A Roof Over Their Heads

She can’t have the man she loves...if it means losing her child!

Alexi Docker’s a widow trying to adopt the child she and her husband had taken in. Except her new rental home turns out to be a disaster reno...and she, now single, has to prove she can give the boy everything he needs. That includes a roof over his head, four walls and running water! If not for the absentee landlady’s cranky recluse of a brother, she wouldn’t have been able to cope. But now Alexi has to choose between a man she’s growing to love and the boy she needs to adopt...because Seth Greene has a past that could ruin the adoption process.

M. K. STELMACK writes contemporary romances set in Spirit Lake, which is closely based on the small town in Alberta, Canada, where she lives with pets who outnumber the humans two to one and with dust bunnies the size of rodents—because that’s what happens when everyone in the household prefers to live in their imagination or outdoors—but she can also be found on social media, where you can share your comments on her stories or her breathless one-sentence bio on Facebook or at mkstelmackauthor.com.

A Roof Over Their Heads

M. K. Stelmack

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08091-0

A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS

© 2018 S. M. Stelmack

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Her hand was suddenly in his hand. He held her fingers in his tight, full grip.

This was nothing like his handshake. This was the hold of a man who felt her pain and wanted to bring her through it. “I’ll do it,” he said, his voice raw. “I’ll help. Just—just don’t beg me. I don’t want you thinking that I’m anybody other than a guy with a hammer.”

What a strange thing to say. Anybody could see he was more than that. He cleared his throat. “Besides which, Matt’s a good kid. You don’t have anything to give me, but Matt—well, you’re the only one who can give him what he needs.”

For a solid year, she’d had to prove that to teachers, adoption caseworkers, neighbors, the police. And on the worst nights, she’d lain curled on her side of the bed, knees to chin, with only the light from the phone, wondering if maybe she was wrong. To hear it now from a man who hardly spoke and when he did, it wasn’t ever complimentary... She squeezed his hand back.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

He nodded once, released her hand and crossed to the stairs. “Hey,” he called to Matt, “let me show you how to make a knot that lasts.”

Dear Reader,

Thirteen years ago, my family moved to the house in the town where we still live and which has become the focus of my fictional town, Spirit Lake. Since moving here, the town has stretched, popped up a Walmart, Canadian Tire, Sobeys and—oh, the golden standard of an Albertan town having made it big!—a Tim Horton’s.

Tim Horton’s is wholly Canadian, our blue-collar alternative to Starbucks. Actually, that partly describes this story: a blue-collar Canadian romance about finding family. It stars a woman struggling to hold her family together and a man struggling to not surrender to yet another lost cause. The glue that sticks them together is a boy who longs for a father and for his grieving heart to heal.

Serious stuff, but everyone who’s read it so far has had plenty of LOL moments. Because that’s life, right? In telling this story, I had the pleasure of introducing the hero’s siblings, whose stories will appear later this year.

To peek at what’s happening with them, you are welcome to come to my website, mkstelmackauthor.com. You can also find me on Facebook at M. K. Stelmack.

M. K. Stelmack

In Memoriam

To Sheila.

I wish you were here to read your sister’s story of love and hope—your favorite kind.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Angela Spiller, who drew from her own experiences to share the emotional and bureaucratic journey of adoption, of cobbling together strangers, needing and worthy, into a family. Thanks also to Mark Matheson at the Red Deer office of community corrections for providing insight into how community service would look like for my hero.

Thanks to my editor, Victoria Curran, who gave my life a Point of No Return, and to Astrid Theilgaard, my tried-and-true critique partner.

With this book, I’ve gained a tribe in the form of the Heartwarming Sisters, who have filled me with the conviction that our stories matter.

May I dwell long among them.

And to the Holy Spirit, who daily drags me through my character arc, abiding and chiding through my every kick and complaint.

I am blessed.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dear Reader

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

Extract

CHAPTER ONE

SWEAT WAS A thin glue coated on Alexi Docker, sticking her T-shirt to the driver’s seat and her hot jeans to her legs, the slimy by-product of four hours on the road with no air-conditioning and a tire change in a highway ditch.

She crawled the van with the U-Haul trailer to a stop in front of the new home, and turned to her four kids in the back seats. “So, what do you think?”

Please, please like it. Or, at least, don’t hate it.

While three-year-old Callie, behind the front passenger seat, kept her brown eyes fixed on Alexi, the other three kids regarded the white split-level and attached garage with a kind of hopeful hesitancy, as if waiting for someone to throw open the front door and boom out a welcome.

When, not surprisingly, that didn’t happen, Matt said, “Cool.”

“Where’s the backyard?” asked eight-year-old Bryn from the bench seat he shared with six-year-old Amy. The big backyard was the prime selling feature for the kids.

“Duh. Behind the house. In the back,” Amy said.

Bryn unbuckled himself. “Okay, I’m going there.”

“How about I get a picture with—” Alexi began, but Bryn had already activated the side door and hopped out. Two more buckles unclicked, and Matt and Amy cleared the van with Bryn and were racing past the house, straight for the promised land of the backyard.

“Matt,” she called, as she rounded the hood. “Stay together, okay?”

Matt, her eldest at eleven, was the family border collie, patrolling boundaries and herding the strays. He nodded once and disappeared.

That had gone rather well. No outright mutiny, at any rate. Alexi stretched, a breeze wicking away her sweat and fanning her warm face. If a bit of fresh air could do this, imagine the powers of a dip in the lake.

“How about,” she said to Callie, unclicking her car seat straps, “we all walk down to the lake this evening? Play in the water. Watch the sunset. That would make a pretty picture, wouldn’t it? Whaddaya say?”

Callie stretched out her dark arms.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ Now, let’s check out our new home.”

With Callie tucked against her left hip, Alexi opened the passenger door and leaned across for her water bottle. She took a pull from it and drew in warm air. Empty. As it had been for the last sixty miles. As were all the kids’. She needed to refill their bottles fast because a run in the backyard was going to dry out the kids even more.

She pressed to her other hip the box of essentials—toilet paper, phone charger, soap—with the water bottles piled on top. Making for the door, she looked around as she matched reality with the emailed pictures from Connie, her landlady. She didn’t remember the lawn grass rising above her ankles and the front garden a solid green rectangle of weeds. Never mind, she could mow while the kids weeded. A family activity.

Inside an old work boot by the door she found the house key as planned and, juggling it, the box and Callie, Alexi opened the door.

Fresh paint fumes gagged her and Callie buried her face against Alexi’s neck. Alexi breathed shallowly as she lowered the box to the floor. If plywood counted as a floor. The stairs, the hallway and the living room were completely stripped. Alexi stepped across protruding nail heads and wet, coppery paint splotches to the kitchen. Or where it should’ve been. There weren’t any cupboards or appliances, not even a kitchen sink. Just a space with pipes, hoses, outlets hooked up to nothing.

Was she in the right house? The address and the pics of the outside matched. The key was in the right place. She hadn’t got the dates confused. She’d talked to Connie last week, and all was a go.

Was there even water?

She hurried to the hallway bathroom, which actually had a sink and a toilet, if not a tub. She turned on the faucet and heard sputtering and a great wheezing of air in the pipes. That was it.

Seriously?

“Right. Okay,” she explained to Callie, who still had her face rooted in Alexi’s neck. “All I have to do is go to the basement, find the main water valve and turn it on.”

But first—she looked out the kitchen window into the backyard. All three were there, though Bryn was fiddling with the latch on the fence gate. She started toward the back door but then heard Matt call from the fire pit, “Hey, Bryn. Look!”

It was a stick. Bryn loved sticks. Had invented a million uses for them, and sure enough he changed course for Matt, who’d always known not to run after someone ready to bolt.

Callie pointed to them.

“Do you want to go play?” Fixing the water would go a lot easier without Callie.

Callie squirmed to get down.

“Okay, hold on. Let me carry you across this yucky floor first.” The second Alexi opened the back door, Callie shot outside. The paint fumes must be near lethal for her to leave Alexi. A good thing for once that Callie wasn’t able to tell stories. Alexi didn’t want the kids, namely Bryn, alerted to the state of the house until she got the water running.

Alexi called to Matt to watch Callie, who was already toddling toward the others. Bryn was now holding the stick, an unusual one, smooth and tapered like a baseball bat. Bryn examined it, and then squatted to rummage through the pile of firewood. Good, that should buy her time. She headed for the basement stairs, placing a call that switched to voice mail as she started down the stairs.

“Connie, this is Alexi Docker. Your tenant. I just arrived at the house, and it’s—it’s unacceptable.” She resisted saying more. The situation demanded a face-to-face meeting. “Please call me. Immediately.”

In the split second she glanced from the steps to the phone to end the call, she slipped and stumbled down the last steps onto the concrete floor, the phone skittering across the cement, screen down.

No, no, no. Not the phone, not the phone. It held everything.

She scrambled after it on hands and knees, turned it over and—yes! A smooth screen wallpapered with a shot of the kids on monkey bars. She kissed it in relief.

She stood and nearly screamed from the sudden pain in her left ankle. Great, a sprain. All she needed. She limped around the basement until she found the furnace room with the copper water pipes.

Now, which valve and where? She tapped her phone against her chin and then realized a better use for it. After a quick internet search, she reached over and twisted a likely valve. There was a sucking pull and then—water.

She’d done it. Only when she stepped out of the furnace room did she hear exactly what she’d done. Water gushed and slapped against the upstairs floor. The other valves were already open. Alexi rushed back into the furnace room and cranked the main valve shut again.

She leaned her sweat-damp back against the concrete wall. This. Was. Insane. She’d moved to a place with a lake and didn’t have a drop to drink. She ran her tongue inside her dry mouth. Okay. Think. Figure out which pipe went where. She traced the looping paths of the hoses and pipes. Right. Another internet search.

First, time to check on the kids.

She hopped upstairs into the kitchen in time to see Bryn climb the deck stairs to the back door, stick in hand. He would flip out if he saw the inside of the house. She needed to prepare him.

Alexi intercepted him on the back deck.

“That’s a great stick.”

“Yes, I’m going to put it in my room.” He stepped to get around her.

Who knew what shape the bedrooms were in? She stepped with him. “How about I do that for you and you can look for more sticks?”

He shook his head. “I’m thirsty.” He shifted the other way. She followed.

“How about I bring out a pitcher of water while you get more sticks?” An offer she had no idea how to fulfill.

He frowned and ducked, caught her wide-open on her weak side and darted inside. When she joined him, he was standing stock-still, his feet glued to the floor...and perhaps, considering the condition of the plywood, that was actually true. He was doing a slow scan of the place, eyes wide, jaw dropped.

Alexi held her breath. It was a disaster for Bryn if the toaster was not square to the coffeemaker. She’d spent the past week showing him pics of the place (before it was gutted), explaining over and over how it would be the same. “We have a kitchen sink. The new place has a kitchen sink. We have a fridge. It has a fridge. You have a bedroom. It has a bedroom.”

Behind her, she heard the thumping of the other kids’ footsteps on the wooden deck stairs, and then they, too, were inside.

There was a collective, shocked silence. Callie clutched Alexi’s jeans, and Alexi automatically picked her up.

“What happened?” said Matt.

“I don’t know,” Alexi said. “I’ve left a message with the landlady.”

“The place stinks,” Amy commented. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“What are we going to do?” So like Matt to quickly move to solving the problem. Except she didn’t have an answer.

What was she going to do? She couldn’t cook, couldn’t keep food cold. Could hardly breathe. She couldn’t return to Calgary. New tenants were moving into their old place even as she stood in this disaster. What had she done?

At that moment, Bryn broke free of his trance and screamed, “I want to go home!” He shot out the back door, stick raised.

“Bryn! Stop feet!” she called after him and moved to follow, Callie’s legs banded tight around Alexi’s waist. Pain tore through her ankle. “Matt! Get the back gate.”

Matt was already on it. Bryn dropped his stick and stripped off his shirt. Matt darted past him to get to the gate first, flattening himself against it. Bryn registered that, grabbed his stick and swerved in the opposite direction to the front of the house.

“I’ll open the van for you,” Alexi called to Bryn from the back door. “Then we’ll go home.” If she could get him in the van, lock the doors, then she could talk him down.

If she could open the van before he got there.

She set down Callie and did a limping run to the front door, opening it, just as Bryn, now completely nude, stick in hand, reached the van. Where were her keys? There, in the box. She double clicked on the remote and threw open the front door. Too late. She watched Bryn reach the corner of the block, turn a sharp left and disappear from sight.

“Matt!”

He was there.

“My ankle is twisted. You go. Stay with him. I’ll get Amy and Callie, and follow in the van.” A real nuisance with the U-Haul still attached and a bum tire to boot. She was snapping Callie into her car seat when Matt came tearing back, fear stark on his face.

“Mom! A man stopped his truck and Bryn got in. Then he drove off!”

* * *

SETH GREENE HADN’T lived his entire life in a lakeside tourist town not to have seen his share of young sidewalk streakers with mortified mothers in pursuit. Usually it was closer to the lake, or right on the beach. This was the first time one veered across the street in front of his truck. He slammed on his brakes, and the kid took advantage of the stoppage to dive into the cab.

“Drive! Let’s go for a drive!” the boy ordered, waving about a long stick that Seth snagged inches before it hit the windshield. It looked familiar, and then he remembered. It was his, a baseball bat he and his dad had chiseled from an old fencepost when he’d been about the size of this kid. Which meant this boy lived in his old childhood house not three blocks away.

His sister had said she was going to rent it out, her second plan after first deciding she was going to move in.

His foot hard on the brake, Seth angled the stick toward the truck floor, the boy gripping the other end. “Here. Keep it down. How about I drive you home?”

The boy squirmed, easing his butt cheeks off the hot leather seat. Seth looked fully away, because he didn’t want the kid worrying that—

Crap. There, standing frozen on the sidewalk, was another boy, taller and older, staring wide-eyed at them.

Without looking at his naked passenger, Seth pointed. “Hey, that your brother?”

“Where?”

“There on—” But the boy was gone. Probably tore back to tell his mom about the abduction of his brother. Seth edged his truck to the curb and threw it into Park, before he reached into the back of the crew cab for the only piece of extra clothing he had.

“Look at this.” He held it up for the boy. “My team jersey. Brand-new.”

The boy’s brown eyes locked on to the bright blue-and-white jersey, emblazoned with the Lakers name, the bottom stroke of the L in a sweeping Nike-like check. “Put it on,” Seth said. “You can’t be naked in my truck.”

“Is that the way it works?”

“Yep.”

The boy took the jersey and examined the back of it. “Fifty-three. Why fifty-three?”

Not getting into that. “It’s my age,” Seth said, seventeen years off the mark.

That seemed reasonable to the boy, who nodded and wiggled into the jersey, tucking it under his butt. “To the lake!”

Seth saw an opening. “Good idea. We can get your brother and you two can play together.”

“Okay! But we have to include my sisters, too. And Mom. We can’t go to the playground without her. That’s the rule.”

Fine by him. The boy glanced from one side of the street to the other. “Wait! Where are they?”

Probably calling the police. “I know where they are.”

Seth pressed the child lock button—a feature he’d never used before—then lost no time turning the corners to pull up behind a U-Haul trailer. On the paved driveway were clustered the kids, and the mom on the phone. He could only hope she was talking to the dad who was looking for the boy.

The second Seth hit the release on the lock, the boy hopped out, and for a wild moment Seth considered driving off. He’d brought back her kid, nothing wrong had happened, case closed.

But if the mom had involved the police, Seth was known to them and doing a kind of drop-and-run wouldn’t look good.

This was his one chance to clear himself. He picked up the old bat the boy had abandoned and prepared himself for whatever might come out of left field.

CHAPTER TWO

AS SETH WALKED toward the family, the boy announced, “Come on, guys. We’re going to the lake!”

None of them moved. Then the boy who had been on the sidewalk earlier strode over and slapped his brother upside the head.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“For running off. Go tell Mom you’re sorry.” Attaboy. Any brother worth his salt kept his siblings in line.

A little girl with Asian features was the next to break from the bunch, doing a kind of hop-run with her right leg in a brace. She was hands-on with her runaway brother, too, except with a hug so hard it nearly knocked them both to the cement. The mom was close behind, a black girl with thick glasses riding on her hip, the phone still at her ear. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay...”

She slipped the girl down and reached for her lost boy, gathering him to her, his face mashed against her flat stomach. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Seth couldn’t tell if she was talking to the person on the phone or the boy. Or, from the way her voice shook, herself.

She lowered the phone and bent her head, her hair—a big, dark, squiggly tangle—tumbling onto her runaway’s head. She kissed his spiky hair long and hard.

“Bryn,” she said, her voice steady now, “glad you’re back home.”

He mumbled something and she pressed him tighter against her. “It’s okay.” This time it sounded as if she believed it. “We’ll work something out. How about you go with Matt and Amy to the garden right there? While I finish up with this call? Matt has your shorts.”

Bryn followed the other kids, while the smallest stayed glued to the mom’s leg, her brown eyes behind the smudged lens monitoring Seth’s every move. The mom brought her phone back to her ear to resume her conversation.