Serenity Harbor

“Grape jelly. Good choice. A personal favorite. Do you want peanut butter with that?”

He nodded with an enthusiasm that made her smile. A boy after her own heart. “What else? You can’t have one without the other. Okay, then. Any idea where I could find the peanut butter?”

He nodded again and hurried over to a covered pantry door. Milo tugged on the door but couldn’t open it. When she joined him, she noticed the pantry door was fitted with a hook and eye latch that was out of his reach. Another safety precaution, she assumed.

She flipped the hook and opened the door. A quick scan revealed a jar of gourmet peanut butter on one of the shelves, along with an unopened loaf of bread.

There was more food in here than all the children in Gabi’s orphanage would eat in a week. Katrina grabbed the bread and the jar, then returned to the kitchen island.

Milo stood watching with interest while she laid out several pieces of bread and started spreading the peanut butter from edge to edge on each piece.

He craned to watch each movement while she finished spreading peanut butter. “Want to help?” she asked. “I would love it. Let’s wash your hands first. You always wash your hands when you work in the kitchen.”

He obviously wasn’t crazy about hand-washing, but he didn’t make a fuss when she squirted soap and helped him rub it around on his skin before rinsing while she sang the alphabet song through twice.

“That’s what my students at school have to do while they’re washing their hands,” she told him. “We’ll get a timer for you so you know how long to wash your hands.”

Something told her he would respond better to numbers than letters.

Milo was a complete puzzle. He obviously understood far more than he could communicate back. He could nod or shake his head to indicate yes or no, and she had watched him employ other rudimentary signs with Bowie to get his point across.

She wished she had more experience with language delays so she might know the best way to tackle his particular issues. If she had been his teacher, speech therapy and some sort of augmentative communication device would have been her first priority. A person had to be able to express his needs and wishes.

In her limited time here, she would have to do some research to figure out if she could help him.

“Okay, now that your hands are clean, I’ll grab a chair for you so you can help me with the sandwiches.”

He seemed eager to give her a hand—or maybe he was simply hungry and wanted her to get on with it. She couldn’t quite tell. But after she scooped out some jam onto the middle of a slice of bread, she handed him another knife and showed him how to spread it across the peanut butter. With his bottom lip tucked between his teeth, he focused on making sure a little purple smear covered the entire peanut butter landscape.

“That’s perfect,” she said. “Good job. Now, can you do a few more?”

He nodded and turned to the task with gusto after she scooped out more jam and plopped it onto the bread.

“You are one excellent PB&J chef,” she told him when they finished. “Now comes the fun part. Now we eat.”

She hadn’t had lunch either, and the humble sandwiches made with so much fierce concentration looked completely delicious.

To Milo’s plate, she added some baked chips she had found in the pantry and a couple of baby carrots from the vegetable drawer, and he attacked the food with the same enthusiasm he had thrown into making the sandwiches.

She was finishing the last bite of hers—every bit as good as it had looked—when Bowie came back into the kitchen.

Oh man. If she was going to work here for the next few weeks, she really needed to do something about the way her palms started to sweat and her breath seemed to catch in her chest every time she was around him.

He was just so darn gorgeous. It wasn’t fair that she should meet him now, when she absolutely didn’t have time for men.

“Sorry I took so long. I had four texts and a phone call from work that needed my attention.”

He set a check next to her plate and the amount still staggered her.

“Thanks,” she managed to say without sounding completely breathless, then folded the check in half and tucked it into the pocket of her shorts.

“I’m the one in your debt and we both know it,” he said. “You’re doing me a huge favor. I’m more grateful than I can say.”

She wasn’t so certain, but she didn’t argue with him. This arrangement would give her a desperately needed cushion in case her attorney came up with some other expensive fee she needed to pay before she could become Gabi’s mother.

He took in their plates and the jars still open on the island “PB&J. Looks delicious.”

“Milo and I made you a sandwich, too. That one on the work island is for you.”

Surprise flickered in his eyes. “That wasn’t necessary. I could have grabbed something. Heaven knows, Mrs. Nielson stocks enough food to feed half the neighborhood.”

“We were already making them for us. It was no problem to make one more. Milo spread the jelly, didn’t you, bud?”

Milo seemed to have gone somewhere in his head, or at least he wasn’t in the mood to respond.

“Thanks,” Bowie said after a moment. He looked surprised at the small gesture. Almost...touched, as if the courtesy was out of the norm for him. That was ridiculous. He had a housekeeper who did his shopping, for heaven’s sake. Bowie had to be used to women falling all over themselves to take care of him.

She found his reaction absurdly appealing.

Oh, she really hoped she wasn’t making a terrible mistake by agreeing to help him out. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Money wasn’t everything—or so she tried to tell herself, anyway.

She probably would have stuck to her guns and continued to refuse him, if not for the phone call she’d received that morning from Angel Herrera, the inaptly named attorney representing her in the adoption process. She had found nothing angelic about him from the moment they met. Though he had come recommended by the local representative from the Colombia national adoption agency, he was loud, abrasive, and made her feel stupid every time she talked to him, either because of her halting command of the Spanish language or because she struggled to understand the complicated and unwieldy international adoption process.

It didn’t help that he constantly seemed to approach her with his hand out.

The latest conversation had been the same. He had insisted he needed an extra two thousand dollars because of unexpected costs associated with filing some of the necessary paperwork.

She didn’t understand. How much could it cost to make duplicates of her adoption petition and run them to the adoption office? Did he have to cut down the trees and mill his own paper or something?

After working with him for three months, she was beginning to understand the meaning of the word extortion. Angel knew how desperately Katrina wanted to adopt Gabi, knew that she would pay any cost, try to conquer any obstacle.

She felt completely out of her depth, trying to negotiate the complex process and receive approval from two countries to bring Gabi to the United States.

Herrera made her feel like she was eight years old again, forced to repeat the second grade because of a combination of missed classes and the strong medication that mostly controlled her epilepsy making it tough to focus.

StupidKat. TwitchyKat.

The weirdo.

You can’t invite her to your birthday party. What if she has a fit or something?

No. I’m sorry. My mom says you can’t stay overnight because of your medical condition.

My nana says kids who have seizures shouldn’t be allowed in school with normal kids because you could hurt somebody.

She had spent most of her life trying to quiet those damn voices, with varied levels of success.

She didn’t want to continue playing Angel Herrera’s game, but she didn’t know what else to do. At least with Bowie’s help, she would feel a little more secure if the attorney came to her again with his hand out.