“I’m sorry the children bothered you,” she murmured. “I really am a bad mother. I appreciate you coming over, but I’m getting up now, so you can go—”
Through the upstairs window, he heard the battle in the yard escalate. Seth cried out, Jordan yelled back, then Stella melted down again. Dallas could have throttled all three of them. And Lizzie still hadn’t moved from bed. Under normal circumstances, nothing would keep her from tending to her kids.
“Don’t worry about me,” he finally said, “and you’re not a bad mom.” He hooked a thumb toward the window. “But your three running around like banshees? You falling on your face—like you almost did last night? Doesn’t that tell you anything? You seem pretty sick to me.”
She sighed. “By tomorrow I’ll be on my feet again.” Even she couldn’t believe that.
“I think you should call Doc Baxter.” He pulled out his phone. “No, I’ll call him. But first—with your permission—I’m going downstairs to get control of the situation in the yard. That okay with you?”
She nodded before she laid a hand across her eyes. “I don’t need Doc.” Her face had turned green again. “Take the water pistols away...” She didn’t go on.
“I’ll handle them,” he said. After that, he intended to handle Lizzie.
Better not give her any warning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“JORDAN, CLEAN THIS UP.” Hands on his hips, Dallas surveyed the mound of clothing that had spilled from the boy’s bedroom out into the hall and shook his head. Seth had tripped over the pile and was lying on the carpet, clutching his knee and wailing as if he were being murdered.
“Mama! I broke my leg!”
While Lizzie was at the doctor’s office this afternoon, Dallas was babysitting, which he’d been doing most of the past three days, juggling his work at Clara’s ranch and canceling his rehab sessions. Lizzie had protested that she didn’t need to see Doc Baxter, but at last she’d given in.
Gently, he probed Seth’s leg. “Your mom’s not home yet, buddy, but nothing’s broken.” Dallas should know. Once, after a rodeo outside Reno, he had in fact set one of his friends’ arms. No doctor or medic had been around by then, no hospital nearby either, but the break had been simple. Just pull on it, the guy begged him. The rough-and-tumble world of rodeo, as his mom had said—not a story he’d share with Lizzie. “Probably bruised, pardner, or at most a sprain. Can you get up? Let’s put some ice on that.”
Dallas couldn’t lie. Taking care of Lizzie’s kids was not his area of expertise. In the past few days, he’d confirmed to himself that he was indeed better off staying single, honing his fitness to get back to the circuit, working on his local rodeo plans. His, and Lizzie’s. Too bad he couldn’t keep his mind on that while he waited for her to come home from the clinic, fearing, as he always did with his mother, that the news wouldn’t be good.
As he started to help Seth to his feet, Stella emerged from her room to glare at Dallas. “What did you do to him!” A hard case if he ever saw one. She’d instantly decided Dallas was an intruder, not to be trusted, especially near her mother. Stella held out her hand. “Seth, come with me. You can stay in my room. We can play—”
“Not dolls.”
Dallas assumed she’d tried that ruse before.
“Legos,” she conceded, sending Dallas another death stare. To eliminate him from the scene, she would lower herself to fitting plastic bricks together with her baby brother.
Seth’s face brightened. “The new spaceship model Daddy bought me?” He scrambled up off the hall carpet, plunged through the pile of Jordan’s clothes and followed his sister with no limp to be seen.
Dallas poked his head into Jordan’s room. At least Lizzie’s oldest remained on his side, still entranced at having a rodeo star living next door. “Get moving, man. Don’t let your mother see that mess in the hall—plus it’s a hazard. When you’ve finished hanging up those clothes, you owe Seth an apology. He could have been badly hurt.”
“He wasn’t.” Jordan’s voice had an unexpected stubborn tone. A chink in the armor of his hero worship. “Not my fault he’s clumsy and stupid and fell over his own feet.”
“Jordan, don’t call your brother stupid.” Clumsy at six years old was a different matter. Hadn’t Seth seen the mound in the middle of the hallway? Or had he been running helter-skelter like he did most of the time, not looking where he was going? Cute, though. The kid melted Dallas’s heart—but not enough to make him want one of his own just yet. “Why did you throw your clothes out there anyway?”
“Most of ’em are too small. Mom can give them to baby Seth.”
“Don’t call him a baby, Jordan.”
He ignored that. “The rest are not cool. Besides, I’ll need new clothes for school and my closet was too full.”
“Makes sense to purge your room, then, but get a plastic bag for the things you don’t want.” He paused, remembering the time when he’d carried all his belongings in such a bag from one foster home to another. “Pretend you’re getting ready to rodeo. You know, when I’m on the road, everything I need is in my one gear bag. No extras. Just me, my truck, my rope and a dream of the next bull I’ll ride.”
Jordan’s eyes widened. “I wish I could run away, be in the rodeo with you.”
Not the right thing, then, for Dallas to have said. “Let’s start slow, okay? When you’re finished here, we’ll put on that rodeo tape. You can see what I normally do every day. So, cowboy up, Jordan. Now.”
With a grin, Jordan shot from his room down the hall to the stairs.
