Home with You by Shirlee McCoy

Author:Shirlee McCoy [McCoy, Shirlee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Getting six kids ready for a hospital visit had taken its toll. Rumer had rushed them home from school, signed their daily planners, looked through their assignment books, and gotten them snacks. As soon as that was done, she’d sent them to comb their hair, brush their teeth, and get ready to go.

That, of course, had meant helping kids find shoes and combs and—God help her—toothpaste lids that had fallen into sink drains. It had meant separating the twins when they got into a fight over whose toothbrush was whose, untying the knots in Moisey’s favorite laced boots, helping Twila choose just the right lip gloss and hair accessories, and ignoring Heavenly’s irritable glares and muttered curses every time she was reminded that she needed to get ready.

At some point, Rumer had convinced the tween to get moving. Heavenly had one-upped the request and taken Oya with her, claiming that if she was going to be forced to go, she might as well get the baby ready, too.

Now, nearly an hour after Operation Getting Ready to Go had commenced, Rumer was shoving herself into the only clean clothes she could find—a poodle skirt and sweater set. They’d been packed in the suitcase Minnie had dropped by on Rumer’s first day of work. There’d also been makeup, hair products, a few herbal headache cures, three romance novels, and a box of emergency chocolate.

The emergency chocolate was gone.

The rest of the stuff was sitting in the bottom of the suitcase. Aside from the 1950s getup Rumer had donned, all the clothes Minnie had brought were dumped in the hamper, most of them splattered with pig slop, baby spit-up, or good old-fashioned dirt from working on the farm.

She zipped the poodle skirt, running her hand down the front to smooth out a few wrinkles. The sweater was a little short, the bottom edge of it hitting right above the waistband of the skirt. She tugged it down as far as it would go, ran fingers through crazy-wild hair, and hoped to Heaven she didn’t look as frazzled as she felt.

She glanced in the mirror and winced. Yep. Frazzled in the extreme: hair poking out in a million different directions, light pink poodle skirt falling nearly to her ankles, one earring in and one missing.

She thought she might have lost it in the middle of the night and been walking around all day without it. Moisey had woken screaming around midnight, and she’d run downstairs to see what was wrong. The screaming had woken Oya, whose crying had woken Heavenly. Eventually, every one of the six kids was down in the kitchen having warm milk and toast.

Sullivan had been there, too, wearing dark blue pajama bottoms that clung to his lean hips. That was it. No shirt. No robe. She’d been fiddling with the darn earring, trying not to notice his lean, hard muscles, the smooth expanse of his skin, the contraction of biceps and triceps as he helped kids get toast and clean up messes.

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