Page 6 of Taken Home By the Grizzly

She turns her head to the stairs. “Adrian!” she bawls.

I finger the envelope she’s just given me. It’s stuffed with a wad of cash. Two-thousand bucks, she told me. That’s double what I was expecting.

Her hubby hurries down the stairs, carrying two suitcases. He flicks me a sheepish glance.

“Anything else at all that I need to know about the kids?” I’m begging now.

She plasters a huge smile on her face. “You’ll figure it out.”

“You see a rundown cabin on your way up here?” Adrian fixes me with a serious look.

“Yeah,” I say slowly. I do remember passing a cabin as I trudged up the hill to the property, lugging my duffel bag. I’d been walking alongway from the Greyhound bus stop, and I was almost delirious with cold and tiredness, but it caught my attention. The windows were dim, but I swear I saw a face behind the glass, watching me. It should’ve been creepy, but it felt cozy, somehow. Homely.

“If you know what’s good for you, stay away from it,” he mutters.

“Why?” I ask.

“Just stay away from it,” he says cryptically.

Okay.Well, that’s the least of my worries right now.

He hauls open the front door, and they’re gone.

“I didn’t agree to this,” I tell no one at all. I stand in the open doorway, watching dazedly as my new employers climb into one of their trucks and pull away.

They didn’t even say goodbye to their kids.

The last hour has been one of the strangest episodes of my life, and that’s saying a lot, considering my upbringing made Alice’s journey through Wonderland look like a guided tour with a map.

Funny, when I arrived here, and saw the lit-up fir tree in the yard, my chest warmed. I thought, this is a good family. A family that cares about making things nice. How wrong I was.

The minute the parents are out of sight, the kids stream past me and bound into the yard like overexcited puppies. One of them clambers on top of his mom’s truck, while the other starts scaling the fir tree. The first one is Jace, while his twin brother is Todd. They’re wearing different clothes, luckily. As for their younger sister, Mari, she’s heading toward the far corner, where the woodpile is.

“Jace, come down from there, you might put a dent in the roof,” I call.

He flashes me a look, then jumps up and down on the roof with both feet.

Oh, god.

I rush over and step up on the running board, trying to reach for him. Of course, he ducks away from me.

“Haha! can’t catch me!”

Behind me, I hear a rustling sound and spin around in time to see Todd scrambling up to the highest branches of the fir tree. They don’t look strong enough to support him.

“Todd, come down from there, please,” I call.

“You’re not my mom!” he shrieks.

“You can’t tell us what to do,” Jace yells from behind me.

I close my eyes for a beat, disengage myself from the situation, just like the childcare book advised. “No, I’m not your mom, but I’m taking care of you in place of your mom. Which means that it’s my job to keep you safe. And because I’m an adult, I’m better at this kind of stuff than you guys. Please come down here, and we can go play a game together.”

Both of them completely blank me and carry on with what they were doing.Crap.What now?

What nowis that I discover the parents left the front gates open when they exited, and Mari is no longer playing on the woodpile. In fact, I can see a set of tiny footprints exiting the gate and heading down the hill.No!Panic screams through my brain.

“You two, get down from there right now!” I yell. The childcare book would definitely not condone this, but desperate times and all that…

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