A Small Fortune Read online

  “We’ll see her around, right, Daddy?” Jace asked, seeking assurance. “Right?” he repeated when his father didn’t say anything to him.

  “Sure,” Asher answered mechanically, knowing that if he didn’t, Jace would keep after him until he got the answer he wanted.

  Jace made a beeline for the sofa that was butted up against the large bay window. The window looked out onto the driveway. Scrambling up on the cushion, he stood waving madly as he watched the lady who had come to his house walk to her car.

  “She’s looking, Daddy, she’s looking!” Jace cried excitedly. “Wave!” he pleaded. When his father didn’t join him at the window, the boy remained where he was, waving frantically with both hands. “C’mon, Daddy. She won’t come back if you don’t wave.”

  There were times, Asher thought as he crossed over to join his son, when Jace took his breath away, displaying glimmers of rare insight that were far beyond his young years.

  * * *

  It came as no surprise to Asher that the very next day, Jace asked after the young woman he’d taken such a shine to. Asher would have been far more surprised if his son hadn’t asked him if she was coming that day. But the boy’s query, repeated several times over the course of the morning, still didn’t make him drop everything and put in a call to her.

  “Why don’t we see how we manage for ourselves first?” he finally suggested.

  It wasn’t that he had found fault with the woman Marcos had sent his way. From where he’d been standing, she seemed pretty much flawless.

  Almost unnervingly so.

  And it certainly wasn’t because he didn’t like her. He did. Maybe more than he was comfortable with, but that wasn’t why he wasn’t putting in a call to her for her services, either. Asher simply felt that it pointed to a lack of character on his part if he actually admitted that he needed help.

  But by the third day, as he continued taking his life out of the various cardboard boxes while Jace seemed determined to become a whirling dervish, Asher was willing to admit that maybe his ability to stay on top of everything while also taking care of Jace was woefully overrated.

  With equal feelings of dread and anticipation, he took the card that Marnie had left behind—the one with her cell phone number on it but not her landline, he noted—and began to tap the numbers out on his cell.

  He heard the phone on the other end of the line ring four times. On the fifth go-round, he heard a clicking noise and knew his call was being transferred to voice mail.

  A product of the electronic age, he still hated having to talk to some inanimate machine. He’d call back, he decided.

  Asher was about to terminate the connection when he heard a noise on the line. Quickly bringing it back up to his ear, he said, “Hello?”

  “Hello?” the voice on the other end echoed. It was Marnie. It unnerved him slightly when he realized that he knew her voice instantly. It was obvious, though, that she didn’t recognize his voice, but then, why should she?

  But rather than his identifying himself, the next word he uttered was “Help.”

  “Mr. Fortune.” It wasn’t a question but a statement. A statement with a touch of amusement in it.

  He’d never really liked being addressed by his surname. For a very specific reason. “Mr. Fortune is my father,” he told the woman in a crisp, emotionless voice. “This is Asher.”

  He could almost hear Marnie smile as she replied, “Yes, I know. I was beginning to think that you’d decided to go with someone else.”

  She’d said as much to Wendy when the latter called to find out how she liked working for Asher. Wendy had told her that wasn’t possible since Asher really didn’t know anyone else to hire.

  “I could have just lost your number,” Asher pointed out.

  As far as she was concerned, that hadn’t even been a consideration. “You don’t strike me as the type to lose anything,” she told him simply. Besides, if he had lost her number, he could always have called Wendy or Marcos for it.

  Asher laughed as he looked around the absolute chaotic mess that surrounded him. All his rooms looked like this one to varying degrees.

  When had he accumulated all this stuff? he couldn’t help wondering.

  Unable to deal with his emotionally crushing situation at the time, he’d opted to allow the movers to pack everything up for him. Seeing the result now, he realized what a colossal mistake that had been on his part. Although the moving company had come highly recommended, the actual movers involved obviously had no regard for rhyme or reason when it came to packing. And although the boxes had been labeled “master bedroom” and “den,” the contents of all the boxes he’d opened so far had items in them that had no place in the rooms they were purported to belong in.

  Between that and his son’s maddeningly frequent bursts of pure, unadulterated frantic energy, Asher felt overwhelmed, outnumbered and just plain exhausted beyond words.

  “You obviously haven’t seen me unpack,” he said now to Marnie.

  “Yes, I have,” Marnie pointedly reminded him. “The other day, when Marcos sent me over, remember? You were hip-deep in boxes at the time.”

  “Well, it’s gotten a whole lot worse since then,” he told her, the weariness he felt seeping into his voice despite his best efforts to keep a lid on it, at least until the woman got here. “Can you come over?”

  He hadn’t specified a date yet, or a time. “When?” she asked.

  “Yesterday,” he said honestly. “But I’ll settle for whenever you can get here today.”

  For a second, she thought he was just being funny, but then she realized that he was serious.

  “To help you unpack?” she asked since he hadn’t mentioned Jace. He made it sound as if it was the unpacking that was getting to him, not his free-range son.

  “To tire out Jace if you can,” he said in a moment of weakness. “Barring that, if you could just keep him busy in any room that I’m not in, that would be a tremendous help right now.”

  So it was to babysit, she thought. Marcos and Wendy had been right. Jace’s dad was a stubborn man who didn’t like asking for help because he felt he had something to prove.

  “I take it that Jace is being too helpful?” Marnie guessed.

  She heard Asher sigh wearily on the other end before answering her. The sound seemed to come from the bottom of his toes and was, whether or not he realized it, an answer in itself.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

  Rather than ask why he hadn’t called her sooner, Marnie felt sorry for him. She could feel her sympathy kicking into high gear. “Well, my last student just called to cancel because she has to study for a make-up exam, so I can probably be at your house within the hour.”

  Asher felt instantly better. He refrained from saying that he would be counting the minutes.

  Instead, he just told her, “Great! Jace will be really happy to see you.” And I will, too, he added silently.

  Saying so out loud, though, would be admitting too much and it might, he told himself, give her the wrong idea. He definitely didn’t want to scare her off since, to date, she was the best babysitter he had managed to find.

  Asher began to whistle the moment he ended the call. The cavalry was coming.

  * * *

  His doorbell rang exactly twenty-three minutes later.

  On his knees beside a box he’d just emptied, Asher looked up sharply.

  Marnie.

  Uttering a quick prayer of thanksgiving, Asher dusted off his hands and got up off his knees. He kicked the box he’d just gutted out of the way and quickly made his way to the foyer.

  The door was already open by the time he reached it.

  Asher’s considerable relief at seeing Marnie standing in his doorway was somewhat diluted by the fact that Jace
had gotten there ahead of him. Since the door had been locked, that meant that his son had been the one to open it. This despite Asher’s countless lectures to the boy about never opening the door to anyone.

  “What did I tell you about opening the door, Jace?” Asher asked him sternly the moment he reached him.

  Overjoyed to find Marnie standing on the threshold, Jace now looked at his father in obvious confusion. It was apparent that the boy didn’t understand what he had done wrong.

  “You said not to unless you were there.”

  If he knew that, then why had he opened the door? “Well?”

  “But you were there, Daddy,” Jace pointed out. “You were in the house. I heard you yelling at the boxes when the doorbell rang.”

  Embarrassed and not wanting to come off like some kind of fool who talked to inanimate objects, Asher protested, “I wasn’t yelling, I was...”

  “Discussing things,” Marnie injected helpfully when she saw that Asher was struggling to find the right words to defend himself. No hint of a smile graced her face, although it did manage to come out a little in her voice.

  “Besides,” the boy went on, “I had to let her in. I didn’t want her to go away.”

  So saying, the boy took a firm hold of her hand and tugged on it, wanting Marnie to come into the house, afraid that she might change her mind and leave.

  For such a small boy, he really did have a very strong grip, she noted, as she allowed him to draw her into the foyer.

  Jace continued hanging on to her hand.

  “I would have waited,” she assured the boy. “If I had to, I would have rung the doorbell again. Several times.” She looked into the boy’s eyes. “Your dad’s right, you know,” she told him quietly. “You shouldn’t open the door when he’s not standing right there next to you. Promise me you won’t open the door again unless he or some adult you know is with you?”

  She didn’t want to say anything either more graphic or stern because she didn’t want to rob Jace of his innocence or his confidence that he was safe in his own home. She didn’t believe in frightening a four-year-old. She didn’t want him being afraid, just careful.

  There was a very fine line between the two, and it wasn’t the easiest one to navigate, but it was well worth the trouble. Jace had a right to be a happy child for as long as possible.

  “Okay,” he told her cheerfully, “I promise.” He was still holding on to her hand. “Are you gonna stay?”

  She looked at Asher. “Yes, I am. For a while,” she qualified.

  That was all he wanted to hear. At four, Jace was still living in the moment.

  “Cool!” he declared with even more than his usual enthusiasm. “I got a new video game. But I kinda don’t know how to play it,” he confessed.

  It was a game that Wyatt’s fiancée had given to the boy.

  “I haven’t had a chance to read the directions to explain it to him,” Asher confessed.

  “That’s fine, I can do it,” she volunteered. Turning to the boy, she told him, “Looks like you’re in luck, Jace. I just happen to be very fluent in video-game-speak.”

  The upturned face was full of wonder as well as adoration. “Is that good?”

  “Yes. That’s very good. All right, take me to your game,” she instructed Jace playfully.

  “You bet!”

  This time, the sigh she heard escaping Asher’s lips just as she left the foyer was one composed of sincere relief.

  Hearing it made her smile.

  Chapter Seven

  Over the next several weeks, Marnie felt like she was getting to be a fixture around Asher’s house.

  Whenever she wasn’t working at the stables, teaching a small, eager group of preteens and teenagers how not just to ride well, but also to respond to the different signals their horse was giving them, she was at Asher’s place. Initially, it was just to occasionally watch his son and all that entailed.

  But what she did, while always including Jace, began to spread out. She took the boy to the grocery store to restock Asher’s refrigerator and pantry. And, to pass the time and because he asked her about it, she started giving Jace horseback-riding lessons. Granted, the pony was of the large, plastic variety that only moved up and down, but it was a start.

  While Marnie still referred to what she was doing as babysitting, it seemed to her as if what had begun as a part-time job was taking on all the ramifications of a full-time nanny position.

  Although she had no way of knowing, it felt the same way to Asher.

  Each time he said goodbye to Marnie, he was fairly certain that he wouldn’t be seeing her for a while, that, because Jace was such an angel around her, things were finally beginning to work themselves out for the better. In this case, it meant that things were going back to the way they’d been in the household before his marriage had split in half.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way when Marnie wasn’t around. Right before his eyes, it was as if his son had turned into two entirely different little boys.

  When he and Jace were alone, while not being out-and-out disrespectful, the boy definitely became far more than just a handful to deal with. Though Asher hated to admit it, Jace had become a maddening challenge to him at every turn.

  So much so that Asher was finding himself surrendering sooner and sooner, mentally waving a white flag as he reached for the phone in order to call Marnie for help.

  Mercifully, she’d always agree to come over. And every time, the second she walked across the threshold, Jace would suddenly transform. The whirling dervish would disappear and the little angel would take his place.

  He was still full of energy, but that energy was easily harnessed and redirected. The boy was nothing if not on his very best behavior around Marnie.

  If this change occurred once or twice, Asher might not have thought anything of it. But since it happened every single time, it was the cause of some concern for him. Why couldn’t he control his own son? He certainly loved the boy enough. What was he doing wrong?

  He would have put the question to Marnie if Jace hadn’t left him so utterly worn out by the time he called her for help.

  “Hi!” Jace all but crowed happily the second the front door was opened and Marnie walked in, having come straight from the stable.

  True to his word, the boy hadn’t opened the door on his own even though he knew it was Marnie and he was eager to see her. But he was right there, closer than a shadow beside his father, when the latter unlocked the door.

  “I put all my toys away like you wanted me to,” he dutifully informed Marnie.

  It was the last thing she’d said to him when she’d left last night. She’d told him that he needed to put his toys away neatly after he finished playing with them each day.

  “Very good,” she said, smiling her approval. “I like a man of his word.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the completely stunned expression on Asher’s face. “What’s the matter?”

  Asher looked incredulously at his son. “His room was a total disaster area half an hour ago. It looked like two toy stores had exploded. I told him to clean up his room and he just said, ‘Later.’”

  “Well,” Marnie said, pretending to mull over what he’d just told her for Jace’s benefit, “technically, this is later. So, as long as he did clean up, that’s what really matters.” Turning toward Jace, she put her hand out to the boy. “Let’s go up to your room and see how well you did,” she suggested.

  “Sure!” Jace agreed eagerly. He liked the way she smiled when he pleased her.

  “This I’ve got to see,” he said.

  When Asher walked into his son’s room, it didn’t look like the same place he’d seen earlier that day. The bedroom was nothing short of spotless, so neat, in fact, that it looked like something that might have
been photographed for a magazine.

  Looking at it, Asher found himself temporarily speechless. It was, he thought, as if he’d suddenly slipped into some parallel universe.

  “It sure didn’t look like this half an hour ago,” he murmured, more to himself than to Marnie.

  She, in turn, smiled down at Jace. “See what you can do if you try?” she asked him.

  The boy beamed in response to what he took to be a seal of approval from the woman who had won his young heart.

  She glanced at Asher over her shoulder. “You called me half an hour ago,” she reminded him.

  He knew that. The room had been the final straw that had caused him to call her this time. Asher looked at her now, not sure what her point was. “Yes, so?”

  Lowering her voice, she gave him a suggestion. “Carry that to its logical conclusion.” She didn’t want to come out and say it, especially not in front of the boy, but it was obvious that Jace was behaving this way for a reason. Then, turning toward Jace, she said, “Didn’t you say you had a new book you wanted to show me?”

  Because he was pleased that she remembered what he’d told her just before his dad had ended his call to her today, Jace’s face lit up even more brightly, if possible. “Yeah, you wanna see it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about nothing else,” she told him with a very straight face.

  “Really?” Jace asked. If he appeared to be any more pleased, he would have been walking several inches off the floor.

  “Really,” she told him solemnly.

  Okay, so it wasn’t really strictly true, but she wasn’t ready to admit what actually had been preying on her mind to a far greater extent.

  Besides, she didn’t think it would be exactly appropriate for her to tell the little boy that his father had all but become a fixture in her brain. A fixture that she could pretty much keep at bay during her waking hours.