Laurie Paige – The Housekeeper's Daughter (страница 7)

Just as she turned to head inside, Drake stopped his mount beside the fence. He dipped his head toward her in greeting, then simply watched her, making her think of lunch and the way he had looked at her then. There was an invitation in those dark depths, but she didn’t know what it was an invitation to.

The baby stirred and kicked vigorously as if sensing her agitation. Flustered, she rushed into the house.

Three

“Maya, come with us,” Joe Junior shouted as soon as she stepped in the door. “Drake’s gonna teach us how to rope.”

“Yeah, we’ll be rodeo champions someday!” Teddy said.

“Indoor voices, please,” Maya reminded them, going into her room and storing her book bag before swapping her flats for sneakers. “What about your homework?”

The boys vowed they’d do it before dinner and give up their hour of television if need be.

“Okay.”

“We can?” Joe looked disbelieving, then he let out a whoop, quickly suppressed. He and Teddy took off.

Maya’s heart did a somersault. Drake was good to his younger brothers. He obviously cared for them. They needed love and approbation from someone other than her. Their mother was too unpredictable in her love.

Their father loved them, but there was a sadness in him that Maya thought the youngsters sensed, so they tended to be subdued around him. Besides, Joe was deeply involved with all the other problems in the Coltons’ lives at present—the shootings, the disappearance of Emily.

With Drake, the boys could do “guy” things. The shared companionship was good for all of them, Drake included. The boys touched a soft spot in him. He needed that.

Not that she was concerned with his needs, she reminded herself. Pulling on a jacket, she headed outside to keep an eye on her two charges. Ms. Meredith had made it very plain that she paid Maya to be with the boys and keep them from harm. That meant keeping them within view at all times.

Arriving at the paddock, Maya found Drake had set up two sawhorses with brooms for heads and was showing the boys how to hold their lariats. She couldn’t help but laugh. He turned his intense gaze on her with a quickness that dried up the merriment.

“Your laughter makes the day brighter,” he said.

Maya was aware of the boys looking from one to the other, then at each other. They giggled in the way kids do when grown-ups say funny things.

“Is this right?” Joe asked, directing his brother’s attention to their concerns once more.

Leaning on the fence, Maya watched Drake start the two youngsters close to the sawhorses. Joe, being older, caught on quicker than Teddy. Drake moved him back to ten feet, then worked with Teddy until he got the hang of tossing the rope over the broom.

After an hour, Maya called out, “Ten more minutes, guys.”

“Then what?” Drake asked.

He gave her a sexy once-over that startled her thoughts right out of her head. “Then it’s time for homework,” she said, gathering her wits.

When the boys protested, Drake shushed them. “You have to plan your time carefully to get everything done. That’s what a good SEAL does. You’ve done roping, now it’s time for the next item on the agenda, right, teacher?”

“Uh, right,” she echoed.

“Vamoose!” Drake ordered, then grabbed a sawhorse in each hand and left the paddock.

Joe and Teddy climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground beside Maya. “Drake’s really good,” Joe told her. “He could be a rodeo champion if he wanted.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m gonna be,” Teddy decided.

Joe gave him a shove. “Ha!”

“I am!”

“Enough, guys. Don’t argue. Discuss—that’s the rule. And don’t touch another person without permission. Joe, ten minutes earlier to bed.”

“Aww,” Joe started to complain.

Ms. Meredith opened the door and glared at all three of them. “You will lower your voices at once,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” both boys intoned simultaneously.

Maya felt like echoing the boys’ subdued manner. She had stopped “ma’am-ing” Ms. Meredith a year ago upon realizing that, in order to be taken as an equal, she must act as one. She would not be subservient.

“Have the boys done their homework?” Meredith asked her with a severe frown.

“We’re on our way to do that now. Drake was teaching them how to rope. It’s excellent training for eye-hand coordination,” she said in a firm teacher-knows-best voice.

She smiled with an assurance she was far from feeling and hoped she didn’t get a dressing-down in front of her young charges. They tended to take her side, ending with all three of them getting a lecture.

To her relief, the other woman nodded and left them in the hall while she went into the living room to speak to her husband. Maya quickly herded the boys to her room where she set them to work on their lessons. She got out her own books and studied the physical, mental and emotional development of children from kindergarten to sixth grade.

Drake peeled out of his clothes, took a quick shower, dressed, then hurried to the kitchen. Maya wasn’t there.

“Where…are the boys?” he amended his question.

Inez Ramirez, longtime housekeeper, friend and confidante to the Colton family, studied him for an uncomfortable five seconds before answering. “Maya took their dinner to her room. They aren’t finished with their homework yet.”

Disappointment hit him. He tried to keep it from showing. Growing up, he and all the kids on the ranch had decided Inez could read minds. She always knew when they had done something they shouldn’t as soon as they walked into the house. At the present moment, he felt as if she knew of each and every tryst he’d had with her daughter last summer…and of the lustful dreams he’d been having of Maya every night since then.

“Thanks,” he said politely and headed for the living room where he’d seen his parents earlier. He paused when he got within earshot.

“You simply have to pay it. It’s been months,” Drake heard his father say.

“Really, Joe,” Meredith said in obvious annoyance. “It’s only a couple of thousand. You’d think I’d asked for your life savings.”

“Precisely why I did what I did with your credit cards. You have an allowance. I suggest you pay your bills with it.”

“But some of these charges were for your birthday party!”

Drake winced at his father’s laughter. He’d never heard that tone before—cold and harsh and cynical.

“Not one of the family’s better days,” Joe Senior continued in the same vein.

“I…no, it wasn’t,” his mother agreed, her voice going soft. “It frightened me, that you might have been killed, or at the least, incapacitated.”

Drake waited for his father’s reply, but heard nothing. In another second, he heard the tap of his mother’s heels. He stayed in the dining room until she went down the hall toward her room. He heard her door shut with a brittle slam.

After another minute, he ventured into the other room. His father stood at the window, his face expressionless as he stared out at the deepening twilight. He turned when Drake entered, then smiled in greeting.

Drake felt a tightening in his chest. No matter what his father’s disappointments or trials were in life, Joe always had time for children, whether his own or the foster kids that stayed with them at the ranch. Drake admired that quality in his sire and tried to emulate it with his younger brothers.

“How are things with you?” Joe asked.

“Fine, sir,” Drake began, then stopped. “Well, maybe not so good. I’m not making much headway with Maya.”

Joe raised his eyebrows in question.

“She won’t tell me who the father of the child is,” Drake admitted.

“A brandy?” Joe asked, pouring one for himself.

“Please.”

Drake accepted a snifter, then sat on the sofa after his father settled in a chair. The feel of leather, the shine of the furniture and faint scent of lemon oil were familiar and comforting.

His father swirled the brandy in his glass, then fastened a piercing gaze on him. “Does that matter?”

Drake was startled by the question. “Well, yes,” he began. “That is… If it’s mine, then naturally I’ll do the right thing.”

“What if it isn’t?” Joe persisted. “Joe Junior was left on our doorstep. Your mother and I adopted him and raised him as if he were our own flesh and blood.”

Drake nodded. It was such ancient history, he’d truly forgotten that little Joe was a foundling.

“If Maya’s child couldn’t be yours, I assume you would have said so and not come home.”