And he’d decided to show up today? Knowing she had money in her checking account? Demanding that she give it to him?
How the hell did he know she had money?
She put her head under the shower spray. Now that she’d had a minute to process everything, she wasn’t as upset as She was surprised. Shocked that he’d shown up at her house like that. But now that she knew she was on his radar again, she wouldn’t cower as her mom had. She’d stand her ground. And she would call the police. If he touched her or—God forbid—her kids, he’d be in jail so fast his head would spin.
She got out of the shower and dried her hair. In ten minutes she had on clean shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair was combed. Her tears were dry.
She headed outside.
She expected to find Wyatt and the kids in the yard. Instead, they were nowhere in sight. When she knocked on his kitchen door there was no answer, so she stepped inside.
“Wyatt?”
“Back here.”
She followed the sound of his voice to the large corner bedroom, the 1960s version of a master suite, just like the one in her house. Old-fashioned lamps and lacy curtains reminded her of the room she’d inherited herself.
But the bed was covered in boxes, and more boxes were piled on the floor. Taking a bite of cereal from a bowl on the bedside table, Owen saw her. He grinned. “Hi, Mommy.”
Lainie popped up from behind the bed. Claire peeked around a tall stack of shoe boxes. “We’re looking for treasure.”
Missy walked into the room. “In the boxes?”
Owen said, “Yeah. But Lainie spilled her milk.”
Wyatt came running out of the bathroom, holding a roll of toilet paper. “Okay, everybody stand back… .” Then he saw Missy. “Hey.”
She took the toilet paper from him and rushed to the other side of the bed, where rolling milk rapidly approached the edge of the area rug. She spun off some tissue and caught the milk just in time.
Wyatt rubbed his index finger across his nose. “Things look worse than they really are.”
On her way to dump the milk-sodden tissue in the bathroom, she said, “What is all this?”
“This,” Wyatt said, following her to the bathroom, “is everything I found in the closet.”
“Are you kidding me? How’d your gram get all that in a closet?”
“She was quite the crafty packer.”
“I suppose.” Missy glanced around. “So it looks like you haven’t found the jewelry from Scotland yet.”
“Nope. And the kids were fine. Great, actually, until Lainie spilled her milk.”
“She gets overeager.”
He laughed. “She wants to do everything at once.”
“I can take them home now.”
“Why? We’re having fun. And I’m actually getting through three boxes a minute.”
“Three boxes a minute?”
“They open, dump, get bored and move on to the next one. And that leaves me to collect up everything they dumped, and get it back in the box. As I’m collecting, I’m checking for jewelry. At this rate I’ll have this whole room done by noon.”
She laughed.
And he sighed with relief. But the relief didn’t last long. With her tears dry and her mood improved, he knew she’d never tell him about her dad. And he couldn’t just say, “Hey, I saw Monty running out of your house this morning.” It would be awkward for her, like dropping someone in an ice-cold swimming pool.
Still, he couldn’t let this go. He’d been the one to tell Monty she was doing well. He’d thought he was doing her a favor. Turns out he had everything all wrong. And somehow he had to fix it.
“So what happened this morning?”
She strolled back into the bedroom and walked over to Helaina, who’d dumped out a box of panty hose.
“What is this?”
He grabbed the ball of panty hose and stuffed it back into the shoe box. “My grandmother never met a pair of panty hose she didn’t want to save.”
“My grandmother saved them, too. She used them as filler when she made stuffed animals or couch pillows.”
“Thank God. I was beginning to think my grandmother was nuts.” And he’d also noticed Missy had changed the subject. “So what happened this morning?”
She sucked in a breath, ruffling Lainie’s dark hair as the little girl picked up another shoe box, popped the lid and dumped the contents.
Bingo. Jewelry.
He swung around to that side of the bed. Beads and bobbles rolled across the floral comforter. “Well, what do you know?”
Missy caught his gaze. “Don’t get your hopes up. Most of this looks like cheap costume jewelry.”
He picked up a necklace, saw a chip in the paint on a “pearl.”
“Drat.”
“Finding jewelry is a good sign, though. At least you know it’s here somewhere.”
He dropped the string of fake pearls to the bed. “Yeah, well, she has three furnished bedrooms. I found clothes in the drawers in the dressers in each room. All the closets are full of boxes like these.” He sighed. “Who wants to go play in the yard?”
Missy laughed. “Is that how you look for jewelry? In the yard?”
He faced her. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m sort of, kind of, the type of guy who doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
Shaking her head, she laughed again. “So how do you intend to find the jewelry?”
He shrugged. “Not sure yet. But I’m an idea guy. That’s how I got rich.” It was true. Even his writing was a form of coming up with ideas and analyzing them to see if they’d work. “So eventually I’ll figure out a way to find the jewelry without having to look through every darned drawer and box in this house.”
“Well, I’d volunteer to help you, but I have some thinking of my own to do today.”
“Oh, yeah.” He sat on the bed, patted the spot beside him. That was as good of an opening as any to try again to get her to talk to him. “I just told you I’m a good idea man. Maybe I could help you with that thinking.”
“No. You and I have already been over this. Your idea to solve my financial problem was to give me money.”
He
