by himself—which Joe won by reassuring the boy he’d never be more than a few feet away—his brother pushed through the door, while Taylor swung around the reception desk to extract a blank file card and fee schedule from a drawer.
“This’ll only take a sec,” she said, rummaging through a second drawer for a pen, which she handed to Joe with the card. “I just need his name and age, your name and where we can contact you while he’s here. Oh, and any allergies you might know about. Day camp hours are nine to three, generally, but we always have a few kids who need to stay until six or so—”
“I’d like to pick him up around four, if that’s okay,” Joe said as he filled out the card, tamping down the spurt of panic that he had no idea what the boy might be allergic to. “I promised Seth I’d be done work by then.”
“Four will be fine.”
Joe frowned at the fee schedule. “‘All fees are suggestions only?’” he read aloud, then lifted his eyes to hers. “What does that mean?”
“It means this is a small town and money is sometimes pretty tight. And Didi swore when she and Chuck came to Haven nearly thirty years ago and started up the camp, that she’d never turn anyone away who couldn’t pay.” She smiled again. Full out. Laugh lines around the eyes and everything. “And before you ask how she manages, let’s just say Didi has, um, connections.”
“One of those ‘the Lord will provide’ types?”
Taylor laughed. “No, one of those ‘the Lord helps those who help themselves’ types. Rummage sales, car washes, carnivals—you name it, Didi does it. And if that doesn’t bring in the funds, she has no qualms about shaming people into coughing up a donation.”
There went that damn smile again, more of a grin this time, actually, partnered by an open, direct gaze as ingenuous as a child’s. Only far more potent. At least, to a man who hadn’t spent a whole lot of time gazing into women’s eyes in the last little while. To his surprise, that grin and those eyes reached way deep inside him, way past the heaviness he’d begun to think would be a constant companion for the rest of his life, and tugged loose a chuckle.
“Sounds like a Hallmark TV movie, doesn’t it?” Taylor said, and Joe’s chuckle gave way to, “Just what I was thinking,” which was about the time some outlandish idea bubbled up out of his brain about how he wouldn’t mind standing here the rest of the day shooting the breeze with this woman. The bubble popped, though, as bubbles always do, and he returned his attention to filling out the card.
His mouth, however, had apparently missed the bulletin about the bubble-popping.
“I’m pretty much a city boy myself. Never spent any time to speak of in a small town.”
“Me, either, before I moved here a couple years ago.”
“Oh, yeah? Where from?”
Small talk, is all this was. Just something to fill the silence while he finished filling out this card, the kind of stuff you asked to be polite, not because you were really interested. As long as he didn’t look at her, he was safe.
“Houston,” she said, which immediately got Joe to wondering how on earth she ended up in tiny Haven, Oklahoma. Why she’d ended up here. But asking her would indicate he was really interested, which he wasn’t, so he didn’t.
Sure made him curious, though.
The card finally finished, he handed it back, running smack into the woman’s sympathetic gaze.
“And if there’s anything, um, out of the ordinary about his situation we should know about?” she said softly, and he realized he wasn’t the only curious one here. As he would be, too, in her place. Wasn’t every day a grown man came along with an eight-year-old brother in tow, he imagined. With Seth standing right beside him yesterday, Joe hadn’t felt comfortable discussing many of the particulars with the pastor’s wife. But there was nothing stopping him now.
Just as there was nothing stopping him from getting his own gaze tangled up with Taylor’s. As a rule, Joe didn’t have much use for sympathy, since sympathy had a bad habit of degenerating into pity, which he had no use for at all. But this wasn’t about Joe—it was about a little kid who right now needed all the comfort he could get. The kind of comfort Joe wasn’t sure he knew how to give.
“Seth and I didn’t even know about each other until three weeks ago,” he said quietly, seeing in her concerned expression the comfort he sought. For Seth, that is. “We met for the first time about a week after my father and Seth’s mother were killed in a car crash.”
“Ohmigod,” Taylor said on a soft exhale, her eyes darting to the men’s room door. “I figured it was something serious, but…” Her lower lip caught in her teeth; she shook her head and then looked back at Joe, her expression one big question mark.
“There was a will.” Joe’s mouth flattened. “After a fashion. For reasons known only to my father, he’d appointed me guardian in case anything happened to both him and Andrea.”
“Even though you and Seth didn’t know each other?”
Joe crossed his arms over his chest, as if that might somehow armor him against her incredulity. “Apparently, there’s nobody else,” he said, then added, “This has been real rough on the kid.”
Her steady gaze momentarily threatened the composure he’d fought like hell to hang on to from the first moment he’d laid eyes on Seth, especially when she then said, “I don’t imagine it’s been any picnic for his brother, either.”
Inside Joe’s head, a warning bell sounded. He’d never allowed sentimentality to color his feelings or decisions, and damned if he was going to start now. A humorless smile pulled at his mouth. “You play the hand that’s dealt you, you know?”
The dulled sound of a toilet flushing, followed seconds later by Seth’s reappearance, derailed whatever she’d been about to say. Even though it nearly killed him, Joe realized he had to make a clean break. Now. Before his brother’s big brown eyes sucked him back in.
Before Taylor’s soft green/gray/gold ones made him forget how crowded his life already was.
“Okay, you’re all set,” he said, cupping Seth’s head. “I’ll see you at four.”
Tears welled up again in the little boy’s eyes, but Joe ruffled the kid’s hair and strode outside, where he was free to let his emotions beat the crap out of him, even if he wasn’t exactly on a first-name basis with most of them. His gut churned as he got into his middle-aged Blazer and twisted the ignition key, that he had to go to work when he knew the kid needed him right now. But if he didn’t work, all the other people who needed Joe would be screwed.
And no way in hell was he going to let that happen.
As befitted anyone who’d lived through as many first days of school as she had, Taylor wasn’t particularly surprised that Seth’s tears dried up as soon as Joe left. That didn’t mean she was particularly relieved, however. On-the-surface acceptance was not the same as being at peace with the situation.
An observation which she imagined applied equally to the child’s big brother, she thought with a little pang of…something.
Except for the occasional tremor in his lower lip, the boy was doing a bang-up imitation of a statue, standing right where Joe had left him and staring blankly at the open door. His attachment to someone he hadn’t even known a month wasn’t all that odd, considering how desperately he probably wanted something, anything—anyone—solid and real and alive to hang on to. Not that losing a parent was easy at any age, but eight was particularly difficult: old enough to fully understand the extent of the loss, but not old enough to understand, let alone believe, that things would ever feel “right” again.
“Seth?” Taylor said gently. After a long moment, the child turned, but his gaze was shuttered, provoking a twinge in the center of her chest. Although his hair was so clean it shimmered, tears had