The Story Of Us: A Secret Baby Romance (Serenity House Book 1)

by Molly O'Keefe

Too bad she's turned her back on that part of her life. No longer a journalist Jennifer just longs to be with her son and heal from the last few years of her life. Years that nearly killed her.

  Soon she find it impossible to resist the story. And even more impossible to resist the man. But if she breaks the story, will she lose the man?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jennifer Stern was a logical, sensible woman. And, she told herself, logical, sensible women didn’t stand on chairs, screaming.

  No matter how much they wanted to.

  “Do you see it?” Deb Barber asked, from her position on one of the chairs.

  “I can’t see anything,” Jennifer said, her own logical, sensible, stupid feet firmly planted on the floor. She had to yell in order to be heard over the cacophony of spraying water.

  A geyser licked across the ceiling from the broken faucet then splashed onto the floor, creating a lake in the middle of the kitchen.

  And while she couldn’t see the snake, she knew it was somewhere between her and the water shut-off valve.

  “It’s just a garter snake,” she said, inching around the fridge. “Right?” This is why she lived in cities. Cities with plumbers. Cities that didn’t have snakes just roaming through kitchens.

  “I have no idea,” Deb answered, crouching and resting her hot pink wrist-casts on the back of the wooden chair. “All I know is it was big. A big snake in the middle of the kitchen.”

  Jennifer ducked under the geyser and stepped gingerly over the lake, with one eye out for visiting reptiles.

  When she’d agreed to help out for two weeks at Serenity House while her friends Samantha and J.D. went on a much-needed vacation she had not agreed to this.

  “Tell me if you see it,” Jennifer said, feeling vulnerable as she ducked under the counter and cranked off the water supply.

  It was probably just a garter snake. Or, even more likely, a figment of Deb’s imagination.

  “I didn’t make it up,” Deb said, her voice loud in the sudden quiet. “I swear I saw a snake.”

  “I never said you didn’t,” Jennifer said quickly, wondering if Deb wasn’t just a little psychic. She wouldn’t be all that surprised. If Deb could sprout wings and fly, Jennifer wouldn’t even blink.

  Officially, Deb was in charge of Serenity since Sam and J.D. left. But a bad fall resulting in two broken wrists made doing anything required in the day-to-day running of a small community center pretty much impossible.

  Which is why Jennifer was here. Deb was the brains, Jennifer was the wrists.

  “Hey, wow, Mom, look.”

  At the sound of her son Spencer’s voice, she jumped and smacked her head scrambling out from under the sink. “Spence, be careful there’s a—”

  Her eleven-year-old son, red curls catching the late afternoon sun, stood in the doorway to the kitchen holding a small, twisting green snake.

  “Oh, dear lord,” Deb breathed. “Honey, you need to put that thing down.”

  “Why?” Spence asked, glancing at Deb. “It’s just a garter.”

  Daisy, Serenity’s giant guard dog and Spence’s constant companion when he was at the shelter, barked once as if to second that assessment.

  “You’re not scared of a garter, are you, Daisy?” Spence asked, dangling the snake over the half-rottweiler, half-whatever-lived-under-the-Munsters’-stairs beast. Daisy’s tail didn’t even twitch.

  Jennifer collapsed against the counter because her knees were gone. And because she was so glad her son was a young biologist and knew he wasn’t holding a cottonmouth, and because Deb looked absolutely ridiculous on the kitchen chair with her hot pink wrist-casts and ebony dreadlocks, Jennifer did something she hadn’t done in ages. She laughed.

  She laughed so hard she wiped her eyes.

  She laughed so hard she kind of had to go to the bathroom.

  “Mom?” Spence’s blue-grey eyes were wide with wonder and a little fear. It had been so long, she realized, so long since he’d seen her happy like this. So long that uncontrolled laughter was scary. Oh, Spence, she thought, a sadness gripping her so hard it hurt, have I been that grim? “You all right?”

  “I’m fine, honey,” she reassured him quickly. “Deb thought it was a giant king cobra coming to eat all of us.”

  Spence’s serious face cracked open and his laughter, not as rare as hers but sweet all the same, spilled over the kitchen and made her laugh harder until they were gripping their knees to stay upright.

  “Jennifer? Spence?” Deb asked, looking at her as if she’d grown two heads. “You having some kind of fit?”

  “Stop it,” Jennifer cried.

  “I mean, if it was someone else, I’d think you were laughing. But since in the whole year I’ve known you I’ve never seen you so much as giggle—”

  “I laugh,” she protested. “Spence? Don’t I laugh?”

  “Not like this you don’t.”

  There hadn’t been anything worth laughing about. Not in years. In fact, at some point two years ago, she’d been fairly convinced she’d never laugh again. Never feel joy again.

  But here it was. Different than before, harder, sharper, almost painful. But everything was different than before.

  Her. Spencer. Life.

  But laughing again felt good. Like sex.

  Though she was not counting on its return anytime soon.

  “I’m going to take the snake outside,” Spence said and was out the front door in flash, the screen slamming home behind him and Daisy.

  A humid Carolina breeze trickled through that screen, making everything just a little stickier.

  “When’s the air conditioner going to be fixed?” Jennifer asked. Had she known there were going to be snakes, broken faucets and no air conditioner she definitely would have said no—no matter how much she loved Sam and J.D.

  “Gary said it would take him a few hours, when he got here. Should be cool by tomorrow.”

  “Thank God.” She sighed and took in the broken faucet, the giant lake and the water-splashed ceiling, and wondered where to start the clean-up efforts. She’d been here two days and already she had to wonder how Sam did this every day. It seemed like all she and Deb were doing was putting out fires. Snakes. Broken pipes. Hungry kids. Nutrition classes. Parenting classes. Book groups.

  Deb ducked into the community center office/supply closet, tried to grab two big mops and ended up knocking both of them to the ground.

  “Stupid casts,” she muttered.

  “Hey, I’m supposed to be doing that stuff,” Jennifer said, and rushed in to get the mops and a big stack of towels. Being incapacitated wasn’t easy on anyone but it was particularly rough on Deb, who was used to doing on her own since she ran away from home and right to Serenity House four years ago.

  Deb was far, far older than her twenty-two years.

  “What do you think about the pipes?” Jennifer asked, laying the white and green towels across the big puddle.

  “Even if my wrists weren’t busted,” Deb said, “I wouldn’t be able to fix that faucet. Sam’s been holding those pipes together with string and hope for too long now.”

  “Figures it would fall apart when she was gone.”

  “Well—” Deb arched a plucked black eyebrow “—maybe with her gone we can actually get them fixed. Serenity House has a private benefactor who as far as I am concerned, doesn’t do nearly enough benefacting.”

  Jennifer paused while mopping. “You’re not suggesting we call—” dramatically, she looked left then right “—the mysterious number?” she whispered. When Sam left she’d given Deb and Jennifer this phone number that was only to be used in the case of extreme financial or legal disaster. At the time Jennifer had thought Sam was joking, but J.D. quickly shook his head, indicating the number wasn’t something Sam joked about.

  Deb tried to look stern, imitating Sam. “We don’t make fun of the number.”

  “Has she ever called the number?” Jennifer asked.

  “A few times.” Deb kicked a
towel over one part of the lake. “Once when there were some legal issues after that estranged husband broke in to the shelter and kidnapped his wife and child. And then other times when she wanted to build the classrooms onto the shelter and get computers. When the roof caved in.” She shrugged. “That’s it.”

  “Did the benefactor give you the money?”

  “Right away,” Deb said, like she couldn’t believe it. “It was like he was waiting around for the chance to send money. Sam left a message and within two hours a banker was on the phone wondering where to wire the money.”

  “Wow.”

  “Right, wow.” Deb was getting worked up. “And when we called with those legal problems, a lawyer contacted us right away and the whole thing just disappeared.”

  “Does she know who this benefactor is?”

  “No idea.”

  And that, Jennifer thought, was the really wild thing about it. Money just arrived. Legal trouble got fixed. No obligations. No thank-you notes. Nothing. Like magic Sam called this number, left a message and her troubles vanished.

  Who wouldn’t call that number?

  What Jennifer would have done for a number like that two years ago.

  Though, she thought with the stabbing pain that had only gotten bearable in the past year, money wouldn’t have saved her husband.

  She heaved an armful of wet towels into the sink and turned around to look at Deb.

  “Do we call this magic number?” she asked.

  Deb sighed. “Not yet. Things need to get a lot worse.”

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