Garnet lifted her nightgown and pretended to wash.
Balancing on one foot, Elizabeth toed off the lid of the pail, held the facecloth over it and wrung out the excess water before she used it to wash Emerald. Emerald awoke at the first touch of the cold cloth. She smiled sleepily up at Elizabeth, then lay quietly, playing with her fingers, her dark, almost liquid, black eyes taking note of her new governess’s every movement.
Finished with the bathing, Elizabeth dropped the soiled facecloth into the pail with the wet diaper and positioned a fresh diaper beneath Emerald. She pulled the triangular pieces of linen together until the ends met in the middle of Emerald’s chubby little belly and loosely pinned them together with a large safety pin, taking great pains not to pull the fabric too tightly or to bind Emerald in any way. She was about to celebrate her accomplishment when Garnet bumped her elbow with a decorated metal can of Fine Nursery Talcum Powder.
Elizabeth looked down and found that Garnet had already sprinkled some of the fine powder onto her hands and was busy rubbing it across her abdomen and down her legs. She couldn’t help but smile at the sight, for the clever toddler was rubbing the talc into the fabric of her bunched up nightie. “I know you think I’m hopeless in the nursery,” Elizabeth said, making a funny face to emphasize her point to Garnet. “But, believe it or not, I know what to do with talcum powder. I just didn’t realize you used it on babies.” Elizabeth unpinned Emerald’s diaper, held out her hand and motioned for Garnet to fill it with talc, then sprinkled the powder on Emerald. As she rubbed the superfine powder into Emerald’s tender skin, Elizabeth marveled at the contrast between the very white, very soft powder, and Emerald’s much darker, much softer body.
Emerald giggled as Elizabeth touched a ticklish spot as she carefully repinned the diaper, and Elizabeth found herself cooing to the little girl, “Does that feel good to you? Is that ticklish?”
“Mine.” Garnet said, bumping Elizabeth’s elbow again with the box of powder and lifting the hem of her gown to allow Elizabeth access to her stomach. Elizabeth poured more powder into the palm of her hand and coated Garnet’s midriff with it.
In a matter of minutes both little girls were giggling with delight at the new game. Elizabeth took advantage of their amusement to whisk Emerald’s soiled nightgown over her head and grab the fresh one meant to go on in its place from the bed rail. Emerald laughed uproariously as Elizabeth played peekaboo with her, pulling the old gown off over her head, momentarily covering Emerald’s face and tousling her dark, black hair.
“What’s going on in here?”
At the sound of the deep baritone voice, Elizabeth automatically let go of Emerald’s nightgown. It slipped out of her grasp and fluttered to the floor, forgotten, while Elizabeth, twisting her hands in the folds of her nightgown like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, turned toward the door.
James Craig stood on the threshold, watching.
Fifteen
“DADDY!” GARNET AND Emerald squealed with glee and reached out to him.
“Hello, my little beauties.” James entered the bedroom, then knelt down and opened his arms to welcome Garnet. “What’s been keeping you? Your sister is already downstairs with Mrs. G. awaiting her breakfast.” He hugged Garnet close, lifting her into his arms as he got to his feet and walked over to Emerald’s bed. “Hello, Miss Sadler,” he said, his voice low and husky as he noticed that she was barefoot, and that the smoke-colored satin wrapper she wore had come untied, allowing tantalizing glimpses of her delicate white lawn nightdress to show. James decided he liked the way she looked in the morning when her exceptional blue-green eyes were heavy-lidded and languid and her face still bore the marks from her pillowcase and the braid confining her thick tawny mane of hair was rumpled from sleep. And although his visits to the nursery before breakfast were a part of his everyday routine, the chance to glimpse Elizabeth Sadler looking as she looked right now gave him added incentive to continue to rise early to check on his children.
“Mr. Craig.” Elizabeth nodded to her employer in what she hoped was a professional manner.
James quirked his lips into a half-smile, then turned his attention to Garnet and Emerald. He planted a kiss on Garnet’s forehead, then listened intently as she babbled happily. When Garnet finished speaking, James nodded gravely as if he had understood every word of her nonsensical chatter then replied, “You two look like you raided the flour bin again. What’s going on up here? What mischief have you gotten into while Miss Sadler’s back was turned?” James pretended to ask Garnet and Emerald, but he looked over their heads and directed his gaze—and his questions—at Elizabeth.
“N-n-no mischief, Mr. Craig.” Elizabeth barely managed to get the words out. There was something in his look, something in his tone of voice that made her breath catch in her throat. Her heart began to pound. Her mouth went dry. And she seemed to be having trouble regulating her breathing. She stared at James Craig—at his expensive suit and the fine white powder smeared across the front of his waistcoat and tie. Elizabeth cringed, remembering the many times she had run to her mother, eager to show her love and affection by offering a hug, and received a scolding for mussing her dress instead. She gritted her teeth, straightened her shoulders, and steeled herself for James’s stinging rebuke, knowing it would come once he realized that the child he held in his arms had marred his immaculate appearance.
But James Craig surprised her. He noticed the talc on Garnet, then glanced down at the powder dusting the front of his suit, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “oh, well,” then looked up at the ceiling and laughed.
And in that moment Elizabeth knew she was in danger of giving her heart away. She remembered the buttery handprints and the blotch of jam that had stained the suit he’d worn to the jail. She remembered catching an intriguing whiff of what smelled like strawberries and wanting to reach out a finger and touch the stain, then taste it to see if her sense of smell had deceived her. She wanted a taste this time, too. Not of the talcum powder on the front of his suit, but of him. James Craig. She knew how talc felt against her skin, and she knew how his lips tasted; now she wanted another longer taste. She wanted to press her lips against his, to feel the texture of his lips and share his breath. She wanted to kiss him. And she wanted him to hold her in his arms the way he had held her the first time they met and kiss her the way he had kissed her at Bender’s. Until she was breathless. Until she needed his breath to sustain her. Until she recognized every nuance, every flavor of his mouth and breath and touch.
“Miss Sadler?” James repeated for the second time. “Have my busy little Treasures been giving you problems?”
“N-no problems, Mr. Craig,” she stuttered, her cheeks reddening with embarrassment as she struggled to put aside her outlandish daydreams and concentrate on her job. She was a governess now. She must remember that—must remember that honorable men like James Craig did not kiss their children’s governess—except in times of emergency—like yesterday when they’d needed to put on a show for Lo Peng’s hatchet men. She wondered, suddenly, if any of the men in the black silk tunics emblazoned with red silk dragons had followed them from San Francisco to Coryville—and if they were watching now. She shivered at the thought of another emergency kissing.
“Miss Sadler? Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
Staring at her bemused expression, James said, “If they haven’t been into mischief, how did they”—he glanced down at his suit and over at Elizabeth’s satin dressing gown—“we all become covered in talc?”
“Garnet was helping me change Emerald’s diaper. See?” Elizabeth smiled broadly, then turned to Emerald and proudly lifted her out of the baby bed to show off her handiwork.
And she watched in horror, as in the instant that Emerald hung suspended by her arms, the diaper slid over Emerald’s narrow hips, down her legs, and onto her feet.
James bit his bottom lip to strangle his laughter as Emerald kicked free of her diaper,
“Oh!” Elizabeth’s incredible blue-green eyes widened in utter disbelief. “Oh! I’m so sorry!” She hugged Emerald close to her body, then looked at James. “I don’t understand what went wrong. I’ve never—” She stopped abruptly. “I’ve never had this happen to me before.”
“Not to worry,” James said as he set Garnet on her feet, then crossed over to where Elizabeth stood and held out his arms for Emerald. The bare-bottomed tot released her hold around Elizabeth’s neck and slipped into James’s welcoming embrace. “It happens to me all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, indeed.” He bent and retrieved the lost diaper and the nightgown Elizabeth had dropped on the floor. He draped the garments over his shoulder, then carried Emerald over to the low bureau that doubled as a changing table. Shifting Emerald to one side so that she rode on his left hip, James opened the top right drawer of the bureau and quickly shoved the freshly laundered stacks of clothing inside. That done, he pushed the drawer closed and lay Emerald on top of the thin pad.
Elizabeth was stunned by James’s proficiency in the nursery. She watched, open-mouthed, as he pulled the diaper from his shoulder and carefully unpinned it. He stuck the safety pin into the fabric of the breast pocket of his jacket, well out of Emerald’s curious reach, then grasped the little girl by the ankles, lifted her hips, and positioned the diaper beneath her.
“It’s been my experience,” he confided as he pulled the three sections of the cloth together and pinned them snugly into place, “that children are a lot like Shetland ponies. They tend to puff out their stomachs and if you don’t pull the cinch tight enough, the saddle slides down around their bellies.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her, and Elizabeth saw that his brilliant blue eyes were sparkling with mirth. “I never had a pony,” she said.
“Well, of course! That explains it,” he pronounced as he pulled Emerald into a sitting position, took her nightgown from its resting place on his shoulder, and dropped it over her head and tied the satin bow at her neck with a flourish.
“Explains what?” she asked, unable to resist the teasing note in his voice.
“Why you didn’t know to tighten the cinch.” James smoothed Emerald’s gown into place and carried her back to her baby bed. “I knew a teacher with your experience and vast knowledge of children would know her way around a nursery.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I never claimed to have a vast knowledge of children. You took it for granted …”
James stiffened. Elizabeth watched as the sparkle in his blue eyes disappeared, replaced by something harder and colder.
“I never take anything for granted,” he told her. “I knew yesterday afternoon how much, or should I say, how little practical experience you had with small children.”
“How did you know?” she asked.
“I knew from the bewildered and dismayed expression you had on your face when I first told you about the Treasures.”
Elizabeth could have informed her new employer that her bewildered and dismayed expression had come from the fact that she had thought of him as single and available and had never once considered that he might be a married man with four little girls. And while she was on the subject, she could have pointed out the fact that James hadn’t told her anything about the Treasures except their ages, and that he hadn’t dared breathe a word about the fact that his daughters were Chinese. But Elizabeth tactfully managed to refrain from making those points. She concentrated, instead, on pulling together the pieces of her already battered sense of pride. “Is that why you came up here?” she asked, more sharply than she intended when she realized her satin wrapper had come untied and hung open, revealing her nightgown and adding to her nervous, unsettled feeling. “To supervise an incompetent governess?”
He glanced over at Elizabeth as she snatched up the ends of the sash of her robe, pulled them tight, and tied them in a bow at her waist. She certainly is defensive and prickly this morning. “There’s a big difference between incompetent and inexperienced,” James told her as he lifted Emerald from her bed and held her in his arms. “And no, I didn’t come to stand over your shoulder and pass judgment. I came to the nursery because I thought Diamond would be awake and fussy and ready for a fresh diaper and breakfast. Not necessarily in that order. She usually—”
James broke off abruptly and watched as Elizabeth slapped her palm against her forehead.
“Diamond!” she said as she rushed to the cradle. “Oh, my goodness, Garnet, we forgot about Diamond!”
“What about Diamond?” James was standing at Elizabeth’s side in an instant. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Elizabeth answered, staring down at the baby who lay quietly gazing up at the ceiling and contentedly sucking on her fingers.
“Are you certain?” James wrinkled his nose in distaste as he leaned over the cradle and caught a whiff of Diamond’s soiled undergarment.
“I’m certain,” Elizabeth replied, turning her attention away from the baby in the cradle long enough to study James’s profile. “Absolutely certain that you were right about Diamond. She’s hungry and she needs changing. And not necessarily in that order.”
James gave her a boyish grin. “Be my guest,” he invited, reaching out to hand her another fresh diaper.
Elizabeth blanched. Practicing on Emerald was one thing, but Diamond … Diamond was so small.
Seeing the look on Elizabeth’s face, James relented. “Here, you take Emmy.” He handed Emerald over to Elizabeth. “And I’ll change Diamond.” He carried the baby over to the changing table and held out his hand for the clean diaper, which Elizabeth gladly relinquished. “Now, watch closely and pay attention,” he instructed. “This is your last lesson in diaper changing. I’m not always going to be around.”
“You’re not going away again?”
James recognized the hint of alarm in her tone of voice for what it was—not panic, but genuine disappointment. “Not out of town,” he told her. “But to the office. I do work for a living, you know.” He unpinned and removed the baby’s dirty diaper, then held out his hand like a surgeon demanding a scalpel. “Warm damp cloth.”
Elizabeth rushed to the bathroom to get one, then returned and placed it in his hand.
“This is the tricky part,” James explained, lifting Diamond’s hips and gently, thoroughly washing her. “Be sure you get her clean. Babies have very sensitive skin.” He shoved the dirty diaper and face cloth to the far end of the bureau, positioned the fresh linen into place. “Powder,” he demanded, and Garnet bumped his leg with the can. James reached down and took the powder from her. He nodded toward the powder on Garnet, then winked at Elizabeth and Emerald. “I think you’ve got the powdering part down pat.” He sprinkled talc on the baby, gently rubbed it in. “As for the cinching and the pinning, same procedure as before,” he told Elizabeth. “But on a smaller scale. Any questions?”
Elizabeth bit her bottom lip and shook her head at the same time, then blurted out, “What about that? What do you do about that?”
“What?”
Elizabeth pointed to the baby’s raw belly button. “What do you do for it? Emerald’s doesn’t look like that.”
“Neither does Garnet’s or mine,” James replied. “Or yours.” Suddenly intrigued by the idea of intimately exploring Elizabeth’s belly button, he gave her a smoldering look. “But that’s because ours have healed. Diamond’s hasn’t had time.”
“Healed from what?” Elizabeth hated to sound ignorant, but her curiosity got the best of her.
James chuckled. “From birth, Miss Sadler. You’re looking at what’s left of Diamond’s umbilical cord—the cord that attached her to her mother while she was inside the womb.”
“Oh,” she replied, her cheeks turning a most becoming shade of pink.
“Yes, oh,” James agreed. “How refreshing to have a novice governess!” he teased.
“I’ll learn,” Elizabeth promised.
“You already have,” James sa
id, flashing her a truly devastating smile. “Any more questions?”
“No.”
“Then, we’ll pin Diamond together,” he announced, doing just that by fastening the safety pin in the center of the three sections of her diaper, “and begin lesson number two.”
“Lesson number two?” Elizabeth parroted.
“Breakfast,” he announced.
“Yours? Mine?”
James shook his head, then nodded toward Garnet, Emerald, and Diamond. “Theirs. And we’ll start with. Diamond.” He lifted the baby from the changing table, cradled her against his chest, then reached down and took Garnet by the hand. “Let’s go eat, shall we?”
“I can’t go down to breakfast dressed like this,” Elizabeth protested, suddenly remembering she was still barefoot and wearing nothing but a satin wrapper and nightgown.
“Of course you can,” James told her, shrugging his shoulders. “Everyone else is in their nightclothes.” He nodded to indicate the little girls.
“You’re not,” Elizabeth said.
James glanced down at his suit and noted the blotches of white talcum powder across the front of it. “Only because I have an early meeting with my associate, Will Keegan, at the office this morning. Otherwise, I’d have breakfast in my dressing gown every morning. Come on,” he urged. “Or our breakfast will be cold.”
Still, Elizabeth hesitated. “This isn’t proper.”
“Sure it is,” James told her. “House rule number one: Everyone eats breakfast dressed in their nightclothes.”
Elizabeth smiled. “I don’t believe you have any such rule.”
“It’s true,” he fibbed. “It’s a Craig family custom. One my mother adopted from the Chinese servants. And believe me,” he continued, embellishing the story, “it’s quite a practical custom when you have small children. Look at all the powder on my suit. Dressing gowns are easier to clean.”
“The powder will brush right off and you know it.”