CHAPTER THREE

I showed up thirty-five minutes early on Wednesday. Dawn, as Mrs. Arnosta insisted I call her, asked me to arrive half an hour before my usual time because she needed to give me instructions before she left for work. I wasn’t sure how many instructions I needed for a twelve-year-old, but I guess I was about to find out.

She lived less than ten minutes away from the Mercers, which would help a lot during the winter in case the weather got nasty and road conditions were—

Wait. What was I saying? This was Florida. I was no longer in the Midwest. A nasty winter here was probably a bracing forty degrees with a slight breeze.

Okay, so scratch that last part.

The short drive would…help me save a lot on gas money. Yeah.

The neighborhood was nice, with professionally tended lawns and huge, beautiful houses lining wide, well-paved streets. I began to get excited, thinking I’d get to chill on extra-long leather sofas and watch late-night shows on large-screen televisions while I snacked on gourmet popcorn after my ward went to sleep. But then I parked in front of the correct address, and my hopes crashed. Kaput. Suddenly, I remembered Dawn was a single mother who had to work a second job to support her family. No extra-long leather sofas for her. Or me.

Her place was obviously owned by her neighbor to the right because the style of architecture plus the blue and white color schemes of both places matched. I deduced that her house must be an old guest cottage the owner had turned into a rental.

Hooking the strap of my knock-off Prada purse over my shoulder, I locked my car and trudged up the sidewalk to the front door. Mr. Landlord to the right was a total ass. His own house was freshly painted, while the worn siding on his guest cottage had begun to peel in places, and the lawn sported brown patches of dead grass.

I’d just leaped over a deep chasm a giant might consider a small crack in the sidewalk when the front door opened. A thirty-eight-year-old woman—if my internal age radar was reading her correctly—peered out at me. Willow slim, she’d tied her dark hair up into a perky ponytail.

I know, I know. My own hair was bawling with jealousy to do the same. Someday, I swore, I’d get to wear my hair up again.

Despite the youthful locks, her eyes looked tired and were double ringed with fatigue, while her shoulders stooped as if taking on the weight of the world. But she had a friendly smile, so I instantly liked her and felt bad for her in equal measures. She just looked so exhausted and worn down.

“Reese?” she asked.

I nodded and made my own guess. “Mrs. Arnosta?”

“Oh, it’s just Dawn.” Hearing my address made her wince with a pained expression, but she stepped aside and opened the door wide to let me in.

Her last name must give her fits or maybe memories of a bad spouse. This was the second time she’d asked me to use her first name…a little too forcefully.

“Right.” I cringed. “Sorry.” I definitely wouldn’t make that mistake again.

With a forgiving nod, she graciously ushered me into the house. For some reason, I instantly smelled sickness. I breathed it in deeply, reminded of one of my childhood friends from home who’d had a little brother with leukemia. There had always been this sterile scent of medicine in the air whenever I had visited. That same pharmaceutical bouquet hung heavy in Dawn’s front room, telling me someone living here was not one hundred percent healthy.

Glancing at her, I checked her over, wondering if she was okay. Did she have cancer? That would definitely account for the weary, threadbare look about her.

“Sarah’s back here,” she said, sending me an almost guilty glance before motioning me to follow as she started down a long, dark, narrow hall.

As we approached the lighted room at the end, I heard a voice saying, “Hey, I know you wanted to go to that slumber party your classmates didn’t invite you to tonight, but don’t sweat it, okay. I bet you’re not missing anything fun at all. I mean, what kind of—”

“Mason!” Dawn interrupted the speaker, sounding surprised as she entered the kitchen just ahead of me. “There you are. I didn’t realize you were still home. But since you’re here, the new evening sitter just arrived, and I’d like you to meet her.”

Hearing that name, I stumbled and tripped over my own feet before bumping into the wall and jostling a hanging framed portrait of a young Mason.

Yes, a young Mason, as in Hotness from Waterford County Community College, Mason ~Lowe~.

I gawked at the face in that photograph—though, aww, he’d even been a cutie patootie when he’d been missing his two front teeth—and suddenly, I didn’t want to enter the kitchen. Thinking quickly, I tried to concoct a plan to not exit the hallway. But honestly, there was no way to avoid it, unless I wanted to abandon this babysitting gig altogether. Which just seemed totally irresponsible and not at all like me.

“Reese?” Dawn asked, her voice full of concern as she appeared in the opening of the hallway. “Are you okay?”

No, not really. But I nodded and stepped into the room, smoothing down my shirt as I went, so I hopefully wouldn’t look like a total dork. But when my gaze latched onto a pair of familiar gray eyes, I experienced a mad case of word vomit. “I’m fine. Sorry about that. I’m just the queen of clumsy.” And a total dork.

“Reese,” Dawn said again, this time with amusement in her eyes. “This is my son, Mason. He works most evenings at the Country Club, so you may or may not see him coming and going whenever you’re here. Mason, this is Reese Randall.”

Mason gaped at me with the most horrified expression I think I’ve ever seen. A second later, he shook his head and cleared his throat before glancing away and distractedly mumbling, “Hey.”

“H-hi,” I croaked.

But what the hell? Hotness was Dawn Arnosta’s ~son~? That couldn’t be. They didn’t have the same last name.

Even though I knew this was all a big, awful coincidence, I felt tricked.

With him decked out in his work uniform—a pale blue polo shirt with an oval logo for the Waterford County Country Club over his left pec and Khaki pants to match—I was suddenly reminded of what Eva had said about him being a gigolo.

Holy crap, she hadn’t been lying about the Country Club thing; what if she hadn’t been lying about—

My eyes grew round. And his narrowed as he stared back, his lips tightening as if he could read my mind.

“…Mason just started taking classes at the community college this semester too,” Dawn was telling me. “Maybe you two will see each other there.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, half out of it as I smiled tightly at the mother before turning back to the son. “I…I think I might’ve seen you around campus already.”

“You dumped a bag full of books on my feet before my calculus class on Monday,” he reminded me dryly.

“Right,” I agreed slowly before trilling out a guilty little laugh. “That ~was~ you, wasn’t it? Yeah, sorry about that…again.”

His stare was borderline hostile, telling me I didn’t impress him in the least. But it still held a powerful punch.

Whenever he’d glanced at Eva on that first day of classes, it was as if he’d stared straight through her. With me, it was the complete opposite.

He ~saw~ me. He just didn’t approve of what he saw, for some unknown reason.

“Oh, so you two have already met, then.” Dawn seemed pleased to learn this. “That’s great.”

I sent her a horrified glance to let her know she was crazy. Mason and I had certainly never “met” before. But she was too busy pointing to something he was blocking with his body like some kind of protective papa bear.

“I guess that leaves one introduction. Reese, this is Sarah.” Taking Mason’s elbow, Dawn manually dragged his resisting body aside to reveal the little girl sitting in a wheelchair behind him.

Yeah, I said wheelchair. Sarah, the twelve-year-old I was supposed to babysit, sat in a wheelchair.

This, I had not expected.

Trying not to show my shock, I clasped my hands together and gave the girl such a huge smile it stretched my lips to unbelievable proportions. “Hi, Sarah. I’m so happy to meet you,” I said aloud when internally, I screamed, ~Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Why didn’t Dawn mention this in the phone interview?~

In response, Sarah flailed her head and arms, limbs and neck spasms floundering her out of control as her torso went limp and floppy. A low, garbled sound, like a sick cow on drugs, moaned its way from her throat.

I’m not too sure, but I think she said, “Hello.”

I freaked.

How the hell was I supposed to watch a special needs child in a wheelchair? I wasn’t trained for this. Artie, the autistic boy I’d watched once or twice two years ago, had had such a mild case that sometimes I’d forgotten he was different at all. But there would be no forgetting it with Sarah. I didn’t know the first thing about…well, whatever it was she had.

“Sarah, this is Reese.” Dawn crouched next to her and set her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder. “She’s going to stay with you in the evenings now that Ashley’s gone.”

I smiled encouragingly at Sarah, hoping she understood I was a good guy, hoping she understood anything.

Sarah moaned out another inarticulate sound that didn’t give my hope a lot of room to breathe.

Damn it. ~Why~ had Dawn kept this a secret?

Mason stiffened. Don’t ask me how I knew that, but I felt a blast of angry chill attack me from his direction, so I glanced over. He glared with so much pent-up anger I actually shrank back. But the meaning in his glower was clear. If I did anything to hurt his little sister, he would make me regret it.

I was tempted to hold my thumbs up in a message-received signal but restrained myself. Bad timing and all that.

“Sarah has CP,” Dawn told me.

“Oh.” I nodded as if I knew what that meant and unconsciously turned Mason’s way with a questioning wrinkle in my brows.

“That’s short for cerebral palsy,” he said, his voice damn near a challenge, daring me to run screaming from the house.

Except I wasn’t really the running and screaming type.

Again, I nodded as if I totally understood and had no problem with it. Really, though, what the hell was cerebral palsy? I’d heard the term plenty of times but had no idea what it actually entailed.

“It’s a muscle disorder,” Dawn answered my unspoken question. “Sarah was born premature, and it injured the motor part of her brain, affecting the muscles in her entire body, from her limbs to trunk to even her tongue and eye muscles. It takes an extreme effort for her just to talk, or chew, or even blink.”

Ohhh. Good to know. But poor Sarah. That kind of life had to suck monkey butt. I glanced at her with a commiserating grimace, which seemed to tick her big brother off something fierce.

“I need to get going,” he broke in, as if he couldn’t bear to stand in the same house with me a second longer.

Bending slightly to kiss Sarah’s cheek—and my, my, how nicely those pants fit his rear to perfection—he said, “Take care, kiddo,” before he stood and ruffled her oak-colored locks, which were the same shade as his own. Then he glanced at his mother and waved goodbye.

When he turned toward me, because he had to since I was standing right by the hallway entrance, his eyes were stormy and filled with silent warning. He didn’t even nod as he brushed past before disappearing down the hall. A second later, I heard the front door open and close. And he was gone.

I felt rattled after his departure, but his mother didn’t seem to notice anything strange at all.

“So this is Sarah’s picture board,” she told me. I jerked to attention, not daring to miss any vital piece of information. “If she has trouble understanding something you’re saying, you can always point at a picture to communicate. And likewise, she can do the same in order to speak to you.”

I nodded, soaking in as much as I could.

“Her supper’s already ready. I have her meal blended and sitting in the refrigerator. Just pop a straw in. We keep them in this cupboard.” Dawn paused to open a nearby cabinet door so she could point out their location. “And hold it to her mouth for her. She’ll probably try to talk you into letting her hold it on her own, but trust me, it’s always less messy if you do it. Make sure she eats in about half an hour. Her evening meal is at 8:30 every night.”

Another nod. Was I soaking this up well enough? I was still so freaked it felt like I was forgetting more directions than retaining. Half an hour suddenly didn’t seem like nearly enough time to learn how to care for Dawn’s daughter.

But she seemed to think I’d do just fine as she showed me Sarah’s bathing chair in the bathtub and explained the girl’s nightly routine.

“Cleaning her teeth is important. But we’ve been having trouble using a toothbrush. It used to be she’d let Mason brush them. But lately, he can’t even get her to open up. She just doesn’t like the bristles. So use a cotton swab and soak it in some toothpaste if you have to. Just do the best you can, and beware of these chompers.” With a grin she tapped Sarah’s chin. “She can bite.”

Oh, joy. I looked forward to the rest of this evening more and more. Not.

We moved through the house, Dawn talking in rapid-fire succession as she pushed the wheelchair ahead of her, making me forget more and more of what she said. As we entered the front room, Dawn stopped Sarah in front of the muted television and smiled at me.

“Oh, and if she has a seizure,” she added as she slipped on her café apron and picked her purse up off the coffee table, “don’t try to stop it, because you can’t. Just make sure she can’t do anything to harm herself and wait it out. Call 911 if she turns colors or if she has more than one.”

With that, she kissed Sarah’s cheek. “Take care, munchkin. I’ll be home by the time you’re awake in the morning.”

And she was out the door.

I panicked. Seizures should never be addressed in a parting comment, I decided. Seizures were scary. And serious. I’d just been left alone with a CP kid I had no idea how to even talk to who had seizures.

I turned slowly from the doorway, praying she wouldn’t fall into convulsions that very second.

“So…” My voice trembled as I clasped my hands together. I was afraid to step toward her, and I had no idea why. She didn’t smell bad or anything. I knew she wasn’t contagious. I was just…ignorant.

But I stretched out my arm as far as I could without moving close and tapped a picture on her board. “Do you want to watch some television?” I asked in a slow, drawling voice.

Sarah knocked the picture board off her lap with a flailing hand—I suspect she did it on purpose. Then, she moaned out the word, “no,” and despite all the bobbing her head did, I could tell she rolled her eyes at me.

Yes, she did. She rolled her freaking eyes.

The child thought I was lame. And that just wasn’t acceptable. I was one of the most un-lame people I knew.

But really, the rolling eyes thing bespoke of a rebellious move and calmed me down more than anything else had since arriving at the Arnosta house. It was comprehendible tweenie behavior. And comprehendible behavior, I could get.

Narrowing my eyes, I smiled. Game on, brat.

“So…I overheard you and your brother talking about how all your friends are at a slumber party tonight,” I started, folding my arms over my chest in a ha-take-that manner. “And you weren’t invited.”

She wailed out a groan, telling me I was trudging on dangerous ground for bringing up such a sensitive subject.

I tsked out a sympathetic sound and sat on the chair beside her wheelchair so we could be eye-to-eye. “That’s really too bad, you know. I bet they’re having loads of fun right now, putting on makeup and doing each other’s hair, maybe having a campfire in the back yard and eating s’mores while they tell spooky ghost stories.” I shivered for effect, really rubbing it in.

But then the damndest thing happened. Miserable, fat teardrops glistened in Sarah’s eyes. When she blinked them away, my throat went dry.

Now ~I~ was the total jerk face.

Here, I’d been trying to prove I wasn’t some pathetic, pushover babysitter, and my ward had been suffering from honest-to-God heartbreak. Ashamed of myself for being so cruel, I shut up and cleared my throat.

I had to fix this. Like right now.

And suddenly, as if the genius god had visited me, I had an idea. I’ve been known to have occasional, random streaks of brilliance, sure, but this one took the cake.

“Yeah, it’s too bad,” I repeated in the same fake-compassionate voice I’d been using. “Because those girls aren’t going to have ~nearly~ as much fun as we will tonight.” Then I let out an enthusiastic cheer and surged to my feet. “Let’s get this party started.”

Sarah glanced at me with a confused wrinkle in her brows.

I sighed and rolled my own eyes. “Let’s do each other’s hair and put on makeup. I swear, I have an entire cosmetic kit in my purse. We don’t need a bunch of other lame girls around to have fun. We can have it all by ourselves.”

Before she could nix the idea, I hurried to my purse I’d left on the floor by the front door and returned to the chair beside her, pulling out everything I had on me and lining each item on the coffee table.

“You sit here,” I ordered as if she wasn’t already sitting, “And I’ll glam you up.”

That’s what happened too. I babbled and applied while she sat and listened.

“The key to putting on makeup,” I murmured ten minutes later, holding my mouth just right to mimic how I wanted hers to purse while I applied glittery gloss to her lips, “is to make it look like you’re not wearing any at all. I mean, to be honest, if you’re not going out club-hopping, too much makeup these days is just tacky and gauche.”

“Then…why…put…it…on…”

Since the long question was such an effort for her, I hopped in, interrupting. “Why put it on at all?”

When she nodded, letting me know that’s exactly what she was curious about, I grinned. “Oh, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. I have so much to teach you, my little grasshopper. You see, beauty is all in the eye of the beholder. Some people will think you’re lovely no matter how much you doll yourself up. Others will think you’re hideous. It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s just a fact of life. So, honestly, the only opinion that really matters is your own. And I say…as long as you ~feel~ pretty, you will be. When you take out special time each morning to beautify yourself, it’s just easier to feel that way. Tilt your chin up for me, will you, precious?”

I was pretty sure my whacked out speech on life and beauty would horrify Sarah’s mother. But…Dawn wasn’t here, so I kept gushing on as I grasped her chin to keep it as steady as possible when she tried to move it up herself but couldn’t quite manage.

When I playfully dusted blush across her nose, she giggled a hoarse, keening moan.

I think I loved her laugh.

“There,” I murmured, tilting her face from the left to the right as if examining every inch for flaws. Surprisingly, I found none. “You’re simply beautiful, ~dawhling~.”

And she really was. There was a certain glow to her perfectly formed cheeks. I could see how she was related to Mason. They both had gray eyes and dark eyebrows. On him, the eyebrows looked sexy. On her, I might’ve wanted to pull out my tweezers and start plucking, but they still gave her a certain charming character. She looked amazing.

“I always feel like dancing when I put on makeup just for fun,” I told her. “Do you feel like dancing?”

She nodded, and I grinned. “Well then what are we waiting for, chickie? Let’s boogie.”

Grabbing her wheelchair, I rolled her down the hall and back to the kitchen, which had a nice big open space in the center of it.

I booted up some Flo Rida on my iPhone, set the volume to full blast, and we got a “Good Feeling” going. Holding hands, we whirled around the linoleum, dancing in our own way.

We totally connected. She loved how I sang off key to the song and made the wheels on her chair skid into a circle.

“Only…Mason…dances…with me,” she confessed a few minutes later when I plopped into a kitchen chair beside her, exhausted after our workout.

Something warm and tight trickled through me at the mention of him. “Does he? That’s nice.” I snagged a cookie off the center of the table, trying to sound blasé about it, when really I wanted to ooh and aww and blurt out how much my crush on him was growing that very second. “He sounds like a good brother.”

“He’s the best.” She snatched a cookie too and began to munch.

I froze, not sure if cookies were allowed. I mean, if her supper needed to be blended, solid food must be taboo. Right?

But she grinned at me as she downed the entire thing. So, I grinned back.

And life was good.

From there, our night only got better. I found a flashlight and put a red cup over it before setting it in the middle of the living room floor—my very safe interpretation of a campfire. Using Sarah’s dolls as fill-in people, I arranged our little party into a circle around the pseudo campfire. Then I helped Sarah from her chair and propped her back against the sofa with enough pillows on either side of her to keep her from tipping over.

We ate supper there—she held her own cup, of course, without a single spill—and I told her the golden arm ghost story. She loved every second and actually argued with me when I insisted it was bath time. But she ended up being helpful and pointed out the location of things when I needed to know where her soap and shampoo were kept.

By the time I got her into bed, we were both drained. She fell asleep almost immediately, and I stood over her for a minute, awed by such a wonderful, sweet child. She actually wanted to hug and kiss me goodnight, and we’d only known each other a couple of hours. When she said, “Love you,” into my ear just before dropping off, I almost started bawling.

I think I loved her too; she was just too precious not to.

Lightly brushing her hair out of her face, I pressed a kiss to her temple and left her sleeping peacefully.

I settled on the couch and closed my eyes to catch my breath. And like Sarah, I fell asleep almost immediately, worn out from all the energy I’d put into entertaining my new buddy. But something jerked me from a muddled dream where Jeremy was pinning me to the door of my childhood bedroom and opening his pocketknife with an evil leer. ~“I told you trying to get rid of me would be a big mistake.”~

A muted light shimmered from the hallway, providing me a dim, shadowed outlook of the Arnosta living room. I had no idea what time it was, but it felt late. Groggy and disoriented, I stirred and yawned. I began to sit upright when I heard a noise from the back of the house.

A thump and then scraping wood yanked me alert.

That didn’t sound right.

I panicked because I’d left my purse in the kitchen when Sarah and I had danced earlier, and the kitchen was way too close to where that sound had originated. My mace, Taser, and cell phone were in there.

Hell, yes, I owned a Taser. My psycho stalker ex-boyfriend had tried to kill me four months ago.

What was worse, I suddenly couldn’t remember a thing I’d learned in self-defense training.

Oh, God. How was I supposed to protect Sarah?

Sarah! Wait, what if she’d somehow gotten out of bed, and that was her back there, ~hurt~?

I had to know what that sound was. But, Lordy, I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to find out.

To be on the safe side, I snatched one of the dolls we’d used for our campout that was still sitting on the floor with its back propped against the entertainment center. Then I crept to the opening of the hallway, scared out of my gourd.

Thinking of Sarah’s safety first was the only thing that gave me the nerve I needed to put one foot in front of the other, because if Jeremy had found me and followed me here, there was no way I was letting him anywhere near that sweet, innocent girl.

I paused at the partially closed doorway to her room, holding my breath, half hoping she was inside—and safe—and half hoping she wasn’t—because if it wasn’t her making that noise, then who the hell was?

I nudged her door the rest of the way open and peered into the darkness inside. The nightlight plugged into the wall revealed a perfectly shaped Sarah-sized lump on the bed. Then she shifted, making her mattress and sheets rustle.

Okay, so she was here. Then who ~else~ was in the house with us? If Dawn—or even Mason—was home, wouldn’t they have woken me and told me I could go?

Something moved again in the back bathroom at the end of the hall, the one Dawn had told me not to use because the toilet didn’t work right. It sounded like a drawer opening and shutting. Was someone looking for drugs or a weapon to use against me?

Shaking all over, I gripped the doll in my hands tighter and held it like a ball bat, prepared to swing a home run if necessary.

Just as the door to Sarah’s room had been, the opening to the bathroom was also hanging half open. I had to creep closer than I wanted to in order to get a peek inside. When I finally eased in just enough to see the sink, I froze solid. Hermione Granger could’ve pointed a wand at me and shouted, “Stupefy,” and she wouldn’t have had a better result. I could only stand there in shocked wonder and gawk. All fear vanished to be replaced by instant fascination.

With his back to me, a sopping wet Mason Lowe wore nothing but a towel as he leaned over the vanity and held onto its sides as if the sink were the only thing keeping him upright.

I could see his slightly bowed face perfectly in the mirror above. He’d squeezed his eyes closed, and a ragged expression contorted his features while creases of haggard regret etched deep grooves into the skin around his mouth and eyes.

I gasped when I saw the scratch marks on his bare, upper back, just under his shoulder blades and right where a pair of feminine fingernails might grip him if he’d had a woman lying under him very recently.

Lashes popping open, he looked up and saw me in the mirror.