Pris instantly understood. “Tell your cousin to pull that letter before the police find it. I’ll tell the others to delete the image.” She began typing on her mobile.
Having someone who understood what he didn’t know how to say was...scary...but a relief in this case. With everyone finally out of the way, he hugged her close and claimed her mouth.
She responded with hungry alacrity. The noise of the twins’ laughter in the other room jarred them back to reality. Dante took a deep breath, relieved that he wasn’t alone in this dangerous attraction.
He forced his mind back to his mobile and scanning the tiny words on the screen. “Lucia’s letter is telling me she waited too late to get rid of the babies. Her business required travel, and she couldn’t take care of them.”
Dante could almost hear Lucia yelling at him to come home and help her. She’d shouted about his absences often enough. “This must have been her last letter. She says London wasn’t safe for babies.”
“In that violent household, she had to have been terrified,” Pris murmured. “Motherhood is not for everyone, even if we’re often stuck with it, but at least she recognized that kids shouldn’t be raised in that environment, which is more than her mother understood.”
Dante struggled to read the fine script. “Lucia begs me to take the twins. If I didn’t, she meant to give them up for adoption so they’d have a happy home.”
Appalled, he couldn’t even begin to register the possibility of never knowing his children, never having known of their existence, if Vincent had had his way. Thank all the heavens that Lucia had at least given him a chance to make things right, even if he’d never responded to her letters.
“She didn’twantto give them to strangers,” Pris reminded him. “I bet she was scared and heartbroken when she wrote that letter, especially since she had no reason to believe that you would take the children.”
Feeling sick, he nodded and closed the phone. “I don’t think I want to read more now. I need to change into the kind of father the twins need. I just don’t know how.”
Pris wisely slid out of the booth. “In our branch of Malcolms, family always comes first. It’s some kind of unwritten law. That usually means some of us take over the people duties while others take over the monetary, and no one ever gets rich. It works best when we all share responsibility. You have a large family. If you have to work, then you have to put someone in charge of the twins. Your mother is good, but not enough.”
Was she saying she wouldn’t go with him? Of course, she was. “A nanny isn’t enough either.” Using the cane, Dante pried himself up. “I’ll be in the library.”
Leaving the twins to the women.He knew better. Pris had already stolen them once—proving a point he hadn’t learned the first time. He knew it now.
How the hell did a man think and take care of children at the same time?
His work was intellectually stimulating, but what was the purpose of all his education if he couldn’t apply it to make life better for his children?
Or for a wife and maybe even himself? He needed time to plan...
Thirty-six: Evie
THANKSGIVING
Afterthought,South Carolina
“Soup tureenon the dining room table with the bowls,” Pris shouted over the chaos of a dozen voices. “Rolls beside it. Evie, where do you keep your serving spoons?”
Evie snorted and stacked every plate in the house in the center of the dining table, along with the bowls. “At your apartment and Gracie’s house and Aunt Val’s mansion and...” She didn’t waste her breath listing the entirety of people who borrowed from the Victorian’s kitchen. That’s why the house existed.
Wearing her purple glasses and a sparkly black dress, Loretta grinned at Pris’s shriek and laid out the ancient tableware she’d just washed. “Mom always had Thanksgiving catered. This is like watching a holiday movie of everything that can go wrong, going even more wrong.”
With an apron still covering her gold, vintage, mini-dress, Evie swatted her ward with a linen napkin. “Don’t say that. Don’t eventhinkthat. This is not wrong. This is totally normal. They know to return the tableware. It happens every year. Aunt Ellen will trot along momentarily with all of it gathered. She knows where we hide our door keys.”
Small towns had their pros and cons. She’d learned to accept the intrusiveness. Pris, not so much.
“We’re here, lovies, we’re here!” The mayor’s voice cried from the front door. “Where do we put the sweet potatoes?”
“With all the others on the chafing dishes.” Mavis passed the dining room on the way to greet Larraine, wiping her hands on her apron and admiring the mayor’s offering. “No marshmallows, thank you! My diet thanks you.”
Loretta snickered and glanced at the other three bowls of sweet potatoes on the sideboard. “I like marshmallows.”
“You aren’t a vegetarian like Iddy or on a diet like Mom. Good job, kid. I hereby express my thanksgiving for your assistance and dismiss you to keep an eye on the twins and Aster. I think they’re in your old room upstairs. Send Gracie down. We need all hands on deck in the kitchen before Pris starts swinging knives.”
Loretta raced into the hall, greeted Larraine and Reuben, who’d apparently arrived together, and made wild horses sound quiet in her dash up the stairs. Loretta loved bossing the youngers around.
“I have the tables set up in the parlor,” Evie’s cousin Iddy called. “Do we need to set any in the library?”
