Yours, Mine...or Ours?

“Rudy?”

He blinked, then looked down into Violet’s flushed face, framed by a zillion coppery coils that slid across her shoulders. In the sunshine, she was…incredible. He had to literally order his hand not to lift to her face.

“I’ve been calling and calling you,” she said, a small voice in a big pink coat. She looked over her shoulder at a mud-and-salt-splattered sedan that had seen its share of New England winters. Her son’s grinning face popped up in one of the back windows. She waved, then turned back. “You get your girl all settled in?”

“She’s twelve. Settling’s not exactly her strong suit.”

“She’ll make friends,” Violet said. “She’ll be fine. Anyway, I was going to call you, but since you’re here, the answer’s yes. Cooking, fixing the place up…whatever you need, I’m your girl.”

Maybe you shouldn’t put it like that, Rudy thought, eyeing a stray curl that was toying provocatively with her mouth.

KAREN TEMPLETON ,

a bestselling author and RITA® Award nominee, is the mother of five sons and living proof that romance and dirty nappies are not mutually exclusive terms. An Easterner transplanted to Albuquerque, New Mexico, she spends far too much time trying to coax her garden to yield roses and produce something resembling a lawn, all the while fantasising about a weekend alone with her husband. Or at least an uninterrupted conversation.

She loves to hear from readers, who may reach her online at www.karentempleton.com.

Karen Templeton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Shannon Stacey,

whose answers to all my dumb New England

questions made me more grateful than ever

for New Mexico winters.

And to Gail C and Charles G,

the best editorial team evah,

for keeping me sane.

I love you guys.

Chapter One

Rudy Vaccaro took one look at her and fell in love.

Hopelessly, impossibly, insanely in love.

Even though she wasn’t perfect. Hell, she wasn’t even all that good-looking, not in the shape she was in. And high maintenance? Hoo-boy. Yeah, he’d gotten himself in deep with this one.

But then, maybe that’s what he loved about her, Rudy thought, standing there grinning like a loon, that she needed him. Needed him bad—

“Ohmigod, Dad—I cannot believe you ruined my life for this!” said his twelve-year-old daughter, Stacey.

That was followed by his younger brother Kevin’s, “Exactly how closely did you look at the place before you bought it?”

Refusing to let either his daughter’s horror or his brother’s skepticism deflate him, Rudy lifted his grin to the (peeling) ceiling in the inn’s front room/lobby/whatever and let out a whoop of sheer, unadulterated joy.

For twelve years he’d anticipated this moment, squirreling away as much of his cop’s salary as he could, even before he fully understood what he was squirreling it away for. Twelve years of nudging a vague dissatisfaction into a dream, then a goal, and now—thanks to a confluence of events he could have never foreseen—reality.

A hundred-fifty-year-old, six-bedroom reality with curling wallpaper, carpeting in assorted shades of barf and cobwebs thick enough to snag Cessnas.

Rudy’s breath frosted the unheated air as he clapped his hands together, eager to get on with the new year, his new life, both barely two days old.

Mine. All mine, he thought as he tromped across the threadbare carpeting, his size thirteen workboots making the joists squawk underneath. After six months’ vacancy, the ancient studs were rheumatic with New England winter damp. Silence met his tap on the thermostat by the dining room archway. Huh. Probably no oil in the furnace.

If he was lucky.

But oh, he was. The luckiest bastard on the face of the earth. Finally, a home, a life of his own—

“Like, eww,” his smart, scowling daughter said to a sagging, suspiciously stained wing chair that might have been yellow in another life. Or pale green. Horrified, gorgeous brown eyes lifted to his. Okay, so this part of things needed work. Already pissed at him for jerking her away from all her friends, not to mention an extended family with ties to half of Massachusetts, clearly the idea of spending her formative years in the Lemony Snicket house wasn’t exactly racking up points. “People actually sat in that?”

“Thousands, from the looks of it,” Kevin said.

Stacey backed away, shuddering.

Rudy yanked off his knitted cap, ruffling his short, prickly hair. “There’s a reason I got it so cheap,” he said, proudly. Almost smug. He turned to his spiky-haired brother, six years his junior, not quite as tall, a good fifty pounds lighter. Not counting the five layers of denim, flannel, cotton jersey. Kev was still trying to get a handle on what—and who—he wanted to be when he grew up. However, with all the restoration skills he’d picked up over the past few years, he’d decided for the next cuppla months he could figure that out here as well as anywhere. “You got any idea what prices are like up here, normally?”

Arms crossed, Kev frowned at a dark streak meandering from ceiling to floor, through endless, drab green marshes populated with faded ducks. “That looks like a leak. If you’re lucky, maybe only from a bad radiator or something—”

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Stacey said, hands stuffed in the pockets of her puffy vest, her long, dark hair alive with static. Coffee bean eyes still flashed you-will-so-pay-for-this messages. Rudy’s smile never wavered. You’ll come around. You’ll see how right this is. For both of us.

“There’s six,” he said. “Four upstairs, two down here. Take your pick.”

Her mouth dropped. She was tall for twelve, although still stick straight, thank God. Another year, maybe, before he’d have to unpack the stick. “Six?”

“Yep.” Rudy grinned at Kevin, willing him to stop frowning. See? his grin said. Not as dumb as I look. He’d save a bundle, not having to add bathrooms. Although what condition the plumbing was in…

He’d think about that tomorrow. Now he pointed down the hall. “Closest one’s down there.” As Stacey tramped off, Rudy met Kevin’s still-not-gone frown. “The Realtor sent me a floor plan,” he said, shrugging.

“A floor plan.”

“Yep.”

“So what you’re sayin’ is, you invested your life’s savings sight unseen.”

For the first time since they’d walked into the house, Rudy’s grin wavered. But only for a second. He even clapped his brother’s shoulder. “At least give me some credit. The agent also sent me dozens of photos from her camera phone.”

“Oh, well, then.”

“Look, I had to move fast. The price had just dropped—a lot—and there were two other interested parties. I made an offer and the seller pounced. It did pass the basic inspection, Kev, so you can stop looking at me like that. The roof’s not gonna cave in—probably—and no termites. It’s more run-down and neglected than anything. And anyway, with your lousy track record in the responsibility department, you’ve got one hell of a nerve looking at me like that.”

The creep actually laughed. “That’s just it—this is the kind of stunt I would pull, not you. You’re supposed to be…I dunno.” He frowned up at the stain again. “Not somebody who’d blow his entire wad on a piece-of-crap inn in the middle of freaking nowhere.”

“It’s not nowhere. It’s New Hampshire. You go forty-five minutes, an hour at the most, in any direction, you run into something. Lake Winnipesaukee, the mountains, even a speedway. What more could anybody want?”

“Civilization?”

“Now you sound like Stacey.”

“With good reason. What were you thinking, man?”

“What I was thinking,” Rudy said, caressing the wood fireplace mantel that probably hadn’t been refinished, or even polished, since Elvis’s heyday, “was that for thirteen years I’ve devoted every waking moment to my kid.” He turned his gaze on his brother. “Thirteen years of ignoring my own needs, my own life. All just so I could scrub this—” he made the L for Loser sign “—from my forehead.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said, his mouth twitching, “I can see where buying the Bates Motel—sight unseen—would do that—”

Stacey screamed. Rudy streaked from the room, Kevin on his heels, only to nearly collide with his hysterical daughter shooting from the opposite direction.

“It went in there!” she shrieked, the friendship-bracelet-choked hand pointing toward the kitchen a blur. “Get it out, Daddy! Get it out!”

“Get what out, honey?” he said as both he and Kevin crept toward the kitchen, unarmed except for their cell phones and the keys to the SUV.

“I don’t k-know!” Stacey whimpered behind them, so close Rudy could smell her girly shampoo. “Something big and fat and furry, with disgusting beady eyes!” She grabbed the back of Rudy’s plaid jacket; he could barely make out her muffled, “I hate it here, I hate it! I want to go home!”

It’s okay, these days she hates everything, Rudy reminded himself as the three of them shuffled like some giant, six-footed, whimpering (from Stacey) bug into the kitchen. Big, Rudy thought, his mood lifting even more. Lots of light.

Ugly as sin, he thought, chasing the thought with, Ugly can be fixed.

The Nixonian-era palette of avocado and burnt-orange reminded him of his childhood, when his parents had been too busy trying to keep six children alive to worry about things like color schemes and such. Even the boxy refrigerator and standard four-burner gas range were planted in their spots like a pair of alien geezers at the Home, waiting for Jeopardy! Extraterrestrial Edition to come on.

Fake-brick-patterned vinyl flooring covered God knew how many previous incarnations; blistering, dingy gold enamel choked the paned cabinets. But one large window faced east (morning sun!), another the woods behind the woefully neglected gardens. And wallpaper could be stripped. And maybe there were wood floors—

“Whatever it was apparently escaped,” Kevin said. “There’s a big hole in the plasterboard by the back door, probably leading outside.”

Right. The wildlife issue.

Kevin was bent at the waist, hands on knees, peering inside the hole. “Could’ve been a raccoon, maybe. Or a skunk.”

“A skunk!” Stacey shrieked again in the vicinity of Rudy’s kidneys. “Gross!” Except then she said, with great authority, “No, it definitely wasn’t a skunk—it wasn’t black and white.” As though suddenly realizing how uncool it was to be clinging to her father, she let go of Rudy’s jacket. Only to immediately say, “Do we have to stay here tonight?”

“Of course we’re stayin’ here tonight—”

“There’s no heat, bro,” Kevin quietly reminded him. “Or,” he said, flicking the lifeless light switch, “electricity.”

Damn. The Realtor had promised him the utilities would be back on. But they had candles. And he’d seen stacks of firewood on the back porch. And the nearest motel was clear on the other side of town.

“So we’ll fire up the woodstoves,” Rudy said heartily, “light some candles. And we brought a sh—uh, boatload of camping equipment, we’ll be fine. And tomorrow I’ll call the utility people, get the juice turned back on.” At Stacey’s skeptical look, he gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Oh, come on—where’s your spirit of adventure?”

“In the Bahamas,” she said drily.

Behind him, Kevin choked on his laugh.

At the height of the dinner rush, Violet Kildare grabbed one, two, three, four specials for table six from underneath the warming lights and thought, Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

“Mom!” George, her nine-year-old son, yelled as she whizzed past the booth where he and his younger brother Zeke sat surrounded by backpacks, Game Boys, assorted school papers and the remnants of the burgers and fries she’d tossed at them an hour ago. “What’s five plus four?”

“Use your fingers!” she called back as she set the plates down in front of Olive, Pesha, and the Millies, who trooped down to the diner from the retirement community every night, unless it was raining or the snow was over six inches deep, smiling for them even though they never tipped and at least one of them was guaranteed to find something wrong with her food.

“You shouldn’t tell him that, dear,” Old Millie (eighty-six as opposed to “Young” Millie’s eighty-two) said. “How’s he ever going to learn his sums if he keeps using his fingers?”

The other ladies all murmured their assent, interrupted only when Pesha—bony, blond and half-blind—poked Violet in the hip with one sharp fingernail.

“This isn’t what I ordered.”

“Yes, it is, Pesha. You ordered the special. Hot roast beef.”

“No, the special’s Salisbury steak.”

“That was yesterday. Today’s hot roast beef.”

Pesha squinted at Young Millie’s plate, directly across from her. “Is that what she’s having?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what they’re all having.”

“Well, I don’t want hot roast beef, I want Salisbury steak. Mushrooms on the side.” She shooed at the plate. “Take it away.”

With a heavy sigh, Violet snatched up the plate and headed back toward the kitchen. “Nine?” George called out. “Is five plus four nine?”

“That’s right, baby,” Violet said, shoving an orange—not auburn, not chestnut, not ginger—corkscrew curl out of her eyes as she swallowed back hot, pissed tears. She hadn’t signed on for this, night after night of chronically sore feet and aching back muscles, of dealing with cranky, cheapskate old ladies and old farts who clearly thought she should feel flattered by their very unwelcome attention. Night after night of tossing her babies scraps of attention, instead of being able to sit down with George like a good mother and help him navigate the minefield of letters and numbers he brought home from school every day.

“What the hell’s this?” came the stringy, snarly voice from the other side of the warming counter when Violet shoved the uneaten roast beef back across it.

“Sorry, Maude, Pesha wants Salisbury steak instead,” Violet said tiredly to the dull brown eyes peering out at her from underneath black bangs with more staying power than the Berlin wall. “Mushrooms on the side.”

The sixty-something owner of Mulligan Falls’s only independently-owned-and-operated-since-1948 eating establishment grabbed the plate, muttering, as “Mo-om! What’s six plus two?” sailed across the crowded restaurant, piercing her skull like a nail gun, and she thought, Buck up, chickie,’ cause going under’s not an option, even if she had been left on her own to deal with their smart-as-a-whip son who still couldn’t remember that five plus four made nine, who had to have all the directions on his assignments explained three times because he couldn’t remember them on his own. With their younger son who barely spoke, even at four, but whose smile could melt the hardest heart.

Not that she’d ever expected life to be easy—she wouldn’t even know what to do with easy—but she wasn’t asking for easy, just a chance—

“Here you go,” Maude said, clunking Pesha’s Salisbury steak on the serving counter. Pesha’s mushroom-smothered Salisbury steak. Not even taking the time to sigh, Violet grabbed a fork and scraped the fungus into a little glob beside the meat.

Then, hoping for the best, she strode back toward the old ladies’ booth, yelling out, “Use your fingers!” to George.

The bell over the front door tinkled. More customers. Yippy skippy. The diner went eerily silent, as though somebody’d pressed the mute button. Violet glanced up, skidding smack into a pair of smoky-blue eyes in a male face that didn’t have a single soft anything, anywhere. At least, what she could see underneath the beard haze.

He was big, bodyguard big, his head stubbled with little more hair than his face, big enough to nearly blot out the younger man behind him, to dwarf the pretty, long-haired girl in front, her slender shoulders swallowed by a pair of huge, hard hands.

“Three?” Darla, the other waitress, finally got out, gawking at the taller man as though she wouldn’t mind clutching him to her flat little bosom like one of the front-door-size laminated menus in her arms.

“Yeah, three,” he said, and Violet more felt than heard his voice, deep, not from around here, felt it seep into her skin, through her pores…

No more romance novels for you, she thought, shrugging off two years’ worth of unused hormones, about the same time she realized Darla had seated the trio in Violet’s station because hers was all filled.

Great. Just great, she thought as Darla passed around the menus, her long face sagging with disappointment.

But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. So, jerking her pencil out of her hair, Violet marched over to take their orders.

“Smile,” Darla hissed at her as she passed, and Violet reminded herself that her sore feet and bitching back were not these peoples’ fault. And that the grumpy approach was probably not the best way to get a tip.

Both men were slouched heavily against the padded booth backs, the girl’s face folded into the standard issue adolescent glower. Without even knowing the particulars, Violet felt a tremor of sympathy for her. Orders taken, she called them out to Maude—burgers and fries, the special, spaghetti for the girl—then asked, “So what brings you to Mulligan Falls?”

Those sharp blue eyes swung to hers, and assorted body parts quivered, remembering. Then he said, “I just bought the old Hicks Inn, up on the hill.”

And presto-chango, Mitch fell to second place on Violet’s Men Who Screwed Me Over list.

“Your food’ll be here in a sec,” the redheaded waitress said, her voice like needles as she snatched up the menus, and Rudy thought, Huh? But the needles had pricked him awake, at least enough to notice her as something other than the means by which food would eventually reach his stomach. Enough to catch the sparks of anger, of hurt, in her big, silvery-green eyes, before she wheeled around and tromped off, the diner’s overhead lights tangling in a thousand tiny ringlets the same color orange as in the wallpaper in his “new” kitchen.

Then the haze of exhaustion cleared enough for him to notice the body underneath the curls, short and curvy and compact in the pale green uniform, like one of those VW Bugs, he thought, stronger and far more crash-resistant than one might think.

“What was that all about?” Kevin asked, and Rudy shook his head, half-annoyed, half-relieved that he hadn’t imagined it.

“No idea,” he said. But after a flurry of murmurings and gasps, Rudy noticed several heads had turned in their direction.

“Dad?” Stacey whispered. “Why’s everybody looking at us?”

“Beats me, honey.”

Kevin leaned forward. “Why do I feel like we just landed in the middle of a Stephen King novel?”

Stacey sidled closer as Rudy kicked Kevin under the table.

Until three minutes ago, Rudy hadn’t had too much trouble keeping his good mood aloft. Much to their surprise—and Rudy’s profound relief—three of the upstairs bedrooms were in fairly good shape, as were the bathrooms. Yeah, the downstairs needed a lot of work, but no huge surprises. So he’d decided—especially after four hours of nonstop cleaning and inspection and plugging up unplanned critter doors—that nobody, including him, was up to canned Dinty Moore stew warmed up over a camp stove. And besides, promising Stacey any dessert she wanted might earn him enough points to see them through at least the next twenty-four hours.

So, with the U-Haul trailer unhitched, they’d piled into his edging-toward-classic-status Bronco and headed to town, “town” being Main Street, basically, five blocks long and anchored by an old-fashioned square, across from which sat Maude’s. Applebee’s, it wasn’t, but—as he explained to his sneering daughter—the sooner they started mixing with the locals, the sooner they’d stop feeling like outsiders.

“Never happen,” she’d muttered as they’d walked in. Although he already knew she had her eye on a piece of chocolate cream pie in the old-fashioned display tower on the counter.

He hadn’t counted, however, on being regarded like their ship had just cut swathes in the crop fields. Unnerving, to say the least. And frankly annoying. For God’s sake, the minute he or Kev opened their mouths it was pretty clear the Vaccaros hailed from the same good, solid working-class stock as the majority of Mulligan Falls’s residents. So what the hell?

Their waitress returned with their drinks, which she clunked in front of them, her mouth pressed tight, and Rudy saw the pinch of frustration and exhaustion in those squeezed lips. Although what that had to do with him, he had no idea. His cop senses sprang to attention, that this was someone about to blow, and he thought, I could fix, you, too.

What the freaking hell?

“Oh, and, miss?” he said, gently, “my daughter would love a piece of that chocolate pie, if you could add it to our order?”

“Sure thing,” she said, not meeting his eyes but smiling just enough at Stacey for Rudy to see through at least some of those suffocating layers of resentment.

Then one of the old biddies at the booth across the way called her over, in that imperious way people have when they think you exist solely for their comfort, complaining about her food being cold or something, and at the back of the restaurant a little boy yelled, “Mom! What’s twelve take away seven?” as the woman behind the serving counter dinged an obnoxiously loud bell and hollered, “Violet! Order up!”

He saw her—Violet—stop for a second, her back expanding with the force of her breath, before yelling, “Use your fingers!” to the boy (there were two of them, Rudy now saw, practically buried by books and things in the booth), grabbing the old lady’s plate and carrying it back to the kitchen, where she exchanged it for the three plates waiting for her.

The plates precariously balanced, she spun around again at the precise moment the youngest boy darted out of the booth and into her path. On a yelp, the waitress—Violet—stumbled, the plates leaping, flying, crashing magnificently onto the tile floor as, catching her son in her arms, she went down, too.

Rudy and Kevin were instantly out of their seats, Kevin snatching the child out of the pile of shattered plates and splattered spaghetti and scattered fries and roast beef and gravy as Rudy grabbed for the crumpled waitress.

“Leave me alone!” she cried, close to meltdown, slapping at his hands as she struggled to her knees and grabbed her chick. “Zeke! You okay? Does anything hurt?” Heedless of the spaghetti sauce and gravy clinging to her breasts, dribbled down her skirt, she frantically checked for blood and bruises. A noodle dangled from her hair; she yanked it out and tossed it on the floor, then clamped one tiny shoulder with a short-nailed hand, holding the other one three inches from the kid’s nose. “How many fingers?”

“Th-three,” the kid said, small-voiced, trembling. “I’m sorry, Mama, I had to pee! I didn’t see you!”