Page 44 of First Bride to Fall
“I didn’t cheat my parents.”
“How about your sisters?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it cheating, exactly.” She shrugged sheepishly. “But I guess I did deceive them. Charlotte especially. There was that one year where I helped her with her Halloween candy.”
“Helpedher with her candy?” Grant hooted, glad to know she wasn’t a saint, either. “See there? Iknewit. I knew it!” He shot her a smug look. “You’re not so perfect yourself.”
“Never said that I was. And anyway, it’s not like you think,” she said, her cheeks pink. “Misty came down with a sudden fever that year and couldn’t go trick-or-treating. So Charlotte and I offered to share our candy with her. Only, after Charlotte went to bed, I refilled her plastic pumpkin so she wouldn’t suffer.”
“With candy from yours?”
She nodded.
“Didn’t Charlotte notice the next morning?”
“Oh yeah, she did. But I said the Great Pumpkin had come by and worked some Halloween magic.”
Grant chuckled at her impish grin. “Did she buy it?”
“Yeah.” Nell chuckled, too. “She actually did.”
“Wow, Nell. That was pretty altruistic for a kid.” There he’d been kind of hoping she’d share some dirt, but even her stories about being naughty were charming.
“I was always looking after them. I wanted to.” She smiled, and he could tell that she meant it. Nell had such a caring instinct.
“How old were you?”
“Eight. No. Nine.” She locked on his gaze, pondering something. “So, how about you? Did you ever fess up? About those missing Scrabble letters?”
“Didn’t have to.” He shook his head. “Mom had me totally figured out.”
“Yeah? What did she do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“We kept playing, and she acted like she didn’t even notice those missing tiles. Mom was cool that way. Or maybe she decided to let my own guilt punish me. It didn’t seem to matter much, anyway. She kept right on winning.”
“So. Which letters did you steal?”
“All of the Us at first. Mom was lethal with that vowel. She had a way of combining it with certain consonants and placing the words on high-value squares.” He shrugged. “Once all the Us disappeared, she still won. That’s when I knew that the Q and Z had to go.”
“Two high-ranking letters.”
He nodded. “Ten points each.”
Nell shook a scolding finger. “You were such a sneaky cheat.”
“Hey! I take offense at that,” he said, but he was laughing. “But, yeah. Probably so.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten? Maybe eleven? Come on.” He held his hands out in front of him. “She was always coming up with tricky words. I had to do something. When I had a Q, all I could think of was words that took Us, like Queen or Quota or…I QUIT.”
Nell roared at this. “But the Us were missing in action by then?”
“Exactly.” He grinned at the funny memories. “Meanwhile, Mom still stunned me with words like QI, ‘a vital force inherent to all things,’ and QINTAR, ‘a monetary unit of Albania.’”
