Sugar Pine Trail. RaeAnne Thayne

“Kidnapping, Ms. Winston?” he teased. “That’s a felony.”

      “Yeah,” the younger boy said, crossing his arms just like his brother. “A fella-me.”

      “You’re not helping,” she snapped, her chest rising sharply.

      “Why don’t we all go back inside?” he suggested. “We can all sit down, and you can tell me what’s going on.”

      The boys eyed the doorway, but must have sensed they couldn’t juke past him. He hadn’t been a linebacker on the Hope’s Crossing High School championship football team for nothing.

      They reluctantly turned around and went into her living room.

      “I’m Jamie.”

      “My name is Clinton Scott Slater, and this is my brother David Joshua Slater.”

      “Clint and Davy are going to be living with me for a while,” Julia said.

      “Only until we run away and go home and find our mom,” Clinton responded.

      “You know your mother is not at home,” Julia said through her teeth. Something told him they had covered this ground a few times already that evening. “You can’t go back to an empty house.”

      “Why should we believe you? We thought you were our friend, but you were just spying so you could call the welfare people on us.”

      “I’m hungry,” the younger boy whined.

      Julia sighed and ruffled his hair. Despite his alleged unhappiness, Davy leaned into her hand a little.

      “I know you are, buddy. I’m working on dinner. I’ll remind you both that I would have been done twenty minutes ago, if I didn’t have to keep coming out to make sure you weren’t trying to sneak out the door when my back was turned.”

      She tried to tighten her mouth into a stern expression, but something about the quiver in her lower lip stirred all the chivalrous instincts ingrained in him since birth. She appeared very much like a woman completely out of her comfort zone.

      “Tell you what,” Jamie said, “we can help you finish that delicious-smelling dinner. With all of us working together, the work will go faster—then you can invite me over to eat with you, since I’m starving, too. See, it’s a win all the way around.”

      He winked at the boys, earning a giggle from the younger one. While the older boy didn’t look as convinced, he appeared a little less belligerent.

      “We can’t ruin your whole evening,” Julia protested.

      “What are we cooking?” he asked, ignoring her to lead the way into the kitchen. “Smells like spaghetti.”

      Julia and the boys both followed him. It was obvious she didn’t want to accept his help—just as it was obvious to both of them that she needed it.

      “Lasagna, actually. It should be done in about fifteen minutes.”

      “What can we do in the meantime? Besides wash our hands, of course.”

      “I only need to make a salad and set the table.”

      “You sit down. You’ve done all the hard work on the lasagna. Clint, Davy and I can handle the salad.”

      “Can you?”

      He had plenty of nieces and nephews and was quite an accomplished child-wrangler, if he did say so himself, but he decided to let his skills do the talking.

      “No problem,” he said. “Just watch us.”

      “I’ll set the table,” she said, looking disarmed and more than a little overwhelmed.

      “Excellent division of labor.”

      He steered the boys over to the sink, where he supervised while they washed their hands, then washed his own.

      “All right, guys. What do we need for salad?”

      “Lettuce,” Davy said promptly.

      “And tomatoes. Except Davy doesn’t like tomatoes.”

      “We’ll put those on the side, then.”

      All the necessary ingredients for a good tossed salad were in a colander draining in the other sink from the one where they had washed their hands. Jamie put the boys to work ripping up the lettuce into bite-sized pieces while he found a knife and started cutting up the tomatoes, green onions and celery for the salad.

      After a few minutes, Julia wandered over to see how they were faring.

      “You can handle a kitchen knife,” she said with surprise as she watched him.

      He smiled, cutting the avocado in half and slicing it into strips inside the skin with an expert flourish. “My family has a café back home in Colorado. My Pop is more than seventy but still works there every single day. My parents made sure all of us knew our way around a kitchen, so I spent most of my school breaks working there—busing tables, washing dishes, prepping food, working the grill. There’s not much I can’t do.”

      What he hadn’t learned at the Center of Hope Cafe kitchen, he taught himself after he first went to school, then military training. A guy could only eat at the mess hall so often—and he quickly got tired of frozen pizzas.

      “I can cook,” Clint boasted, bony chin up in the air.

      “He makes super good toast and mac and cheese and microwave popcorn,” Davy attested.

      “That’s an excellent start. Now you know how to make a basic green salad, too,” Jamie said.

      Who were these boys and what were they doing in Julia’s kitchen?

      A hundred questions chased around his brain. When she introduced them to him, she said they were staying with her for a while. There was obviously a story here.

      You know your mother is not at home. You can’t go home to an empty house, Julia had said to them. Where was home? And where was their mother?