Page 5 of Tru Blue
“Okay, princess, this is the deal.” He set her on his leg, laid Lincoln down, and quickly stripped off the baby’s diaper, revealing a worse rash on his bottom than Kennedy’s. He carefully took off the baby’s shirt, and nearly lost his mind at the sight of a big fucking bruise on the baby’s upper arm. He ground his teeth together to keep from cursing whoever put it there. He held Lincoln against his chest, feeling sick to his stomach. Fighting tears of anger and empathy, he whispered, “Never again, little guy. I promise you. Never again.”
Truman took off his own soiled shirt and set Kennedy on her feet so he could take off his jeans and boots, leaving on his briefs. “We need to get you two cleaned up. Then we’re going down to the corner to get you and your brother some food and warm clothes.”
“No baf!” She clung to his legs.
Tru closed his eyes for half a second to get his emotions in check. He was still waiting for the impact of finding his dead mother to hit him, but she’d already been dead to him for a very long time. That didn’t stop the night from hell from burning under his skin. Between the screaming baby and the stubborn girl, he should be fit to be tied, but it wasn’t their fault they were born to an unfit and uncaring mother.
He picked up Lincoln and climbed into the bath. Lincoln kicked his feet, crying as Truman washed him. Meanwhile, Kennedy held on to the side of the tub watching them.
“Baby no like baf.”
“He’s doing okay,” he assured her, holding on to the baby as he poured body wash into his hands. “You’re okay, right, little bro?” He kissed the baby’s head. “Doesn’t it feel good to get clean?” Lincoln’s cries quieted, and Kennedy cocked her head to the side, her little brows tightly knitted.
“I think he likes the bath now, princess,” Truman said.
“Me like baf.” She put her arms around the side of the tub and tried to throw her leg over the top.
“Whoa.” He lifted her onto his lap with one hand, wishing he had a third arm.
A short while later, he diapered them, dressed each in one of his clean, soft shirts, grabbed a few crackers for Kennedy to eat in the car, and drove to Walmart.
GEMMA WRIGHT TOSSED a third pint of ice cream into her basket and reached for a jar of hot fudge from the display beside the freezer. She stopped short, eyeing the caramel topping and rainbow sprinkles, and decided to get all three. It was after midnight, and calories didn’t count after midnight. That was her night-owl rule and she was sticking with it. Especially after some jerk hit her car and took off. Tonight she deserved the biggest ice-cream sundae known to man.
She headed over to the children’s aisle to check out the new bodysuit tutu her friend and employee Crystal had told her about. As the owner of Princess for a Day Boutique, she was always on the lookout for cute outfits. She spotted a rack of pastel bodysuits with bright fluffy tutus.
“Thank you, Crystal!”
Lifting a pink outfit with a white tutu from the rack, she felt the familiar pang of longing wriggling deep inside her. Some girls dreamed of white weddings, expensive gowns, and knights in shining armor—or billionaires in Armani suits and lavish honeymoons. Gemma didn’t need a fancy wedding, or even a gallant husband, for that matter. She did quite well on her own. She had her dreams. They were just a little different from most girls’. All her life she’d sat on the sidelines, first listening to girls complain about menstrual cramps and, later, watching women’s bellies grow with new life. But Gemma was born without a uterus, and oh how she used to wish she could experience those dreadful cramps to determine if they really were as horrid as her friends had claimed and to use them as an excuse to miss gym class. Gemma’s dreams had nothing to do with lavish weddings or anything other than being lavished with love. She dreamed of little chestnut-haired babies and a loving, stable man to father them. A man who knew how to love, not throw money and gifts at them, hoping it made up for his absence. A man who wouldn’t desert his family for all the wrong reasons.
The sound of a baby crying brought another pang of longing. She gazed in the direction of the noise as the wailing grew louder, and carried her basket to the edge of the aisle, peering around the corner. Her heart nearly stopped at the sight of an impossibly tall man with thick dark hair and untamed scruff holding the crying infant while he paged through a magazine. His heavily tattooed, thickly muscled arms swallowed the child, like he was afraid the baby might slip away if he didn’t hold every inch of it. A little girl sat in the cart with her back to Gemma, surrounded by just about every type of baby food and formula there was. Alarm bells went off in Gemma’s head. Why were these babies out so late? And why was he reading a magazine while the baby was screaming? Gemma had a naturally inquisitive mind, and she was used to it running in crazy directions. She began weaving a story about the guy—his wife left him, and he was a single dad for the first time, totally lost. Or maybe he’d abducted the kids. That was her imaginative side taking over. The side that made up stories when she was younger to get through her treacherously lonely life and wrote the newsletter for her boutique, which included a made-up story for the kids and something interesting and local for parents to check out. She ducked around the aisle again, clutching her basket, mentally figuring out how she could ease that wailing baby’s sadness without seeming too nosy.
