Autumn Promises Read Free Page B

stepped into a homey kitchen with soapstone counters and back splashes and natural-colored, pine bead-board cabinet fronts.
    Any other impressions she got were short-circuited somewhere on their way to her brain by the troubling cries of what sounded like a dozen babies. They sounded hungry. Good grief! Had the man abandoned the twins?
    Meg quickly followed the wails to a sprawling sitting room with the vaulted ceiling she’d expected. And there she discovered a sight more startling than walking in on all that howling.
    Evan Alton sat in a rocker with a baby on each shoulder, attempting to burp both fussy babies at thesame time. “Come on, you two,” he was saying in a low voice that even she had to admit had a soothing quality to it. “You’ve got to stop conspiring against your granddad. One little burp. I promise. Just cooperate and we’ll get you back to the feedbag.”
    “Well, this is a photo op the local newspaper editor would probably kill for,” Meg drawled. “The great and powerful Evan Alton brought low by fourteen pounds of newborn.”
    “Do you always walk right into a man’s home and attack him with your smart-mouthed comments?” he demanded.
    “If and when I attack, you’ll know it. As for the house, I was invited. And I was under the impression that this was Jack and Beth’s home now. Or did you renege on that promise, too?”
    “I have never once reneged on a promise to my son.”
    Meg waited a beat, raised one dark eyebrow and said, “No, just on several to his mother.”
    He shook his head. “Nope. Not to Martha, either.”
    She clenched her teeth. “I was referring to me. ”
    The twins, who had stopped their crying when she’d spoken, apparently got bored with the sound of a new voice and started bawling again. “I assume you’ve come to help,” Evan said over the din. “So help. Take Maggie. She’s the easier to handle.”
    “Are you implying that I can’t handle Wade?”
    “No, I’m saying it right out plain and simple. He’shaving a problem with the bottle, poor little tyke. I’m not turning him over to some inexperienced second stringer who’s never done more with a baby than give him away.”
    Oh! Meg folded her arms over her chest. “I wish I’d known then that you have no real respect for adoption. But you lied through your teeth to hide your feelings.”
    “I didn’t lie,” Evan said emphatically. “I hold adoption and the ability to love someone else’s off-spring as one of the finer qualities humans have. It’s the parent discarding a child I still have trouble with. Especially when they turn around and storm back into the lives of those children three decades later, disrupting everything.”
    Meg snatched up the infant in pink from his shoulder, and the bottle with the pink charm from the table next to him. “If you’ll remember, Jack came looking for me. It seems there was a void in his life he hoped I could fill. It isn’t my fault he felt that way. It’s yours.”
    Evan gritted his teeth as Meg Taggert settled in the other rocker at the far side of the hearth. He’d probably ground a year’s worth of enamel off his teeth when she’d arched her dark eyebrow in that superior way of hers. Blast the platinum-haired witch! Knowing she was right really stuck in his craw.
    Evan smirked in spite of his annoyance. For some reason, matching wits with her always made him feelmore alive than he had in the years before meeting her. “It must really get your goat that Jack chose to come back and run the Circle A and live here with me over Laurel Glen and that foreman’s job your brother gave him.”
    Again that annoying but lovely eyebrow arched. “Ross didn’t give Jack a thing. He earned that position on his own merit. My brother hired Jack with no knowledge whatever of who he was. In fact, I was away at the time. Doesn’t it bother you that Ross saw the potential in Jack during a one-hour interview when you never had, even after living a lifetime with