Cracking her neck and rolling her shoulders to loosen up, D.J. commanded her feet to move toward the door. She’d work in a quiet yoga session later, but now it was time to get out there.
Wishing she’d thought to buy a couple of toys, utterly willing to resort to bribery right off the bat, she walked sprightly down the hall, clapping her hands as she neared the living room. “Okay, kiddos, ready to have some fun? I… Ah!” The sight that greeted D.J. stopped her dead in her tracks and elicited a swear word before she could censor herself.
Four children and one can of whipped topping had wreaked havoc on the already disrupted living room. Ribbons and clouds of the stuff covered the coffee table, sofa, windowsills. “What are you doing?” Heaven help her, but she swore again.
One of the twins responded. “You said a baddie.”
Yes, she had. And now she was speechless.
“She sa-id—” The other curly headed brother began a singsong recounting of her indiscretion, using the word several times in succession.
“James, stop that,” D.J. ordered.
“I’m Sean! And you sa-id—”
The youngest child, Livie, sat on the sofa with a huge teddy bear at her feet, clumsily ladling ice cream out of a half-gallon container. Both the bear and the child, D.J. noticed, had ice cream mustaches. “She said a baddie, she said a baddie…” Livie chanted, kicking her feet.
“All right, everybody stop saying that.” All she needed was for Max to come home the first day to find that his kids had increased their vocabulary by one colorful curse.
Anabel, the older girl, sat in a chair, her eyes glued to the TV. One of the twins, the one who wasn’t Sean, started squirting the table again.
“Hey!” D.J. sprang into action, hopping over assorted toys to grab the offending item from James’s hand. “What is this?” She turned the plastic container over in her hands. “Squeezable mayonnaise?”
“We ranned out of whip cream.”
“All right, give me anything edible.” They stared at her dumbly. “Fork over the food!” She held out her hands and motioned to the little dears. “All of it. Right now.” Collecting the can of whipped cream from Sean and the ice cream from Livie, whose lower lip started to quiver sadly, D.J. said, “There will be no more gourmet art as long as I’m here. Food belongs in bellies, not on tables or any other furniture. Is that understood?”
She received no response, other than big-eyed stares from the three younger children. Anabel continued to watch the TV. “Excuse me,” D.J. said, stepping into her line of vision. “You seem somewhat normal. May I ask what you were doing while your brothers and sisters were destroying the living room?”
Brown eyes, large and beautiful behind a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, and dramatically more solemn than the dancing blue eyes of the other children, gazed at D.J. “I was waiting for you to come out of the bedroom.”
Right. Anabel: one. D.J.: zero. “Well, I’m out now, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to clean up this living room. Then—”
“I’m hungry,” James said.
Sean echoed immediately, “Me, too. I’m starving.”
Livie said plaintively, “Is it time for dinner yet?”
D.J. stared. Were they joking? You could start a burger franchise with what they’d spread on the coffee table. “Didn’t you eat anything while you were doing that?” She pointed to what looked like a model of Mt. Everest.
Sean shook his head. “That was for Livie’s bear. It’s his birthday.”
The little girl nodded hard. “He wanted to play ice cream parlor.”
With a heavy sigh and a shake of her exotically dark head, Anabel slid off her chair to approach D.J. “I’ll take these things to the kitchen,” she said, removing the ice cream and other weapons of living room destruction from D.J.’s arms. “You’d better get the kids something to eat before they have a major meltdown.”
The girl trooped off to the kitchen, and D.J. felt a ridiculous urge to call out, “Don’t leave me!” despite the fact that Anabel, too, was only a child. But at least she seemed to know what she was doing. Taking a deep breath, D.J. said, “All right. We’ll clean up here, and then we’ll eat some dinner. Okay?”
Ending with a question was her first mistake. Sean leaped up. “Jamie’s starving,” he informed in a sudden show of brotherly support.
“So’s Livie.” Jamie jumped up, too.
Swinging her legs, Livie picked up her previous chant. “You said a baddie…you said a baddie….”
D.J. wanted Max to come back. Right now. In the restaurant he had juggled all four kids, kept his sense of humor and managed to appear relatively sane. Of course, he’d had practice at this. He’d given her his cell phone number; she could call him for a little five-minute-advice session. She could imagine him responding in that half-wry, half-soothing tone he had and felt better already.
Unfortunately, she could also imagine him wondering what kind of wimp he had hired, and that did not sit well at all.
Whipped cream and mayonnaise slipped in glops from the table to the carpet. Livie’s bear dripped ice cream onto the sofa.
The boys joined their sister’s chant.
And D.J. realized she wasn’t nearly as tough as she’d thought.
Chapter Three
Sunshine spilled across the green hills like drizzles of honey, sweetening the earth, kissing the children’s skin as they romped and laughed in the afternoon rays. Daisy grinned at the children’s antics.
“Anabel! Sean, James, Livie!” she called, waving them over. “Time for your music lesson.”
Picking up her guitar, she lowered herself gracefully to the warm grass. Immediately the children scampered over. They looked so darling in the outfits she’d made for them. And you could hardly tell that the jumpers used to be a set of curtains hanging in her bedroom.
Positioning her fingers behind the frets, Daisy strummed a few chords from the children’s favorite song. “You know this one, so I’ll begin and then you join in. James, remember the line is ’jam and bread’ not ’yam and bread.’” James flushed, but giggled along with the others. “All right, here we go.”
Strumming the intro and nodding in time to the music, Daisy lifted her voice. “’Doh, a deer, a female deer…’”
Sitting upright on the couch, D.J. heard herself gasp as she came fully awake. Dazed, she looked around. The living room lights were still on, and the TV screen glowed with the image of Maria and Captain Von Trapp joining their family onstage for a patriotic rendition of “Edelweiss.” Swinging her feet to the floor, D.J. calmed her labored breath.
Oh, dear God.
She’d popped The Sound of Music into the VCR after the kids had lost the bedtime battle, and the living and dining rooms had been restored—through a heroic effort of her own blood, sweat and tears—partially to order. Recalling that the lead character in The Sound of Music was a nanny, she’d hoped to pick up a few pointers. Her night had been torture.
After the kids started screaming for food, D.J. had discovered that there wasn’t any. A few slices of bread, two eggs, a mostly empty box of corn flakes and a jar of peanut butter was all she’d had to work with. Her cooking skills were more practical than creative, so a trip to the market had been unavoidable.
And that was when the real trouble