aunt clear up after a meager dinner of cabbage soup and crackers.
Sylvie’s ocean-blue eyes had turned down as she glanced at Ciara and Aiden huddled by the hearth. “Poor mites,” she’d murmured with a shake of her head that had loosened her flyaway graying blond hair. “Lost their mum and da in that terrible fire a few months ago. Their older sister had the raising of them, but she struggled so. Now she has a chance to go with Mercer’s Belles to Washington Territory. Sure-n but she’d be a fool not to take it.”
He’d read the story in the papers that eventually ended up blowing down the streets of Five Points before someone used them to fill the holes in the walls or burned them for fuel. Some fellow from the wilderness claimed men in Seattle needed teachers and seamstresses. The editors seemed to think the women were more likely to be forced into marriage or worse.
“So she’ll marry and go on with her life,” he’d surmised. “She’ll have what she needs, and she won’t think of them again.”
His aunt had set a sudsy hand on his arm. “Miss Katie O’Doul might have had her heart fixed on a crown, but Miss O’Rourke is another sort entirely.”
That night, he’d been willing to give Maddie O’Rourke the benefit of the doubt. But a reporter had sailed with Mercer’s Belles, and as his stories returned to be printed, Michael had struggled to find charity with Ciara and Aiden’s sister.
Roger Conant, a good Irishman his aunt insisted, told of flirtations galore with the ship’s officers, among the other passengers and at every port of call. How could Maddie O’Rourke be immune? He’d been the most surprised when the telegraph had arrived stating that passage had been paid for Ciara and Aiden and a lady to escort them.
“She must have found a rich husband,” he’d told his aunt when she’d shared it with him after the excited children had gone to bed.
“She signs the cable Maddie O’Rourke,” Sylvie had pointed out, showing him the closely worded note. “She’s made her fortune, just as she’d hoped, and a great deal faster than anyone expected. And now the dear girl hopes to share it with her family.”
She was trying to share it, all right. Michael didn’t like thinking what such quarters must have cost her to build and furnish. She clearly wanted her brother and sister beside her, yet something told him she wasn’t sure what to do with them now.
Leaving the children to put away their belongings, he followed her downstairs, locating her in the kitchen. The whitewashed walls enclosed a thick worktable with space below for bowls and rolling pins. Bright copper pots and dark iron pans hung from hooks over a squat wooden box with a lid. Its purpose defied him. One wall was built of red brick, with a small iron door at the bottom to cover the firebox and a wider door opening higher up for the oven.
Which just might have been big enough to fit a certain longshoreman.
Maddie was at a door in the wall to his right, digging through the supplies stored there. Casks and sacks crowded the floor; the shelves at the back were filled with tins of butter, cones of sugar in bright blue wrappers, jars of preserves, and bottles and vials of things he wasn’t sure he could name.
She glanced at him as he came to a stop beside her, and he thought he saw something glistening on her cheek before she returned to her perusal of the supplies.
“It wasn’t my place to settle that,” he said. “Forgive me.”
She reached out and pulled down a fat ham, molasses thick on its sides. “You had to settle it,” she said, carrying the ham to the table. “I couldn’t. They’ve changed. Once I was the world to them both, and when I told them what they should be doing, they did it.”
As she pulled a knife from a drawer in the worktable, he ventured closer. She sliced through the meat with brisk efficiency, but her face remained tight.
“Ciara is growing up,” he allowed. “Though don’t tell her I said so. She’ll take it as leave to make further demands.”
Instead of smiling as he’d hoped, Maddie grimaced. “She’s been like that since she was born. Da used to be teasing her like you did, calling her royalty.” She rested the knife on the table. “She never was treating me that way. I’m thinking she blames me for leaving her behind.”
She ducked her head, but Michael heard her sniff.
“It’s hard to understand when someone you love leaves,” he murmured, her pain like a wound inside him. “When my parents died, I remember feeling like I was the last person in the whole world.”
She paused, slanting a glance up at him. “Who had the raising of you?”
He smiled. “Sylvie. She’s sister to my mother. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
Her hands started moving again. “But you didn’t rail at her, tell her you had no use for her.”
“I wasn’t eleven,” he pointed out with a shrug. “Or I might have. As it was, I was the first of her borrowed children, as she likes to call them. And she gave me many brothers and sisters over the years.”
She took the remaining ham back to the larder. “Did you never mind having to share her?”
Had Maddie minded? Sylvie had said Ciara and Aiden’s mother had been Maddie’s stepmother. Maddie had to have been nearly grown when they came along.
“I never saw it as sharing,” he told her. “Sylvie made you feel like the most important person in her world, like the two of you were partners. Her children were my family.”
“Small wonder you’re so good with Ciara and Aiden,” she said, bending to gather some potatoes from a sack. “I just wanted to give them a home, a family again. I never thought they’d fight against me on that.”
“Give them time,” Michael advised as she carried the potatoes to the table. “You’ve had more than five months to accustom yourself to the place. For them, life changed when they boarded the ship, and it changed again when they left it.”
She nodded. “I’ve just missed them so. All I wanted was for them to be happy.” She glanced up at him. A drop of molasses darkened the tear on her cheek.
Unthinking, he reached out and wiped the smudge away with his thumb. Her skin was as silky and warm as it looked, and all at once he smelled cinnamon again, as if she were the sweet treat he was meant to savor. Embarrassed by the thought, he stepped back as her face turned pink.
“You’ve given them every reason to be happy,” he said. “A good home, a warm welcome. And what child wouldn’t want to live over a bakery?”
She smiled then, brightening the room, lifting his heart. “Sure-n they say that the way to a man’s heart is down his throat. That must be twice as true for children.”
She gathered the food and a jar of preserves and headed for the door before Michael could stir himself to help. He thought she was right about Ciara and Aiden—good cooking and kind words would go a long way toward healing their hurts, helping them see the love their sister was trying to offer.
A shame it would take more than a bakery to make him ready to take a chance on love again.
