Lost and Found Groom by McLinn, Patricia (most difficult books to read .TXT) 📗

“Help?” His faint smile was crooked. “You need a plane landed on a dirt road? Want pointers on pulling together a disguise that would fool your best friend? Expertise in evading Santa Estellan government forces?”

She shook her head, trying not to smile. “I had preparing Matthew’s lunch in mind, not taking over a small country.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever taken over a country, small or large. But if you insist on help with lunch . . . Need a jar opened?”

“Nothing that easy. You could give Matthew his milk while I finish.”

“Or wait until he’s old enough to pour his own,” Daniel muttered.

Leaving the piece of leftover chicken breast half cut up, she turned and pointed the knife at him. “You said you want to be a father, Daniel. Didn’t you mean that?”

He gazed at Matthew with such intensity Kendra half expected her son to react as he would to a touch. But Matthew was absorbed in running his wooden car around the tray top.

“I meant it.”

He turned back to her and their gazes connected, but only for an instant before Daniel’s slid away.

Last night he’d said he didn’t know how to deal with Matthew, passing it off as the general ignorance many of his gender had of kids. But then he’d added a sentence that indicated it might be more specific than general.

I don’t know how.

But was there more? Why was this man, so sure of himself in most arenas, intimidated by this two-and-a-half-foot high dynamo?

“Then you might as well start with the milk.”

He stood and took the duck cup she handed him with a quick lift of his eyebrows but no comment. She was aware of him passing behind her to get milk from the refrigerator, but forced herself to not watch the process. Even when he returned to his chair and presented the cup of milk to Matthew she didn’t turn.

“There you go. Milk. I’ll hold–”

But not even the best of intentions could stop her from spinning around after a scuffling sound accompanied by the screech of a thwarted two-year-old.

“No! Mine! No!”

Apparently jolted by Matthew’s scream, Daniel jerked back as if he’d given the child an electric jolt. At the same time, Matthew slung the newly captured cup around, as far away as his short reach could carry it from threatened recapture, spewing milk across himself, high chair, a corner of the table and the floor.

“Matthew!”

The cup came to rest on the milk-sodden tray with a splash, and her son emitted a rebellious, “Me do!”

“Matthew, you know better than that,” she scolded as she gathered paper towels, sponge and damp cloth–the stalwarts of a toddler’s mother’s arsenal.

“Here–” She handed paper towels to Daniel. “Start mopping. It’s good practice.”

“Sorry, Kendra. It happened so quick–”

“It always does. That’s part of the drill. No–start at the top and work down, otherwise it drips on where you’ve just mopped.”

She unhooked the high chair’s safety belt to wipe up around Matthew and the few drops beyond his mega-sized bib. They worked in silence for a moment, with Matthew an interested spectator.

“He’s fast, isn’t he,” Daniel said with a rueful kind of pride.

“As a rattler.”

He chuckled, and the atmosphere eased as they contained the milk spill.

“That should do it,” she said after a while, heading to the sink. “I’ll rinse out this sponge and do another pass.”

“ ‘Unch!” demanded Matthew.

“You have to wait a minute, Matthew. You made a mess and we have to finish cleaning–”

“Matthew!”

At Daniel’s shout, she spun around in time to see her son, standing on the seat of his high chair–Oh, God, she’d failed to belt him back in!–leap into the air as if reaching for a trapeze that wasn’t there.

CHAPTER SIX

Before a cry could reach Kendra’s throat, Daniel snared Matthew with one arm and gathered him in close to his side.

For a second, all three of them remained frozen and silent.

She stared into Daniel’s eyes and saw reflected there the same fears of what might have happened as she felt churning inside her. But something deeper and darker, too.

A gasp escaped Kendra’s constricted throat–how much a reaction to her son’s near miss and how much to what she saw in Daniel’s eyes she didn’t know.

She had no time to sort it out as Matthew began hollering in thwarted outrage, “Me do! Me do! Down! Down!”

Holding the toddler against his side in a cross between a sack of potatoes and a football, Daniel shifted for a more secure grip as the squirming boy arched his back and flailed his legs.

“Here, you better . . .”

It trailed off as he turned to give Kendra the opportunity to take Matthew off his hands. At the last second, and as much as she wanted to reassure herself her son was truly safe, she pulled her hands back.

“No. You should make sure he knows who’s in charge.”

“Isn’t he?”

A chuckle escaping her efforts to stifle it, Kendra gave him a reassuring smile. “You’re doing fine. Have you heard of the terrible twos? Matthew is a great believer in them.”

Her laughter and their failure to pay attention to him had calmed Matthew. In fact, he apparently liked the novelty of his position and the new angle it gave him on the adults.

“Matthew,” Kendra asked in an even voice, “what did I tell you?”

“ ’tay put,” he answered promptly. “Me di’n’t”

“No, you didn’t. You could get hurt, and Mommy doesn’t want you to get hurt. So, this time, what are you going to do?”

“ ’tay put.”

“Good boy. Daniel, would you put Matthew back in his chair?”

Only a flicker of discomfort showed in his eyes before he said with a fair assumption of casualness, “Sure.”

It was an awkward business. Such an awkward business and accompanied by enough indignant squawks from Matthew that as much as Kendra tried to focus on finishing his lunch, she bounced from the temptation to laugh to the urge to do the job herself.

But in the end, Matthew was solidly seated in his high chair, facing forward, with a leg on each side of the divider and the belt around his