Twelve Days (21 page)

"So if..." God, he was going to say that even if he and Rachel split up, Rachel could still keep the children.

She didn't need him as much as he thought she did.

"Sam?" Miriam asked. "Are you okay?"

He nodded. All these years, children had been the one thing he and Rachel hadn't had, one thing he hadn't been able to give her. Now he found out she didn't need him at all for that. Not to keep these children.

"What's going on?" Miriam asked.

"Nothing," he insisted.

"Do you and Rachel want them if they become available for adoption?" she asked. "I have to warn you, I don't know how long we might be living in limbo here—how long we'll look for their parents, whether we'll ever find them, whether the children will ever be free for adoption. There are no guarantees here, and I thought after what happened with Will..."

"I don't know," he said. "I have to talk to Rachel."

And then he thought of what his wife had already done, the promises she'd already made on their behalf, and took a leap of faith himself.

"But you don't have to look for someone else to take them after Christmas. They can stay at our house. Rachel already promised them that. It's not a problem, is it? We've still got all our paperwork in order?"

"Yes. You and Rachel can have them for as long as you want them, provided we don't find where they belong."

"Okay." He frowned. "You have single-parent foster homes, too?"

"Of course."

"It's not a problem? Being a single parent?"

"We're not exactly overwhelmed with people dying to take foster kids into their homes, Sam. We have plenty of kids to go around." She frowned at him. "What's going on?"

"Just curious," he said, shaking his head back and forth.

A few days ago he felt trapped because of the kids. He couldn't have walked out on Rachel and the kids. Now he worried that they didn't need him at all. Oh, he could probably take the coward's way out, stay for the sake of the children, and maybe Rachel would keep him around for the same reason.

But it was about the saddest reason he could think of for him and Rachel to stay together, and he didn't think it was enough for him anymore. And he didn't know what to do.

Chapter 11

On the ninth day of Christmas, Rachel got out of bed very early, dressed quickly, gave Grace a bottle and put her back down, then went downstairs to find Sam still asleep on the sofa in the den.

Good. She'd made it down here before he crept out the back door. She'd waited up for him the night before and the one before that, but he hadn't come in until very late. He was doing it again, sometimes disappearing before she woke up, sometimes coming home long after she'd gone to sleep at night.

Not today, she vowed.

She went to work in the kitchen, intending to have him wake to a house filled with the smell of homemade biscuits baking and bacon sizzling in a skillet. It was going to smell so good, he wouldn't be able to leave without eating, and she intended to make him do it sitting across the table from her. He couldn't ignore her sitting across the table from her. She wouldn't let him.

It was time they got on with this. He didn't blame her for anything that happened in their past, had generously offered his forgiveness for it all, if that wasn't enough. He'd said he would have married her anyway, even without the baby, and she was trying to make herself believe it.

He'd decided not to ask the children anything else about their mother and didn't intend to let them tell him or Rachel anything about their father. Rachel had never been prouder of him than she was in that moment. That was the man she knew, the one she'd loved for so long. A man three lost children could count on to stand by them, to help them. A man she could count on, as well. When he wasn't hell-bent on avoiding her.

That seemed the way it had always been for her and Sam. Two steps forward, one step back. They had just been coming out of the fog of losing the baby when Rachel's grandfather had died. Two years later, her mother had died. The next year, they'd gotten involved in an adoption gone wrong. A birth mother who had changed her mind at the last minute. They'd actually seen the baby at the hospital. Rachel had held him in her arms, but they'd never been able to take him home. And then there'd been the adoption that was nothing more than a scam. A woman who'd been pregnant and promising her baby to a half-dozen couples throughout the Midwest and in the process managing to scam them out of thousands of dollars. And then there'd been Will.

It was like they'd hardly been able to breathe between one tragedy and the next, and considering it all together, Rachel supposed it was a miracle they'd made it this far, her husband's post-Christmas plans notwithstanding.

But they were still together. They were talking about things they'd never been able to discuss before. There was a long way to go and no guarantees of any kind regarding these children. But they had reason to hope.

Rachel was just putting the biscuits in the oven when she thought she heard a car out front. Glancing at the clock, she couldn't imagine anyone showing up at her door this early unless...

She hurried to the front door, afraid of finding her father or one of her sisters there, but it was Miriam climbing the porch steps.

"Good morning," Miriam said.

It scared her, seeing her aunt here so early, so unexpectedly. "What did you find out?" she asked.

"About the children?"

"Of course, about the children."

"Nothing. Just what I told Sam yesterday. That the DNA tests showed they couldn't possibly belong to the couple in Virginia."

"Oh."

Miriam frowned at her. "Can I come in, Rachel? It's freezing out here."

"Oh. Of course." Rachel stepped back and held open the door. "Sorry."

She took Miriam's coat and led her to the kitchen, where she offered her fresh coffee, conscious of the fact that Sam was still asleep on the sofa in the family room. Which Miriam would know instantly if she took three steps down the back hallway. That was all she needed—Miriam to see that, if she hadn't heard from someone else about all that was wrong at the McRae house.

"Sam said you'll keep the children after Christmas if I still haven't found out where they belong."

"He told you that?"

"Yes. I assume you'd both agreed..."

"We had," Rachel claimed. It wasn't exactly a lie. "I just didn't know he'd told you. That's all."

Miriam was giving her that all-knowing mother look, the one Rachel's own mother used so often. She'd claimed mothers just knew things, that one day they were going to find a gene for it on the X chromosome. The all-knowing-mother gene. Rachel had hardly ever been able to put anything over on her mother or Miriam.

"Sam and I talked about a lot of things. Oddly enough, he was interested in the fact that single people could be foster parents or adoptive parents."

"What?" What did single people have to do with anything?

"Singles. Foster parenting. Adopting. For instance, if you were single and wanted to continue foster parenting these children or to be considered as an adoptive parent, we could probably make that work just fine."

"Oh." Rachel was suddenly feeling awful.

"Why would your husband ever be interested in something like that?"

Miriam headed down the back hallway before Rachel could stop her. She stood in the doorway leading to the family room, Sam just waking up and staring at the both of them as if he weren't quite sure where he was. But Miriam knew exactly where she'd find him this early in the morning, and it wasn't in his wife's bed where he should have been. Miriam gave Rachel another one of those mother looks. That I-knew-it and why-didn't-you-tell-me look, all at once.

"Dammit," Rachel muttered under her breath. She did not need this. She didn't intend to explain her marriage to anyone, especially not her entire family.

Rachel grabbed her aunt by the arm and tugged her back into the kitchen. "This is none of your business," she said.

"Rachel, I'm not trying to be nosy. I'm worried about you. I was worried before I brought these children here, and now I'm worried even more. You and your husband aren't sleeping together?"

"I don't think it's any of your business where we sleep," she said.

"If you're going to try to adopt these children someday, it is."

"We can't adopt them now, can we? They're not free for anyone to adopt."

"No. Not now."

"Then until we can, it's none of your business."

"Rachel," she said, the hurt obvious in her voice. "I care about you very much, and I promised your mother before she died that I would look out for you, as if you were my very own daughter. And obviously, you've needed a mother now for a while, and I haven't been here. Not the way I should have been. I love you. Don't you know that?"

"I know it," she said wearily, then pulled her aunt close for a quick hug. "I do. I'm sorry. I... I didn't want to talk about it. Not to anybody."

Not even her husband. Obviously that had been a mistake. Maybe keeping it from Miriam was, as well.

"Okay. We can talk." She glanced nervously toward the stairs, could hear Sam climbing up—leaving her to deal with Miriam alone, which she actually thought was better. Maybe she could calm Miriam down and convince her not to talk.

But a moment later, she heard one of the children coming down the stairs. Her household was coming to life. This wasn't the time for this conversation. She needed to tell her aunt about Sam. About him losing his parents at five, not fifteen, and what in the world had likely happened to him in the meantime and what it might still be doing to him today. "But not now. I'll call you, okay?"

"All right. How are the children?"

"They're fine. We had pictures made in front of the town tree, and we baked like crazy yesterday."

"Good. I may be able to use one of the pictures on some new bulletins. Lost kids in their Christmas best. That ought to get people's attention."

Rachel nodded, thinking that was the last thing they needed.

"They still haven't said anything that might help us find them?"

"No," she claimed, not liking the lie at all. But she and Sam had chosen their path. They'd made a promise to Emma. As Rachel saw it, little rights or wrongs didn't matter nearly so much as the promise they'd made to keep these children safe.

"I told Sam before, and I want to tell you today that we'll find someone who knows them," Miriam said. "People abandoning their children, unfortunately, is not that rare, but their consciences will finally kick in and they'll come back. Remember that, Rachel. I really don't want to see either you or Sam hurt again. I thought long and hard before bringing them here. I worried about what I'd be doing to you."

"It was the right thing," Rachel reassured her. "The best thing you could have done. We needed them, and they needed us."

"Good. Just be careful. Remember what I said about liking them a lot—"

"Too late," Rachel said with a wary smile. It was probably too late right from the start. "I couldn't stop myself from loving them."

Miriam looked even more worried at that.

"I couldn't," she said. "But I'm stronger than I used to be. And more determined this time."

She was going to do her best to save her marriage and to help these children, no matter what. It felt like the most grown-up decision she'd made in years. Maybe in her whole life. And there was nothing Miriam could say to change her mind.

* * *

Rachel put breakfast on the table twenty minutes later, and a sleepy but hungry Zach dug in. Even Emma ate more than usual. Grace was after the jam more than anything else. She kept grabbing at the bits of a jam biscuit Rachel was trying to feed her until she got her hands on the whole thing. Quite pleased with herself, she tried to shove all of it in her mouth at once and ended up with jam everywhere, all over her hands and her mouth and her bib, even in her hair.

It was strawberry, and she looked like she'd decorated herself for Christmas. Everyone laughed at her, and she laughed, too, then started sucking the jam off her tiny fingers. Sam stayed to eat with them and to help clean up. He and Emma loaded the dishwasher while Rachel got the things for Grace's bath, and they put her in the sink again.

Emma went off to help Zach get dressed, and Sam stayed in the kitchen with Rachel. She probably could have bathed the baby herself, but maybe Grace wanted Sam closer, too, because she squirmed for all she was worth and generally gave Rachel a hard time until Sam stepped in and held her slippery, soapy body while Rachel did her best to wash her. All the while Grace gazed up at Sam adoringly and batted her wet lashes at him, temptress that she was. Rachel laughed at her, wondering if some females were just born with that gene.

"She's flirting with you," Rachel said.

"She's a baby."

"Look at her. She's flirting. You haven't been out of circulation so long that you don't recognize flirting, do you?" Rachel said, and then had a terrible thought.

He
was
planning to leave her. She forgot that at times, and she thought she knew the reason—that it was simply too painful to stay. But there were other possibilities. Scared, she looked up at him, so tall and so strong. So solid. Her rock. She spoke before she even thought about it.