The Cottage on the Corner (3 page)

She yanked another coat from the closet. This one tiny and pink and so well-worn, most of the color had faded.

If he'd really thought the kid was his, no way would he let her go to Las Vegas to stay with strangers. As it was, he couldn't send her into the bitter cold with a coat that didn't look like it could keep a polar bear warm.

“There's no sense in waking Zuzu up and dragging her out in the cold,” he said. “You can stay for the night.”

“Forget it.” Morgan nearly spat the words, her tight pinched expression and flashing eyes reminding him of all the reasons why he'd been happy to leave when she'd kicked him to the curb. “I wouldn't want her to spend another minute in the house of a man who refuses to acknowledge her as his own.”

She stomped to the bedroom, lifted the little girl into her arms.

Despite being woken from a sound sleep, the kid didn't make a sound, just shoved her arms into her coat sleeves at Morgan's bidding, and watched Max with wide blue eyes.

Morgan lifted a small black suitcase, grabbed the little girl's hand. “Let's go, Zuzu. Your
father
is too busy to be bothered.”

“I am not—”

“Can it!” she snapped, stalking from the room, the little girl running along beside her. Still not a peep out of her. She wasn't Max's kid. He was 99 percent sure of it. But that 1 percent?

Yeah. That was bothering him.

Not to mention the fact that he felt sorry for Zuzu.

She looked way too stoic for a child her age, her gaze solemn as she stood at the door and waited for Morgan to shove her feet into three-inch heels. No shoes for the girl. She wore those footy pajama things. Blue with green and yellow cars all over the fabric.

Shouldn't she be wearing pink or yellow or some other girly color?

She stared at Max while Morgan shrugged into her coat. He stared at her. He didn't know much about kids, but this one seemed to be upset. With him.

I'm not your dad.
That's what he wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut because the faster she and her mother got out of his house, the happier he'd be.

Morgan opened the door. Frigid winter air blew in, and Zuzu shivered, reaching her arms up to Morgan.

“Mommy's hands are full. You're going to have to walk,” she said, hooking a designer purse over her shoulder and grabbing the suitcase. “Come on. Let's get out of here.” She grabbed Zuzu's hand a little too roughly for Max's liking. It reminded him of the years before he'd gone to live with his grandparents. Of being dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, shoved into whatever car his mother happened to be borrowing. It made him think of all the times he'd been driven to the next seedy little apartment, the next uncle or dad or whatever his mother asked him to call her newest boyfriend.

Not his problem, but the kid looked so tiny, her black hair pulled into a ponytail that listed sideways on her head. She shoved her thumb into her mouth, eyeing him suspiciously. Smart kid, but no matter how smart she was, there was no way she could defend herself from the trouble Morgan might drag her into.

Let them go,
his inner voice yelled, but his gut was saying something else, and he always listened to his gut.

“Why don't you warm up the car, Morgan?” he suggested, knowing exactly what his ex would do. She'd always been pretty damn good at jumping at opportunities. “That way the kid won't freeze.”

“What do you ca—” Morgan's gaze dropped to Zuzu, her eyes going from angry to calculating.

“All right,” she said, just like he'd known she would.

She crouched down so she was face-to-face with her daughter. “You stay right here, okay? Mommy will be back soon.”

She hurried down the stairs, the suitcase banging against her thigh. Max listened to high heel shoes tapping on pavement. Maybe he was wrong about Morgan. Maybe she'd changed. Maybe, just maybe, having a child had made her into something more than the selfish self-serving wretch she'd been when they were living together.

The sound of a car engine split the early morning silence, and he tensed.

One. Two. Three
.

Headlights splashed across the pavement below, sweeping along the winter dry grass beside the driveway.

Four, five, six.

Tires whooshed over pavement and the Mazda sped away.

Morgan might have looked back, but Max doubted it.

Apparently she hadn't changed. At least not in any way that mattered. He looked at the little girl. She looked at him. He was pretty certain she knew that she'd been screwed.

“Well, kid,” he said. “I'm sorry about this.”

The little girl took her thumb out of her mouth, and did exactly what he didn't want her to do.

She started to cry.

Not just silent tears. Loud wails that drilled into Max's skull and made him want to put her in his car and go after Morgan.

He'd made his choice, though. He liked to think he was the kind of guy who never made rash decisions. He'd keep the kid until he knew for sure she wasn't his, because sending her off with a mother who planned to hand her over to the first person she met in Las Vegas wouldn't work.

“Sorry, Zuzu. You're stuck with me for a while,” he muttered as he scooped her into his arms and walked down the stairs. Zuzu's suitcase sat in the middle of the driveway, a car seat beside it. At least Morgan had thought to leave that.

He picked up the case, but left the car seat where it was. He'd deal with it in the morning. The kid was still wailing and shoving at his arms like he was some kind of monster set on devouring her.

He carried her into the apartment and dropped the suitcase on the floor.

“Calm down, kid. I'm not going to hurt you,” he muttered.

She didn't seem convinced. He set her down in the kitchen, opened up the cupboards, looking for something Zuzu might want to eat. Maybe if she had food in her mouth, she'd stop screaming.

Protein bars didn't seem like a good choice.

Dry pasta? Nope.

He didn't have any cereal. No cookies. Nothing but a box of saltines. He pulled them out of the cupboard.

“Want a cracker, Zuzu?” He ripped open the package, and that seemed to be just enough to get the kid's attention. She stopped crying, walked to the dinette set, and scrambled up into one of the chairs.

Quiet. Finally.

He put a cracker in front of her.

Pete chose that moment to make an appearance. He slithered into the kitchen and wound his way around Max's legs.

Zuzu took one look at the old cat and started screaming again.

 

 

Sleepless nights weren't all that bad.

Sure, Charlotte was going to be tired by the end of the day, but she'd finished all her morning baking before the sun rose. Now with it just peeking out from behind distant mountains, she had enough time for a quick cup of coffee before she headed out on deliveries.

It was always good to be ahead of the game.

As an added bonus, it wasn't the twenty-seventh anymore.

“Thank God for that!” she muttered, grabbing a black marker from a drawer and scribbling out the date on the calendar that hung from the kitchen wall. It was childish, she knew, but it always made her feel better to do it.

She plugged in the coffeemaker, humming a little to convince herself that she really was happy that she'd been up all night.

After all, things could be a lot worse. She could still be living in Billings, making boxed potatoes and precooked meatloaf for the residents of Maple Ridge Convalescent Center. She hadn't minded the work. As a matter of fact, she'd loved the elderly men and women and the stories they'd told. Lives lived long and well. Lives lived with regrets and struggles. She'd make breakfast or lunch or dinner, and walk out into the dining room to chat.

She'd loved the job. What she'd hated was going home.

She poured fresh coffee into a chipped mug that had been left behind by the house's last tenants. There'd been plates, too. Old cups and jelly jars. A Crock-Pot that she used on occasion. Not that she had anyone to cook for but herself.

A woman alone was a powerful thing. That's what Mary had always told her. Charlotte figured her friend had the experience to know. A widow since her husband's death during the Korean War, she'd never remarried, never had children, never done any of the things that women of her generation had been expected to do.

She'd been content and happy about that. Even at the end of her life, when she'd had no one but Charlotte to visit her in the convalescent center in Billings, Mary hadn't regretted her choices. At least she'd never let on that she did.

The doorbell rang, the sound so startling, Charlotte nearly dropped her coffee.

She glanced at the clock. Six in the morning. Only Tessa ever visited that early, and she was spending the next couple of nights at a mountain cabin with her new husband.

It didn't seem likely that any of Charlotte's neighbors would be up that early. Most of them were older and retired. They slept until nine or ten and then came looking for their morning fix. Quick breads or muffins or Danishes. Whatever she had left over from her baking. She always made sure to have something left.

The doorbell rang again. She set the mug down on the counter. She didn't really want to see who was standing on the doorstep, because the only one she'd ever known to be there in the wee hours of the morning or at the break of day was Brett.
He'd
been dead for three years and one day, so there was no way it was him. There were days, though, when she still thought she could feel him hanging over her shoulder, judging the things she was doing, the way she was dressed, the things she said.

There were nights when she thought she heard his heavy plodding footsteps on the wooden floor. Not real, of course. She only heard and felt and thought of those things when she was overtired or overwhelmed.

Right at that moment she was both.

The doorbell rang a third time, and someone knocked on the door. Not a gentle knock, either. A loud, get-the-darn-door kind of knock that made her pulse jump about seven notches.

“Hold your horses!” she shouted as she grabbed the phone and hurried to the front door. If whoever it was looked like trouble, she'd call the police.

“Who's there?” She pressed her eye to the peephole and peered out into the violet morning light, half expecting to see Brett standing there, his hair slicked back and a contrite smile on his face.

There
was
a man standing on the porch, but he wasn't a ghost from the past. Max Stanford leaned close to the peephole, his uniform police hat low on his forehead.

“It's me. Max. For God's sake, open the door!”

Surprised, she did what he asked, stepping back as he barreled into the house with what looked like a pile of clothes in his arms.

“I need your help,” he said without preamble.

“With?” she asked.

“This.” He set the bundle down, a thick blanket falling away to reveal a little girl. She had dark hair and big blue eyes and the kind of chubby pink cheeks that little kids on magazine covers usually sported.

Charlotte's heart jumped in response.

“She's adorable.”

“Yeah. Adorable.” He glared at the child and then at Charlotte. “Except when she's screaming her fool head off.”

“She's not screaming now,” Charlotte pointed out, crouching down so she was eye to eye with the little girl. “Are you, sweetie?”

The girl shoved her thumb in her mouth.

“What's her name?” Charlotte asked as she straightened and met Max's eye. He looked tired, his jaw dark with the beginning of a beard, blue-black circles beneath his eyes. Even tired, he looked good. Better than good. Darn the man and his ability to make her insides melt. Thank God she'd had the presence of mind to refuse his one and only dinner invitation. Who knows what kind of trouble she could have found herself in if she hadn't?

“Zuzu.”

“Cute. Whose is she?”

“My ex's,” he growled. Apparently he wasn't in the mood for long conversations.

“And, you have her because?”

“It's complicated.”

“So, she's yours.” Otherwise she couldn't see a guy like Max babysitting a child.

“That's up for debate.” He glanced at Zuzu and frowned. “Can you help me or not?”

“That depends on what you need help with.”

“I need a babysitter.”

“A babysitter?” she repeated. She'd been asked for a lot of things since she'd moved to Apple Valley. That wasn't one of them.

“For Zuzu,” he explained as if she might have thought he needed a babysitter for himself. “I asked Ida, but she has the historical society meeting today and then she's visiting a friend in Spokane. She thought I should ask you.”

“Why?” She sounded as horrified as she felt.

“Because you were the first person she thought of? Because you seem like the motherly type? How the he . . . ck should I know?”

Motherly type
didn't sound like a compliment coming from Max. Not that she cared what he thought of her. “I work, Max. Maybe she forgot that.”

“I doubt she forgot. You're bringing muffins to the meeting she's attending.”

“I can't work and take care of a little girl.” Even if she could, she didn't want to.

“Neither can I,” he muttered.

He lifted the little girl, wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and opened the door.

She knew she should let him go. She'd regret it if she didn't, but that soft spot in her heart, the spot that had made excuses for Brett's behavior because she'd wanted to give him everything he hadn't had when he was a kid, reared its stupid head. Max was a police officer. Zuzu was a tiny little girl. She couldn't go off to work with him and spend the day at the sheriff's department.