Wild Iris Ridge. RaeAnne Thayne

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      This was good, though. She couldn’t imagine anything she would rather do than spend the evening with her two favorite children.

      She set the hefty box on the bottom step and put the toy store bag on top of it. She was shrugging out of her raincoat when Carter and Faith came barreling down the hall, their hair wet. Carter was wearing LEGO Star Wars pajamas, and Faith had on a nightgown sporting Strawberry Shortcake. They looked startled to see her but rushed over with ready hugs.

      “What are you doing here?” Faith asked.

      “Well, my plan was to drop a few things off for you, but your dad just asked me to stay with you for a couple of hours while he runs into work.”

      “Yay!” Faith exclaimed just as Brendan emerged from down the hall wearing navy cargo pants and a white polo shirt with the logo of the Hope’s Crossing Fire Department on the chest. He looked big and tough and dangerous.

      Oh, and delicious. She couldn’t deny that.

      “Good news, kids,” he said, grabbing a set of keys off a table in the entryway. “You get to stay in your own beds instead of sleeping at Grandpa’s place or at Aunt Charlotte’s. Your aunt Lucy has kindly agreed to keep an eye on you this evening until I can make it back.”

      Carter raced to her and gave her a complicated high-five. Somehow she managed to keep up. “Can we stay up until ten?” he asked.

      “Eight-thirty,” she countered. She figured that was appropriate when Brendan didn’t protest the negotiation.

      “Yay! That’s half an hour later than usual,” Carter exclaimed.

      “Just this once,” Brendan said. He scooped up his son and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Be good for Aunt Lucy.”

      “I’m always good,” Carter insisted.

      Faith rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything. Brendan set the boy down and folded his daughter into a hug. “You, too. No staying up all night reading, got it?”

      “Got it.” She hugged him hard. “Good night, Dad. Be careful, okay?”

      His mouth tightened a little, but Lucy watched him twist it into a smile that looked forced. “Will do, kiddo.”

      He straightened. “Thank you again,” he said to Lucy. “Seriously. You saved the day.”

      “Right time, right place. I’m glad I could help.”

      He studied her for just a moment, and she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. She was no doubt bedraggled from the rainy walk to his house. She should have just driven, but it had seemed ridiculous when he lived less than a block away.

      It didn’t matter what she looked like, she reminded herself. Brendan didn’t care. He had made that quite plain when he had kissed her senseless one moment and then fallen in love with her best friend the next.

      “All right, my darlings,” she said after he left. “Who wants to see what I’ve brought you?”

      “Me! Me!” Carter exclaimed.

      Faith chewed on her bottom lip. “Did Dad say it was okay?”

      Brendan had known she had gifts for the kids. He had seen her carrying them in, and he hadn’t not said it was okay.

      She was going to take that as approval—though it annoyed her that he had apparently expressed enough displeasure about her gift-giving habits that perceptive little Faith picked up on it.

      “It’s fine,” she answered.

      “Okay,” Faith decided. “Then I would like to see, too.”

      She tried not to overspend on the children, though she had to check herself at times. She had been paid an exorbitant salary at NexGen, far exceeding her needs and her investments, and had few people to spend it on—a number that had dwindled in the past two years with Jessie’s and Annabelle’s deaths.

      Her father, her stepmother, her half sister, Crystal, and the children. That was about the size of it.

      She wanted to spoil Carter and Faith with trinkets and treasures but knew the things she gave them paled in comparison to actually making the effort to have contact with them through email, Skype and phone calls.

      To that end, these gifts were small, but Carter adored the clever magnetic shapes that could be put together to form all kinds of structures, and Faith gave an adorable gasp of delight at the little elastic band bracelet loom and the supply of bands that came along with it.

      “Oh! I’ve been wanting one of these to make bracelets for my friends,” she exclaimed.

      “Great. We can figure it out together. The woman at the toy store showed me how, and it looks simple enough.”

      “I’m so glad you’re here,” Faith said.

      “I am, too, sweetheart,” she answered—and to her surprise, it wasn’t completely a lie, at least not when she was with the children.

      She pulled out the heavy box she had carried down from Iris House. “The real treasure is in here, though.”

      “What is it?” Carter asked. “Can I open it?”

      “You both can.”

      The children knelt on either side of the box and worked together to pull back the cardboard flaps.

      “Books.”

      They both said the word at the same time, Carter with disgust and Faith in a reverent tone.

      “Yes. Books. I found them up at Iris House. These were all your mom and my favorites when we were children—The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Nancy Drew, Jack London, The Hobbit.”

      “Hey, I saw that movie,” Carter exclaimed.

      “You need to read the book now.”

      “Only I can’t read chapter books,” he answered in a duh sort of tone.

      “It’s only a matter of time, kid. You’ll be reading chapter books before you know it and then you’ll want to read some of these books, I promise.”

      She pulled a boxed collection from the bottom of the box and held it out to Faith, who looked dazed with delight at the literary bounty. “And look at this. My very favorite. Anne of Green Gables. One summer when I came to stay with Annabelle for a few weeks, your mom and I made a pact to read the whole series by the time school started again. I think I was thirteen.”

      She actually knew she had been thirteen. It was the summer her father had left them, she remembered, when she had been lost and frightened, emotionally traumatized by a lifetime of being caught in the crosshairs on the battlefield of a horrible marriage.

      When her mother—seeking attention, as always—made a halfhearted suicide attempt and was subsequently committed to the psychiatric treatment unit at the local hospital, Robert Drake had once more shrugged off responsibility for her.

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