Wendy Warren – Undercover Nanny (страница 7)

“James, stop that,” D.J. ordered.

“I’m Sean! And you sa-id—”

The youngest child, Livie, sat on the sofa with a huge teddy bear at her feet, clumsily ladling ice cream out of a half-gallon container. Both the bear and the child, D.J. noticed, had ice cream mustaches. “She said a baddie, she said a baddie…” Livie chanted, kicking her feet.

“All right, everybody stop saying that.” All she needed was for Max to come home the first day to find that his kids had increased their vocabulary by one colorful curse.

Anabel, the older girl, sat in a chair, her eyes glued to the TV. One of the twins, the one who wasn’t Sean, started squirting the table again.

“Hey!” D.J. sprang into action, hopping over assorted toys to grab the offending item from James’s hand. “What is this?” She turned the plastic container over in her hands. “Squeezable mayonnaise?”

“We ranned out of whip cream.”

“All right, give me anything edible.” They stared at her dumbly. “Fork over the food!” She held out her hands and motioned to the little dears. “All of it. Right now.” Collecting the can of whipped cream from Sean and the ice cream from Livie, whose lower lip started to quiver sadly, D.J. said, “There will be no more gourmet art as long as I’m here. Food belongs in bellies, not on tables or any other furniture. Is that understood?”

She received no response, other than big-eyed stares from the three younger children. Anabel continued to watch the TV. “Excuse me,” D.J. said, stepping into her line of vision. “You seem somewhat normal. May I ask what you were doing while your brothers and sisters were destroying the living room?”

Brown eyes, large and beautiful behind a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, and dramatically more solemn than the dancing blue eyes of the other children, gazed at D.J. “I was waiting for you to come out of the bedroom.”

Right. Anabel: one. D.J.: zero. “Well, I’m out now, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to clean up this living room. Then—”

“I’m hungry,” James said.

Sean echoed immediately, “Me, too. I’m starving.”

Livie said plaintively, “Is it time for dinner yet?”

D.J. stared. Were they joking? You could start a burger franchise with what they’d spread on the coffee table. “Didn’t you eat anything while you were doing that?” She pointed to what looked like a model of Mt. Everest.

Sean shook his head. “That was for Livie’s bear. It’s his birthday.”

The little girl nodded hard. “He wanted to play ice cream parlor.”

With a heavy sigh and a shake of her exotically dark head, Anabel slid off her chair to approach D.J. “I’ll take these things to the kitchen,” she said, removing the ice cream and other weapons of living room destruction from D.J.’s arms. “You’d better get the kids something to eat before they have a major meltdown.”

The girl trooped off to the kitchen, and D.J. felt a ridiculous urge to call out, “Don’t leave me!” despite the fact that Anabel, too, was only a child. But at least she seemed to know what she was doing. Taking a deep breath, D.J. said, “All right. We’ll clean up here, and then we’ll eat some dinner. Okay?”

Ending with a question was her first mistake. Sean leaped up. “Jamie’s starving,” he informed in a sudden show of brotherly support.

“So’s Livie.” Jamie jumped up, too.

Swinging her legs, Livie picked up her previous chant. “You said a baddie…you said a baddie….”

D.J. wanted Max to come back. Right now. In the restaurant he had juggled all four kids, kept his sense of humor and managed to appear relatively sane. Of course, he’d had practice at this. He’d given her his cell phone number; she could call him for a little five-minute-advice session. She could imagine him responding in that half-wry, half-soothing tone he had and felt better already.

Unfortunately, she could also imagine him wondering what kind of wimp he had hired, and that did not sit well at all.

Whipped cream and mayonnaise slipped in glops from the table to the carpet. Livie’s bear dripped ice cream onto the sofa.

The boys joined their sister’s chant.

And D.J. realized she wasn’t nearly as tough as she’d thought.

Chapter Three

Sunshine spilled across the green hills like drizzles of honey, sweetening the earth, kissing the children’s skin as they romped and laughed in the afternoon rays. Daisy grinned at the children’s antics.

“Anabel! Sean, James, Livie!” she called, waving them over. “Time for your music lesson.”

Picking up her guitar, she lowered herself gracefully to the warm grass. Immediately the children scampered over. They looked so darling in the outfits she’d made for them. And you could hardly tell that the jumpers used to be a set of curtains hanging in her bedroom.

Positioning her fingers behind the frets, Daisy strummed a few chords from the children’s favorite song. “You know this one, so I’ll begin and then you join in. James, remember the line is ’jam and bread’ not ’yam and bread.’” James flushed, but giggled along with the others. “All right, here we go.”

Strumming the intro and nodding in time to the music, Daisy lifted her voice. “’Doh, a deer, a female deer…’”

Sitting upright on the couch, D.J. heard herself gasp as she came fully awake. Dazed, she looked around. The living room lights were still on, and the TV screen glowed with the image of Maria and Captain Von Trapp joining their family onstage for a patriotic rendition of “Edelweiss.” Swinging her feet to the floor, D.J. calmed her labored breath.

Oh, dear God.

She’d popped The Sound of Music into the VCR after the kids had lost the bedtime battle, and the living and dining rooms had been restored—through a heroic effort of her own blood, sweat and tears—partially to order. Recalling that the lead character in The Sound of Music was a nanny, she’d hoped to pick up a few pointers. Her night had been torture.

After the kids started screaming for food, D.J. had discovered that there wasn’t any. A few slices of bread, two eggs, a mostly empty box of corn flakes and a jar of peanut butter was all she’d had to work with. Her cooking skills were more practical than creative, so a trip to the market had been unavoidable.

And that was when the real trouble began. D.J. never again wanted to visit a market with anyone under six foot two. Never. Making the dinner, however, had made the nightmare of shopping seem like a stroll down a country lane.

No two kids had wanted the same thing. Their choices had ranged from chicken nuggets to French toast to corn dogs and tater tots. Anabel had thought they should have a roast, mashed potatoes and two vegetables because then all the food groups would be represented. D.J. had settled the dilemma by buying hot dogs with buns, frozen tater tots, chicken strips from the hot deli and a bag of carrots and celery sticks as a nod to the food pyramid.

It should have been easy. But the water for the hot dogs had boiled over, the tater tots had turned into tater rocks in the microwave, and Livie had pronounced the coating on the chicken strips “yucky,” upon which she’d proceeded to peel off the crumbs, dropping them onto the already abused carpet. D.J. didn’t even want to think about the damage four children and a bottle of squeezable ketchup had done.

Checking her watch, she gasped.

Midnight. For pity’s sake! She’d spent her whole evening cleaning to establish her fake identity as a twenty-first-century Mary Poppins. Then she’d snoozed when she should have snooped.

Pushing herself off the couch, she turned off the TV and went to check on the kids. Relieved to see that they were still sleeping soundly, she decided to search the hall closets first, hoping to find photos, files, anything that might interest Loretta and tell her something about her grandson’s potential as heir apparent and future CEO of the Mallory Superstores dynasty. The chaos D.J. had witnessed so far in his home life wasn’t a plus, but she’d bet the mere fact he had children would tickle Loretta’s fancy.

D.J. tried to picture the surprise and the smiles when Loretta realized she was a great-granny four times over and Max realized he’d never have to worry about finances again.

Opening the closet door, she scanned piles of hastily folded linens and towels, but nothing of real interest. She was stretching to peek at the top shelf when she heard the click of the front door.

Given the late hour, she shouldn’t have been surprised by Max’s arrival, but the sense that she was doing something wrong made her heart skip. When the living room door creaked, she reacted automatically. Shutting the closet door as quietly as she could, she ran on tiptoe to her bedroom. Standing in the dark with her ear to the closed door, she listened to the approach of Max’s footsteps and waited for her runaway pulse to calm down. The closer the footsteps, the more nervous she became.

Uncertainty washed through her. Uncertainty and doubt and a sudden desire to run. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt this nervous.

Bill Thompson, owner and founder of Thompson Investigations—and the man whose future she was currently trying to save—would read her the riot act if he knew she was “undercover.” He’d always insisted on taking straightforward missing-persons cases, tracking down deadbeat dads or surveying cheating spouses. He’d taught D.J. it was possible to make a good living and do a good service at the same time without endangering oneself or others. D.J. used to tease him that he liked surveillance because it enabled him to make a living drinking coffee and eating his wife’s homemade doughnuts while he sat in his car.