‘Mmm.’
She fixed Henry with a look. ‘You did promise.’
‘Yeah.’ He gave her a feeble smile. ‘Okay. We did.’
‘Then I think we might persuade him not to arrest you-this time.’
Apparently this was satisfactory. They snuggled down beside her and then snuggled some more.
But then William asked what was apparently super important in both their minds.
‘Erin, where’s Tigger?’
Oh dear. Erin thought back to the last she’d seen of the house. There seemed not one snowball’s chance in a bushfire that anything could have been saved. There was nothing to do but tell them the truth.
‘Guys, I’m afraid Tigger was burned.’
That silenced them completely. They lay, taking in the enormity of it, and then Henry sniffed.
One sniff was all he allowed himself, but Erin’s heart wrenched. Tigger had been given to the boys by one of their first foster families-a sort of sop-to-conscience-at-taking-them-back-to-the-orphanage gift-and they’d been so young they’d mixed him up with leaving their mother and their bothers and sisters. Tigger had become their only constant, a toy never fought over, never discussed, but simply there.
Apart from each other he was all they had-and now they’d lost him.
Erin knew enough to acknowledge he was irreplaceable. She thought of the impossibility of saying they’d find another Tigger, and she simply didn’t know what else to say.
She was saved by a knock. There was a light rap on the door and it opened to reveal Matt. Unlike Erin and the boys, Matt was fully dressed in his farmer’s moleskins and khaki shirt. A sticking plaster lay across the burn on his forehead, but otherwise he looked completely unscathed. He was bronzed, strong, capable and ready for the day’s work.
‘Good morning,’ he said gravely enough, but his deep brown eyes twinkled at the sight of the three in the bed. ‘That’s a single bed and you guys look squashed. Didn’t you find the other two? Is something the matter?’
‘We just came into Erin’s bed now-to keep her company,’ William said with dignity, casting a doubtful look at his twin. Henry was looking dangerously close to tears, and the twins’ code of conduct decreed it didn’t do to show emotion in front of strange adults.
They’d learned early to keep themselves to themselves.
But after one knowing look at Henry, Matt mercifully changed the subject, seeming not to notice the one errant tear sliding down Henry’s cheek. He chose the one subject that might make them think of something other than loss.
‘I’ve made pancakes and I thought you might like them in bed. How about it?’
‘Pancakes?’ William said, resolutely putting aside the vision of a burning Tigger. ‘I…I guess…’
They were very upset about something, Matt realised, but he could only go on from here.
‘I’ll bring in a tray, shall I?’
‘Yes, please.’ Erin was so grateful she could have hugged him. How had he guessed that the last thing they needed was a formal breakfast? ‘That’d be lovely.’
‘Coming right up.’ He left them to it, and Erin never knew what an effort it had been for him not to sit down and hug the lot of them.
It had cost to get them breakfast.
Matt had come in from the paddocks to find his weekly housekeeper, Mrs Gregory, hard at work. He had a cow in calf in the home paddock and, after a sleepless night, he’d decided he’d be happier checking on her than staring at the ceiling. His cow now safely delivered, he’d come in to find Mrs Gregory already sniffing lugubriously over the marks on the carpet.
‘Charlotte rang me,’ she said before he could say a word. ‘I knew how it’d be, so I decided it was my Christian duty to get here early. Those dratted children. You saved them, didn’t you? Why you had to offer to take them in…’
‘I guess it was my Christian duty,’ he told her and she didn’t even smile.
‘Hmmph. Those twins. And that mother of theirs. Oh, you don’t need to tell me a thing about that woman. The whole of Bay Beach knew her before she disappeared with the last of her string of men. If ever there was a no- good, two-timing-’
‘Hey, you can’t place the sins of the mother onto the children,’ Matt interceded. ‘She threw the twins out.’
‘Which is saying a lot about the children,’ Mrs Gregory said soundly. ‘That woman’s a slut, and if even she couldn’t put up with them…’
Hmm. ‘Mrs Gregory, how would you like a holiday,’ he said thoughtfully. This wasn’t boding well for the future at all. ‘Erin’s here and, with two adults, she and I can surely do the housework.’
‘She won’t. She won’t even notice if the house is a mess. I know her kind.’
‘She will.’ His lips tightened. Heck, his mother and Charlotte and their set had truly branded Erin. Just because of her father…
He finally wrung pancakes out of Mrs Gregory-by throwing in a few more Christian duties and an agreement to take an extended break for as long as they could manage without her-and now he carried the tray toward the bedroom with the air of one who’d achieved a major triumph. When he saw the grateful smile in Erin’s eyes the feeling grew, so his chest felt a whole six inches broader.
There was still something wrong, though. Something majorly wrong. The twins were polite-sort of-about the pancakes but they sat up in bed with the pancake tray on the table between them and they poked at Matt’s offering as if the end of the world was nigh.
‘You didn’t yell at them because of the fire?’ he asked Erin, frowning as she crossed to the window with her pancake plate. She’d done it as a deliberate ruse to talk to him without the twins hearing and it worked. He’d figured it out and followed her. Now they stood with their backs to the twins, as if the cattle grazing in the paddocks was taking all their attention.
She took umbrage at his suggestion. Yell at the twins? ‘Of course I didn’t,’ she told him. ‘They feel dreadful enough without me yelling at them. What do you think I am?’
‘Far too kind,’ he told her promptly, and she smiled but in an absent sort of way as she munched her pancake- which told him her thoughts were still on the twins.
‘I’m not.’ She glanced back at the twins. ‘Sometimes I feel I’m not kind enough. They need so much…’
‘Why the sad faces? Are they still scared?’
‘No.’ She shrugged, After all this man had done for them it seemed stupid to let him see how upset they were about one small Tigger, but there was something in his eyes that said he really wanted to know. He cared. ‘It’s just that they had a stuffed toy that they loved. They’ve now realised it’s been burned.’
He stared.
Then…
‘Wait right here,’ he told them soundly, and without another word he strode from the room and left them gaping after him.
And then he was back, and in his hands-at arm’s length because it was so disgusting-he carried the blackest, filthiest soggiest
‘Tigger!’
Erin barely got the word out before the boys were out of their beds, upending milk as they went and heading straight for Matt. They clung to what he held out to them-one to Tigger’s snout, one to Tigger’s tail, and all the grime in the world wouldn’t have made one ounce of difference to the love that shone from their eyes.
Their Tigger…
Erin was looking at him as if he’d produced a miracle, and the feeling was just great. His expanding chest almost popped the buttons on his shirt. ‘How on earth did you rescue Tigger?’
‘I never meant to,’ he told her and managed a shamefaced grin. ‘They thrust it at me in the fire and, to be honest, I thought it was a dead cat. I just shoved it down my shirt and kept going.’
‘A dead cat!’ Her lips twitched. ‘And do you always go around shoving dead cats down your shirt during house fires?’
‘Before anything else. They’re excellent for curing warts,’ he told her. ‘All you need is a graveyard and a full moon. Everyone tries to find them, but this time I got there first.’
