Three Weddings And A Kiss by Loretta Chase Catherine Anderson Kathleen E. Woodiwiss Page A

absentmindedness. No matter how important the chore, if she allowed herself to be distracted midway, it was a sure bet she would forget whatever she had been doing, oftentimes with catastrophic results. On one such occasion, she had put a laundry tub full of white clothes on to boil over a fire out in the yard. As she stood there, stirring away and gazing off into a blur of nothingness, she heard Cody crying and abandoned her post to go find him. He was horribly upset, and she soon discovered why. Clint’s birthday was coming on July sixteenth, and Cody had nothing to give him as a present.
    Unable to bear seeing the six-year-old cry, Rachel applied herself to the task or cheering him up. Since they had an oversupply of old newspapers and plenty of flour, she suggested they make Clint a gift from papier-mâché. They had decided that a bowl to hold his pocket change would be an ideal gift, and Rachel was just mopping up Cody’s last tears when a shout came from out in the yard. In a twinkling, she remembered her laundry. But by then it was too late. To say that it had gotten scorched was an understatement. Incinerated, more like.
    Failure…It might not have been so hard to take if only she hadn’t come to care so deeply, not just about Clint, with whom she strongly suspected she was falling in love, but about Cody and Matt and all the others. Each of Clint’s brothers had become special to her in some way: Cody because he so desperately needed a mother, Matt because of his tendency to drink, and Cole because he needed help with his spelling, something Rachel was able to assist him with by having him spell out loud. The list went on and on. For the first time in her life, Rachel felt needed, truly needed. She wanted so badly to stay with the Raffertys, to feel as though she belonged with them, to know she wasn’t just a temporary fixture. Instead, because of her continual bungling, she half expected Clint to send her packing. She certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had.
    To ensure that he didn’t, Rachel made plans to bake him a special cake for his birthday—chocolate with fudge frosting—according to Cody, his absolute favorite. On the big day, everything went perfectly. The cake came out of the oven looking divine. Her frosting was flawless, exactly the right consistency. When everyone gathered around the table to eat, Rachel was so proud of herself she had tears in her eyes.
    Then Clint took his first bite of cake. Though he was far too polite to let on, Rachel knew something was wrong by the way his eyes darkened.
    “What?” she cried.
    He waved a hand and tried to smile. “It’s nothing,” he managed. “Really, Rachel.”
    She didn’t believe that for a second. She took a bite to see for herself. Salt. The frosting was delicious, but the cake itself tasted awful. Rachel nearly gagged. She couldn’t imagine how Clint managed to sit there, pretending it wasn’t so bad.
    Suddenly, it was all just too much. In a twinkling, she remembered every disastrous mistake she’d made since coming there. Now, to add insult to injury, she had ruined Clint’s birthday. Even Cody looked at her with accusing eyes.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular. “I’m so—sorry.”
    The final blow occurred when Rachel turned to flee the house. Useless was lying on the floor behind her, and with tears blurring her already poor vision, she mistook him for a rug, tripped over him, and sprawled face first on the floor. Matt reached her first. He was the one to help her stand, the one to check her hands for scrapes and brush her off. The others hovered around, all of them making sympathetic noises, none of them saying what she needed to hear. What that might nave been, Rachel didn’t know. She just knew she was humiliated to the marrow of her bones.
    Looking up at Matt through her tears, she remembered his saying that he’d once advised Molly to run along home, not because he wished to hurt her, but