The bell rang and Matt practically sprinted for the door to get away from more of his mother’s PDA and greeted Kevin and Holly. Her pregnancy was beginning to show, and he was glad a surge of jealousy didn’t wash through him when he saw her. Now that Anna and Toby were with him permanently, they’d been discussing when to add to their family. Both of them had agreed to wait another year or two, especially since Anna had just started her new part-time job in the local branch of a large bank’s international department.
“You’ve got those ceiling fans hooked up, right?” Holly asked as she walked past him. “I know it’s pretty cool this year for the Fourth of July, but I’m hot.”
Kevin followed her, holding a bag of chips and buns. “Please, God, tell me you do,” he whispered to Matt. “She’s hot all the time.”
Holly glanced over her shoulder and shot him a dirty look. “I heard that.”
A smile spread across Kevin’s face. “I meant for you to hear. You’ve never been sexier.”
The expression on her face suggested she didn’t believe him. Kevin tossed the buns and chips at Matt, who made a quick save as Kevin swept his wife into his arms.
“I’ve obviously been slipping on telling you how beautiful you are, “Kevin said. “How can your body not be gorgeous when you’re growing our baby?”
“Good save,” she said with a snort.
He bent down and gave her a kiss. “It’s not a save, Holly. It’s true.”
The door opened behind Matt, and Tyler, Lanie, and Eric were walking in. “I don’t know if you two got fireworks,” Tyler said. “But I stopped by the fireworks tent on Highway 7 and dropped a couple hundred dollars. I figured the little guys might like them.”
Lanie laughed. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s using your children as a scapegoat.”
Matt grinned and shook his head. “I got plenty of fireworks, too.”
Holly shot her husband a devious look. “You better fess up to your extremely large purchase, too.”
“So basically, we can put on a show for the neighborhood,” Matt said. “I love it and so will the boys.”
They all headed outside and Anna helped everyone get drinks and get settled while Matt started up the grill. Toby kept watching the door, and a half hour later, Abby walked in with Ethan. Toby nearly tackled him with a hug and the dogs quickly piled on.
When Abby walked over to Matt, he said, “Thanks for bringing him. I know your friends had other plans.”
“Ethan needs family.” Her chin quivered. “He needs you.”
“He needs you, too, Abby. We’re partners in raising him, and between all of us, he’ll never doubt that he’s loved.”
She nodded. “He’s started calling Toby his brother.” Matt worried that would upset his sister, but she shrugged. “We’re a nontraditional family. Who needs labels? They’re close enough to be brothers.”
“Thanks for understanding, Abs.”
She pulled him into an unexpected hug. “Thank you for loving my son as though he was your own.” Then she dropped her hold and shouted, “There’s a beer somewhere with my name on it!”
Anna’s friend Ashley arrived and hit it off with Abby. The two women realized they had multiple friends in common. Albert told everyone about his first two months in his new apartment. Getting around had gotten easier since he’d advanced from his walker to a four-footed cane.
“Hey, Albert,” Kevin said. “You look like they’re feeding you well there.”
“That’s just it,” Anna said with a sly grin. “Meals aren’t included. My father has suitors who flirt with food.”
Albert chuckled and waved her off. “Only a few women bring me food.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. “He hasn’t prepared a dinner in over three weeks.”
“Way to go, Albert,” Eric said, holding up his fist to Albert, but when the older man didn’t know what he was doing, Eric taught him how to do it. “You’ll score even more ladies now.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Anna teased.
Eric winked at her father. “We single guys need to stick together.”
“Us, too?” Ethan asked.
“You bet,” Eric said. “We can start our own bachelor club.”
Matt and his two friends shouted “No!” at the same time, drawing questioning looks from everyone else.
Matt shook his head. “We started our bachelor brotherhood and a month later Kevin was married—all three of us were married in less than a year.” He pointed his finger at Eric then swung it to point at Ethan, Toby, and Albert. “All four of you are too young to even think about getting married. You’ve got plenty of time to sow your wild oats.”
Lanie grinned and gave Tyler a kiss. “Maybe they should be a little less enthusiastic about sowing their wild oats than you were.”
“I’ll say,” Matt mumbled.
Lanie pointed at Albert. “And that goes for you too, mister.”
Everyone laughed.
When the sun set, the men moved out front with the fireworks, and the women and the boys moved lawn chairs to the driveway.
Matt, Kevin, and Tyler lined up some of the fireworks and let Eric start lighting them. Matt glanced back at Anna and saw she was standing close to the house with Toby on her hip. He hurried over to make sure everything was okay, surprised to see tears on Toby’s cheeks.
“Hey, what’s going on, little guy?”
“The loud booms scare him,” Anna said with a grimace. “This is his first Fourth of July.”
Shit. He’d forgotten. “Do you want to go inside?”
“No.” Toby kept his gaze on the display overhead, but he cringed and jumped whenever the next firework went off.
“I have an idea,” Matt said. “I’ll be right back.” A couple minutes later he came back out, carrying his noise-canceling headphones and his phone. “You put these on and listen to music, then you can watch the fireworks and you don’t have to hear them. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Matt got them set up for him, and Toby let Anna move closer to the chairs.
Anna smiled up at Matt and gave him a lingering kiss. “Have I told you lately how much I love you?”
“Not in the last ten minutes.” He laughed and kissed her back.
Someone tugged on his hand, and Matt had a pretty good idea who it was before he glanced down at Ethan.
“I want to see, too, Uncle Matt.”
Matt almost told him that Anna wasn’t holding Toby to give him a better view, but he picked up Ethan and set him on his shoulders.
Anna glanced over at him with a look so full of love, it sucked Matt’s breath away. He wrapped an arm around her back and pulled her closer.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming,” she said, her voice breaking. “Like this is too good to be true. Thank you for giving me everything I ever wanted. Thank you for waiting for me.”
His heart was so full, he was surprised it didn’t burst out of his chest. This was what he’d always wanted, too. “We made both our dreams come true.” He reached for her hand and linked their fingers. “I would have waited forever for this. It was always you, Anna. Always you.”
Ex-marine Kevin Vandemeer craves normalcy. Instead, he has a broken-down old house in need of a match and some gasoline, a meddling family, and the uncanny ability to attract the world’s craziest women. At least that last one he can fix: he and his buddies have made a pact to swear off women, and this includes his sweetly sexy new neighbor…
See the next page for an excerpt from Only You.
Chapter One
This place is a piece of shit.” Kevin Vandemeer stood in the front yard of the two-bedroom home he’d purchased sight unseen, running his hand over his head.
“Well, of course it is,” his sister, Megan, said.
He turned to her, his mouth dropping open. “You purposely found me a piece-of-shit house? I know I was an asshole when we were kids, but this seems excessive for payback.”
She shook her head in anno
yance. “Stop being a drama queen. You said you wanted a flip house. This is a house to flip.”
“That I could live in.” He punctuated the last two words with his hand.
“Noooo, you said to find you a house that would make a good investment.”
He swung his hand toward the two-story bungalow. The bright blue paint had peeled off in massive chunks. The covered front porch ran the length of the front of the house, although the right side dipped down, probably because the right pillar was missing. It had been replaced with several concrete blocks, then a few bricks, and finally, on top, a canned good. He took a step closer. “Is that a can of pork and beans?”
A grin spread across her face. “See? Your first dinner in your new home.”
His gaze swung back to her. “Megan…”
She put her left hand on her small, rounded belly. He hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and he’d had a hard enough time dealing with the wedding ring on her finger, much less the fact that she was pregnant.
“Kevin, look.” The teasing tone was gone, seriousness replacing the merriment in her eyes. “I know it seems daunting, but you needed a project after everything…and this seemed like it would take up a lot of your time.”
He ignored the after everything lead-in. He was starting to regret telling his sister about his latest breakup. “My new job is going to take up plenty of my time. This place is going to take the rest of my life. How did this even pass inspection?”
“Well…” She sounded insulted. “It didn’t.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Megan?”
“It’s a flip house, Kevin. You take what you get and make the best of it.”
“It looks like the whole place is about to fall into a sinkhole.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Let me be the judge of that. I want to see inside.” He paused, horror washing through him. “Tell me you’ve been inside.”
“Of course I’ve been inside.” But she sounded unconvincing.
Well, shit. There was no telling what kind of mess he was going to find in there. Might as well find out what twenty-two thousand dollars in cash had bought him. Although in hindsight, that should have been a major clue. He’d chalked it up to the cheaper cost of living in the Midwest. Now he felt like an idiot.
Buying the house had seemed like a good idea at the time. He’d come back to his hometown because he needed a change. After twelve years in the marines, his second tour in Afghanistan had been enough to convince him he was ready for civilian life. So it had seemed fortuitous when his lifelong best friend practically begged Kevin to come work with him.
Kevin hesitantly took the executive contractor job even though he felt significantly underqualified. He’d protested that he didn’t know the first thing about overseeing a construction project, let alone one as big as the shopping mall Matt had taken on.
“I need someone who can organize the financial end and watch the overspending. You may not have been a drill sergeant, but you sure as hell act like one. You’re perfect,” Matt had said.
Kevin had accepted the job for a variety of reasons. One, it was as different as he could get from trying to root out the Taliban in small Afghan villages. The horrors he had seen would haunt him to his dying day. And, two, he wanted to be part of his niece or nephew’s life as well as have a chance to get closer to his sister.
After seeing the hellhole she’d bought him, he was reconsidering the second part of number two.
“Keys.” He reached out his hand and she placed two keys in his palm.
“I’m not sure you need them, though. The lock on the front door doesn’t exactly work.”
“Then what exactly does it do?”
She gave him a hopeful grin. “Sits there and looks pretty.”
This situation was going from bad to worse. “Am I going to find a homeless man sleeping in my basement?”
She cringed. “More like a family of squirrels in the attic.”
Releasing a groan, he stomped across the front yard, tripping on an exposed tree root and nearly falling on his face.
“Be careful,” she called after him. “The front yard is like a minefield.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
She laughed, and he made his way up the steps. At least they were made of concrete and looked fairly stable.
He paused, taking in the sight of the first house he’d ever owned. What the hell had he been thinking? His life had gone to shit—there was no denying that—but why had he trusted his sister to find him a place to live?
But, after everything, he’d wanted something familiar. Plus, his sister had recently moved back to Blue Springs, Missouri, after living in Seattle for years. After her entire wedding fiasco, he’d realized he barely knew her. Last summer, she’d shown up four days before her wedding with the man everyone presumed to be her fiancé. But he’d turned out to be a guy she’d met on the plane ride home. Kevin had kicked himself for months afterward, telling himself if he’d been more active in his sister’s life, he would have known that the first guy was an asshole and the second was an imposter. She seemed happy now, but he planned to be around to see if it was really true.
Megan called after him. “Be careful on the…second board.”
His foot fell through a porch slat and tossed him forward, the front door breaking his fall, until it swung inward and he fell on his face flat on the floor.
“Megan.”
“Yeah…the porch has some wood rot. The boards need to be replaced.”
“And my ankle?”
“God, I know men are babies, but you were a marine, Kevin Vandemeer. Isn’t your motto Live free or die?”
“It’s Semper fidelis. Always faithful. And you better be damn glad I’m faithful to not killing my only sister.”
“In case you start to reconsider, just remember I’m giving you a niece or nephew in a few months.”
“In the spirit of this sibling bonding time, I think it’s fair to tell you that’s the only thing saving your ass at the moment.”
“Come on, Kevin. Don’t be so cranky.”
“Cranky?” He rolled to his side and glared back at her. “You think I’m cranky? You just pissed away over twenty thousand of my money!” He realized his voice was rising, but he didn’t give a shit.
“Let’s just go inside and I’ll show you it’s not as bad as you think it is, so stop being so cranky.”
“I’m not cranky!” Somehow he suspected the inside was worse, but he was good and stuck now. And, speaking of stuck, he sat up and jerked his foot out of the hole, pulling off his shoe in the process. “Goddamn it!”
She grinned at him from the bottom of the steps. “Well, if the shoe fits…”
“Not funny.” He crawled over to the hole and pulled his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, shining the flashlight down into the abyss. He found his shoe, but next to it was a pair of black beady eyes that shined back at him before whatever it was scurried for the corner. He jerked backward and pointed to the hole. “What the hell is that?”
She cocked her eyebrows. “It’s a hole. I’m so glad all those years in the marines taught you some valuable discerning skills.”
“There’s something alive down there!”
She leaned back her head and groaned. “You are such a baby. It’s probably a raccoon or a possum.” Then she stomped up the steps and reached for his phone. “Give me that.”
“I don’t think you should be messing around with a wild animal in your condition. What if it attacks you?”
She knelt on the porch next to the hole. “I doubt it’s going to jump out and chew off my face. And even if it does, I don’t need my face to give birth. You’ll just be stuck looking at the grisly scars during the holidays. Now give me your phone.”
He knew that look from when they were kids. She wasn’t budging until he caved, so he saved them both time and handed her his mobile. “Don’t drop it. I’ve heard raccoons are like pack rats.”
> “But what if he needs to watch raccoon porn? I wonder what that’s like…do they show lady raccoons doing the nasty in a trash can?” She leaned forward and shined the flashlight on his phone into the space, then she lay down on the porch and reached her arm down into the two-foot-wide space.
“What the hell are you doing, Megan?” he barked out in a panic. “You’re going to get bitten!”
She sat up, holding a tiny gray kitten in her hand. “I think your data plan is safe.” She held the now mewling animal in her hand and lifted it in front of her face. “What do you think, cutie? Do you want Kevin’s phone?”
She cuddled it close to her chest and gave him the phone. “Get your shoe and I’ll give you the grand tour after I pee.”
“Does this place even have running water?”
“Ha. Ha,” she said in dry tone. “People in Africa would call this a palace.”
“Twenty-two-grand money pit is more like it.”
He was totally screwed.
About the Author
Denise Grover Swank is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived in the area until she was nineteen. Then she became a nomadic gypsy, living in five cities, four states, and ten houses over the course of ten years before she moved back to her roots. She speaks English and a smattering of Spanish and Chinese, which she learned through an intensive Nick Jr. immersion period. Her hobbies include witty (in her own mind) Facebook comments and dancing in her kitchen with her children (quite badly, if you believe her offspring). Hidden talents include the gift of justification and the ability to drink massive amounts of caffeine and still fall asleep within two minutes. Her lack of the sense of smell allows her to perform many unspeakable tasks. She has six children and hasn’t lost her sanity. Or so she leads you to believe.
You can learn more at:
DeniseGroverSwank.com
Twitter @DeniseMSwank
Facebook.com/DeniseGroverSwank
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