LITMIR.BIZ

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you?”

      From beneath the red and blue bandanna he’d tied over the top of his head and knotted at the back, damp, dark brown hair curled down his neck. A shine of sweat darkened his hair and skin, slipped down his temples to his jaw.

      His glance slid to her daughter. The tiny bead of sweat vanished into the rumpled collar of his shirt. “Hey, kid,” he said, nodding.

      Frances Bird beamed at him, tilted her head and batted her eyelashes. Her rosebud mouth curled with happiness. “Hey, Mr. Man.”

      Phoebe almost sighed again, and stopped herself before she became a wind machine. Frances Bird had been born flirting. The result of an absentee father? Phoebe’s own failure? Or simply southern genes asserting themselves in spite of an aggressively midwest upbringing? Phoebe tried not to overanalyze her daughter’s lightning-bug sparkle around males. Tapping her daughter’s shoulder, she said, “Frances Bird, meet my—what are you and I to each other, Murphy?” She lifted her chin, giving him a little attitude, but she couldn’t manage the smile this time. “Not brother and sister.”

      “Not by a damn slight” Murphy held her gaze.

      “Family, anyway,” she said through a tight throat. “Family. That counts for something, even after eight years. Right?”

      He didn’t say a word.

      “Hey,” four-year-old Frances Bird said, her flushed cheeks dimpling with delight. “Me and my mom are going to live with you.”

      “Oh?” Murphy didn’t move an inch. The pleasantly interested question would have fooled anyone who hadn’t grown up with him.

      But his poker-faced acknowledgment didn’t fool Phoebe for an instant. She heard the dismay behind his affable drawl, and her anxiety increased, threatened to blaze out of control.

      Avoiding his coolly distant perusal, she slicked Frances Bird’s wet bangs off her face. “Well, sugar, that hasn’t been decided.” The worst he could do would be to send them packing. And if he did? She’d handle that, too. She had no choice. “We’re here for an afternoon’s visit. To catch up on old times. That’s all. Don’t panic, Murphy.”

      Bird’s mouth puckered up with stubbornness. “You said—”

      “I know what I said, Frances Bird.” This time Phoebe couldn’t stop the sigh that came rolling up from her toes.

      “And what did you say, Phoebe?” A breeze lifted the corner of Murphy’s shirt, brushed it back from his chest, died away in the stillness. “About coming to live with me?”

      Frances Bird patted Phoebe’s knees comfortingly. “Tell him, Mama, what you decided.”

      When Phoebe didn’t speak, Frances Bird leaned forward confidingly and rested her elbows on her skinny knees as she looked up through her eyelashes at Murphy. “We are bums on the street. So we’re going to live with you now ’cause we got no place else to go. And Mama said, home by damn—”

      “Don’t swear, Frances Bird.”

      “—is where when you go, they got to take you in. And that’s that, she said.”

      “Yeah?”

      With her hair swinging about her face, Bird nodded vigorously. Water dotted the faded blue of Murphy’s jeans. “And, Mama,” she said earnestly, “you say the damn word all the time.”

      Stifling the groan that battled with yet another sigh, Phoebe lifted Frances Bird onto her lap. “Shh, baby. The grownups have to talk now.”

      “That’s for damn sure.” He reached up and tugged at his bandanna, shadowing his eyes.

      At Murphy’s use of the forbidden word, Frances Bird poked Phoebe’s face and rolled her eyes.

      He studied them for a moment, a long moment that had Phoebe’s bare toes curling and heat flooding through her again before he said softly, “Bums on the street, huh?”

      “Not quite.” Phoebe shaded her own eyes as Frances Bird leaped into explanation.

      “Oh, yes. But we didn’t sleep in boxes. We stayed at a motel one night. With tiny pink soaps. Soooo pretty. I kept one.” Frances Bird batted her eyelashes again, smiled, and kept talking like the River Jordan, rolling right on down to eternity.

      Phoebe yearned to sink through boards of the porch into a quiet, cool oblivion where Murphy Jones’s too-observant gray eyes couldn’t note her every twitch and flinch. Although easygoing, Murphy had never been a fool. Not likely he’d become one since she’d last had a conversation with him. This homecoming, if that’s what it was, was not going well.

      “We got fired. and we got debts, and—”

      “Enough, Frances Bird.” The hint of steel in Phoebe’s voice finally silenced her chatty daughter. Lifting her chin, Phoebe held his gaze. “Well, Murphy, are you going to keep us standing outside for the rest of the night?”

      He rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. “Seems to me, Phoebe, you’re sittin’, not standin’.” His drawl curled into the deepening blue twilight of the heat.

      “Murphy’s right, Mama.” Frances Bird tugged the hem of Phoebe’s shorts. “We’re sitting.”

      She stood up. “Fine. Now I’m standing. Everybody happy?” Turning her back, she marched up the stairs to the swing, anger crackling down her spine with every mud-caked step. This was worse than she’d anticipated.

      More humiliating.

      She was tired, worried sick, and Murphy was only going to torment her, tease her, and drive her crazy the way he had when they were young. She’d never understood her reaction to him, or his to her, but she was in no mood today to sit or stand for it. Sherman had marched on Atlanta and burned it to the ground and maybe she was burning her bridges with a vengeance, but at the moment she couldn’t care less if she left nothing but ashes in her wake.

      And knowing his cool gray eyes were watching her every movement perversely fueled her temper.

      She grabbed one of the battered suitcases and swung to face her daughter. “Bird, we’re on our way. Say nice to have met you to Murphy.” Wishing she’d pasted on that red lipstick after all, she stomped off the porch.

      “Mama!” The frantic tug at Phoebe’s shorts didn’t stop her march down the steps. But Bird’s anxious whisper, a whisper that was loud enough to hear from five feet away, halted Phoebe with one foot dangling in mid-air. “We got no place to go. You said.”

      “Come on into the house.” Murphy’s sigh echoed her earlier ones. Like chickenpox, sighing was apparently contagious. “Looks like that talk you mentioned can’t wait.” Metal jangled on the ring at his belt loop as he unclipped a key. The look he cast Frances Bird was shrewd. “Anyway, the kid must be hungry.”

      “Very hungry.” With a lightning-fast mood change, Frances Bird smiled winsomely at him. “You got Jell-O? I like Jell-O. Red. With peaches.”

      “No red Jell-O.” Murphy unlocked the door and flung it open. “Bananas okay?”

      “I can make do.” Bird dipped under his outstretched arm and into the dim interior of the house. “Mama says it’s a skill us McAllisters got.”

      In the spirit of making do, Phoebe planted both feet firmly on the bottom step and reminded herself that she couldn’t afford pride. Not today. Not tonight. Anger drained away, making room for the poisonous dread she’d been living with for weeks now. She met Murphy’s guarded eyes and took a breath.

      His wide hand rested on the door as he waited for Phoebe to follow her daughter. “Come into my parlor,” he said, and the ironic edge to his low, slow words did nothing to settle the ping-pong bounce of her stomach.

      “I know how that story ends,” she muttered, dipping, like Phoebe, beneath his arm.

      “Of

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