late wife well enough to say with any uncertainty what she might have said or done concerning his absences. He was depressingly irritated to know that the same was true of his children, and in the eighteen months since a traffic accident had taken Diana’s life, that somehow had not changed. Adam sighed, too tired and too deflated to wrangle with his unruly children. How much easier it had been to deal with tough adult men! He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Get on to bed, all of you. It’s late.”
Robbie and Ryan sat up and folded their legs, watching their sister to see how she was going to respond to their father’s order. Wendy stuck out her plump pink bottom lip and glared at Adam with his own light golden-brown eyes. “Who’s gonna tuck us in, with Nanny Godiva gone?”
“You should have thought of that before you filled her shoes with snow, little Miss Ringleader. Now get to bed before I start smacking bottoms.”
Wendy folded her arms stubbornly, but just as Adam felt his temper go, she suddenly bounced up off the chair and tore out of the room, her little arms swinging stiffly at her sides. The boys scrambled up and ran after her, singing, “Hey! Gone, the witch’s gone. Hey, hey, witchy’s gone…”
Adam put a hand to the back of his neck. What on earth was he going to do now? He had an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, with an auto lube franchiser from Minneapolis, and another on Friday, with a real estate agent. Surely Rebecca or Natalie could watch the kids for a few hours tomorrow. He’d worry about Friday later. He supposed he could always cancel, but only as a last resort. He was tired of living in limbo. He had to find something to do now that his retirement from the military was official. He needed a career, a business, a focus of some sort, but how could he concentrate on that, when the kids had just managed to drive off yet another nanny? Sometimes he wondered if those little rascals were actually trying to trap him here in the house—an unlikely scenario, since they seemed to actively dislike him much of the time.
He shook his head as he walked barefoot toward his bedroom, hitting light switches along the way. He groaned when the thought occurred to him that Godiva was likely to crack up her car on the snowy, icy roads and sue the pants off him. Wouldn’t that just cap the New Year! He ignored the whispers coming from behind Wendy’s door and trudged into the cold confines of his bedroom. Not even the blaze flickering in the fireplace could warm up the place, decorated as it was in shades of white and ice blue, but he crawled gratefully beneath the dark red coverlet—the one change he’d taken the initiative to make—and settled down to a happily blank sleep.
A little thumb pulled his eyelid up and back, nearly gouging out his eye in the process.
“Ow!”
Adam yanked away and surveyed his son with dismay and exhaustion. How many times could one little boy wake up in the space of a single night?
“God, Robbie, don’t you ever sleep?”
“Ryan,” corrected a petulant voice.
“Oh.” The boys were alike enough to confuse, if one didn’t look too closely, but Wendy claimed that their mother had never gotten them mixed up, and Adam could not quite squelch a spurt of guilt that he had, however seldom, done so. Sighing, he rolled onto his back and laid an arm across his eyes. “What is it now?”
“Ah hun-wy,” said Ryan, his slight speech impediment exaggerated by the three fingers he had thrust into his mouth. Adam’s aunt Lindsay, the family pediatrician, had told him that there was no reason for concern, but he worried anyway—when he had the energy, which he didn’t at the moment.
“Ryan,” Adam groaned, “it’s the middle of the night.”
“Na-a-aw. Id maw-ning!”
Surely not. It couldn’t possibly be morning. He hadn’t slept two full hours yet. Oh, God, don’t let it be morning, he thought, carefully lifting his arm and slitting open his eyes. Oh, God, it was morning. Adam made a whimpering sound in the back of his throat and resigned himself to the inevitable, even as he rolled onto his side and craned his neck to read the time on the digital alarm clock beside the bed. Seven-forty. The alarm would screech in five more minutes. Five minutes was not worth fighting for.
“All right,” he said, sitting up and yawning. “What’s for breakfast?”
Ryan shrugged and popped his fingers out of his mouth. “I don’t know.”
Adam swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the T-shirt he’d left lying on the floor the night before. “Well, go see what Nanny’s making, and come tell—”
“Nanny’s gone,” Ryan reminded him.
Adam closed his eyes. Gone, gone, witchy’s gone. Godiva had left them the night before, and Cook didn’t come in until just before lunch. Heaven help them. Well, surely there was something he could dish up…cold cereal, perhaps, doughnuts… He’d have given a thousand bucks to put on his fatigues and jog down to the mess hall just once more. But things were bound to look better after he’d gotten down a cup of coffee. Coffee. He groaned again, realizing that there wouldn’t be any coffee, not this morning. The civilian world was hell.
Ryan scrambled off the bed and attached himself to Adam’s leg, tugging with all the might in his little limbs. Adam laughed at the senselessness of it and got awkwardly to his feet, reaching for the bathrobe that hung over the bedpost. He threw it on and belted it over the fleece pants he’d worn to bed and the T-shirt he’d just donned. His shoes were around here somewhere, if he could just see around the bunched body of his son.
“Okay, okay, Ryan,” he said, patting the boy’s back. “I’m on my way.”
Ryan let go and ran to the door, where he paused and called back. “Better huwwy.” He shook his finger at Adam in a perfect parody of his older sister. “Wendy say if you don’t come, she gonna make breakfast herself.”
Adam’s eyes widened in alarm. Forgetting his shoes, he pelted toward the kitchen, bawling, “Wen-dy!”
He burst through the louvered swinging doors in time to see his daughter standing on a chair that she had pulled up to the counter and dumping flour into a glass bowl from a sack. The flour hit with a whump and rose in clouds around the bowl, which wobbled ominously near the edge of the counter. Adam threw himself across the cooktop island and snatched Wendy off the chair, just as the bowl shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Flour and glass sprayed the narrow aisle between the counter and the island. Wendy immediately burst into loud wails. Adam pulled her up onto the island, expecting to see blood running down her legs. He sagged with relief when all he saw was flour dusting her legs. At that moment, the boys pushed through the door, Robbie first, then Ryan, his hand in his mouth.
“Out!” Adam barked. Neither of them moved a muscle. “There’s glass all over the floor! Get out of here!”
Eyes wide, they backed through the swinging door, but then Robbie pushed them open again and stuck his head inside. “Wendy, you hurt?”
Wendy’s wails had subsided to sobs now, but she made no effort to answer. Adam answered for her, still miffed—pained, if he was to be honest—that his children always seemed to need a reason to obey him. “She’s not hurt, she’s just scared,” he said gruffly, pulling her to him and beginning to inch his way across the floor toward the door, on the lookout for the telltale sparkle of glass splinters.
Once safely on the carpet of the dining room, he set Wendy on her feet, went down on one knee and grasped her by her solid little shoulders.
