Marrying a Delacourt by Sherryl Woods Read Free Book Online

apparently inferring from Michael’s silence that he was willing to withhold judgment until all the facts were in.
    “Since Josh was four,” Jamie finally confessed. “We were together in the first place, but then they got mad at me, ’cause I wouldn’t follow all their stupid rules, so I got sent away to another family. They kept Josh till he ran away to find me. Whenthey dragged him back, he cried and cried, till he made himself sick. Then they said they couldn’t cope with him either.”
    Michael swallowed hard at the image of a little boy sobbing his heart out for his big brother. Instead of being treated with compassion, he’d been sent away. What kind of monsters did that to a child? He glanced at Grace and thought he detected tears in her eyes.
    “How many places have you been since then?” she asked gently.
    “Four,” Jamie said without emotion. “Josh has been in three.”
    “Because you keep running away to be together?” Grace concluded.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “What happened to your parents?”
    “We don’t got any,” Jamie said flatly. His sharp gaze dared his brother to contradict him.
    Even so, Josh couldn’t hide his shock at the reply. “That’s not true,” he protested, fighting tears. “We got a mom. You know we do.”
    “For all the good it does. She’s been in rehab or jail as far back as I can remember,” Jamie said angrily. “What good is a mom like that?”
    “I’m sure she loves you both very much, despite whatever problems she has,” Grace said. “Sometimes things just get to be overwhelming and people make mistakes.”
    “Yeah, like turning her back on her own kids,” Jamie said with resentment. “Some mistake.”
    Michael was inclined to agree with him, but he kept silent. This was Grace’s show. She no doubtknew what to say under very complicated circumstances like this. He didn’t have a clue. He just knew he wanted to crack some adult heads together. The vehemence of his response surprised him. Grace was the champion of the underdog, not him. He’d wanted to distance himself from this situation, not get drawn more deeply into it. But with every word Jamie and Josh spoke, he could feel his defenses crumbling.
    “Where are you from—I mean originally, back when you lived with your mom?” Grace asked the boys.
    The question surprised him. He’d just assumed the boys had to be from someplace nearby. How else would they have wound up in Trish and Hardy’s barn? Realistically, though, how many foster homes were there likely to be around Los Piños? How much need for them would there be in a town this size, anyway?
    “We were born in San Antonio,” Jamie said. “But we moved around a lot, even before Mom ditched us. I can’t even remember all the places. She liked big cities best because it was easier to get…” He shrugged. “You know…stuff.”
    Michael was very much afraid he did know. He held back a sigh.
    “And your last foster home?” Grace asked. “Was it near here?”
    The boy shook his head. “Not really. When I got Josh, I figured this time we’d better get far away so they could never find us. I figured they’d just give up after a couple of days. It’s not as if anybody really cares where we are. We’ve been hitching rides for a while now. Like a week, maybe.”
    “Yeah,” Josh said. “We must have gone about a thousand miles.”
    “It’s only a couple of hundred, doofus,” Jamie said.
    “Well, it seems like a lot. We didn’t get a lot of rides, so we had to walk and walk. Jamie wouldn’t get in a car with just anybody. He said we could only get in pickups where we could ride in the back.”
    Michael listened, horrified. He saw the same sense of dismay on Grace’s face. Clearly, they both knew all too well what might have happened to two small boys on the road alone. Obviously Jamie, at his age and with his street smarts, understood the dangers as well, but it was also clear that he thought those were preferable to another bad