The Housekeeper's Daughter

Ms. Meredith opened the door and glared at all three of them. “You will lower your voices at once,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” both boys intoned simultaneously.

Maya felt like echoing the boys’ subdued manner. She had stopped “ma’am-ing” Ms. Meredith a year ago upon realizing that, in order to be taken as an equal, she must act as one. She would not be subservient.

“Have the boys done their homework?” Meredith asked her with a severe frown.

“We’re on our way to do that now. Drake was teaching them how to rope. It’s excellent training for eye-hand coordination,” she said in a firm teacher-knows-best voice.

She smiled with an assurance she was far from feeling and hoped she didn’t get a dressing-down in front of her young charges. They tended to take her side, ending with all three of them getting a lecture.

To her relief, the other woman nodded and left them in the hall while she went into the living room to speak to her husband. Maya quickly herded the boys to her room where she set them to work on their lessons. She got out her own books and studied the physical, mental and emotional development of children from kindergarten to sixth grade.

Drake peeled out of his clothes, took a quick shower, dressed, then hurried to the kitchen. Maya wasn’t there.

“Where…are the boys?” he amended his question.

Inez Ramirez, longtime housekeeper, friend and confidante to the Colton family, studied him for an uncomfortable five seconds before answering. “Maya took their dinner to her room. They aren’t finished with their homework yet.”

Disappointment hit him. He tried to keep it from showing. Growing up, he and all the kids on the ranch had decided Inez could read minds. She always knew when they had done something they shouldn’t as soon as they walked into the house. At the present moment, he felt as if she knew of each and every tryst he’d had with her daughter last summer…and of the lustful dreams he’d been having of Maya every night since then.

“Thanks,” he said politely and headed for the living room where he’d seen his parents earlier. He paused when he got within earshot.

“You simply have to pay it. It’s been months,” Drake heard his father say.

“Really, Joe,” Meredith said in obvious annoyance. “It’s only a couple of thousand. You’d think I’d asked for your life savings.”

“Precisely why I did what I did with your credit cards. You have an allowance. I suggest you pay your bills with it.”

“But some of these charges were for your birthday party!”

Drake winced at his father’s laughter. He’d never heard that tone before—cold and harsh and cynical.

“Not one of the family’s better days,” Joe Senior continued in the same vein.

“I…no, it wasn’t,” his mother agreed, her voice going soft. “It frightened me, that you might have been killed, or at the least, incapacitated.”

Drake waited for his father’s reply, but heard nothing. In another second, he heard the tap of his mother’s heels. He stayed in the dining room until she went down the hall toward her room. He heard her door shut with a brittle slam.

After another minute, he ventured into the other room. His father stood at the window, his face expressionless as he stared out at the deepening twilight. He turned when Drake entered, then smiled in greeting.

Drake felt a tightening in his chest. No matter what his father’s disappointments or trials were in life, Joe always had time for children, whether his own or the foster kids that stayed with them at the ranch. Drake admired that quality in his sire and tried to emulate it with his younger brothers.

“How are things with you?” Joe asked.

“Fine, sir,” Drake began, then stopped. “Well, maybe not so good. I’m not making much headway with Maya.”

Joe raised his eyebrows in question.

“She won’t tell me who the father of the child is,” Drake admitted.

“A brandy?” Joe asked, pouring one for himself.

“Please.”

Drake accepted a snifter, then sat on the sofa after his father settled in a chair. The feel of leather, the shine of the furniture and faint scent of lemon oil were familiar and comforting.

His father swirled the brandy in his glass, then fastened a piercing gaze on him. “Does that matter?”

Drake was startled by the question. “Well, yes,” he began. “That is… If it’s mine, then naturally I’ll do the right thing.”

“What if it isn’t?” Joe persisted. “Joe Junior was left on our doorstep. Your mother and I adopted him and raised him as if he were our own flesh and blood.”

Drake nodded. It was such ancient history, he’d truly forgotten that little Joe was a foundling.

“If Maya’s child couldn’t be yours, I assume you would have said so and not come home.”

Drake met his father’s level gaze. “It could be. I think…actually, I’m sure it is. But she won’t say so,” he finished in frustration.

“Have you asked her to marry you?”

Drake smiled in irony. “We haven’t gotten that far.”

“I take it that you don’t want the marriage?” Joe questioned dryly.

Drake fought the storm of emotion that rushed through him. “I didn’t plan on having a wife and family. My life is uncertain at best.”

“And extremely dangerous the rest of the time,” Joe concluded. “Yet women and children do manage when husbands and fathers have tough jobs that take them away from home for long periods. It’s all in how the family handles it. Love makes a big difference.”

Drake knew his father was questioning his feelings for Maya. He stared out the window at the dark shadows cast by a tree swaying in the night wind. The darker shadows in his soul shifted painfully. Maya was like the sun. She was all the bright, good things in life, the things forever out of his reach.

“Dinner,” Inez called softly from the dining room.

Joe observed the flicker of emotion pass through his son’s eyes. Drake was a man, with a man’s needs. Sex was part of that, but so was love. A life without it was desolate indeed.

Suppressing a sigh, he rose and led the way into the dining room where the family was gathering for the evening meal. It should have been a joyous time of the day.

He sat at the head of the table, Drake at his left. River and Sophie, now married and expecting—his and Meredith’s first grandchild!—joined them. Their new house which River had designed and built himself, was a beauty, but Joe loved when they visited the main house.

Meredith entered, nodded graciously when the children greeted her, and took her place.

Glancing at Drake, Joe thought of young Teddy. He’d had an impulse to confide to his older son that the youngest Colton wasn’t his but he loved the boy as if he were.

That fact wasn’t something a man could tell his child. However Meredith had changed, she was still the mother of their children. That she adored Joe Junior and Teddy, Joe couldn’t deny.

A sadness reaching clear to the depths of his soul rolled over him. Drake was struggling to realize just what his relationship was with Maya, but Joe had had no doubts the first time he’d met Meredith. Neither had she. They had known they were in love from the first.

Where had it all gone?