Daddy’s Little Christmas Present (Daddy’s Little #6)

Chapter 1

“Pops.” Brock knocked on the door, raising his voice to be heard. Everyone knew Jim Sanders was hard of hearing and sometimes he forgot to put his hearing aids on. “Get a move on, Pops. We’re going to be late.”

“I heard you… the first… three times,” wheezed the old man from inside the room. Shuffling footsteps crossed the creaking floorboards. The doorknob rattled, the lock clicked, and then it opened.

“You shouldn’t lock the door on me,” Brock said disapprovingly as the old man pulled the door open wide.

He was dressed, at least. But his belt wasn’t yet fastened and his shirt, although buttoned up the front, was buttoned up crooked.

“If I don’t lock it, you come inside,” his dad groused.

“If you have another heart attack and I have to break this door down too, I’m not putting another back up again.” Catching his father by the lapel, Brock unbuttoned the shirt before straightening it and buttoning it back up again. “Do you want eggs and toast for breakfast, or just toast?”

“Coffee,” his father replied.

“Yeah,” Brock snorted. “Nice try.”

“Bacon,” he wheezed next. “Crisp and hot… from the pan.”

Brock snorted. “If you’re gonna dream, why not go for a million bucks.” Shirt straightened, he adjusted his dad’s lapel, then patted him on both shoulders. “You had a heart attack. No coffee. No bacon.”

He left his dad’s room, heading back down the hall for the kitchen.

“No reason for… living!” Pops spat after him.

“Put your belt on,” Brock called back over his shoulders.

“I haven’t found it yet.” Throwing up both hands, Pops turned in a circle, searching the floor. Which was funny since there was nothing at all wrong with his father’s mind. He did, however, like to pretend.

Shaking his head, Brock decided to err on the side of senility. “It’s around your waist, but it’s unfastened.”

With a cough of surprise, and then of laughter, his dad hoarsely wheezed, “Well, so it is.”

Shaking his head, Brock went back to making breakfast. It was hard not to smile. He loved his dad, and for sure things had grown more interesting after Pops came to live with him.

Washing his hands at the sink, he dried them on a tea towel before draping it over his shoulders.

Cracking eggs into a bowl, he whisked them at the stove.

Pops got the egg whites; Brock got the rest. At six-foot-four and two-hundred-twenty pounds of lean, mean muscle, he liked to call himself a growing boy.

That wasn’t quite true. He’d finished growing some twelve years ago.

The trick now was, figuring out how to eat without letting his muscle turn to fat.

As he was lifting the pan off the stove, a flash of movement from the window over the sink caught his eye.

He paused, eggs in one hand and spatula in the other, bending slightly to watch the massive eighteen-wheeler truck with a moving company logo on the side as it rolled up the wet, dirt road, rolled right past the rental cabin that was his only neighbor within a three-mile radius, and came to a jerking stop in the mud right outside his driveway.

“Hey, Pops,” he called. “If you want to take part in the interviews, I think the first has just arrived!”

Quickening his step, he quickly pulled down a plate, filling it with scrambled egg whites, toast still warm from the toaster, and half a peeled orange. He put that on the table just as his father came shuffling his slow, careful steps down the hall. “Where’s the coffee?”

“Orange juice is in the fridge,” Brock replied, his attention shifting to the dining room window where he could now see a woman cautiously climbing down out of the passenger side of the big rig cab.

She was a brunette, slender and small in blue jeans, white t-shirt, and the thinnest blue windbreaker he’d ever seen anyone try to wear in this neck of the woods.

Especially in winter. She looked to be arguing with the big rig’s driver.

Scratch that. She looked to be pleading with the man, and whatever they were discussing, he could tell from here that it wasn’t going her way.

Her eyes were big as she looked from the man to the house.

Brock was glad he wasn’t visible through his mom’s old Chintz curtains.

He wasn’t the gossiping type, and he didn’t usually spy on others, but this was right outside his house and, he had to admit, the way the woman bit her lip before climbing up onto the runners to move her seat to reach into the back of the truck cab made him intensely curious.

When she pulled out a small toddler, in a white and pink coat, pink fuzzy boots, and a fuzzy ball dangling off the top of her knit cap, he realized the problem.

“Looks like the first interviewee has a baby and no sitter.”

“Looks like she just moved here,” Pops wheezed back.

“Looks like,” Brock agreed. “Well, unfortunately, that’s a point against her, don’t you think?

We don’t need to live with a baby, one; two, if she’s looking after her kid, she’d not be looking after you; and three…

” Brock shook his head. “I don’t know what she’s got in that thing, but I doubt if we could get even half that load in this house. ”

“Oh, I don’t know...” His father’s hoarse voice trailed off, growing fainter as Brock studied the woman.

Her toddler on her hip, she was trying to tiptoe through the mud until she reached the stepping stones that were his walkway to the porch.

She was awfully pretty, and way too young.

Maybe not for motherhood, but certainly to have the kind of experience he was hoping to get in whomever he hired to be his father’s live-in care provider.

Up until now, he’d never seen a need to hire anyone to help take care of his elderly father.

He’d pretty much been the one taking care of Pops for all his life.

The man had been sixty-two when Brock was born—a change-of-life baby, they’d called him.

His mother had thought herself barren, right up until she turned fifty-one and suddenly he’d shown up.

They also called him a miracle, since the chances of her birthing a healthy baby without disabilities had been slim at her age.

She’d passed from a stroke almost twenty years ago.

Brock was thirty-five now and Pops was ninety-seven, with one bad fall, one heart attack, and a triple bypass already under his belt. Just as soon as he hired someone to move in with them, his days of going to work without worrying about his old man alone at home were over.

The woman paused to dig out a folded sheet of paper from her back pocket.

When she glanced down the dirt road the way they’d just come, Brock followed her gaze to the beat-up white pickup driving up to meet them.

She bit her bottom lip when the driver started yelling at the approaching truck to hurry up.

When it stopped and two more men got out, she made an abrupt about-face and hurried back to the truck.

“Wait, wait,” he heard her cry through the closed window. She picked her way quickly through the mud, hugging her baby as if that secure grip might help keep both of them from slipping and falling. “Please,” he heard her faintly saying.

The driver stalked around to the back of the truck, where she hurried her fastest to meet him.

They were arguing again.

The woman showed him the paper she was holding, but the trucker yanked it out of her hand, ripped it into pieces and flung it into the mud under his rear wheels.

“Son,” Pops growled, but Brock didn’t need to be told. He’d already put the pan and spatula on the Lazy Susan in the center of the table.

“Be right back,” he said, mildly enough, but inside his temper was pricked. He didn’t know what the problem was, but he couldn’t think of a single good reason for the way the driver was now yelling directly in her face.

Pulling on his boots and coat, Brock paused at the standing gun safe behind the front door. Stuffing his revolver into the back of his pants, he adjusted his coat and went outside.

***

Stace backed up a step, instinctively turning to put her own body between the truck driver and Lily, who had started crying the instant he started yelling.

“But this is what I paid for,” she tried again to say.

“I worked it out with your boss. I stop here for the interview first, and then we go to—”

“No second stop,” he snapped at her for the second time now. “Not for free, it’s not. Plus, I had to pay gas on two vehicles and wages on two extra guys for all that time spent driving. Five grand, lady. Pay it now, or I drop your stuff right here.”

“But I did pay for it.” She tried again to show him the inventory and billing receipt she’d been given by the estimator of the moving company. “See, it’s right—”

Grabbing it out of her hand, the driver ripped it in half twice, then threw the scattering paper into the muddy dirt road behind his truck. “You pay now, or you get the hell out of my way.”

Stace Monroe’s heart was in her throat and her stomach had sunk so low she was sure she stepped over it when she tried again to calm the angry man.

She didn’t hold much hope for that. He’d been angry at her practically from the moment he’d helped loaded her things into his van.

He’d been angry that she was forced to ride in the truck with him, but what choice did she have when her in-laws had claimed her car in the divorce?

He’d been angry for having to drive 680 miles to the tiny community of Myrtle Creek, because her favorite aunt had offered her rental cabin for as long as Stace needed.

When he first clapped eyes on Lilly and her car seat, he’d gone through the proverbial roof, stomping and swearing, and even throwing her things, albeit only from the ground into the back of his truck.