Mackinnon 03 - The Bonus Mom (7 page)

“Isn’t there a medal of honor for surviving something like this?” Whit asked the world—as he dug out the key, unlocked and started heaping the packages in the back. “A purple heart. Or a bronze cross. Or maybe just a subtle
D
for
Dad
in neon lights. Or—”

Once the girls dissolved in giggles—and let loose with a few disgusted
“Daaaad”
s—he upped his pace.

“There must be some kind of training you females go through to build up your strength and endurance. And weight training. The tons in those packages in back is probably going to cost us extra mileage—assuming the tires can carry this much ballast. I’ll bet you all do run-in-place exercises. Push-ups. Treadmill...”

Before they hit the second stoplight, the girls fell asleep, still strapped in, but limp as puppies, covered with blankets and jackets and packages. Whit glanced in the rearview mirror, realized why the girls were suddenly so quiet and quit with the teasing.

A few minutes later, he said suddenly, “Rosemary...I should have thought. We weren’t far from the hospital complex in Greenville. If you’d wanted to stop to see your parents—”

She gave a wry chuckle. “Thanks, but not to worry. My chances of seeing them were probably around a zillion to one.”

“That bad?”

She heard the humor in his voice. “Probably worse,” she said, in the same humorous tone. “This is their home hospital. But they divide their time between here and Johns Hopkins—where they’re always on call. They’re both cardiac surgeons, but my mom specializes in small children. My dad works more with transplants, accident victims. Either way, when they’re doing surgery, they’re pretty much out of contact for five hours at a time or more. And if they’re catching a few minutes shut-eye, no one will wake them. Not for a silly reason like a family member calling.”

That silenced him, but not for long. “That was true, even when you were a child? That you couldn’t reach them?”

She turned her head. He was watching traffic, not looking at her, but there’d been concern in his voice. Sympathy. “I don’t think it hurt any of us, that our parents had important work...more important than thinking about us all the time. Besides, there were advantages to not having parents around much.”

“Like?”

“Like...the three of us grew up self-reliant. If no one was around for dinner, I’d make a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.”

He winced.

“Yeah, that’s what my brothers thought, too. Ice cream in cereal was another one of my specialties. Sometimes with chocolate topping. Sometimes not.”

“Chocolate topping. In the morning?”

“Hey, I’m talking about when I was eight or nine.”

He shot her an amused look. She put her head back, and relaxed. Really relaxed, she realized. Shopping with the girls had been total fun, and shopping with Whit playing his suffering-guy act had been hysterical. They were so easy to be with.

Once out of Greenville, traffic lightened up, cars thinned out. Even though it was still afternoon, the sun had already started a fast slide toward the horizon.

“It gets dark so fast this time of year,” she murmured, and glanced in the backseat again. “They’re still sleeping.”

It seemed only minutes later that the highway lights disappeared, and Whit reached the mountain turnoff. He slowed down, and that quickly, they were surrounded by the lush green forests and winding around the road’s slithering curves. “Rosemary?”

When she turned her head at his curious tone, he said, “Before we get to your place, I just want to say...those were my daughters you met today. This is the happiest I’ve seen them in a year. They were rowdy and laughing and arguing and teasing each other, and just...being
alive
again. Thanks. I mean it.”

A lump clogged her throat. “I didn’t do anything—”

“Yeah, you did. They lightened up with you. They let loose. They even stopped being so darned good all the time and came through with some serious sass. It was all your doing.”

The lump in her throat thickened. She couldn’t help it, any more than she could help feeling a wave of tenderness toward him. He seemed to see himself as a father, a widower, an ordinary guy.

She saw the rough jaw, the mesmerizing eyes, the hard-honed muscled shoulders. She saw a man who loved his kids deeply, beyond deeply. She saw a man who was steadfast, who valued family, who seemed to have no ego or awareness about his good looks. She got it—that he was a good guy. But that wasn’t what rang her chimes.

Lust was.

Near him, she didn’t feel a little tingle. She felt fire. She heard sirens.

She heard herself yearning for him like a teenager with a mortifying crush. And it had to stop. It was completely inappropriate and she knew it.

When he pulled up to her place, the girls were still sleeping hard. Rosemary unbuckled her seat belt, grabbed her bag. Determined to act—to be—as normal around him as possible, she offered, “I’m not sure what I’ve got, but I could probably scare up some dinner.”

“That’s okay. I need to get home, get this car unpacked, get the girls settled in. They’re scheduled for a Skype call to their grandparents still tonight.”

“Your parents, or maternal grandparents?”

“Mine.” He pushed the car into Park, then half turned to her. “I mean it, about thanking you. I don’t want to embarrass you. I just want you to know how much today meant—for my girls, for us.”

“Okay. That does it.” She dropped her bag and swiveled toward him on one knee. “I’ve had it with you.” He looked startled, then started to grin. Trying to maneuver over the console with its cupholders and gloves and debris was beyond awkward, but she managed it, managed to balance on one knee and pop a kiss on his mouth. She wanted to ham it up. Hoped she came across as silly and funny—anything to diminish those red-hot feelings for him, to reduce his effect on her down to a normal, livable level.

And she did.

Sort of.

Her lips smacked his then immediately lifted. She only caught a millisecond of his taste, his scent, those butter-soft lips of his. She avoided his eyes, grabbed her purse again, and then reared back to grab the door handle. “Quit with the thank-yous, or you’ll be sorry,” she said in her crossest voice. “I love spending time with your daughters. Loved spending your money. Loved getting out to do some Christmasy things instead of working.”

“I’m sorry I thanked you,” he said humbly.

“You should be.”

“Are you going to kiss me if I do it again?”

Well, hell. She wanted a lighter feeling between them. Instead there was a glitter in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. He had an expression, something like a rooster who just found the key to the henhouse—and she was the hen.

“No,” she said. “Next time I’ll whack you upside the head. You can count on it.”

“And you can count on there being a next time, Rosemary.”

She heard him say good-night as she closed the door and headed for the house. She didn’t look back—not until she was inside and her jacket and bag had been thrown on the chair. Then she glanced out, watched until the headlights turned around, until he started downhill, until the last wink of his tail lights disappeared.

Then she took a long, deep breath.

There was no way she would hurt that vulnerable family.

No way she would hurt Whit. Which meant—lust or no lust—she would find some way to cool her jets around him, whatever it took.

Chapter Six

“G
ot to get you into my life....” Whit couldn’t remember where the song came from, who sang it, what the rest of the words were. And he didn’t care. That title showed up in his head, and like a guest at a party, refused to leave.

He felt that song was his plan for Rosemary. About the woman who kicked up his juices from here to Poughkeepsie. About the woman who engaged him, fascinated him, in ways his wife never had. Rosemary was like him. She liked natural things, no labels, no pretenses, no tickets to the opera. He knew she’d like a wandering hike on a fall-bitten day, knew she’d stop to love the sunshine dancing on a creek. Life with her would be fewer dinners with antique china, more picnics in the shade of an oak. Less ballet tickets and more lying outside and counting stars.

“
Daaad!
Would you quit humming that stupid tune?”

“I didn’t know I was doing it,” Whit defended.

Lilly said kindly, “We
know
you don’t know what you’re doing. Look at this mess.”

He quit humming and looked. The afternoon project was supposed to be stringing popcorn to decorate the tree. His job, he figured, was making the popcorn. So he’d made it. And made some more. And then more—enough to fill every bowl, every plate, every pitcher in the place, and then to just kind of lay down newspaper to heap the rest.

“You think we have enough?” Whit asked Lilly.

His daughters exchanged glances. When the twins shared that kind of look, it made him terrified of their teenage years. One child was a child. Two children, especially twins, were a pack.

“Dad,” Lilly said tactfully, “we have enough popcorn to decorate our tree, Rosemary’s tree and probably every tree in Charleston. The problem is that now we have to string it.”

“Well, of course. That’s the idea.”

“Uh-huh. Well, if you didn’t pack some needles and thread, we sure didn’t,” Pepper informed him. “We didn’t know we were going to do this.”

Whit hadn’t either...but normally he had an IQ higher than ten. Obviously they couldn’t string garlands of popcorn without needle and thread—unless there was some unknown other way. “Maybe we could try glue?”

“Dad,” Lilly said, again using her Be-Patient-With-Dad voice, “we don’t have glue, either. We’re not home. We don’t have the stuff we have around home.”

“And glue wouldn’t work anyway,” Pepper said. “I know what would, though.”

“Me, too,” Lilly agreed.

“What?” Whit was all ears.

“What we need to make this work is...” Both girls finished the sentence in unison.
“Rosemary.”

“Well, darn,” Whit said in a tone of complete meek astonishment. “You two just might be right.”

“So could we call her, Dad? Could we?”

“She could come over, help us string the popcorn. Maybe watch a movie with us? Like why
not,
Dad?”

“Well...I don’t know. Maybe if you two called her—”

“Yeah! We’ll call her right now!”

He did his best to be talked into the plan. Then he did his best to heave himself in the overstuffed chair and look helpless, as he watched the girls grabbing the phone from each other, bouncing around as they talked to Rosemary. Pepper knocked over a glass with drops of milk still left in it. Lilly punched her when Pepper refused to give over the phone.

He wasn’t sure what Rosemary was saying...but he was positive the girls could talk her into coming over if anyone in the universe could.

He noted the spilled milk, the knocked over glass, the array of blankets on the couch from where the girls had curled up watching TV the night before, the splash of shoes and scarves strewn in the general vicinity of the back door.

He couldn’t help but think of Zoe’s reaction. She would have hated everything about this place, would see it as a household out of control—a sin on a par with murder or grand theft, and a lack of manners.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Rosemary came through the front door with her arms full of bags. She heeled off her boots, held her car key between her teeth so she could divest herself of parcels and get her jacket off. Instead of her usual cherry parka, she wore a soft, fuzzy jacket in the girls’ favorite purple.

The girls rushed her with the exuberance of defense after the opening kick. Both tried on her jacket—with her permission—the whole time they nonstop chattered. From the parcels and bags, she produced a plastic bag of thread, a container of sewing needles, two bottles of whole cloves, a bag of fresh oranges, fresh lemons, a linen bag of herbs he could smell from the door and a gallon—no, two gallons—of cider.

Whit suddenly suspected that he’d been demoted from manager of the day’s events to unpaid flunky.

When she had everything—but the kitchen sink—
on
the kitchen sink, she finally had both hands free. She smooched Lilly on the cheek, then Pepper on the forehead, then loped over, went up on tiptoe, and gave him a fast smooch on the chin.

A kiss like she gave the kids.

Like he was another kid.

He’d never guessed before that she had a cruel side.

“Whit, can you bring in the big pot from my car? Oh, and there’s a giant spoon ladle thing on the seat. And there might be another grocery sack....”

The day turned into a marathon honey-do list. Outside, a thready drizzle turned into a window-drumming downpour. The girls turned on a chick flick for background—something about knights and that kind of junk. He was given sets of instructions. Slice lemons and oranges. Put the pot on the stove, pour in the cider, add the linen bag of herbs, start stirring, don’t let it boil, keep stirring, add the lemons and oranges, keep stirring.

The girls got the stringing popcorn job. Actually, he offered, but the three females pounced on him when they caught him—it was only one time!—nibbling on the popcorn instead of stringing it. They gave him another god-awful chore after that. He was supposed to stick cloves in oranges. Like cover up the orange completely with cloves. That was interesting for almost three or four minutes, but then his fingertips started hurting from all the clove stabbing, and he couldn’t get them in straight anyway.

He complained that his hands were too big for this particular job.

No one paid him any attention.

He continued killing his fingers on the cloves. Continued stirring the wassail. And in the meantime, watched her listen to his girls, really listen, even for answers to the simplest questions she asked them.

She started out by asking what their mom used to like for Christmas—like what kind of presents. Did they ever make things by hand, or did their mom give them ideas, or how did they all work it?

“Well, Mom always made it easy for us. She’d ask for a Dior lipstick or something like that, that Pepper and I could afford by splitting.”

“Yeah,” Pepper agreed. “But with Dad, she’d give him a whole list. Like a new Coach purse or a Movado watch or two days at a fancy spa—Mom loved that kind of thing.”

“And jewelry. She loved jewelry. But she always said men couldn’t buy jewelry because they didn’t understand what a woman wanted, so she’d pick that out for herself. Just put it on Dad’s card.”

Pepper added, “So she made it easy on everybody. She could get exactly what she wanted, but nobody had to do anything hard. Dad hates shopping, so he really liked it that way.”

Rosemary’s back was turned away from his view, so Whit couldn’t see her face or read her expression, but her voice took on a different tone. “Okay...so how do you know what to pick out for your dad?”

“Oh, Dad’s
really
easy. He always wants tools and stuff like that. And besides, he likes surprises. Like I got him a polka-dotted flashlight one year. Cracked him up. But it was a good light, you know? He used it all the time.”

Lilly piped in, “And I got him a big bowl one time. It was for his popcorn. He always said that Mom’s china was too darned fancy for a football popcorn afternoon, and there wasn’t a big bowl in the whole house. He used that all the time, too.”

“And we both made him ties one year in school. I can’t remember what they were made of, but we dunked them in this swirl of dye. So everybody’s was different. I mean, all the ties were made the same way. But each one had different colors, different swirls.”

Lilly jumped in again. “The thing is, Dad doesn’t like ties. He never wore ties for anything unless Mom made him. But he liked the ones
we
made. If he picked us up from school or was going to teachers’ meetings or something, he
always
wore one of our ties.”

“He said we saved him from all the god-awful ties out there in the stores.”

“And then Mom’d yell at him for saying god-awful. But we knew what he meant. Ties are pretty boring.”

“Father’s Day was different, though,” Pepper interrupted. “Dad always said he didn’t want a present. So we’d try to think of something to do with him. Like we cooked him breakfast even when we were
really
little. Like sometimes adding a maraschino cherry to scrambled eggs. With maybe some peanut butter. And he
ate
it.”

“And one Father’s Day we said we’d mow the lawn for him. But we couldn’t really use the riding mower by ourselves. So Dad mowed while we just hung on. That was fun.”

“And sometimes we’d sneak out to get McDonald’s or Burger King for Father’s Day. Because Mom didn’t like that kind of food. And he loves it.”

Okay, they had to be boring her ears off. Whit quit listening...but he couldn’t seem to stop watching.

The girls glommed on to Rosemary as if she was the rose and they were the bees. They never stopped talking. She’d got them talking about Christmas—when he’d been afraid to do that—but they didn’t get upset, mentioning their mom. Not with Rosemary. She just made it...natural somehow.

The three females had claimed the couch, all sewing strings of popcorn. Three pairs of loose socks were perched on the coffee table, not much different in size. All three had blond hair, although the girls had thicker, longer styles, where Rosemary’s was short. Still, scooched down, heads against the couch back, the three looked as if they belonged together. Belonged like a family. Free to be yourself—that kind of comfortable. That kind of belonging.

The house filled up with smells. Pine, cloves, oranges. Outside the rain stopped, leaving a glistening cold afternoon. He brought out sandwiches and mugs of wassail. The group weaved their garlands of popcorn on the tree, then strung his cloved-oranges from wherever they could find a hook—lamp arms, window latches, wooden chandeliers.

More smells showed up after that—almond and cinnamon. The girls destroyed the kitchen, leaving flour and crusty bowls everywhere, and eventually sheets of snickerdoodles emerged from the oven, finally cooled enough to devour. After that came a couple batches of sugar almond cookies.

The females claimed they were too tired to clean up—naturally, when the kitchen was in such bad shape the health department would likely have condemned it. He let them get away with it. It wasn’t that hard to hurl stuff in the dishwasher, swipe down counters, wrap up cookies.

When he finished, he ambled to the doorway. They’d all moved to the floor by the Christmas tree. Rosemary was lying on her side, the curve of her hip a fabulous view for a man who was already fiercely, helplessly smitten. The conversation had turned mighty serious, seemed to be about the icky boys in their class, the unfair teachers.

He strolled forward, making enough noise so they knew they were being interrupted, and gave each a slight whip with the dish towel. “We’ve been inside all day. Time for a walk.”

The young ones took out their usual bag of complaints. It was too wet. Too cold. They were too tired. They were happy right where they were.

“Did I just do the dishes for you all? Did I sample your cookies so you could be sure they weren’t poisoned? Did I make the wassail? Did I carry the trees in?”

They conceded to a
short
walk.
Very
short. The agreement only came after hard-won union negotiations—their union consisting of the two of them, and no one in the universe could out-negotiate his twins. They wanted to watch some chick flick the following Tuesday that was just coming out. They wanted a sleepover after the first of the year.

They were still tacking on demands as he coaxed them toward their jackets and gloves and shoes—still fine-tuning the details, when he opened the door and delicately pushed them all out. It was like herding cats. They could do spin moves. Evasive tactics. He resorted to carrying Pepper upside down, which was guaranteed to make them both shriek nonstop.

When he finally had all three outside, he turned a beleaguered sigh on Rosemary. “They’re monsters. You’d think they’d been raised by wolves.”

She was no help. Her cheeks were already pink from laughing so hard. He obviously wasn’t going to get any sympathy from her, but damn...she was gorgeous when she laughed. Her eyes picked up sparkle, her skin seemed to glow.

“You have so much fun with them!”

He raised his eyebrows. “Of course I have fun with them. What’s the point of having kids if you can’t torment them now and then?”

“That’s not every parent’s attitude.”

“I know. But I never understood it. Why people have kids if they don’t want to spend time with them.”

Talk came easily, nothing demanding or heavy. Outside was a shine-soaked afternoon. The chill had a bite, but raindrops hung on branches like teardrops. Pine needles carpeted the old woods, all washed clean from the midday rain. The house smells had been fabulous, enticing.... The fresh oxygen outside was also enticing, just in a different way. Whit needed that blast of sharp air to clear his head.

Although he already knew what he wanted to do.

The girls pranced on ahead. The gravel path down the mountain was easy to follow, trails just as easily marked. The woods up here were virgin, old, big-trunk trees shadowing out any smaller growth—which made it ideally easy to suddenly, carefully grab Rosemary’s hand. A little twist, beyond a tree or two, then a dance behind pines, and he had her alone. Maybe only for seconds, and not far from the girls. But he still had her alone.