Marrying a Delacourt

Michael was very much afraid he did know. He held back a sigh.

“And your last foster home?” Grace asked. “Was it near here?”

The boy shook his head. “Not really. When I got Josh, I figured this time we’d better get far away so they could never find us. I figured they’d just give up after a couple of days. It’s not as if anybody really cares where we are. We’ve been hitching rides for a while now. Like a week, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “We must have gone about a thousand miles.”

“It’s only a couple of hundred, doofus,” Jamie said.

“Well, it seems like a lot. We didn’t get a lot of rides, so we had to walk and walk. Jamie wouldn’t get in a car with just anybody. He said we could only get in pickups where we could ride in the back.”

Michael listened, horrified. He saw the same sense of dismay on Grace’s face. Clearly, they both knew all too well what might have happened to two small boys on the road alone. Obviously Jamie, at his age and with his street smarts, understood the dangers as well, but it was also clear that he thought those were preferable to another bad foster care experience or another separation.

“We told the truth,” Jamie said, looking from Grace to Michael and back again. “You gonna let us stay?” He didn’t sound especially hopeful. His expression suggested he was ready to run at the first hint that Michael and Grace might not agree to let them stick around.

“Why don’t you boys go and check on the feed for the horses?” Michael suggested. “Grace and I need to talk things over and decide what’s best.” He scowled at Jamie. “And don’t get any ideas about taking off while we do, okay? We’ll work this out. I promise.”

He meant that promise more than he’d ever meant anything in his life.

Unfortunately, he had a feeling that the solution to this particular problem wasn’t going to come to them over a second cup of coffee. And judging from Grace’s troubled expression, she knew it, too.

Chapter Four

Grace wanted to cry. As the boys straggled dejectedly out of the kitchen as if the weight of the world were on their narrow shoulders, she couldn’t bear to meet Michael’s gaze. She was afraid if she did, the tears would come and she wouldn’t be able to stop them.

She identified with Josh and Jamie a little too much. She could remember exactly what it felt like to have no one around she could count on. After her father’s departure, her mother had sunk more and more deeply into a depression from which she never recovered. Grace had been eighteen when her mother died, a sad, lost woman.

Because for so many years Grace had been as much caregiver as child, she had felt the loss even more deeply, felt even more abandoned and alone. She blinked back tears at the memory of that time. She had been so frightened and so determined not to show it.

That was when she had met Michael and, for a time, she had felt connected. She had leaned on him, drawing strength from the attention he had showered on her, envisioning herself a part of his large family even though at that time she’d never met them.

But, in the end, he hadn’t been able to give her what she desperately needed—a storybook family in which she would come first with him, just as he did with her. Graduation day had been a brutal awakening for her. She had realized then that the only person she could truly count on was herself. She’d clung to her independence ever since, not wanting to risk more disillusionment with another man.

But while her lifestyle suited her now, she didn’t want that for Jamie and Josh, who were already far too used to fending for themselves. She wanted them to be surrounded by people who cared, people they knew would be there for them always.

“Grace?”

Michael’s concerned voice drew her back to the present. “What?” she said without glancing up.

“You okay?”

“Of course,” she said, forcing a brisk, confident note into her voice. It was her courtroom tone, the one she drew on so no judge or jury would ever sense a hint of vulnerability. Even so, she wasn’t quite ready to look him in the eye.

“This is a hell of a mess, isn’t it?” he said.

“Now there’s an understatement, if ever I heard one.”

“What are we going to do?”

Her gaze came up at that. “We?” she echoed, not bothering to hide her surprise. “I thought you intended to dump this into my lap.”

“Look, if you don’t want my help, that’s fine by me. Believe me, nothing would please me more that to turn this over to you and get on with my nice, peaceful vacation.”

She regarded him skeptically. “‘Peaceful’ and ‘vacation’ are not two words I normally associate with you,” she said. “You’re here under duress, remember?”

“The prospect has become considerably more appealing overnight.”

“How unfortunate, since we have a crisis on our hands,” she declared, emphatically echoing him.

“I knew it was a mistake the minute I said that,” he muttered.

He didn’t sound half as disgruntled as she was sure he meant to. In fact, he sounded like a man who’d unwillingly been deeply touched by what those boys had already been through in their young lives. For the first time ever, she thought maybe she knew Michael Delacourt better than he knew himself. She had always known that he possessed a heart. He just wasn’t in touch with it very often. He wouldn’t allow himself to be, because he wanted nothing to compete with the time he devoted to Delacourt Oil.

Those boys had reached him in a way she suspected he rarely allowed to happen. She wasn’t about to let him back away from the experience. Just as he was about to rise from his seat—probably intent on beating a hasty retreat—she put her hand on his.

“Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not getting out of this that easily.”

He sank back down with a sigh of resignation, then reached for a piece of paper. “Okay, what’s the game plan?” he asked.

He sounded as if he were strategizing a corporate takeover and wanted every detail nailed down in advance. He almost seemed eager to get started. Or maybe, she thought more realistically, he was simply anxious to get finished.

Despite Michael’s sense of urgency, Grace considered their options thoughtfully. “I’m going to make a few discreet inquiries,” she began slowly.

He regarded her worriedly, as if he already sensed that he wasn’t going to like the role she had in mind for him. “What about me?”

She regarded him with a certain amount of delight. “You’re going to go out there and see how much more information you can pry out of Josh and Jamie.”

“Such as?”

“A last name would be helpful. So would their mother’s name.”

“Grace, those two fell in love with you at first sight. They were all but falling all over themselves earlier to please you. If they wouldn’t talk to you, how do you expect me to get them to open up? They don’t trust me. The only reason they didn’t sneak away from here last night was because they were too exhausted to try.”

“It’s not too late to change that. You can become their new best buddy.” She looked him over carefully. He was in another pair of slacks with creases so sharp they could have cut butter and a shirt that probably cost more than everything in her suitcase. “One little suggestion, though, before you go outside.”

“I could use more than one suggestion, sweetheart. I need a damned manual.”

“You were a boy once, Michael. You had brothers. Surely you recall what that was like.”

“Of course, but Jamie and Josh are nothing like we were.”

“For good reasons.”

“I know that. What I don’t know is how to get through to them, especially Jamie. He’s got solid concrete walls built around himself.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Of course not, but—”