didn’t know whether to be optimistic or worried about it! He turned away, trying to make up his mind about the confounding Matilda Kincaid, his hand lighting on the back of his neck.
Mattie, meanwhile, smoothly took control. Calling Chaz forward with a crooking finger, she put Candy Sue on her feet and motioned for him to take the two younger girls out as his father had instructed. Casting curious glances in his father’s direction, Chaz silently complied, herding the girls ahead of him. When Orren turned back around, Mattie was sitting alone at the table, her hands folded in her lap. He shot a surprised look around the room, frowned, and leaned forward to place both hands flat on the table.
“How old are you?” he asked bluntly, determined to maintain control this time.
Mattie smiled serenely. “Nineteen, the same age you were when you made Chaz.”
Orren’s frown deepened. “Nineteen’s young to watch over four kids—and to be so damned direct!”
Her smile never faltered. “I’ll be twenty soon, if it really makes any difference. And it’s true, isn’t it? You were just nineteen when Chaz’s mother was expecting him.”
He couldn’t deny it, so instead he got defensive about it. “Girl, you’ve got some brass!” She ignored him, craning her neck to get a good look around, though what there was to look at, he couldn’t guess.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
Her gaze was completely undisturbed. “Your wife.”
He felt like he’d been coldcocked. “I don’t have one!”
She looked askance at that. “Those children didn’t spring out of the ground.”
Orren threw up his arms. “She ran away with a rodeo bum! Anything else you want to know?”
She shook her head, but whether in answer to his sarcastic question or in response to his ill-natured revelation, he didn’t know. She looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I can start right away.”
Defeated, he plopped down in the chair he’d vacated earlier and sighed. “I bet you lead your daddy a merry chase.”
Mattie nodded unrepentantly. “He thinks I’m still twelve, which is how old I was when my mother died.”
Orren put his head in his hands. “I don’t know whether to slit my throat now or hold out a few years in hopes my own girls will run off with circus performers.”
“You don’t mean that,” Mattie told him, as if he didn’t already know it.
He dropped his hands and gave her a hard look. “Does your father know you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“How do you suppose he’ll feel about you working for a single man my age?”
She shrugged. “Hard to tell. He might assume you’re too old to be attractive to me.”
He couldn’t believe he’d heard that right. “What?”
She ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken and went on. “Or he might assume you’re too old to be attracted to me. Either way, I’ll be too young in his mind. But, it’s a baby-sitting job, and he’ll think that’s appropriate, so it shouldn’t be any problem, really. If he hedges, I’ll enlist my stepmother’s aid. She’s never had children so she doesn’t have these parental hang-ups. And if he outright forbids it, we’ll have a screaming fight. Then I’ll take the job anyway, because it’s what I want, and I am, after all, over eighteen. I have two years of college, by the way.”
Orren just stared at her for a second. “I think I will cut my throat.”
She got up from the table and said, “Can I look around?”
“No!”
She threw out a slender hip and propped her hand on it. Yes, indeed, she was over eighteen. But she was still a baby. Especially compared to Gracie. He frowned. Now why had he done that, compared her to Grace? She folded her arms and asked baldly, “So how long has she been gone?”
He nearly hit his chin on the table. Little shocker. Well, if she wanted the dirty details, he’d give them to her. He got up and put his hands flat on the table, drilling her with his baby blues. “Two years and seven months.” He waited a beat and added, “A week and three days.”
She batted her lashes at him. “Candy Sue was just a baby.”
“An infant,” he admitted. “I had to put her on a bottle.” Let her digest that.
She was outraged. A nursing mother had abandoned her baby, not to mention three other children and a husband! Then she started looking for acceptable reasons. “She must’ve been young when you married.”
“Older than me,” he said flatly, “but that didn’t keep me from getting her pregnant. Four times.”
Miss Matilda Kincaid lifted her chin a notch. “You’re trying to embarrass me.”
“And succeeding,” he admitted, looking at the splotches of color spreading across her cheeks. “Maybe that’ll teach you not to go around asking nosy questions.”
“Is there a better way to find out what I want to know?” she retorted saucily.
He grinned. Damned if she didn’t have him there. “You ever hear that curiosity killed the cat?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s pretty obvious I’m not a cat, and it wouldn’t be very responsible of me to walk into a situation blind, would it?”
He scratched his chin at that. “Guess not. You’ve just got an awful frank way about you.”
“Yes, I do. Now, is the job mine or not?”
He shook his head, chuckling, and said the one thing guaranteed to get her dander up. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to your dad first, clear it with him.”
The color in her face blossomed to full red as she struggled to tamp down her temper. It took several seconds, actually, of breathing through her mouth and working her jaw, but she finally got it in hand. That hip flew out again, and she was clearly fuming, but she managed a nearly polite, “Fine.”
He went to the phone, figuring it would be dangerous for him to laugh outright. “What’s his name?”
“Evans Kincaid.”
“I want you to know I’m doing this because you said earlier that he’s a police officer, which seems a good recommendation. Are you really nineteen?”
“Yes!”
“What’s the telephone number?”
She ground it out through bared teeth, and he punched it into the telephone. The conversation was fairly short. Kincaid was obviously pleased that he’d been consulted. It marked Orren, he said, as a conscientious father himself. Orren politely but honestly explained that he was divorced and fairly desperate as he hadn’t generated much interest in the position, the hours being tricky and some housekeeping being required. Actually he was hoping for more than some housekeeping, but he wouldn’t mention that. He couldn’t exactly demand it, considering the wages he was able to pay, and he knew he had no right to expect it. Since his days off as manager of the car repair shop were Sunday and Monday, he pointed out that he would expect Mattie to work Saturday. He didn’t say that he could easily keep her busy seven days a week by taking small jobs on the side, but he was hoping Mattie would welcome the extra money as much as he did. At any rate, Kincaid made it plain that he would not approve of Mattie working Sundays, and Orren made special note of it, figuring that Kincaid was a religious man who wouldn’t take kindly to having his little girl’s ears scorched more than they already had been.
Mattie, her father promised, was great with kids and a hard worker. She knew her way around a house, too, having pretty much taken over the domestic