Forever Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

boy’s body, pulling his shoulders taut, curling his hands into fists, sucking the color from his face. The kid looked like he’d either bolt or disintegrate on the spot if someone so much as sneezed. Sean wiped the frown from between his brows and swung himself into the cottage entrance on his crutches. Balancing there, he extended his right hand.
    “You must be Josh,” he said. “Your mom told me you like to read on my deck.”
    Damned if the kid’s face didn’t go even whiter—just before he buried it in Grace’s shoulder.
    Sean raised a perplexed eyebrow. “Something I said?”
    Lips pressed tight, Grace shook her head. “He’s talking about me, Josh. I told him you like to sit on his deck.”
    “Of course I was talking about —” Sean stopped. “You’re not his mother.”
    “Aunt.”
    He blinked, adjusting to the information. The woman who smelled like strawberries didn’t have kids? Well.
    “Mommy isn’t here,” a new voice informed him. “She’s in the hospital.”
    Sean looked sideways and down to meet the solemn brown gaze of a little girl with braided, dark hair and pajamas covered in purple penguins. A smaller girl peeked out from behind her with round, darkly fringed blue eyes.
    “Are you the man who yelled at Josh?” the taller girl asked.
    Once again Grace cut off his response.
    “That’s enough, Lilliane. Take Sage and go into your room. I’ll be there in a minute to tuck you.”
    Without so much as an instant’s hesitation, the two girls turned and departed. Sean blinked.
    “You certainly have them well trained,” he said to Grace, and damned if she didn’t flinch and go pale, too. What the hell?
    He shifted his weight on his crutches. His injured leg responded with an intense flash of pain that twisted through his gut. “Son of a bi—”
    Grace’s scowl cut him off mid-word. Right. Children on the premises. He swallowed a slow roll of nausea.
    “Sorry,” he muttered. “I moved the wrong way.”
    Her gaze dropped to his leg. “Is it bad?”
    “Getting that way, yeah.”
    “Right, let’s get you inside.” With quick efficiency, she popped the shells out of the shotgun she still carried and slipped them into her jeans pocket. Stretching up on tiptoe, she placed the weapon on top of a cupboard over a washing machine, then stripped off her coat and draped it over a hook. “Josh, can you grab a couple of blankets out of the closet and one of the pillows from my bed?”
    With a lingering, wide-eyed glance at the shotgun’s resting place, Josh sidled out of the mudroom toward the kitchen, then disappeared around the corner.
    “Do you need help getting your shoes off?” Grace asked.
    “Um…”
    Again her gaze dropped, then rose to meet his, shocked and more than a little horrified. “You’re not wearing—you walked that entire way in bare feet?”
    Brown, Sean realized. Her eyes were brown, like those of her niece and nephew, only darker. A rich, just-sweet-enough, dark-chocolate brown.
    And they were scowling at him again.
    His mouth twisted. “Only one bare foot, technically. My shoes were in the cottage, and there didn’t seem much point in mentioning it when neither of us could do anything. Besides, we’re here now.”
    He tacked the last bit on hastily, when she flicked her hair back over her shoulder and planted both hands on her hips, looking as if she might launch into a full-blown lecture. She favored him with tight-lipped silence in return and lifted one hand to point toward the kitchen.
    Sean took hold of the crutch’s handgrips again, trying not to think about how bruised his palms had become or how little sleep his leg would likely give him without painkillers available. Once he reached the kitchen, Grace went ahead of him to the couch in the living room, clearing a path through the toys and books scattered across the floor.
    She didn’t apologize for the mess, a fact that bumped her up a notch in his estimation. After spending a great part of his