Chapter 6 #2
“We’ll drop the homework and let Mia say hi,” I tell him, steering us toward safer ground. “Then we’re out of your hair.”
“Actually, Bella could use the company.” He scratches the back of his neck. “She’s had a rough few days.”
“What happened to her?”
Something shifts behind his eyes, there and then shuttered, a look I can’t read at all.
“Allergic reaction. To something she got into.” He picks each word carefully.
“We’re keeping her home through Monday so she gets her strength back.
Would it be all right for Mia to stay a while?
Through dinner, maybe? It’d do Bella a world of good.
She’s got nobody to talk to but me, and I’m sorry company at best.” He spreads his hands ruefully.
“All I’m good for is tea parties and dolls, and I’m reliably terrible at both. ”
The picture of Marcus Steele crammed onto a tiny chair pouring imaginary tea drags a smile out of me before I can lock it down.
I don’t want to say yes. Every careful rule I’ve built tells me to drop the folder and run. Then I think of that little girl with no mother and no father, sick in a vast empty house with only her uncle for company, and I cave.
“I guess that’s fine.”
“Don’t you have to get back to the office?” he asks.
“It’s Friday. I take half days.” I lift a shoulder. “And I do most of my work from home, so my hours bend when I need them to.”
“Lucky,” he says and starts us back around the house.
On the way, he stoops and plucks a gray shirt off a low branch at the edge of the lawn, shrugging into it as we walk.
“Why’s your shirt hanging in a tree?” I ask.
“Dropped it there before my run.”
I think back to that button on his jeans, to the exact moment I came around the corner, and I stop dead on the path. “Marcus Steele. Please tell me you’re not one of those weirdos who strips down and runs naked through the woods.”
Color crawls up his neck. “I don’t run naked in the woods.”
I hold his gaze a long, skeptical beat. “I really hope not.”
“I do not!” He protests weakly as I walk past him to the car. I just shoot him a disbelieving look over my shoulder. As soon as I let Mia out of the car, she barrels toward the man following me.
“Hey, Marcus!”
“Hey, kiddo.” Marcus smiles down at her warmly. “I heard you brought Bella her homework.”
Mia nods.
His eyes gentle. “Thank you. That’s a very nice thing to do.”
She just smiles broadly, and he walks with her to unlock the front door.
She rushes through ahead of me with the homework folder clutched to her chest. Inside, the house is even more absurd than the outside promised, all soaring ceilings, pale stone, and a staircase wide enough to march a band up.
Marcus leads us to a bedroom on the second floor, where Bella is propped against a mountain of pillows with earbuds in, knees drawn up, looking small and washed out.
Her whole face transforms the second she spots Mia.
“Mia!” She yanks the earbuds free and throws her arms wide, so the girls collide on the bed in a tangle of limbs and overlapping chatter.
“Hi, sweetheart.” I perch on the edge of the mattress and tuck a loose braid behind her ear. “How are you feeling?”
“My whole body hurts.” Bella’s voice comes thin. “Like everything’s sore on the inside.”
“She’s had a hard time holding food down,” Marcus offers from the doorway.
I glance back at him. “What have you been giving her?”
“The usual stuff.” He hesitates. “We had steak this afternoon. She only got some of it down.”
I turn fully around to stare at him. “She has a bad reaction, can’t keep anything down, and you fed her a steak?”
“It’s good steak. It’s protein.”
“She needs broth. Soup. Something light and warm that won’t sit heavy.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “What else can you even cook?”
“I do a good steak.” He pauses. “I manage eggs when I have to.”
I gesture at Bella, at the whole impossible house. “How has this child survived ten years in your care?”
He scratches the back of his head and has the grace to look sheepish. “Sheer luck, mostly.”
I huff and turn back to the girls. “How about I make you two some soup and sandwiches? Get something gentle into you?”
“Mom makes the best sandwiches in the entire world,” Mia announces with total authority.
Bella’s eyes brighten for the first time since I walked in. “Yes, please.”
Downstairs, I trail Marcus through rooms that keep opening into bigger rooms, and the scale of the place starts to grate on me.
One family lives here. Two people, a man and a little girl, rattle around inside square footage that could house twenty.
The furniture looks like nobody’s allowed to sit on it.
Gold glints from the picture frames, the fixtures, a row of ornaments along a shelf that each probably tally up to more than I make in a month.
“Who designed this place?” I can’t quite scrub the edge out of it.
“I did.” He says it without apology, leading me toward the back. “At the top of my career. My girlfriend at the time was an interior designer, so she had opinions.”
“Of course she was.” I don’t bother softening it.
He shoots me a look, half amused, half wounded. “What? You don’t like it?”
“I have no opinion.” I roll my eyes at the gaudy design.
We pass under an arch into a kitchen the size of my living room, and my eyes catch on a gilt vase by the window, tall as a child and holding nothing at all.
“You hate it,” he accuses, watching my face. “You’ve got nothing but opinions.”
“I have no opinion,” I repeat and set my jaw.
He laughs under his breath. “For what it’s worth, I’m not attached to most of it. When Bella’s grown, she’ll want to tear it all out and redo it her way. I’ll let her.”
The casual love in that catches me off guard, so the question’s out before I’ve thought it through. “Bella? Isn’t redecorating a house something a wife would want to do? Yours, someday?”
“No wife.” He pulls a cutting board down and sets it on the counter for me. “I’m not looking to give Bella a stepmother.”
I tug open the enormous fridge and start hunting through it. “No?”
“Most of the women who come around me want the name or the bank account.” He says it without a scrap of self-pity. “I won’t bring someone like that into Bella’s life and let her get attached only for them to walk the moment the shine wears off. She’s been left enough.”
I straighten up with an onion in my hand, and the picture I’ve held of him for ten years cracks a little wider. “That’s not the worst instinct,” I admit. “Half the time you have no idea who you’re really standing beside until it’s too late.”
My voice comes out rougher than I want it to. I clear my throat and turn back to the vegetables.
He leans a hip on the counter. “You’re sighing like a woman who got her heart stepped on.”
“I’ve never had much luck in love.” I keep my eyes on the onion, the knife, anything but him. “I seem to collect deadbeats. It’s a gift.”
“There’s a story in that.”
“There isn’t.” I find the knife and a fresh board. “One was a deadbeat father. The other turned into a deadbeat stepfather. Turns out I have a type.”
He goes still. “You were married, then.”
I glance down at my bare hand, at the pale band of skin where a ring never actually sat. “We were married on paper for six years, and he was a good man right up until he wasn’t.”
Marcus shifts closer, his voice dropping, careful. “So it was never a real marriage.”
“The place I worked back then was religious. Strict about things.” I start chopping because it gives my hands somewhere to go.
“They didn’t think much of unwed mothers, so a friend put his name on the certificate to keep me employed.
We stayed out of each other’s way, and somewhere in there, we turned into a sort of family.
There wasn’t much choice about it.” The knife scrapes.
“Then he showed me he was exactly what the first one was. Or maybe he was worse.” I pause for a moment.
“What did he do?”
“I didn’t know about his gambling addiction till I had creditors at my door and the bank foreclosing on the home that I had just bought. He left, and I spent the next couple of years rebuilding myself.”
“So you divorced him?” Marcus asks slowly.
I let out an angry laugh. “No. He divorced me. But not before he took half of what I had in court. He never even showed up, the fucking coward. His lawyer did.”
My hands tighten around the knife, suddenly irritated with myself for even revealing this much. I don’t know why I develop the gift of gab anytime I am around this man.
To my surprise, though, he doesn’t offer any comments. He doesn’t rush to fill the quiet with something useless, which I grudgingly respect. I rinse the knife and reach back into the fridge for the rest, shoving aside cartons and jars, coming up empty.
“You don’t have any chicken in here.”
“No.” He peeks over my shoulder before glancing at me. “But if you want one, I’ll grab one from the forest.”
I stare at him. “You’ll grab one from where, exactly?”