Any Way You Want It : An Upper Crust Series Novel (The Upper Crust Series Book 5)
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Mr. Right and Other Mongrels
Hearts Afire
Alphabet Dating
Building Attraction
A Fair Exchange
Snowbound, a Chicklit Christmas Novella
Anthologies
It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Chick Lit
I’ve included a sneak peek at Any Way You Build It. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Acknowledgements
I absolutely loved Chloe and Moose’s story. It’s a funny thing because readers tell me they love my male leads and the fact that they’re usually good guys—I think Moose is definitely one of the best of them. After all, anyone who gives a girl a coffee machine is perfection in my mind.
First off, I owe a huge thank you to the lovely members of Writers’ Dozen who support my writing and keep me on track.
Without my wonderful writing friends, I know I could not continue and a special shout out to Annabel, Rae, and Terri for their feedback on this book.
Thanks to my beta readers for your ongoing help—especially to Renee, Betty, and Terri whose help I found invaluable.
Thanks to cover designer Erin Cawood for the gorgeous cover design, which I absolutely adore, and to Chrissy at EFC Services for the editing.
Finally, a thank you to my regular readers who write reviews for my books and e-mail me and tweet me about my stories. Knowing you’re out there reading my stories and anticipating the next one gives me more joy than you can possibly imagine.
Any Way You Build It, Book 6 in the Upper Crust Series out February 2017.
It was dusk when Sarah finally pulled the car up in front of her aunt’s old home. Or, her own new home to be precise. The warm summer breeze seemed to guide them to the house. Sarah expected to find it run-down and a little sad looking. She thought the lawn would be long and the flowers dead.
She was wrong. Someone had been taking very good care of her late aunt’s home in the last six months. She nearly cried tears of relief. This had been the longest year of her life and it was only half over. Small things, small gestures of human kindness reminded her that things would get better.
She’d come here for a better life and it was already looking up.
The kids were in the back seat. Restless and eager to get out. She could hardly blame them, they’d been on the road for days.
“We’re here,” she declared, and they let out a cheer.
Zach unbuckled himself and was out on the driveway instantly.
“I want to see too, Mama,” Olivia shouted from her seat.
“Coming, baby.” She climbed out and did a quick stretch before lifting her daughter from the back seat.
“So this is our new home. What do you think?” She watched the kids take in the two-story house. The white clapboard and green shutters, the front porch complete with a porch swing and the big yard.
“It has a lot of stairs,” Livi said quietly. She was right, it certainly did have a lot of stairs.
“Nothing to worry about.” It was Sarah’s job to assure everyone that life was about to get better.
Zach was tumbling across the grass. “I like it. I thought you said it might be a mess. This isn’t a mess, this is the nicest place we’ve ever lived.”
He was right and they hadn’t even made it inside yet. “Let’s go take a look inside.”
She carried her daughter up the first lot of stairs and deposited her on the porch swing. She remembered sitting on that swing with her aunt reading to her when she was a girl. The key was hidden under a ceramic pot beside the front door. The lawyer had come and hidden it there today.
“Do you want to do the honors, Zach, as the man of the house?” she asked her son. He was only seven but he was way older than his years, poor kid. He’d had to be. He took the key from her and turned.
“Come on,” he said, and she picked Livi up and carried her in.
Someone had been in here recently. It didn’t have the musty smell of a house closed up. It was clean and dusted and fresh as a daisy. The tears pricked her eyes again. Zach ran through the house calling from room to room. She knew the house like the back of her hand. She used to spend her summers here as a teen, working at a nearby summer camp and staying with her aunt.
“Which room is mine, Mom?”
“You choose from either one at the end of the hall upstairs,” she called to him, following him up to the second floor. She placed Livi down on her aunt’s bed. The same floral comforter covered it as it always had. A wave of sadness hit then. She missed her aunt terribly. She’d been her only living relative, and even though they lived hundreds of miles apart, they had talked often. Her sudden death had been a shock, and then the shocks kept on coming. She really hadn’t had time to mourn.
“Are you okay, Mama?” Livi asked as she blinked back a tear.
“Yes, I was just thinking about Aunt Esme who left us this house. I miss her.”
“She’s with Daddy and the angels in heaven,” the sweet four-year-old said.
“She is. And I know she would be very happy that we finally made it here.”
Todd was in his tree house office looking out on the street when he saw the beat-up station wagon with the U-Haul trailer pull into Esme’s drive. Well, it wasn’t her drive anymore of course, she’d been dead for months and the house now belonged to her niece, Sarah. A niece who hadn’t even bothered to show up for the funeral. That would have broken the old woman’s heart.
He had been so angry about it himself. Esme spoke about the girl as if she was a treasure but that had tarnished her for Todd. It was unacceptable. Todd was a pretty laid-back guy. He spent his days mostly designing apps and raking in the money. In between, he met his friends at the diner, played some poker, and in the summer went water skiing. He wasn’t normally a judgmental type but Esme had been like a mother to him and she deserved better than that.
At first, he’d stopped mowing the lawn and raking the leaves because he didn’t want to help her niece out, but the sight of his old friend’s house, her pride and joy, declining had been too much for him, so he’d resumed his duties as if she was alive.
He noticed the younger woman had carried one child in. She came out again with the older boy and headed to the car. He should go and offer to help them unpack. He knew that was what Esme would have expected him to do, but he didn’t feel inclined. He was pretty sure they couldn’t see him from this vantage point. The little boy turned and said something to his mother and then pointed to his tree house.
A grown man having a three-story tree house in his yard was unusual, so he could hardly blame the kid for pointing. He pulled back from the window a little to be extra sure he wasn’t spotted. He needed a beer. He crossed to the bar fridge and pulled one out. The lid twisted off and he heard the gentle fizz of the drink. It was a warm summer’s evening. When Esme was alive, he would have been over on her porch now, shooting the breeze and solving the world’s problems. He missed her. He crossed back to the window in time to see Sarah unfold an ancient wheelchair onto the porch. A wheelchair? Who the heck needed a wheelchair?
There wasn’t much about Sarah’s life that Esme hadn’t shared with him. The truth was he’d always liked the sound of her and hearing stories about her. There was never a wheelchair in any of the stories. A dead husband and two kids but no wheelchair.
Then he had a sick feeling in his stomach. That child she’d carried in looked too old for a chair. He flicked back through the stories, she was four or maybe five. Too old to be carried.
Todd downed the beer in one and headed outside to help his new neighbor.
Table of Contents
Any Way You Want It
Any Way You Want It, Copyright Monique McDonell
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
If you liked Any Way You Want It, please leave me a review. Good reviews make an author’s day.
Acknowledgements
Any Way You Build It, Book 6 in the Upper Crust Series out February 2017.