that one’s far too big to be sucking her thumb, too,” the dour-faced woman in front of him said, and Steve lost it. Calmly, but he lost it.
“Mrs. Hadley?” he asked, smoothing a tangle of dark brown hair away from the baby’s face as she nestled more closely against him.
“What?”
“Why on earth do you hire out to care for children when you obviously dislike them so much?”
Thin lips pressed together until they nearly disappeared. Then the woman whirled around, banging back the screen door on her way out. Everybody including the dog wandered out onto the porch to watch her leave, which she did in a spectacular fashion, tromping down the drive to that old blue bomb of hers. She hurtled her impressive body inside and slammed the door, then gunned the car down the rutted dirt driveway in a cloud of dust, as if petrified the kids were going to turn into ten-foot monsters and eat her alive.
As her car sped toward the end of the driveway, though, Steve caught movement out of the corner of his eye—a cyclist coming down the road from the main highway. The road curved a bit, right before it got to the foot of his drive, the entry partially obscured by a forest of volunteer elms he’d been meaning to take out ever since he bought the place. His heart bolted into his throat when he realized the cyclist and Mrs. Hadley, who clearly wasn’t even thinking about slowing down, might not see each other in time—
“Hey!” he shouted, taking off down the steps and out toward the road, Rosie laughing and bouncing in his arms, the other kids hot on his heels, George barking his damn fool head off. “Hey! Slow down! Slow down!”
But of course, the older woman couldn’t possibly hear him. And he doubted she was looking at her rearview mirror—
Oh, hell! Steve ground to a halt, his heart hammering painfully at the base of his throat while the twins and Dylan jumped up and down beside him, shrieking and waving. And now he saw Mac streaking toward them from the back, making more noise than any of them. Steve silently swore at himself for letting them out, because if anything happened, if they saw—
His stomach heaved as Mrs. Hadley took the turn at full throttle, spinning out onto the road at the same moment the cyclist rounded the curve. The kids screamed even louder as car and bicycle swerved to avoid each other, the car quickly straightening out and rocketing down the road. The bicycle, however, wobbled for a second or two, then toppled over into the brush.
The word that rang out a moment later from the bushes was one he regularly gave Mac hell for using.
Sophie was reasonably sure she’d live. Whether she wanted to was something else again.
The ground seemed to vibrate beneath her battered body—pounding footsteps, she realized, intermixed with a dog’s frantic barking. A second later, she found herself surrounded by a herd of short people, all with brown hair and eyes, all shouting, “Are you all right?” and looking both extremely worried and extremely relieved to find her conscious. The dog, a large, rather smelly mongrel, got to her first, whimpering in her face as if to ask where he—at this level, his gender was not in question—should kiss first to make it all better.
“For the love of Pete…! George, kids—get out of the way!”
Oh, dear God in heaven. Tell her it wasn’t…
After judiciously determining her arm wouldn’t fall off if she moved it, Sophie shielded her eyes from the early morning sun and looked up into a pair of familiar gold-flecked green eyes set above a shocked grimace.
It was.
“Judas Priest, lady!” Steven carefully untangled limbs from bicycle, letting it fall with a loud clatter off to the side before squatting beside her. “What the Sam Hill are you doing way out here at this time of the morning?”
She thought, briefly, of sitting up, decided against it. “Are you always this solicitous when people land in a heap in your bushes?” She tried moving the other arm, peered up at him. “Or aren’t these your bushes?”
“These aren’t anybody’s bushes. They’re squatters. Lie still, for godssake.”
Sophie suddenly realized Steven’s brusqueness stemmed from concern, not rudeness. He’d transferred the youngest child, an adorable little thing with long dark hair and bangs that practically fell into her equally dark eyes, to a taller, more slender girl on the cusp of adolescence, then set about gently feeling for broken bones. Or so she assumed.
All four children, she realized, looked remarkably like each other. And absolutely nothing like Steven.
“These your children?” she asked.
His glance was nearly as brief as his answer. “For all intents and purposes.”
She angled her neck to watch his deft progress down one leg, determined not to react. Right. The sexiest man she’d ever met with the strongest, gentlest, most efficient hands she’d ever felt was taking his time skimming those hands over her flesh and she wasn’t going to react? A bit worse for wear, she might have been, but she wasn’t dead, and the parts that weren’t shrieking in agony were very aware that this man in a white, tight T-shirt was something definitely worth waking up the hormones for. Just to look, unfortunately, but it had been a looooong time since her eyes had been anywhere near such a feast.
Perhaps focusing on his face would distract her from his hands.
Oh, all right—so it had been a long shot.
His expression was earnest and focused, she was reasonably sure, solely on her skeletal structure. So she followed suit. Cheeks. Jaw. High, broad forehead. His brows and lashes were as pale as his hair, which for some reason she’d always found off-putting before this.
“I suppose—” She swallowed, tried to reestablish saliva flow. “I suppose you know what you’re doing?”
“Well enough.” Apparently satisfied, he started in on the other leg.
“The lady gots lots of boo-boos,” the littlest one pronounced in a voice that, in twenty years or so, was going to rival Greta Garbo’s.
“She sure does, honey,” Steven said, never taking his eyes off Sophie’s leg.
“C’n I give her some of my bandy-aids?”
“Sure thing…what?” This last was directed at Sophie, who’d feebly raised one hand.
“I realize I might regret dispensing this tidbit of information, but I didn’t land on my, um, legs.”
His hands stilled as he slowly twisted to face her, allowing her to see that, judging from his terrible attempt at keeping his expression blank, he understood. “I see.” And then the smile blossomed, wicked and sweet and just this side of cocky. And if she hadn’t already had the wind knocked out of her, the smile would have done it for sure. “And I don’t suppose I need to check that out for broken bones, huh?”
Oh, dear, but that grin was deadly.
And just like that, her imagination conjured up a very brunette woman with remarkably dominant genes who’d undoubtedly helped create all these children.
“A very astute observation,” Sophie said, deciding the time had come to haul herself upright and be on her way.
“Wow, lady—” This from an older child she hadn’t noticed before, a youngish teenager with close-cropped, nearly black hair. Which meant there were five children. And also meant that Steven had gotten a very early start in the reproductive phase of his life, since the kid looked at least fourteen or so, and Steven, she surmised, couldn’t be more than in his mid-thirties. The kid was inspecting her bicycle, which she could tell, even from this angle, wasn’t going to be transporting anyone, anywhere, anytime too soon. “You like totally demolished this.”
She silently swore, then began the arduous task of gathering together assorted body parts and convincing them to work together just long enough to get upright. She’d tackle actual movement at a later date.
“What