Dreaming of His Snowed In Kiss - Jessie Gussman Page 0,29

for Hazel when her phone dinged. She wasn’t expecting an answer that fast.

Bring your smile. I need it.

Chapter 10

It was 10 o’clock, and he hadn’t served breakfast yet.

Gabriella at least had eaten. Twice. He was working on the third time. It seemed like everything he did, he did with the baby in the crook of his arm.

Garrett had pooped his pants twice, and the second time, West just left his underwear off. So the kid was running around naked. Yesterday when he left his underwear off, Garrett hadn’t gone to the bathroom at all outside of the actual bathroom.

Five minutes after he put his pants on, they were wet.

West believed himself to be kind of thick at times, but he could definitely see a pattern there.

“Is it ready yet? I’m hungry.”

West made a mental note to invest fifty dollars in boxed cereal the next time he was near a grocery store.

He had a few chickens out in the barn, enough that he enjoyed eggs for breakfast every morning and had a few to share on Sundays at church.

But he hadn’t made it out to the barn to gather the eggs lately, not to mention it was a lot harder to cook eggs than it was to dump something in a bowl and hand it to a kid.

Less stressful, too, since the kids seemed to prefer the sugar in a bowl over the eggs.

He probably would have to accept that, except going to the barn for eggs beat going to the store for cereal any day.

A crash broke through his thoughts. One that sounded like a chair being flipped over and landing on the floor in the dining room. A three-second pause of complete silence, and then Trevor started to scream.

West put the fork down that he was using to scramble the eggs and walked into the room to make sure lives were not in danger. It had been about two weeks, and he’d figured out that crying, no matter how bad, meant the kid that was crying hadn’t died.

Crying was good.

Sure enough, he could see from the doorway that Trevor was already trying to clamber to his feet. So obviously, he wasn’t dead, and it didn’t look like anything was broken either.

Not on the kid. Not on the chair.

Wins all around.

West started walking forward to right the chair and pick the kid up, then he decided there was no point in righting the chair, since it would probably just get knocked over again.

He figured he might as well let Trevor cry it out, too, since his cries already seemed to be less loud and angry.

He supposed, even if he had a parenting handbook, he wouldn’t use it anyway. But he was pretty sure it didn’t hurt kids to cry.

Movement on the other side of the doorway caught his eye, and he realized Minnie was standing there. With the white t-shirt he’d given her to wear, since she’d sweated through her nightgown and he’d not gotten the laundry done, she looked like a skeleton wearing a white sheet. A short white sheet, since it only came to mid-thigh.

A ghost of a smile kept her face from looking too spectral.

“Sometimes if you leave them alone, they calm themselves down,” she said, with a glance at Trevor, who had stopped crying and was trying to set his dump truck back on its wheels.

“I think I had just figured that out. Two weeks ago, that would have been a revelation for me.”

“I’m so sorry.” Her eyes closed, and her hand reached out like she needed the support of the doorway in order to stay on her feet. “I should have never come. I obviously have made your life miserable.”

“Not miserable. This is good for me.” He figured the words were true, even if he didn’t really want to believe them and would prefer not to have this “good” thing happen to him.

Her head shook while her eyes stayed closed. “I was selfish. I tried to think of the best person that I could, someone that I could see being good with my kids. And you are the only one that came to my mind. I should have talked to you about it before I just showed up. And now...” She took a breath, like talking had robbed her of everything, including the ability to breathe. “I’m too weak and tired to try to come up with a plan B.”

“No need for plan B. I’m here. I’m actually starting to like these rug rats. Most