Too bright, the boy was. Of course he didn’t want them to stay. He lived alone. Always had, except for visits to Cy. He moved from one guide job to the next, season to season. His home was his truck and the wide blue sky, the forests and rivers and streams.
But right now, eyes as blue as that sky were looking at him, vulnerable and lost. The boy needed some sense of security.
What the hell was she thinking, uprooting him like that? A child needed a safe place to grow up, to belong. Like he’d had, until—
“No use to worry about it now. Something will work out. Your oatmeal’s ready.” He scooped the boy into one arm and carried a bowl in the other, turning toward the table.
Perrie’s soft, sleepy gaze studied him, and he felt like he’d been caught doing something illicit.
“Mom!” Davey crowed. “Look, I made oatmeal!” He glanced over at Mitch, sliding one arm around Mitch’s neck. “Well, Mitch helped me, but mostly I made it.”
“Enough for me?” Her voice held the huskiness of sleep, rasping its way along Mitch’s nerves.
“Sure!” Davey squirmed to be let down. Mitch set him on his feet. “Look, you can have this bowl.”
She rose, and Mitch could see that she wasn’t yet steady on her feet. He started to go to her, but she cast him a forbidding glance, then straightened carefully, holding onto the arm of the sofa with one hand and using the other to free her braid of spun gold hair from her collar. With slow steps, she rounded the sofa.
By the time she reached the table, what little color she had was gone. But her spine stayed ramrod straight and around her prickled a cloud of warning.
She wouldn’t thank him to follow his instincts and carry her back to the bed. She wasn’t his business, anyway—she’d only be here as long as it took to get her well enough to leave.
He’d turned down several jobs over this fall and winter. He’d disappointed some people; he was always in demand. But he’d felt the need to come—
Home.
No. Not home. He didn’t need a home. Didn’t want one. He’d merely come back to be sure Cy’s cabin—his cabin—was all right for winter. He could leave tomorrow and get a job at the snap of his fingers. Maybe he should. Let her have the place if she wanted.
But the boy needed him right now. And so did she—like it or not, wise or not. It wasn’t in Jenny Gallagher’s son to leave them stranded, even a woman as heartless as this one.
Mitch finished dishing up Davey’s oatmeal and his own. As he sat down, he couldn’t help looking back through time to another table, another dark-haired man and blonde woman and boy. All that was missing was the dark-haired older son who had once belonged at a table like this.
Who had once been part of a family.
Until he’d destroyed it.
Perrie woke at the sound of a thump on the kitchen floor, followed by a deep rumble and animated whispers. Her impulse to leap up from the bed and be sure Davey was all right was automatic, but she waited. Mitch was with him. No matter what he thought of her, she could not fault his care of her child.
Well, except maybe the lack of bathing. But Davey was no doubt in little boy heaven.
The door opened a crack. A small blond head bobbed through the opening. When he saw that she was awake, he shoved through the door and bounced on the bed. “Mom—Mitch is making you a bath.” His little face wrinkled in disgust. “He says I gotta take one after you’re through.”
“Good for him. You need one. I wonder if all little boys hate baths.”
“They do,” the deep voice confirmed.
Perrie glanced up at Mitch. “All of them?”
“My mom practically had to hog-tie my brother and me when we were kids.” For a moment, he seemed younger, lighter of heart. The tawny eyes sparkled.
“You have a brother?” Davey asked. “Is he big like you?”
The sparkle vanished, replaced by a look of such deep sorrow that it hurt to watch.
Then the iron man recovered and resumed his careful mask. “I don’t know.” Mitch glanced at her, his expression neutral. “If you’d like to bathe, Cy had an old tub that should work.”
He didn’t know what his brother looked like? Perrie wanted to know more, but everything about him said Back off. The brief glimpse of a carefree boy was gone as if it had never existed. In its place was the forbidding stranger.
But forbidding or not, a bath sounded like heaven. Except that— “Where will you be?”
He snorted. “Davey and I will go outside.”
Perrie fought a blush. No one but Simon had ever seen her naked. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be seen by a man again. But this man, so overpowering, so…male… He made her very conscious that she was female.