No Place Like Home

by Leigh Michaels

  “Not quite. You accused me of being selfish and using people. I think, myself, that you’re the champion when it comes to that sort of thing. You’ve got the innocent face of an angel, my dear, and underneath it is the scheming heart of a—”

  She slapped him, as hard as she could. He didn’t even flinch, but the imprint of her hand stood out as clearly on his cheek as if it had been painted there.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It needed only that. You haven’t disappointed me yet, though an audience would certainly have improved the dramatic value of the scene.”

  Her palm stung from the impact. She clenched her fist in her pocket, trying to hide the pain. But the ache was more in her heart than in her hand. “It’s not true,” she whispered.

  “You went straight back to him,” Brendan said. “After what we shared, you went straight back to him.”

  “What had we shared?” She was almost screaming. “A quick romp in the sack, which didn’t mean a damned thing to you.”

  “How in the hell would you know what it meant to me? You wouldn’t listen to me—you wouldn’t stay there with me—”

  “Just what would it have solved if we had spent two more days in bed? And as for me going straight back to Graham, look at yourself, Brendan. The whole thing was so unimportant to you that you went fishing in Wisconsin!”

  “I did a whole lot more thinking than fishing. And I didn’t go fishing immediately.”

  For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why that had anything to do with it. “It doesn’t matter when you went. You can’t make me believe that you were desperate to talk to me when you didn’t even stick around and dial a telephone!”

  “What point was there in that? You’d made your choice.” He rubbed a hand across the back of his head. It left a streak of plaster dust across his dark hair.

  “What a fool I was,” he said, “to think that any ordinary guy could take you away from Graham Forrest. But I thought I could. It was pretty conceited of me, wasn’t it, to believe that in the end you’d prefer me to Graham and his millions?”

  “What?” It was a bare whisper.

  “You must have found it very amusing,” he said harshly. “You see, I thought you really were the innocent and lovely girl you seemed to be. I believed you were only engaged to Graham because you’d never really understood what love could be, and I was arrogant enough to think that I might be the man to show you.”

  But you did, she thought, and tried to speak. Her throat was too tight to form the words.

  He went on relentlessly. “Graham was stiff competition, and I didn’t think you’d believe me if I told you I’d fallen in love with you over a Reuben sandwich at the Wolfpack.”

  She made a sound that was something like a harsh croak.

  “I didn’t recognize it, then, of course. I didn’t know it till the day you and Graham came to look at that house in Henderson Heights, and you were wearing his ring. You called me a damn fool that day—do you remember?”

  She nodded.

  “I was, Kaye. I looked at you, and at that ring, and I knew that if I stood aside and let you marry him, I would never have a day’s peace again. But what was there for me to do? How the hell could I make you believe I was what you really wanted? You would have laughed at me if I’d said it. The only thing I could do was make you question your engagement, in the hope that some day you’d turn to me.”

  She was trembling. She reached out carefully to the nearest wall and put a hand against it, and then was afraid that the vibrations of her body might knock it down.

  “That day you came running to me here, I thought you’d seen what I was trying to show you—that you could never be happy with Graham. But then, when I kissed you, you backed away, and I knew I’d gone too fast. I was afraid that I’d blown everything, and afraid that the reaction would send you straight to him.”

  She put her hands to her cheeks. Her fingers were icy against the hot blood pounding in her face.

  “So I was back to walking the tightrope again, and I knew that I had very little time. The moment you found a house you liked, there would be no stopping you.” He broke off and looked at her with anger in his eyes. Anger, and sadness, too. “I was a fool, wasn’t I, Kaye? Tell me, did it amuse you? Did you know what was going through my mind?”

  She shook her head numbly.

  “That day in Nassau when you came to me, I thought you had realized that you could never love Graham. But then you announced that you were going back to him.”

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort,” she protested automatically.

  He didn’t seem to hear. “I still didn’t believe that you were capable of cold-bloodedly seducing me. I tried to believe that you were just confused, and frightened of making a mistake. I knew that security was important to you, and you certainly made it plain what you thought of me, and my way of life.”

  She tried to swallow, and couldn’t.

  “And then I remembered what you’d said, and it gave me hope. You said, I ought to marry Graham. I thought that must mean just the opposite, that you knew you shouldn’t—and that you just needed a little space, and some time to think it over.”

  She had said that. She remembered it now.

  “So I stayed away from you the day after we came back, and I did some planning of my own—how to convince you that I’m not as unsettled as you seemed to believe, and that you wouldn’t be spending your life being dragged from one place to the next if you married me.”

  She gasped a little, and whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you go away, instead?”

  “I was on my way over to the travel agency to talk to you, and I was planning to stand on the sidewalk and shout if I had to, to get your attention. But just then you and Graham drove up in his car, and the two of you stood there in front of the shop.”

  She closed her eyes in pain, remembering just how they had expressed that final goodbye. “You saw that?” she whispered.

  “Half of Henderson saw it. And only then did I realize what an utter, stupid fool I had been, to ever dream that you might give up that brand of security for me.” He scowled, and kicked at the plaster again, and so he couldn’t see her face.

  The same sort of stupid fool I was, she thought, not to know that you were incapable of using me and throwing me aside. The same sort of stupid fool who never dreamed you might feel inferior to Graham, and threatened by his very presence—because I saw you as so much more than he ever could be.

  “I didn’t go back to Graham,” she said.

  There was the briefest possible instant of silence. “Why? Didn’t he like your explanation?”

  “I gave him his ring back that day.”

  “Of course you did,” he agreed. “A girl always gives a man’s ring back and then throws her arms around him and kisses him goodbye.

  “I don’t know about other girls,” she said. “But that’s exactly what I did.”

  “And what happened to make you change your mind?”

  She swallowed hard, and then she said, very quietly, “You happened, Brendan.”

  He looked down at her with the coldness of pain still in his eyes, and Kaye knew that the rest of their lives might well depend on what she said next.

  “I’ve had a taste of living now,” she said. “You’ve showed me that today is the only thing I can count on, that it’s fine to plan for the future, but we have to live today.”

  He hadn’t moved. She swallowed hard and went on, feeling as if she was fighting for her life. “I love you, don’t you see? If I can’t have you, then today isn’t worth much, and there’s no hope at all for tomorrow. I want to spend my todays with you, Brendan. All of my todays.”

  Still, he didn’t speak, and she felt sanity slipping away from her. It can’t be too late, she thought frantically. But what can I say, what can I do to make him believe?

  She said, softly, “Graham will be disappointed if you don’t make an honest woman of me, Brendan. He said I’d need all
the help I can get, married to you, so he promised me a case of baby food as a gift for each of our children.” The tightness in her throat grew. “He guessed how I felt about you. And it was such a grand gesture, coming from him, that I just had to hug him.”

  “Damn Graham Forrest,” Brendan said, “We’ll buy our own baby food, Kaye.”

  She flung herself into his arms with a glad little sob, and he kissed her hard, like a man granted a reprieve at the very foot of the gallows steps. My God, she thought, how close we’ve come to disaster because we were afraid to admit the truth—afraid that we’d look like fools!

  “I won’t lie to you, Kaye. I don’t have Graham’s resources, and the first thing you learn when you go into the real estate business is not to count your money till it’s in your hand. Commissions sometimes vanish into the mist.”

  “Like when clients decide not to get married after all?” What a delicious trembling feeling it was, to be free to tease him again! “Which reminds me, how are we going to pay for the car?”

  “It’s paid for. You can’t still think that I planned to buy it with Graham’s money.”

  “A good thing you didn’t,” she said.

  “It tends to be a feast-or-famine kind of living. But I swear we’ll always have jam, as well as bread and butter.”

  Did the man remember everything she had ever said to him?, Kaye wondered, and made a fresh resolve to never attempt to hide the truth from him again. “You’re all the jam I need,” she said, and he pulled her close again. “Tell the truth, Brendan,” she went on. “Were you really trying as hard as you could to find a house for me?”

  He laughed a little. “Cross my heart, my love, I worked the hardest for you that I’ve ever done.”

  “Really?” She was vaguely disappointed.

  “Yes. Keeping you from liking some of those houses was the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced.”

  She uttered a furious little cry.

  He said, “Would you rather I’d have sold you the one in Henderson Heights? I could have. Graham could have been persuaded to buy it.”

  “I would never have forgiven you.” She put her head down on his shoulder and decided that she’d rather not move ever again.

  But there was something about Nora’s kitchen that nagged at the corners of her mind, and finally, she could stand it no more. “There is a broom and a garbage can in here,” she pointed out.

  “That’s right. Bright girl, aren’t you?”

  “Why are you cleaning up the fallen plaster in Nora’s kitchen?”

  “Because it kept my hands busy and prevented me from setting the damned thing on fire.”

  His hands were plenty busy now, she thought, and sighed in pleasure at the sensation of strong fingers sliding up under her jacket to massage her spine. “Arson doesn’t sound like you,” she said carefully. “Why would you want to burn this house?”

  “Because, regardless of what you think of me, I don’t always just think of today. And all I could see ahead of me was a succession of endless years alone, of walking through these rooms and seeing you in every corner, in every beam of light.” His arms tightened around her. “You see, I couldn’t think of a better way to show you that I was deadly serious about you—so I bought your house the morning after we came back from Nassau.”

  “That was pretty crazy,” she pointed out gently. It was all she could do to keep from screaming out the gladness in her heart.

  “I know it was crazy, but I didn’t come to my senses until after I’d signed the papers. Then I saw you with Graham and all I could think of was how glad I was that you would never share it with him. But today ... well, today it all seemed like a little too much.”

  “Any house would have done, Brendan. Home isn’t a place.”

  “Nevertheless, I now own a house. The bank was so anxious to get rid of it that they rushed the paperwork through in record time. So if you’ve decided you don’t like this house after all, then I don’t know what we’re going to do, because no one else on the face of the earth wants it.”

  “There’s always arson,” she said. “But that wouldn’t make Nora very happy.”

  “Besides, I’d still have the mortgage hanging over my head.”

  “Our heads,” she corrected. “And as long as we’re talking about Nora… Shall we ask her to come and live with us?”

  He pushed a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear and looked down at her with deadly seriousness in his eyes. “Kaye, are you sure this is what you want?”

  “Not this,” she corrected. “You. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing. That’s everything I want.”

  His arms tightened around her, and Kaye knew, with a deep conviction that she could feel all the way to her toes, that this was right. This was where she belonged.

  She looked up at him with a half-teasing glint in her eyes. “Hi, honey,” she said, very softly. “I’m home.”

  A Word from the Author

  No Place Like Home was the first book I wrote in the McKenna Family series. Though I didn’t imagine it that way from the very beginning, no sooner did I “meet” Brendan McKenna than I knew this guy was part of a big family, all of whom were just as charming, determined, lovable, and wildly attractive as he was. So – even though I didn’t know anything about the family when I started writing this book beyond the name of one of his siblings, I found myself adding a few hints here and there about the McKenna family... like, his mother is a poet and a bit fey, and there’s a teddy bear riding around in his car which belongs to a niece who lives in Wisconsin, and his sister Anne is the youngest and the only girl.

  A year after No Place Like Home, when I added Patrick McKenna to the clan in A Matter of Principal, I already had these parameters set for the family and so I had to live by them. (Though I wrote A Matter of Principal second, the events of that story actually happened before the ones in No Place Like Home – it’s Susan’s teddy bear which was forgotten in Brendan’s car.) And of course that book added more dimensions to the family because it happened in the McKennas’ hometown of Lakemont, Wisconsin. Grandma Nell came on the scene, along with little brother Colin, and dad Dennis and his fixation with trying to grow grass around the family’s Victorian house.

  Though I loved the McKennas, I was having trouble keeping them all straight, and writing other books in between didn’t help matters much. So when Anne McKenna demanded her own story with Garrett’s Back In Town, I went back to the beginning. I read and outlined the two previous books, noting every detail about each character in a spiral notebook grandly titled The McKenna Files – so I wouldn’t trip myself up by changing someone’s hair color (or worse, personality).

  Another year, another McKenna story – this one, The Unexpected Landlord, when Rowan McKenna came on the scene. This time I returned to Henderson, Illinois, the setting of No Place Like Home, and Kaye wanders in with her brand-new baby.

  And then almost two years went by. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write another McKenna story, but knowing it would be the last one made me sad. It had to be a very special story, and it had to incorporate all the other characters – without letting them take over the story – in order to be a fitting end to the McKennas’ saga. (Why, oh why, I asked myself, had I said right up front that Brendan McKenna had exactly four siblings? Why not six? Eight? More?)

  But ultimately, Rachel Todd – the perfect counterpart for the last remaining McKenna, Colin – turned up. Everybody in the family got involved in matchmaking, driving Colin and Rachel to pretend they were dating each other just so everyone would leave them alone, and with Dating Games the series was complete.

  At the end of that book, the score stands at four successful McKenna marriages and one engagement; one little girl, two toddlers, and two babies on the way; three old houses and one certifiable mansion; and a couple of airplanes, a newspaper, and a bank in the family.

  And an author with a very large spiral notebook to keep it all straight.

  Because may
be someday there’s going to be a McKenna cousin whose story needs to be told.

  – Leigh Michaels

  This book is copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced without written permission.

  Leigh Michaels is the author of more than 90 books, including 80 contemporary romance novels and non-fiction books including On Writing Romance. She also writes single-title historical romance set in Regency England. Six of her books have been finalists in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest for best traditional romance of the year, and she has won two Reviewers’ Choice awards from Romantic Times magazine. More than 30 million copies of her books have been published in 25 languages and 120 countries around the world. Her website is www.leighmichaels.com