CHAPTER SEVEN

‘THEY deserve to be spanked. I’ll do it if you won’t.’ Charlotte was at her vitriolic best and Erin silently counted to ten before she put herself between Charlotte and the boys. Somehow she forced herself to think fast. She needed a defensive weapon here, and luckily she had one, just granted to her by an indignant Shanni.

‘You touch them and I’ll… I’ll publish the poetry you and Bradley Moore wrote to each other when you were teenagers!’

What a threat! Erin’s voice was whisper-quiet and desperate, but everyone knew she meant it. Matt’s eyebrows flew up in astonishment. Charlotte gasped and took a step back, allowing Erin to crouch protectively before her two white-faced little boys.

Now what? Erin thought desperately. The boys knew exactly what they’d done, and how naughty they’d been. Now they flinched, but they met her look, defiant and expecting the worst.

Why did she always want to hug them?

She couldn’t. Matt was still holding them a hand apiece. He was angry, she knew. He’d been distracted momentarily by her stupid threat to Charlotte, and she could see her threat would surface to haunt her, but meanwhile he had every right to be angry.

‘What the…?’ Charlotte was shocked to the core. ‘You never…’

‘You used Rob McDonald as a go between,’ Erin said, and managed a smile. This was kids’ poetry they were talking about. It was only teasing, after all. Wasn’t it? ‘Silly move, Charlotte. Rob might be a police sergeant, but at fifteen he wasn’t so law-abiding. The dratted boy copied them and Shanni found them a couple of weeks ago when she was cleaning up out at her parents’ farm.’

It might be crazy, and wholly unethical, but as a desperate ruse it worked brilliantly. As a distraction, this was a beauty!

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Charlotte managed, right off track.

‘Yep!’ It was, but Shanni had laughingly suggested it as a weapon, and it had been in Erin’s head at the wrong time. Bay Beach was a very small town with a very long memory!

‘Poetry,’ Matt said blankly. ‘Bradley?’ and Erin had to choke back laughter and concentrate on the important issue here.

‘Do you know where Cecil is now?’ she asked the boys gently. She was more dismayed than angry. Heaven, it was as if they tried to drive off anyone who was good to them. They’d all put in so much work to make Cecil splendid, and to undo it all now didn’t make any sense. ‘He’s down in the mud by the river, and he’s filthy,’ she continued. ‘All the work that you and Matt did is wasted.’

‘We don’t care,’ William whispered.

‘Now Matt won’t be able to go to the show,’ Henry added. He was scared stiff, but still there was a whisper of defiance. ‘With her!’

And there was the crux of the matter. They wanted Matt to stay right here, so they’d taken matters into their own hands.

Help! Erin thought bleakly. They needed to be punished-but how? She couldn’t let them off scot-free, and here was Charlotte ready to thrash them. All of them. Erin included.

The woman looked at explosion point. Maybe Erin’s threat hadn’t been such a good idea.

Concentrate on the twins, she told herself. ‘You’d better go to your room,’ she said wearily, trying to block out Charlotte’s fury and think what was best. Her head was spinning. ‘Oh, Matt, I’m so sorry.’

‘There’s no need for you to be sorry.’ Matt’s face was still grim, but there was a trace of understanding behind his eyes. Now they’d given their reason, he could see it and, damn, he’d had fun with the kids himself. He could see why they didn’t want it to end. He hadn’t thought it important-he’d assumed they’d be fine here with Erin while he was away for the night-but looking at it from a kid’s perspective he could see where they were coming from.

And he could see the problem Erin had with them now. They needed consequences, but where were the consequences in this one? He stay home and they’d won? That’d achieve nothing except trouble next time. Or he’d work until midnight getting the bull ready again, and leave them all to be upset in his absence. Erin feeling guilty and the kids feeling bad.

Consequences…

Charlotte was quietly having kittens by his side. What had Erin said? Bradley Moore… Well, well.

Consequences!

‘This is a real shame,’ he said, and made himself look gravely at the twins instead of at Erin. He still had their hands. Now he gave them both a gentle tug so they were facing him. Unlike Erin, he didn’t stoop. He stayed looking down at them from his great height, and he schooled his features into sad instead of angry.

Or…sadness instead of laughter?

‘I can’t believe you did this-just when I’d made the extra bookings,’ he told them, and they stared.

‘Bookings?’ The twins knew they were expected to respond but they didn’t know how. They didn’t know what the word meant.

‘For accommodation,’ he told them. ‘Since you’d done such a fine job helping me with Cecil, and since he needs a lot of grooming at the show, I’d decided you needed to come with me. I’ve just booked hotel rooms for you and Erin, so all of us could come.’

Erin blinked. Had he?

He hadn’t. He’d only just thought of it, she decided as she watched his face, but it was a great idea. The boys faces dropped to their boots, and their look of incredulous disappointment was stunning.

‘You were going to take us?’ Henry whispered and Matt nodded.

‘Yep. But it’s no use now. We have a filthy bull.’

Charlotte’s jaw had dropped in disbelief. ‘You didn’t…’

‘Hush, Charlotte,’ Matt told her kindly. Bradley Moore, eh? Brad was a bachelor farmer living not five miles away. The man was horse mad, and had the brains of a peanut.

But he couldn’t think of that now.

‘I guess none of us can go, now,’ Matt said.

Silence. Erin was looking stunned, as well she might. She couldn’t think of a better punishment for the boys than this if she’d thought for a week. To miss out on something as brilliant as the Lassendale show…

She felt a stab of disappointment herself, and had to remind herself that he’d only made it up to punish the boys.

‘What if we catch him again?’ Henry asked. ‘We could wash him.’

Matt glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty already.

‘I have things to do,’ he said. ‘A lot if I’m to get to the show. I haven’t even started feeding yet.’

‘If he’s in the mud all by himself then we could catch him.’ William was right there with Henry, and their two active little minds were in overdrive. ‘If you gave us the rope…’

‘And we can wash him. We know how to.’

‘We helped the first time, and now we can do it ourselves.’

Erin compressed her lips, trying not to smile. Now what? Had Matt backed himself into a corner?

But no. He rose to the occasion with fortitude.

‘I don’t have the time to do it myself,’ he told them. ‘But if Erin’s willing to supervise and you’re willing to try-’

‘They’ll never do it,’ Charlotte snapped, but Matt simply raised his eyebrows and smiled.

‘They can try. I don’t want to miss out on showing Cecil unless I must. He’s a champion but I won’t get the highest stud fees for him unless he’s shown.’

‘Can we try?’ The twins were turning to Erin, their eyes a mixture of hope and despair. They knew they couldn’t do it without her help, and they needed her.

So what was new? Kids always needed Erin.

And she was a farmer’s daughter. Supervising the cleaning of one docile bull should be a piece of cake.

‘You really have booked us accommodation?’ she asked suspiciously. If she did let the boys go to this effort, Matt couldn’t let them down at the end of it.

‘I really have,’ Matt told her. His eyes met hers and held, and something intangible passed between them. Some assurance that wasn’t all about accommodation.

There was a moment’s pause.

Then…

‘What are we waiting for?’ Erin asked. ‘Come on, boys. Let’s go find us a bull.’


And four hours later, once again they had a fine looking bull. Cecil was brushed and groomed to within an inch of his life, and the three of them had never worked so hard to make him that way. He was some bull, Erin thought. To have put up with it all twice in one day…

He had, and the boys had worked themselves to the point of exhaustion to make him perfect. They’d stopped briefly for dinner-sandwiches eaten on the back step so they wouldn’t have to clean up-and then gone straight back to work until they’d finished. They gave Cecil the final brush-strokes right on eight, just as Matt strolled in for final inspection.

He’d kept far away from them all evening, knowing that was what was right, but it had cost him some resolution to do so. Charlotte had gone home an hour or more back, and it had been an almost superhuman struggle to stop his feet making their way to the shed.

Now though, it was all worthwhile as he entered to find three beaming faces, proudly displaying what they’d done.

And Cecil was practically beaming, too. He looked magnificent!

‘What do you think?’ Erin asked, and he heard the note of anxiety behind her words. She still thought that maybe he couldn’t keep his word. That he’d say the bull wasn’t good enough or there was a problem with accommodation.

But Matt was a man who was owed a few favours. As soon as Charlotte had gone he’d made some phone calls, and everything was set. Except Charlotte’s temper, he thought ruefully. She’d slammed off home in a vile mood, and he could see all sorts of problems looming ahead.

Erin had overstepped the mark with her threat, but then, he knew that Charlotte had been perfectly capable of slapping the boys, and he also knew how urgent it had been to stop her. She didn’t understand what he instinctively did-that a slap to kids who’d been kicked around in the past meant the undoing of all of Erin’s work.