Serenity Harbor

She could tell by Sam’s pout that she would have a hard time escaping a late night with her. Maybe she could talk her into just hanging out by the lakeshore and talking.

“Okay. I guess we’d better hurry if we want to have time to make our salad.”

Sam hurried toward the front doors, and Katrina turned back to her list. Only the items from the vegetable aisle, then she would be done. She headed in that direction and spotted a flustered Bowie Callahan trying to keep the boy with him from eating grapes from the display.

“Stop it, Milo. I told you, you can eat as many as you want after we buy them.”

This only seemed to make the boy more frustrated. She could see by his behavior and his repetitive mannerisms that he quite possibly had some sort of developmental issues. Autism, she would guess at a glance—though that could be a gross generalization, and she was not an expert, anyway.

Whatever the case, Callahan seemed wholly unprepared to deal with it. He hadn’t taken the boy out of the store, obviously, to give him a break from the overstimulation. In fact, things seemed to have progressed from bad to worse.

Milo—cute name—reached for another grape despite the warning, and Bowie grabbed his hand and sternly looked down into his face. “I said, stop it. We’ll have grapes after we pay for them.”

The boy didn’t like that. He wrenched his hand away and threw himself to the ground. “No! No! No!” he chanted.

“That’s enough,” Bowie snapped, loudly enough that other shoppers turned around to stare, which made the man flush.

She could see Milo was gearing up for a nuclear meltdown—and while she reminded herself it was none of her business, she couldn’t escape a certain sense of professional obligation to step in.

She wanted to ignore it, to turn into the next aisle, finish her shopping and escape the store as quickly as she could. She could come up with a dozen excuses about why that was the best course of action. Samantha would be waiting for her. She didn’t know the man or his frustrated kid. She had plenty of troubles of her own to worry about.

None of that held much weight when compared with the sight of a child who clearly had some special needs in great distress—and an adult who just as clearly didn’t know what to do in the situation.

She felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Bowie Callahan, probably because her mother had told her so many stories about how mortified Charlene had been when Katrina had a seizure in a public place. All the staring, the pointing, the whispers.

The boy continued to chant “no” and began smacking his palm against his forehead in rhythm with each exclamation. A couple of older women she didn’t know—tourists, probably—looked askance at the boy, and one muttered something to the other about how some children needed a swat on the behind.

She wanted to tell the old biddies to mind their own business but held her tongue, since she was about to ignore her own advice.

After another minute passed, when Bowie Callahan did nothing but gaze down at the boy with helpless frustration, Katrina knew she had to act. What other choice did she have? She pushed her cart closer. The man briefly met her gaze with a wariness that she chose to ignore. Instead, she plopped onto the ground next to the distressed boy.

In her experience with children of all ages and abilities, they reacted better to someone willing to lower to their level. She wasn’t sure if he even noticed she was there, since he didn’t stop chanting or smacking his palm against his head.

“Hi there.” She spoke in a calm, conversational tone, as if she were chatting with one of her friends at Wynona’s shower later in the evening. “What’s your name?”

Milo—whose name she knew perfectly well from hearing Bowie use it—barely took a breath. “No! No! No! No!”

“Mine is Katrina,” she went on. “Some people call me Kat. You know, kitty-cat. Meow. Meow.”

His voice hitched a little, and he lowered his hand but continued chanting, though he didn’t sound quite as distressed. “No. No. No.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “Is your name Batman?”

He frowned. “No. No. No.”

“Is it...Anakin Skywalker?”

She picked the name assuming by his Star Wars T-shirt that it would be familiar to him. He shook his head. “No.”

“What about Harry Potter?

This time, he looked intrigued at the question or perhaps at her stupidity. He shook his head.

“How about Milo?”

Big blue eyes widened with shock. “No,” he said, though his tone gave the word the opposite meaning.

“Milo. Hi there. I like your name. I’ve never met anybody named Milo. Do you know anybody else named Kat?”

He shook his head.

“Neither do I,” she admitted “But I have a cat. Her name is Marshmallow, because she’s all white. Do you like marshmallows? The kind you eat, I mean.”

He nodded and she smiled. “I do, too. Especially in hot cocoa.”

He pantomimed petting a cat and pointed at her.

“You’d like to pet her? She would like that. She lives with my mom now and loves to have anyone pay attention to her. Do you have a cat or a dog, Milo?”

The boy’s forehead furrowed, and he shook his head, glaring up at the man beside him, who looked stonily down at both of them.

Apparently that was a touchy subject.

Did the boy talk? She had heard him say only “no” so far. It wasn’t uncommon for children on the autism spectrum and with other developmental delays to have much better receptive language skills than expressive skills, and he obviously understood and could get his response across fairly well without words.

“I see lots of delicious things in your cart—including cherries. Those are my favorite. Yum. I must have missed those. Where did you find them?”

He pointed to another area of the produce section, where a gorgeous display of cherries gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

She pretended she didn’t see them. Though the boy’s tantrum had been averted for now, she didn’t think it would hurt anything if she distracted him a little longer. “Do you think you could show me?”

It was a technique she frequently employed with her students who might be struggling, whether that was socially, emotionally or academically. She found that if she enlisted their help—either to assist her or to help out another student—they could often be distracted enough that they forgot whatever had upset them.

Milo craned his neck to look up at Bowie for permission. The man looked down at both of them, a baffled look on his features, but after a moment he shrugged and reached a hand down to help her off the floor.

She didn’t need assistance, but it would probably seem rude to ignore him. She placed her hand in his and found it warm and solid and much more calloused than a computer nerd should have. She tried not to pay attention to the little shock of electricity between them or the tug at her nerves.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, looking quickly away as she followed the boy, who, she was happy to notice, seemed to have completely forgotten his frustration.

CHAPTER TWO (#u8447eef0-0e4a-5b31-be04-0115090733b8)

WHAT WAS GOING on here?

Bowie followed the gorgeous woman with the sleek fall of honey-blond hair, listening to the steady stream of one-sided conversation she seemed to be having with his heretofore nonverbal little brother.

He felt as if he had just slid down a rabbit’s hole, into a bizarro world where it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary for a woman to take a strange kid under her wing in the grocery store and where a pretty smile could divert an out-of-control boy from a full-blown meltdown.

He didn’t know what to think. Who was she? And how had she managed to reach his brother so quickly and so efficiently?