Only In His Sweetest Dreams (Secret Dreams Book 2) Read online

  L.C. snorted. “Oh, you’re my father,” he said, even though his dad’s current live-in was only a decade behind him. The one before that, however, had been younger than L.C. “Consider me warned off,” L.C. drawled, trying to catch another glimpse of the backs of Mercedes’s knees.

  Sadly, she was gone, hustled outside by his son.

  L.C. turned back, finding the old fart taking his measure with a well-practiced eye. It didn’t bother him too much. He got that look a lot.

  “Did I hear your name right? Are you Harrison Michaels, the writer?”

  “Guilty.”

  That explained the give-no-shits attitude. If the author bio read correctly, the man was an ex-military tank mechanic who had rescued himself from a hostage situation and hiked across a desert to eventual freedom. His characters were always Average Joes caught up in a mess of someone else’s making, surviving on grit and wit, forever falling for women who were out of reach.

  “I like your books.”

  “Thanks. You a writer?” he asked with a suspicious lower of one brow.

  “Oh hell, no,” L.C. snorted. He couldn’t even pass a damned GED and he needed it if he wanted to challenge the millwright exam. He was tired of bumming around, taking whatever work he could find. The good jobs that paid real money required a proper ticket, not just his say-so that he could fix anything. He eyed the old guy, wondering how he had learned where the commas went. “Why? Do you offer classes or something?”

  “Hell to the no. If I pandered to every wacko who said they wanted to write a book, I’d never do anything else.”

  L.C. shrugged off that idea before it fully formed and chucked his chin toward the door where Mercedes and Zack had left.

  “What about Zack? Gonna pander to him?”

  “Should we?”

  L.C. considered the level of prejudice that had been coming off the preying mantis of a woman in the meeting. The rest seemed okay.

  “He’ll talk you into it regardless.” Zack had a lot of his salesman grandfather in him. “But he’s a good kid. Takes after his mother,” he added in an aside.

  Harrison smirked, but sobered right away. “We have a lot of kids here right now. We’ll have to wait and see which way the wind blows with yours.”

  The line-toeing cow behind the desk at the clinic refused to admit Ayjia.

  “Unless you’re her legal guardian, we can’t treat her,” she said to Mercedes. She didn’t add, and certainly didn’t look, ‘sorry.’

  “But I’m her aunt, her mom’s sister. Ayjia, who am I?”

  “Auntie M,” Ayjia said, grasping the edge of the counter to pull herself up so her nose poked over the edge.

  “I just want her to have a tetanus shot,” Mercedes said. “She cut her chin on a nail. I can’t reach her mother right now and I’m the one who will pay for it. Surely—”

  “We can’t treat a child on any old say-so. If this were your child, would you want someone else making decisions regarding her medical treatment?”

  “If the child was in the care of a blood relative like my sister, sure.” Which was a huge lie. If she were able to have kids, she would never leave them in Porsha’s care longer than a bathroom break. This issue would never come up.

  And she would not get maudlin about it right now. She’d done the right thing at the time. Pity parties were for midnight after a lousy date and half a bottle of wine.

  “So I don’t have to get a shot, Auntie M?” Ayjia asked.

  “Sorry, hon, I’m still trying. I think it’s important. Do you have any suggestions on how I might get around this?” Mercedes asked the lady in the white sweater who could not possibly be a nurse since she was more concerned with rules than health care.

  “Sometimes schools have arrangements whereby the school nurse has permission to authorize something like this. You might check with them. Is she old enough to be in school?”

  “Kindergarten, but not here.” Mercedes regretted being so frank as the nurse’s brows went up. “I know they’re missing school. It should only be a day or two.”

  Dayton continued making car noises in the corner.

  “Is their school aware of the reason for their absence?”

  “Um—” Damn. “I’ll call them as soon as I get home.” No way could she drive back to Holbrook and put them in school tomorrow. Although, if she didn’t get this shot today, she might have to consider it. She would definitely call, see what the school nurse suggested.

  “Is their mother ill or something, Ma’am?” the woman asked.

  “Or something,” Mercedes admitted, giving the woman a meaningful smile. Maybe she’d take pity.

  “Then perhaps you should call social services.”

  Mercedes’s smile froze. She thanked the woman for her time, mentally flipped her the bird, then dragged the kids out to the car.

  “No shot, no shot,” Ayjia sang, as she skipped to the car.

  Mercedes drove back to her apartment, slipped the kids inside, and pulled out her phone to see Porsha had texted.

  Leave the kids with Mom. Heading to Florida with Carlos. Will be gone a few weeks.

  “Weeks!” Mercedes let their bags drop around her ankles.

  “Mom?” Dylan guessed. “Does that mean we’re going to stay with Nana?”

  “No,” Mercedes said, perhaps too forcefully because both kids went very still. “No, I’d miss you if you went to Nana’s,” she said more gently. And Nana wouldn’t miss the kids for days if they were snatched by a pedophile or run over by a truck.

  Mercedes tried Porsha’s cell but only got voicemail.

  “Can we go swimming?” Dayton asked.

  “In a bit. I need to make some calls first. Why don’t you watch a show?”

  “Can I look at the pool?” Dayton asked.

  “From the patio, yes,” Mercedes said, glancing at the time as she looked up the school’s number. She might still get the school nurse. It wasn’t quite three.

  The nurse was gone, but the principal, a woman, came to the phone.

  “When they both didn’t show up, we were less worried,” the woman said. “Since that often happens.”

  “Really?” Mercedes got a sinking feeling. Both kids had only started school this year. They shouldn’t be missing any.

  Mercedes explained her problem and the principal was very sympathetic. “But since it didn’t happen here at the school, under the supervision of our staff, I’m sorry. We really aren’t in a position to help.”

  “Well, who is?” Mercedes asked with some exasperation. “I mean, the hospital here is likely to give me the same run around. What do I do?”

  A second of silence then a gentle tone. “It might not be my place to suggest it, but perhaps you should talk to social services?”

  Mercedes shut her eyes. It was so sordid, so typical of their family. She had really hoped her sister could raise these kids to adulthood without turning them into case files.

  “They’re very sweet kids, despite their situation,” the principal said.

  “Situation?” The kids were in a situation?

  “The lack of stability at home,” the woman clarified.

  “I thought they had more than they apparently do,” Mercedes admitted.

  “Let me give you a number.”

  “No, it’s all right. I’ll...figure it out.” Mercedes hung up.

  This shouldn’t be so hard. Her sister was the problem. The kids weren’t any trouble. She walked from the kitchen to see Dayton had crawled over the balustrade around her ground level patio, crossed the grass and was now climbing the pool fence.

  Mercedes rushed outside. “Dayton, I said to look at it from the patio. Get down from there and come here, please.”

  “Mercedes, do you have children visiting?” The voice came from a group of ladies in tank tops sharing a table and a deck of cards in the shade of a palm.

  “My niece and nephew, Mrs. Brewster. You remember them from Christmas?”

  “Oh, yes. You’re st
ill on vacation, then? Because I have a faucet that needs attention. When will you be able to look at it?”

  “Um, tomorrow, I think— Dayton! Here, please. Now.”

  The chain link rattled as he leapt to the concrete between her patio and the pool, his sneakers making a slapping sound that rang off the two-story building behind her.

  “Thank you,” Mercedes muttered. Weeks, Porsha had said. Weeks. And, as Mrs. Garvey had pointed out, all of Mercedes’s vacation time was gone.

  Okay. Not a problem. She just needed to find a way to keep the kids occupied during the day so she could work. People with kids did it all the time.

  After making peanut butter sandwiches, she opened the browser on her tablet and began calling daycare providers.

  Chapter 4

  L.C. woke in the kind of cheap, Free Cable motel he’d been living in for two years. Most of the time, it didn’t bother him, but now that Zack was with him—

  “Dad!”

  He realized Zack’s knocking was what had woken him. He rolled off the bed and let his son in. “I was asleep,” he excused.

  Zack wheeled his bike into the room, flushed and sweaty. “I was starting to think you had a woman in here.”

  A flash of Mercedes with her strawberry blond curls came into his mind’s eye. He blamed the fact that he hadn’t been laid in a long while for the way she was hovering in the back of his consciousness. He usually found his dance partners in bars, but he’d been staying dry so he’d been staying horny. Mercedes had put a thirst in his belly, though. There was something about her that made him dream of another life where they drank shots half the night then screwed until dawn.

  He waved at the empty room in answer to his son’s remark.

  Zack’s helmet bounced onto the second bed, followed by his shirt. “You don’t need to be here, you know.”

  “I paid for the room. I’m feeling entitled.” And, yeah, he was indecently pleased to have a reason to stay the night and perv over Mercedes again tomorrow. Sue him.

  Pants hit the floor with a muffled jangle of a belt buckle and got kicked toward the corner. “I mean, I don’t need your help.”

  “And yet you accepted it when you needed to empty your dorm room.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s when I thought you’d be a help.”

  L.C. lifted his head from checking his wallet for pizza money. “Are you packing and getting your own room, then?”

  Zack was down to his navy jocks and dug a fresh pair out of his bag. “If you’re going to hit on the one person who might help me stay here, then yeah, maybe I will get my own room. This is important to me.”

  L.C. folded his arms. “I didn’t hit on anyone.” He’d restrained himself to a few appreciative smiles. It wasn’t his fault Mercedes offered so much to appreciate.

  “Oh, please. Who the hell is Elsie?” Zack yanked out a clean T-shirt. “A friggin’ milk cow?”

  “L. C. My initials.” He felt his face heat.

  “Where’d Lyle friggin’ Fogarty go? ‘Cause I thought that’s who my dad was.”

  “I got tagged with the nickname on a job site in Kentucky because they already had a Lyle. It stuck and I like it, okay?” It felt good not to be Lyle friggin’ Fogarty anymore. It gave him a chance to start fresh in a lot of ways.

  “Really? Because it sounded like a line.”

  “You’re right. I admit it. That’s how I’ve been picking up all the women I’ve been seeing for the last two years. Broads go nuts over initials. Have you tried it Z.G.?”

  “I’m just saying, don’t screw this up for me.” Zack started toward the bathroom, paused and warned over his shoulder, “Or I’ll tell her the L stands for ‘Little.’”

  “I’m sorry. I misunderstood,” Janice with Tiny Tykes Daycare said Tuesday morning, wrinkling her freckled nose at Mercedes. “I thought you were looking for after-school care for a kindergartner and full-time care for a one-year-old.”

  “No, grade one.” Mercedes glanced to where Ayjia and Dayton looked like giants crawling over the toddler-sized jungle gym in the fenced daycare yard.

  “Mmm. Well, I’m sorry. We don’t offer anything midday for school-aged children. They’re usually in school.” She punctuated with a weak laugh.

  Mercedes smiled while flutters of panic started in her stomach. She was due for a second attempt at straightening out Zack’s future in an hour. She had planned to confidently show the board the children wouldn’t interfere with her ability to work.

  She waited with growing anxiety while Janice waved at a mom steering a waddling girl in a blue dress toward the entrance of the pink stucco building.

  “I’ll be right in,” Janice called. “Barbara’s already there.” When she turned back to Mercedes, the tilt of her head held a dismissive quality, like she was about to say goodbye.

  Desperation clenched like a fist in Mercedes’s chest. “Can you, um, think of any options I might have? I’m really in a bind.”

  Janice sent a puzzled frown toward the kids. “Why aren’t they in school?”

  Mercedes opened her mouth to say, Never mind, intending to hustle the kids back to her apartment where she could hide the entire mess from the world until she got herself fired and kicked onto the streets, but the pressure of trying to keep it together was becoming more than she could bear.

  Rather than making a dry comment about a sister who sometimes took a vacation from her problems, she felt tears hit the backs of her eyes. Instead of thinking her usual, I can do this, she thought, I can’t. Not when she’d done it so many times before. It had been different when Porsha had only disappeared for a weekend, but the stretches were growing longer and Mercedes knew it was because she enabled her.

  This wasn’t drugs, though. It was children. You didn’t tough love someone by refusing to show up for helpless kids who couldn’t look out for themselves.

  “I can’t—” take them back to Holbrook, she tried to say, but the lump in her throat was growing too big. She tried to swallow and wound up making a pathetic choking sound.

  Janice read Mercedes’ distress and her expression melted into something she probably wore when one of her charges took a hard spill. She reached out with a sympathetic hand.

  It was the first sign of compassion Mercedes had experienced since she had argued with her mother about taking the kids back to Porsha’s apartment. From everyone else, it had been nothing but arguments that she shouldn’t be looking after the kids.

  But if not her, who?

  “Do you want to sit down and talk? Let me tell my partner,” Janice said, hurrying inside.

  Minutes later, Janice pressed a lukewarm instant coffee into Mercedes weak hands. She seemed so kind, with her frizzy brunette hair and cheerful buttercup T-shirt and her willingness to listen.

  Mercedes sank onto a bench beside her, kept her voice low, but told Janice as much as she had to. She didn’t get into her own childhood of men coming and going from their mother’s life, speaking in innuendo and touching without welcome until she and her sister began looking for their own men to protect and provide for them. Mercedes hadn’t magically woken up with her head on straight with a good job and a decent level of self-respect. If she’d been able to get pregnant, she probably would have wound up raising a couple of kids on welfare, too. She wasn’t above having a few drinks at the end of a tough day. She wasn’t perfect, so she tried not to judge Porsha too harshly for the way she behaved.

  But her sister was crossing a line.

  “It’s not that she doesn’t love them. She knows I’ll always take them, is the problem. She just doesn’t realize...” She heard the codependence in her words and trailed off.

  Janice nodded. “I’ve been at this for ten years and wish I could say this is the first time I’d heard anything like this, but it happens. Parenting is tough and when other factors come into play, money pressures or job loss…” She skipped mentioning alcohol and drugs, which was yet another kindness Mercedes appreciated in her. “At least they have yo
u stepping in. They’re very lucky.”

  “But that’s the problem. I have to work. My employers have already bent over backwards for me. I can’t keep taking advantage of that.”

  More nodding, now with the tight smile of a hard truth on its way. “But do you realize that if you want to put them into any licensed daycare, you’ll have to provide medical information? You’ll have to sign the same permission for medical care you can’t get for yourself. If you can’t get Ayjia’s cut looked after, you won’t be able to register her anywhere. You might find something private, but I have to be honest. That’s hit or miss.”

  “Oh, fudge,” Mercedes muttered, not having thought of that. She tried to reach into her purse for her phone and wound up knocking it off the bench. It hit the gravel at her feet. “Double fudge.”

  Janice picked it up for her. “Can I give you a number? It’s a social worker we talk to sometimes. She’s really great. Very child-focused.”

  Mercedes drew a breath, wanting to say a firm, No. Grim memories surfaced of that awful woman who had taken her and Porsha from their mother because their mother’s boyfriend had been arrested. It had only been a few days, but they’d been left in a house that stank of dog and mold, sharing bunk beds that stank of urine and despair.

  Whenever she thought of social services, her mind went straight back to that dilapidated house. Her greatest fear was that Porsha’s kids would wind up somewhere like that, too scared to climb the stairs to the kitchen and ask for something to eat.

  “Just talk to her. Find out what your options are,” Janice urged. “I think you’ll really like her.”

  It was just a phone number.

  Mercedes squeaked out a defeated, “Okay.”

  Janice made the call for Mercedes, booking an appointment for the afternoon while a plump woman named Barbara checked Ayjia’s chin and agreed medical attention was a good idea.

  Mercedes drove back to the complex with the weight of too much responsibility depressing her mood.

  “I didn’t want to stay there anyway,” Ayjia said as Mercedes parked the car and climbed out into what was shaping up to be a scorching spring day. “I want to be with you, Auntie M.”