Harmony Creek Hollow, New York
“Guess what, Sarah?”
The last thing Sarah Kuhns wanted to do was play a guessing game with Natalie Summerhays, the oldest of the four kinder in the house where Sarah worked as the nanny. At ten, Natalie was poised partway between being a kind and standing on the precipice of becoming a teenager.
“What?” Sarah asked as she wondered why anyone with small kinder would build a house with columns within a youngster’s reach from the bannister on the staircase curving above the elegant entry’s marble floors. She’d talked four-year-old Mia into letting Sarah pluck her off one fluted column. Ethan, who at five years old considered himself invulnerable, wasn’t willing to give up his attempt to touch the ceiling twenty feet above the floor.
God, grant me patience, she prayed as she did often while watching the Summerhays kinder. Please let this be the last time I have to save these little ones from their antics. At least for today...
Motioning with her hands, she called to Ethan again, “Komm, kind.”
His head jerked around, and he grinned as the kinder often did when she spoke to them in Deitsch. For some reason, they found the words she used at home funny. She had no idea why.
Ethan’s blond hair fell into his blue eyes, and he reached to push it aside. With a yelp, he began to slide down the column.
Sarah leaned over the bannister, praying it wouldn’t collapse or her glasses wouldn’t slip off and crash to the floor. She caught the little boy’s shirt as he dropped past her. He shrieked, and she wrapped her fingers in the fabric. With a big jerk that resonated through her shoulders, she flipped him across the rail and into her arms. The motion knocked her from her feet, and she sat hard on a step.
Her heart hammered against her ribs as she held the little boy close. He shook, and she cuddled him to her. Maybe he understood how he could have been hurt.
Then she realized he was laughing! He thought the whole thing had been fun. When he squirmed to get out of her hold, she tightened it.
She felt sorry for the four kinder who always were looking for ways to be noticed. Their parents were busy—Mr. Summerhays with his businesses and his racehorses and Mrs. Summerhays redoing her wardrobe and the house every two to three months—and they paid little attention to their kids. Even when one or more acted outrageously, the mischief seldom registered with their busy parents.
Carrying Ethan down the stairs while leading Mia by the hand, Sarah said, “You told me you wouldn’t climb the columns again.”
“We didn’t climb them,” Mia said with the aplomb of a four-year-old attorney arguing a legal loophole in a courtroom. “We got on them up there.”
Sarah resisted rolling her eyes as she put Ethan on his feet. The youngsters nitpicked everything. In the nine months since she’d taken the job as nanny, she’d learned to be specific when setting parameters for them. Apparently, she hadn’t been specific enough.
How her friends in the Harmony Creek Spinsters’ Club would laugh when she told them about this! They were getting together that evening to attend the second annual Berry-fest Dinner to benefit the local volunteer fire department. She wondered if her friends had guessed that she told them less than a quarter of the “adventures” her charges got into each day. She tried to head the kinder off before they were hurt, but didn’t want to hover over them. Being overprotective wasn’t gut for anyone. She knew that too well.
“Sarah!” Natalie stamped her foot. “Did you hear me?”
“Just a minute.” Frowning at the younger kinder, she ordered, “No more getting on the columns anywhere.”
“From floor to ceiling?” asked Ethan.
“And everywhere in between. No getting on the columns. Understood?”
Ethan and Mia glanced at each other, then nodded.
“Sarah!” Natalie crossed her arms over her bright red T-shirt. “Sarah, are you listening?”
Watching the two little ones skipping across the fancy rug that cost more than the farm where she lived with her two brothers, Sarah sighed. She faced the impatient ten-year-old who’d inherited her mamm’s glistening black hair and gray eyes. Someday, Natalie would be a beauty like her mamm, but with her lips compressed, she looked like the kind she was.
“I’m listening.” Sarah smoothed her black apron that had gotten bunched against her dark green dress when she’d kept Ethan from falling. For a moment, she wondered what Alexander, the fourth Summerhays youngster, was up to. She would check once she listened to Natalie. Checking her kapp was in place, she asked, “What’s up, Natalie?”
“Did someone order a cowboy?”
Stunned, she stared at the girl. “Why would you ask me that?”
“Because