Healing Hearts

by Syndi Powell

  He didn’t deserve her, but a part of him wanted to prove himself worthy even if it took the rest of his life.

  He put a hand to the side of her face, and she looked up at him. He glanced around at the other couples, even caught sight of his grandparents dancing a few yards away from him. He tugged her hand, and they walked off the deck toward the back of the yard under a tree that had started to leaf. The music floated on the air toward them, and the smell of the budding flowers made him drunk on her.

  He put his hands on both sides of her face. “April, I messed up with you, and I’ll probably mess up again. I don’t know how to balance my life yet. I get so caught up in everyone else’s that I lose sight of my own. But I’m willing to change. For you.”

  April took his hands away from her face. “No. Don’t change for me. Change for you. Because you want it for you. Make your life better for you first.” She looked back at her guests, some of whom had stopped dancing to watch them. “That’s what my second-chance list is about. Me. And finding happiness for myself so that I can share it with you.”

  “I love you so much, April. I’ll spend every moment proving I’m worthy of you.”

  “You already have, Zach, you have. You’re here, aren’t you?”

  He pulled her into his arms. “I want to work on my second-chance list.”

  She kissed him lightly. “Let’s work on it together.”

  He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against hers. “I knew you were trouble the second you lectured me about my client.”

  “And I’ve been determined to make you notice me since you ignored me for your cell phone.”

  He pulled it out of his pocket and tossed it away. “You’re going to turn my world upside down, aren’t you?”

  She grinned. “That’s the plan.”

  * * *

  APRIL GRIPPED THE leather cord that tethered her to the metal pole that stretched along the cabin of the plane. Zach stood in front of her, but he’d turned so that he could look at her. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, but it still felt as if she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. She was going to pass out if this kept up. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “C’mon, Sprader. You promised that you’d help me with my list. What happened to wanting to experience new things?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to jump out of a plane!” She opened her eyes and glanced outside. They were so high up. She loved this man standing before her, but she was starting to doubt if she could follow him by hurtling through the sky.

  Their instructor called their names and gave them a last-minute pep talk. He finished by sliding the bay door open, and motioned them forward, so they would all jump together.

  April strained to see below and shook her head. “No, I can’t. Sorry, Zach, but you’re asking too much.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I might be asking the wrong question.” He dug through his pocket and pulled out a small blue velvet box and opened it to reveal a diamond solitaire. “What if we got married? And we’ll make a new second-chance list of things we both want for each other.”

  April stared openmouthed at the box. “Like a honeymoon in Italy?”

  “And a house and a dog and maybe some kids further down the path.”

  When she was sick, she’d hoped to find a man who would enjoy life with her. And now, there he stood, holding out a diamond ring. “Yes. Yes to all of that.”

  Zach beamed and slid the ring on her finger. He took her hand in his, then nodded toward the instructor. “What do you say, April? Should we jump?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know. But we’ll be fine if we do it together.”

  She held back, but only for a split second. She turned and gave him a quick kiss. “Let’s take the plunge.”

  And they jumped out of the plane, April opening her arms wide to embrace everything that life could bring.

  * * * * *

  Don’t miss Syndi Powell’s first

  HOPE CENTER story,

  AFRAID TO LOSE HER, or

  her other previous romances

  for Harlequin Heartwarming:

  THE RELUCTANT BACHELOR

  RISK OF FALLING

  TWO-PART HARMONY

  THE SWEETHEART DEAL

  Available from www.Harlequin.com!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS by M. K. Stelmack.

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  A Roof Over Their Heads

  by M. K. Stelmack

  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 su
nset. 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 hom
e.” 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?”