Free Summer Lovin': A Wounded Hearts Novella by Jacquie Biggar Page B

and chest. Shoot, some caregiver she was.
    The television still blared, though she couldn’t hear the kids any more. Maybe they’d followed her example and fallen asleep on the sofa.
    She looked down and grimaced. Half-dry soap bubbles covered her upper body. She hurried to sluice off, shivering as the cool washcloth passed over her skin. Catching the chain with her toe, she pulled the plug, then stood and stepped out onto a plush white bathmat. Reaching over to the hook on the door, she grabbed the navy blue bathtowel and hurried to dry herself before slipping into her cotton candy pink robe and snuggling into its enveloping warmth.
    The bang of the back door and a child’s cry halted the combing of her damp hair. She opened the door and padded in bare feet down the carpeted corridor. She peeked into the living room on the right. Spiderman was climbing the outside of a building on the TV, but no one was watching him. The kids’ plates sat empty where she’d left them on the coffee table, the milk half drunk.
    Concerned, she turned and hurried the rest of the way down the hall to the kitchen. Maybe they were still hungry and had gone looking for food. She hoped Tommy had the sense not to use the stove to make more grilled sandwiches.
    Rounding the corner, she shrieked. Two men sat at her kitchen table wolfing down what seemed like the entire contents of her fridge. Tommy and Jasper were on the floor near the back door. Tommy had an arm around his brother’s shoulders. Tears had left tracks down both boys’ cheeks. All four looked up when she entered the room and her hands fluttered up to the edges of her robe.
    “Well, if it ain’t the teach.” The heavier-set man—Tommy’s uncle, she was sure—plucked at his yellowed teeth with a toothpick. “We were wondering where you were. Not very nice leavin’ kids by themselves. No tellin’ how much trouble they’ll git into.”
    “I told ya I’d go git her,” the other guy said. His smarmy gaze made her feel as though she were naked even though the robe covered her from head to toe.
    “What are you doing here?” she demanded. The unwashed stench of sweat and alcohol permeating the room from their bodies was awful. It also warned her as nothing else could that these were desperate men with nothing left to lose.
    “They…” Tommy started to rise, but a warning glare from his uncle had him sinking down again, sullen and angry.
    Rebecca gave her head the slightest shake. Please don’t do anything stupid.
    “Shut your trap, boy. You’re lucky I didn’t beat your ass for taking off like that.” He took a long chug of milk—right out of the carton—then focused on Becky. “What did you do to my littlest boy, Teach? That how you treat kids in that fancy school of yours? Imagine my surprise to hear a message from the hospital saying you’d been givin’ permission to bring them home—prior to an investigation.”
    Rebecca gasped. He was trying to blame Jasper’s accident on her? “If you had food for them to eat, they wouldn’t have been trying to steal some.”
    The moment the words left her lips she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Pete turned his attention to Tommy who cowered into the corner. Jasper started sobbing and covered his head with his arm, bandaged leg sticking vulnerably at an angle from his body.
    Pete stood, the chair scraping on the ceramic tiles. His fist clenched around the carton, and milk gushed over the top of his hand. Swearing, he threw the container and it splattered on the wall above the boys’ heads.
    Incensed, Becky screeched and ran toward him, fists raised to pound some sense into the idiot. She never got the chance.
    The other man came at her from the side and knocked her to her knees, his weight driving her facedown onto the floor. Panicking, she bucked and twisted, desperate to get him off her, but he only laughed and dug his bony hand into the center of her back to hold her still.
    “I knew you’d like it rough,”