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same question she’d wanted Michael to back away from earlier.
    “Ain’t got one,” Jamie said, returning her gaze belligerently.
    “Okay, then, where did you run away from?” When they didn’t answer, she said, “You might as well tell us. Otherwise, we’ll just have to call the police so they can check all the missing persons reports.”
    Josh regarded them worriedly. “If we say, can we stay here? I can do laundry and make my bed. We won’t be any trouble. Honest.”
    It was already too late for that, Michael thought. He was harboring two runaways and a woman he had a desperate desire to kiss senseless. Talk about a weekend fraught with danger.
    “No,” he said a little too sharply. He saw the look of betrayal in their eyes and felt like a heel. Before he could stop himself, he moderated the sharp refusal. “Tell us the truth and then we’ll talk about what happens next.”
    “You’ll really listen to what we got to say?” Jamie asked skeptically.
    “We’ll listen,” Grace promised.
    “We gotta tell,” Josh said, regarding his big brother stubbornly. “Maybe they’ll let us stay.”
    “I say we don’t,” Jamie insisted. “They’re grown-ups. They’ll just make us go back. They’ll saythey gotta, because it’s the law or something. You want to be separated again, like last time?”
    He seemed unaware of just how revealing his question was. Michael was uncomfortably aware of an ache somewhere in the region of his heart. These two were getting to him, no doubt about it. As for Grace, they’d clearly already stolen her heart. She was regarding them sympathetically.
    “You were in foster care, weren’t you?” she guessed. “And not together?”
    “Uh-huh,” Josh said, shooting a defiant look at his brother. “Nobody would take both of us last time or the time before that. They said we were too much trouble when we were together.”
    “I’m old enough to look out for my own kid brother,” Jamie said, regarding them both with his usual belligerence. “We’ll be okay. You don’t have to do nothin’. Soon as we eat, we’ll go.”
    “Go where?” Michael asked, feeling as if the kids had sucker punched him. He tried to imagine being separated from Dylan, Jeb and Tyler when they’d been the ages of these boys. He couldn’t. They were bound together by a shared history, by family and by the kind of fierce love and loyalty that only siblings felt despite whatever rivalries existed.
    He focused his attention on Jamie, since he was clearly the leader. Josh would trustingly go along with whatever his big brother wanted. “How old are you?”
    “Sixteen,” Jamie said, drawing a shocked look from his brother.
    “I’d guess thirteen, tops,” Michael said, turning to gauge Josh’s reaction, rather than Jamie’s. Theboy gave him a subtle but unmistakable nod. “How about you, Josh? Eight? Nine?”
    “Eight,” Josh admitted readily. He was apparently eager to provide any information that might persuade Michael and Grace to keep the two of them at the ranch. “Last week. That’s when Jamie came for me, on my birthday. We’ve always been together on our birthdays, no matter what. We promised.”
    “And that’s a very good promise to try to keep,” Grace said. “Families should stick together whenever they can.”
    As she said it, she kept her gaze locked on Michael. He got the message. There were now evidently three against one in the room should he decide to fight for an immediate call to the proper authorities. Grace wasn’t going to turn these two over to anybody who would separate them again, though how she hoped to avoid it was beyond him. There were probably a zillion rules about how to handle this, and he’d brought her here precisely because she knew them. Now she was showing every indication that she might just ignore all zillion of them. For the moment, however, it had to be her call. She was the expert.
    “How long have you been in foster care?” she asked,