eyes like his and she was kneeling on the sidewalk in front of him, smiling, though tears glittered in her eyes. Micah was about six, he guessed, a little older than Jacob. They were in New York and the street was busy with cars and people. He was hungry and cold and his mother smoothed his hair back from his forehead and whispered to him.

“You have to stay here without me, Micah.”

Fear spurted inside him as he looked up at the dirty gray building behind him. The dark windows looked like blank eyes staring down at him. Worried and chewing his bottom lip, he looked back at his mother. “But I don’t want to. I want to go with you.”

“It’s just for a little while, baby. You’ll stay here where you’ll be safe and I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

“I don’t want to be safe, Mommy,” he whispered, his voice catching, breaking as panic nearly choked him and he felt tears streaking down his face. “I want to go with you.”

“You can’t come with me, Micah.” She kissed his forehead, then stood up, looking down at him. She took a step back from him. “This is how it has to be and I expect you to be a good boy.”

“I will be good if I can go with you,” he promised. He reached for her hand, his small fingers curling around hers and holding tight, as if he could keep her there. With him.

But she only walked him up the steps, knocked on the door and gave Micah’s fingers one last squeeze before pulling free. Fear nibbled at him, his tears coming faster, and he wiped them away with his jacket sleeve. “Don’t leave...”

“You wait right here until they open the door, understand?”

He nodded, but he didn’t understand. Not any of it. Why were they here? Why was she leaving? Why didn’t she want him to be with her?

“I’ll be back, Micah,” she said. “Soon. I promise.” Then she turned and left him.

He watched her go, hurrying down the steps, then along the sidewalk, until she was lost in the crowd. Behind him, the door opened and a lady he didn’t know took Micah’s hand and led him inside.

His mother never came back.

Micah shook off the memory of his first encounter with child services. It had been a long, confusing, terrifying day for him. He was sure he wouldn’t be there long. His mother had said so. For the first year, he’d actually looked for her every day. After that, hope was more fragile and, finally, the hope faded completely. His mother’s lies stuck with him, of course.

Hell, they still lived in a tiny, dark corner of his mind and constantly served as a reminder not to trust anyone.

But here, in Banner, those warnings were more silent than they’d ever been for him. Watching as Jacob carefully brushed dirt off his pumpkin, Micah realized that this place was like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting. A place where kids worried about pumpkins and talked to strangers like they were best friends. It had nothing at all to do with the world that Micah knew.

And maybe that’s why he felt so out of step here.

* * *

That’s how Kelly found them. The boy, kneeling in the dirt, and the man standing beside him, a trapped look on his face—as if he were trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. Smiling to herself, Kelly climbed out of her truck and walked toward the garden at the side of the house. Micah spotted her first and his brown eyes locked with hers.

She felt a jolt of something hot that made her knees feel like rubber, but she kept moving. She had to admit it surprised her, seeing Micah here with Jacob. She hadn’t pictured him as the kind of guy to take the time for a child. He was so closed off, so private, that seeing him now, walking through a fenced garden while a little boy talked his ears off gave her a warm feeling she couldn’t quite describe.

“What’re you guys up to?” she asked as she walked closer.

“I showed Micah my pumpkin,” Jacob announced. “He likes mine best, he said so.”

“Well, of course he did,” she agreed. “Yours is terrific.”

The little boy flashed Micah a wide grin. Micah, on the other hand, looked embarrassed to have been caught being nice. Interesting reaction.

“It’s okay I came over, right?” Jacob asked, looking a little worried. “Micah was cooking, but he opened the gate for me and stuff.”

“Sure it’s okay,” Kelly told him.

“Okay, I gotta go now,” Jacob said suddenly, giving his pumpkin one last pat. “Bye!”

He bolted through the gate and tore across the backyard toward the house next door.