Mother In A Moment. Allison Leigh

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СКАЧАТЬ at his niece. Her hair stuck out in tangles and the pink-striped sundress she wore looked as if it was on backward. It was only seven in the morning. “Do you want a bagel?” He held up his own.

      She shook her head and he set the bagel half back on his plate. “What do you want, Regan?” He wasn’t going to play guessing games when it came to food with her. He’d done that too many times before Darby had come to stay, and he wasn’t falling for it again.

      “Waffles.”

      “Then you’ll have to wait for Darby to get up so she can fix them for you,” he told her. “I don’t do waffles.”

      She sniffed, and she was so much like Elise had been—all snooty and regal—that he felt irritation rise. He jabbed his fingers through his hair and focused on his niece, reminding himself to be patient. She was only four, and her world had violently changed only a week ago. “I can heat up a frozen waffle,” he offered.

      “Frozen waffles aren’t real waffles,” she said.

      He shrugged. He wasn’t going to take offense at a comment from a four-year-old waffle connoisseur. “Then you’ll have to wait for Darby. Where is Reid?” He leaned over to the counter and snagged the coffeepot to refill his mug.

      Regan scooted out a chair and climbed up on it, sitting high on her knees and leaning over the edge of the table, anchoring his newspaper with her elbows. “I dunno. I don’t like you.”

      “Why?”

      Her eyebrows drew together. She poked at the edge of the newspaper with her fingertip, deliberately tearing it. “’Cause you’re mean.”

      Garrett looked at her over his coffee. “And you’re rude,” he returned smoothly.

      “No, I’m not. I’m a princess. My mommy told me so.”

      “I’m sure she did. But even princesses have good manners.”

      “They certainly do,” Darby commented from the doorway. She held out her hand for Regan. “Apologize to your uncle Garrett for what you said.”

      “She doesn’t have to apologize for telling me what she thinks,” Garrett said. He held up the page of the newspaper that was ripped crookedly through the article he’d been reading. “You can apologize for doing this,” he told Regan.

      She pouted. “It was a accident.”

      “You can still be sorry for an accident,” Darby said. “Excuse us.” She didn’t look at Garrett as she led the girl out of the room.

      He could hear them talking, then the temper-filled stomp of small feet going upstairs. Darby returned and headed for the coffee. She poured a cup and held it to her face, inhaling deeply. “Nectar of the gods,” she murmured.

      He dragged his attention from her legs. But it wasn’t easy. Not with the thigh-length white sundress she wore. “Is Regan upstairs making a voodoo doll of me to stick pins into?”

      “No. She’s just testing you, Garrett. To see where the boundaries are.”

      “I’m not a complete idiot.”

      Her lips parted. “I…know that.” She set aside her coffee cup and pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge. “I expected you to be at work by now.”

      “Disappointed?”

      She whirled around, and he smiled faintly. Rolling her eyes, she turned back to what she was doing.

      “I thought I’d take a crack at the plumbing,” he admitted. “The office won’t fall apart without me for a few hours.”

      She was cracking eggs into a pan. “Why don’t you just hire someone? The owner should take care of it, anyway, just like all the other things wrong around here.”

      “They should, but they haven’t. And I’m a hands-on guy, what can I say? Do you always wear white or tan-colored clothes?”

      Her movements slowed for only a moment. “Yes. I’m a bland kind of girl. What can I say?”

      “Hardly bland. More like a refreshing vanilla ice cream on a hot summer day.”

      Her eyes were amused. “My, my. Poetry. What are you angling for now? Another ‘barely a week’ of child care?”

      He shook out his paper and started reading again. There was another article about the accident. This time, instead of the usual focus about Elise’s family connections, the subject of the article was the other driver, who’d apparently had some pretty serious connections himself. To the kind of wealth and power that Caldwell could only dream.

      “Just saying what I think. Like Regan does. Did you see this article? That Phil Candela guy was apparently some mucky-muck with Rutherford Transportation outta Kentucky. Wonder what he was doing in Fisher Falls.”

      “Maybe he was on his way through to somewhere else,” she said abruptly. “What are you really doing here? Why aren’t you out conquering the world of construction?”

      “Fixing the plumbing,” he assured. His coffee mug was empty again and he stood, reaching for the pot. What he was really doing was trying to follow Hayden’s suggestion that, if he wanted to win in court against Caldwell, he needed to show at least some makings of a family man.

      “Want more?” He held up the pot. She shook her head, and he realized her cup was still brimming full. “Still too hot to drink?”

      “Oh, I don’t drink the stuff. Tastes horrid. I just like the smell.”

      “Sacrilege,” he grumbled, pouring the rest of the pot into his cup. “Heresy.”

      “Good taste.” She slid two fried eggs onto a plate and handed them to him, shutting off the stove in the same motion. “Eat your eggs. I’m going to get the kids now, so if you don’t want to get in the way of flying food, you’ll eat them quickly and escape.”

      He took the plate. “Darby.” She paused in the doorway, looking back at him. “About last night. In here.”

      Her skin turned pink. “It was late,” she dismissed.

      He hadn’t quite known what he’d been going to say. But he knew it wasn’t that. “Yeah, right,” he said blandly. “Late.”

      Four hours later he was cursing the idiot who’d installed the pipes, the idiot inspector who’d approved them and the idiot corporation that owned the house and probably a dozen others just like it. He’d hunched into crawlspaces, climbed through the sloppily insulated attic, torn out a good piece of wall and dug a ditch near the foundation deep enough to swim in.

      “Having fun?”

      He looked up at Darby from hosing off his muddy hands. She’d brought the kids out to the backyard and they’d all been chasing a bright beach ball around the grass. In fact, Darby had several grass stains on her sundress, which wasn’t a dress at all, he’d realized. The skirt of her dress was actually shorts, as he’d seen when she’d been trying to teach Regan how to turn cartwheels.

      She СКАЧАТЬ