Mattie wrapped her arms around placid Candy Sue and tickled her lightly, saying, “And Candy Sue is everybody’s three-year-old Sweetums.” Candy Sue giggled that delightful baby laugh that could still lift Orren’s beleaguered spirits. Mattie laughed with her, then hugged her hard.
Jean Marie got up and walked over to Mattie’s chair, leaning against it in disarming familiarity. “If you come work for us, will you try to make me brush my hair?” she asked challengingly.
Mattie smiled. “Nope.” Jean Marie gaped for a second time. Mattie added, “But you won’t get my special snacks if you don’t.”
Jean Marie clamped her mouth shut in a frown. “What special snacks?”
Mattie shrugged. “Brush your hair, and you’ll see.”
Jean Marie scowled. Maybe this one wasn’t quite so easily managed, after all.
Orren had to hide a smile. He waded through the children toward the table, saying to Chaz, “Son, take the girls out back to play while I talk to Miss, um, Mattie.”
“Is that your name?” Jean Marie demanded, eyes narrowed. “Mattie?”
“Yes, it is,” came the smooth answer. “Miss Mattie to you. It’s short for Matilda.”
Put firmly in her place, Jean Marie brought her hands to her hips and announced baldly, “I don’t like her.”
Orren glared and opened his mouth to lay down a scathing scold, but Mattie Kincaid, in her cool, unflappable style, beat him to it. “Now, Jean Marie,” she said calmly, “you might as well know right now that those bullying tactics won’t work with me. My father’s a policeman, you see, and he taught me that bullies are usually more scared than anyone else and they act all tough to hide it. So what are you scared of, Jean Marie, a little old hairbrush? Or maybe you’d rather have some warty old witch who’d spank you and put you to bed without your dinner instead of making you delicious snacks and keeping things neat around here, hmm?”
Jean Marie’s mouth was hanging open again. Clearly at a loss, she spun and ran out of the room. Chaz’s eyes were big as saucers, but no bigger than his father’s. Orren had seldom seen his prickly daughter routed so easily, and he frankly didn’t know whether to be optimistic or worried about it! He turned away, trying to make up his mind about the confounding Matilda Kincaid, his hand lighting on the back of his neck.
Mattie, meanwhile, smoothly took control. Calling Chaz forward with a crooking finger, she put Candy Sue on her feet and motioned for him to take the two younger girls out as his father had instructed. Casting curious glances in his father’s direction, Chaz silently complied, herding the girls ahead of him. When Orren turned back around, Mattie was sitting alone at the table, her hands folded in her lap. He shot a surprised look around the room, frowned, and leaned forward to place both hands flat on the table.
“How old are you?” he asked bluntly, determined to maintain control this time.
Mattie smiled serenely. “Nineteen, the same age you were when you made Chaz.”
Orren’s frown deepened. “Nineteen’s young to watch over four kids—and to be so damned direct!”
Her smile never faltered. “I’ll be twenty soon, if it really makes any difference. And it’s true, isn’t it? You were just nineteen when Chaz’s mother was expecting him.”
He couldn’t deny it, so instead he got defensive about it. “Girl, you’ve got some brass!” She ignored him, craning her neck to get a good look around, though what there was to look at, he couldn’t guess.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
Her gaze was completely undisturbed. “Your wife.”
He felt like he’d been coldcocked. “I don’t have one!”
She looked askance at that. “Those children didn’t spring out of the ground.”
Orren threw up his arms. “She ran away with a rodeo bum! Anything else you want to know?”
She shook her head, but whether in answer to his sarcastic question or in response to his ill-natured revelation, he didn’t know. She looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I can start right away.”
Defeated, he plopped down in the chair he’d vacated earlier and sighed. “I bet you lead your daddy a merry chase.”
Mattie nodded unrepentantly. “He thinks I’m still twelve, which is how old I was when my mother died.”
Orren put his head in his hands. “I don’t know whether to slit my throat now or hold out a few years in hopes my own girls will run off with circus performers.”
“You don’t mean that,” Mattie told him, as if he didn’t already know it.
He dropped his hands and gave her a hard look. “Does your father know you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“How do you suppose he’ll feel about you working for a single man my age?”
She shrugged. “Hard to tell. He might assume you’re too old to be attractive to me.”
He couldn’t believe he’d heard that right. “What?”
She ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken and went on. “Or he might assume you’re too old to be attracted to me. Either way, I’ll be too young in his mind. But, it’s a baby-sitting job, and he’ll think that’s appropriate, so it shouldn’t be any problem, really. If he hedges, I’ll enlist my stepmother’s aid. She’s never had children so she doesn’t have these parental hang-ups. And if he outright forbids it, we’ll have a screaming fight. Then I’ll take the job anyway, because it’s what I want, and I am, after all, over eighteen. I have two years of college, by the way.”
Orren just stared at her for a second. “I think I will cut my throat.”
She got up from the table and said, “Can I look around?”
“No!”
She threw out a slender hip and propped her hand on it. Yes, indeed, she was over eighteen. But she was still a baby. Especially compared to Gracie. He frowned. Now why had he done that, compared her to Grace? She folded her arms and asked baldly, “So how long has she been gone?”
He nearly hit his chin on the table. Little shocker. Well, if she wanted the dirty details, he’d give them to her. He got up and put his hands flat on the table, drilling her with his baby blues. “Two years and seven months.” He waited a beat and added, “A week and three days.”
She batted her lashes at him. “Candy Sue was just a baby.”
“An infant,” he admitted. “I had to put her on a bottle.” Let her digest that.
She was outraged. A nursing mother had abandoned her baby, not to mention three other children and a husband! Then she started looking for acceptable reasons. “She must’ve been young when you married.”
“Older
