The bespectacled boy shook his head. "You're too pretty and you talk different."
She made a face at him, at ease with his honesty about her looks whereas adult comments made her bristle. "I do not wish to be the same as everyone else, anyway. Do you?"
He thought that over. As he did, she saw that though he was small, he appeared to be the leader of this troop.
"No," he finally said. "Only pod people are all the same."
Confused, she looked to Marc for help. "Pod people?"
But it was the tall boy who answered, "Have you got a lot to learn! We're watching that movie again tonight because Damian can't get enough. You can watch, too."
"I have no idea what you are talking about, but I agree to watch this with you." Hira laughed at the grin that crossed the tall one's shy face. "So how do you make this apple pie? There must be flour on the floor, yes?"
At that, everyone but her stubborn-male of a husband laughed. When little Brian's hand slipped into hers, she picked him up and set him on her hip, uncaring of the flour and little-boy dirt on him.
Unable to stifle her concern and unwilling to do so, she asked, "Do you not eat, laeha?"
He wrapped skinny arms around her neck and laid his head down on her shoulder. "I'm sick. What is a laeha?"
Stroking his back, she said, "It means darling child." The literal translation was darling baby but she had a feeling that none of these boys would appreciate knowing that. Walking over to the bench, she saw the somewhat abused-looking dough. "I will make this apple pie with you. I saw it once on a television show. They had ice cream with it."
A groan from behind her. "Don't you go putting ideas in their heads."
Delighted to have provoked a reaction from Marc, she opened her mouth to respond. The boys beat her to it.
"Too late. Ice cream sounds good," a voice piped up.
"Yeah, yeah. Who wants to go with me to the store?"
There were two volunteers.
"Husband, can you also bring back almonds?" She thought and then added cinnamon and cardamom to the list. "And also vermicelli."
He didn't ask her why she wanted the odd ingredients. "Sure. We'll be back soon." His eyes turned flinty and focused on the boys around her. "Don't eat my wife."
The drawling warning made Hira scowl. "These lovely children won't hurt me. You must not say such things."
He just raised his brow. After the door closed behind him, she turned to the remaining boys. "My husband believes you will behave like wild camels while he is gone. I wish to make him..."
"Eat his words?" said Damian.
"What does that mean?"
"Prove him wrong."
"Yes." She nodded. "Yes. He's always right. It's most annoying. Let us prove him wrong."
They grinned at her. And she knew the little devils were well aware she liked them. In her arms, Brian wriggled and settled in more firmly. She saw a few of the boys' eyes go to the littlest boy in hunger. So, she thought, they were not cuddled much.
Her husband likely gave them his strength but wasn't much of a cuddler. Even in bed he rarely gave the comfort of simply being held. Starved for it herself, she knew how much it meant to be touched in simple affection.
Reaching out to the boy closest to her, she ruffled his hair. He didn't move away as most children his age would have.
His eyes looked into hers, too old in that young face. "You must be okay if Marc married you."
Ah, she thought, understanding their willingness to trust her. "Or I could be as the dragon in the tale of the 'Secret Princess.'" Her big, brooding husband might be a most unaccommodating male, but he'd done. something good here, given these boys a sense of safety in what was undoubtedly a shifting world.
For that she could forgive him his secrets, give him the time he needed to learn to trust her. Like these children, his guard would only drop when he was certain of her, when he was convinced that she was his...body and soul. Where that certainty came from, she didn't know.
"Huh?"
She dragged her mind away from Marc. "It is a story of my homeland, of a princess who was also a dragon. I will tell you this if you show me how to make apple pie."
It took a few more minutes of tantalizing bits from the story, but she soon had them hooked. One boy swept the floor clean, and then they showed her how to make apple pie. Brian fell asleep in her arms sometime during the story. Damian offered to take him from her.
"No, I wish to hold him." She smiled at him, thanking him for his concern. "He's so very light, I worry."
"He's sick a lot. I think he misses Becky."
"Becky?"
"His twin. When their ma and pa died, they put Brian here and Becky in some girls orphanage," Damian explained.
"But that is wrong! In Zulheil, it's said that two who are born together are each other's heart. They are not to be torn apart." No wonder the boy was so frail,
"Marc's doing something to help him."
Hira thought to ask her husband about this later. For the moment she'd enjoy the children's honest company, and try not to think about the depths of tenderness this place revealed about the dark and moody man she'd married and was only now beginning to know.
Marc returned with Larry and Jake, carrying six containers of ice cream. What the boys didn't eat today would be savored later. He expected to find the kitchen in chaos, his princess overwhelmed by these tough kids who'd known more hurt than humanly bearable and yet had survived.
When he'd realized that she was following him, he'd let his temper drive him into a situation that could mean terrible pain for those who least deserved it. Furious at her lack of trust in him, he'd reacted without thought, a strange experience for a man known in business circles as having a will of iron and a heart of ice.
He hoped he hadn't damaged the boys' trust in him by leaving them with a woman who could destroy with one scathing comment. To her credit, she'd never disparaged either his scars or his background as a dirt-grubbing child, but even after he'd loved her this morning, her eyes had looked at him with such distance that he'd felt taunted into trying to tame her.
He'd wanted to rub off some of that aloof sophistication and find out if there really was a living, breathing woman beneath the ice. He didn't want her to be only a beautiful shell who could shut off her emotions as easily as she'd shut him out of her bedroom last night. But, a part of him whispered, she hadn't locked the door. And he'd taken full advantage of that lapse.
"Let's hope for the best," he muttered to himself, shouldering through the swinging door.
He walked into a kitchen filled with laughter. Little Brian was fast asleep in his wife's arms, and tall and shy Beau was blushing but trying to tease her about something. The other children were gathered around her.
She had flour on her nose and elbows. There was a streak of dirt on her designer yellow dress from Brian's shoe, and handprints on her skirts from other little hands. She'd begun the afternoon with her hair pinned on top of her head, but Brian had pulled strands loose. She looked disheveled and messy, and her face was full of such joy that his heart stopped for a minute. Lord, she was beautiful when she was all prettied up; messy and with a child in her arms, she was devastating.
Painful tenderness cramped his heart. His hands froze around the bags he held. This was no ice princess. Despite all the times her facade had cracked, how had he failed to spot the truth about his wife?
"What's so funny?" One of his ice cream helpers asked.
Damian looked over. "Hira's been telling us stories."
"Oh, man! We missed it," Larry grumbled.
"Don't worry, I'll tell more."
Marc couldn't believe the way she had them all in the palm of her hand. As the late afternoon progressed into evening, he expected her to wilt under the emotional demands of the attention-starved boys, but she seemed to glow. Much later, after dinner and the supervised completion of various pieces of homework, they sat down to watch the first hour of a video, a midweek treat the boys only got for good behavior.