Substitute Bride

Rose Beaufort tried to smother a yawn as she poured out crispy rice cereal into two bright pink bowls.

She hadn’t gotten very much sleep last night because six-year-old Jill had woken up twice with nightmares, and Rose had been awakened by her cries and had gone into her room to comfort the girl. But she’d been the Harwood girls’ nanny for more than two years now, and she could go through the breakfast routine without conscious thought. She topped the cereal off with milk, scattered sliced strawberries on top, and then brought the bowls over to the girls, who were both sitting at the countertop bar on the large kitchen island.

“My strawberries aren’t good,” five-year-old Julie said, frowning down at her cereal.

Rose quickly checked the fruit in question. “Sure they are. They’re just darker red than some of the others we’ve gotten. They haven’t gone bad yet.”

“I don’t like mushy strawberries.” Julie was a particularly verbal child, especially for her age, but she was also a perfectionist and was always very unhappy when things in her life weren’t just so.

Rose knew how to deal with the girl by now. She used to take Julie’s complaints seriously, which only nurtured them into real temper fits. Now she knew better, and she always just shrugged them off. She reached over and popped one of the strawberries from the bowl into her mouth. “Mm,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Not mushy at all. I’ll eat them if you don’t want them.”

Julie frowned down again at her bowl and then soberly scooped out a bite, one small strawberry slice perched atop the cereal. She put the spoonful in her mouth and chewed for several seconds. Then she gave a little nod. “It’s okay.”

Rose hid a chuckle by turning around to face the single-serve coffeepot where her coffee cup had been sitting forgotten for a couple of minutes. She gave it a dash of cream and took a sip, closing her eyes for a moment and trying to wake up. She had a long day today since the girls had dance practice after school and then a birthday party at a skating rink this evening.

When she turned back around, she saw that Jill had only stirred her cereal in her bowl. Jill was a year and a half older than her sister and had the same long red-brown hair and hazel eyes. But Jill was much quieter and more introspective than Julie, and Rose sometimes worried that she brooded too much. “Are your strawberries not good, Jill?” Rose asked casually.

“They’re okay.” Jill stared down at her bowl as she finally took a bite.

“Are you tired this morning?” Rose reached over to tilt up the girl’s chin so she could see her. It was a fair, pretty face with a small nose and a sprinkling of freckles. There were slight shadows under her eyes, but her lips weren’t pale and she didn’t look sick.

“No. Just thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

Julie looked over at her sister as she chewed, a trickle of milk streaming down her chin. “Are you thinking about Mya’s party tonight?”

Jill shook her head.

“Are you thinking about your dreams last night?” Rose asked, suspecting this was the case. For the past few weeks, the girl had woken up periodically with nightmares, which was a little worrying.

Jill shrugged and looked down, proving that Rose’s suspicions were right.

“What did you dream?” Julie asked, her eyes wide and round.

“Nothing.”

“Well, you dreamed about something,” Rose murmured, wiping down the stray rice crisps from the counter. “You don’t have to tell us what it was if you don’t want, but it’s not nice to lie to us and say it was nothing.”

“Oh.” This seemed to hit home with Jill. Her little forehead wrinkled.

Julie put down her spoon and leaned her head on her sister’s shoulder. “You can tell me and Rosie.”

It was a very sweet gesture, and it touched Rose’s heart. It also appeared to have an impact on Jill. She gave a big sigh and stared down at her cereal bowl unblinkingly. “It was no big deal. It wasn’t scary.”

“Then there’s no reason not to tell us,” Rose said, leaning on the counter so she was closer to the little girl. “Sometimes dreams are hard to talk about if they’re scary, but it usually makes you feel better if you do.”

“It wasn’t scary,” Jill repeated. “It was about a an evil stepmother—like from the movie. She was mean to us.”

Rose’s breath hitched in her throat at the implications. “What did she do?”

“She yelled at us and made us work all the time, and she threw Topsy out on the street.”

Topsy was the girls’ little white cockapoo, much beloved and long-suffering as she was constantly dressed up in outfits for pictures and playing house.

“That was mean,” Julie said with a gasp, fisting her hand around her spoon again and continuing to eat. “Poor Topsy.”

“Was the stepmother the one from the movie?” Rose asked lightly, carefully watching Jill’s face.

Jill’s eyes shot up quickly and then back down. “Y-yeah.”

Rose knew that wasn’t true. The girl just didn’t want to say who the evil stepmother in her dream had been—which meant it was almost certainly Genevieve Brown.

Genevieve was their father’s fiancée and one of the snottiest women Rose had ever met.