by Jean Oram
Unexpectedly in Love
A Second Chance Single Mom Christmas Romance
Jean Oram
Contents
From the Back Cover
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Sneak Peek from Sweet Holiday Surprise
More Books by Jean Oram
About the Author
From the Back Cover
Unexpectedly in Love
The last thing Joy Evans needs is to have the hunky bane of her existence move in next door.
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But he did.
* * *
And just in time to witness the collapse of the perfect life she’d always said she’d have. Now she’s divorced, her son keeps poking fun at the town gossip, her job sucks, and if she wants to keep her broken family in the same timezone, she’s going to have to move halfway across the planet.
* * *
But her new neighbor Steve insists that Joy is still that take-charge woman with big dreams that he used to know, and that it’s a perfect time to reinvent herself. And possibly even find some room in her heart for a man like him…
* * *
Will these two old rivals find a chance to not only see eye-to-eye, but heart-to-heart as well?
* * *
Find out in this charming, small town sweet romance about the guy next door, a single mom, and second chances. A heartwarming Christmas romance that will delight readers with its humor and tender moments.
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to my team of early readers, Margaret C., Donna W, Erica H, and Sharon S. You gals rock my world. As well, thank you to Margaret C. (a different Margaret!) for all your notes and corrections. You help my stories tie up those little threads I think I’ve tied up but haven’t. And thank you to my proofreaders and series continuity editors Emily, Lia, and Sonya for catching the small things that slipped past.
As well, thank you to Susan Hatler, Ciara Knight, Melinda Curtis and Shanna Hatfield for inviting me into the delightfully fun world of Christmas Mountain. It’s an honor to write with you in the Rockies—one of my favorite areas of the world.
Most of all thank you to each and every one of my readers. This dream would be nothing but dust without you. I hope this story charms you as well as brings you to both laughter and tears.
To happily ever afters and the warmness of the holiday season.
Unexpectedly in Love
A Second Chance Single Mom Christmas Romance
Christmas Mountain Clean Romance Series
(Book 6)
By Jean Oram
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© 2019 Jean Oram
First Edition
Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although in electronic form, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and it cannot be reproduced, modified, copied and/or distributed by any means for commercial or non-commercial purposes whether the work is attributed or not, unless written permission has been granted by the author, with the exception of brief quotations for use in a review of this work. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite online vendor where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. Keep reading!
All characters and events appearing in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, as well as any resemblance to events is coincidental and, truly, a little bit cool.
ISBN: 978-1-989359-06-8
1019C
Chapter 1
I adored the holiday season. Not just because of my festive name, Joy Noelle Evans, and because my birthday fell on a date halfway to Christmas, but because I believed the holidays brought everyone together, highlighting their innate kindness and generosity.
Today, however, I wasn’t feeling my usual level of holiday joy. I also wasn’t feeling the tips of my fingers, due to the frigid December air here in the town of Christmas Mountain, Montana. The colored lights I was stringing along the eaves kept tangling, leaving me frustrated.
As I contemplated the lights again, I caught a glimpse of my seven-year-old son as he tore by with his elbow out—a sure sign he was attempting another running wrestling flop onto the inflatable snowman sitting in the front yard.
“Max, cut it out! You’re going to wreck poor Frosty.”
“He had it coming! He’s a wily, frozen-headed monster! He stuck his tongue out at Ms. Smith when she walked by.”
“Max, you better not have done that, too!”
There was a telling silence and my shoulders sagged. Judith Smith was a ruthless gossip who had a hobby of pumping people for information so she could spread it about town. She was well-intentioned, but the last thing I needed was for Max and myself to wind up on her radar—for any reason.
“What have I said about being polite?” I called.
“Okay. I will.”
“No sticking your tongue out at people, and next time you see her you need to apologize.”
“She didn’t see me.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I readjusted the ladder, wondering where Max had learned his wrestling moves. Surely not from his father, Calvin, a mild-mannered man who was on the same parenting page as I was. Other single moms worried about the influence of their children’s fathers and their lax rules, but I knew Max had the same boundaries at Calvin’s, which meant no wrestling. No sticking out of tongues, either.
Up on the ladder again, I could see that Max had somehow managed to wrangle the seven-foot-tall snowman into a headlock, and our golden retriever, who Max had named Obi-Wan Kenobi after the Star Wars character, was barking and dancing as though a stranger had entered the yard.
“What was I thinking, buying that snowman?” I muttered to myself. “Obi, hush! And Max, cut it out. You’re getting the dog all excited!”
Something caught my eye as our retriever continued to bark. There was a stranger, although not in our yard. The new neighbor, whom I’d yet to meet, was rolling some fancy grill, which had likely cost as much as all the furniture in my living room, from his truck, then behind the fence and hedge that separated us, and around to the back of his house. He had a lanky build and improbably wide shoulders. He also had a familiarity that made me think of someone... Someone who didn’t bring up entirely pleasant memories.
It couldn’t be Steve Jorgensen. Like Calvin and me, he’d left town after high school. In fact, the last time I’d seen Steve he’d been smirking from his spot across the street from the police station as I’d shuffled out with my parents, completely mortified, my shoulders hunched to my ears as I’d tried to hide. My friends from Ms. King’s choir group and I had released a few pigs down the high school hallway after our graduation ceremony and gotten caught. After that night we’d all gone our separate ways, despite our promise to Ms. King that we’d stick together.
But back to the man next door. He couldn’t be Steve which meant I needed to shove aside my introverted nature and bring him a plate of gingerbread cookies. Not the burned ones, or the ones where Max had gone nuts with the icing, but the prettier ones that I’d taken some time with.
The man came back through his side yard, causing Obi to bark again. Our new neighbor snugged the zipper of his coat farther up under his chin as he walked. Due to the distance between our houses, I couldn’t quite catch his features even from my higher-than-usual vantage point on top of the ladder.
The man turned as Obi let out another bark, and I caught his familiar blue-eyed gaze. I let
out a yelp as my foot slipped on the ladder rung, nearly sending me tumbling.
It was Steve. Steve Jorgensen.
No, no, no, no. No…! my mind howled. What had I done to deserve him as my neighbor? I was a good person. Karma should be on my side, not against me!
I didn’t dare look back his way as I carefully climbed down to the safety of the frozen earth. It was simply my imagination playing games with me, because why would Steve return to this small, quiet town when he was all about noise and adventure?
Back on solid ground, I cringed and dared a glance over my shoulder toward Maybe-Steve’s house. I could no longer see him or his walkway, due to the fence and hedge.
Maybe he’d turned away before I’d slipped.
Not that it had been Steve. There were plenty of men who were handsome like Steve had been—if his cocky, know-it-all opinion about my life hadn’t overshadowed the whole typical good-looks thing he’d had going on.
Man, if he could see me now—with my lovely, peaceful life—his sharp, bright eyes would be brimming with judgment. For all his smarts, he hadn’t been able to comprehend why I hadn’t continued chasing my dream of medical school, and had instead fulfilled my plan to marry Calvin once out of high school.
In fact, marriage and starting a family had been pretty perfect until Calvin and I had discovered that what we had was friendship and not actually true love. Now we were back in Christmas Mountain, in separate homes and co-parenting cohesively, as well as considering a move to Paris, France so Calvin could pursue an engineering project.
Steve could put adventure in his pipe and smoke it. I was not idly accepting some boring, stagnant life just because I had followed Calvin to college. I wasn’t complaisant, like Steve had claimed, unable to accept my life as anything more than what was in front of me. Calvin and I had worked hard for what we had, which was surely more than Mr. Judgy-Pants Adventure had in his hollow, empty, meaningless life.
The old anger burned through me, renewed. Steve had even been there the moment my life dreams had changed, but like everyone else, he hadn’t seen why I’d had to give up medical school.
It was a good thing it wasn’t Steve next door, because the last thing I needed was him prodding me to change my very happy, quiet life.
It was Steve.
I knew it the second his boot came around the edge of the white fence that separated our properties—even before his upper body was visible. Obi-Wan was barking, but his dancing around faded from my attention due to the concern in those same blue eyes of Steve’s that had once held such scorn.
The judgment would be back soon. I was a single mom with student loans and a job that left me constantly strapped for cash.
“Joy? Are you okay?” Steve asked. “Joy?” He was reaching for my arms as if he planned to catch me. “I saw you slip.”
I wrenched my hands back to my sides, having extended them toward him.
“Steve?” I cringed inwardly. I was not acting the way I’d dreamed I would if we ever met up again. In those fantasies my life was casually flaunted in his face. He would look at me with awe and a bit of envy for having a family and... and love.
My chest ached.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked, playing it cool while giving Obi the hand signal for him to sit and be quiet beside me, which he did.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes! Of course.” I glanced over at his house and tried to swallow the gut-dropping feeling I was experiencing. “Are you...?” I couldn’t find the courage to ask the question barging through my mind.
Besides, I didn’t have to ask; I knew the answer. I’d seen the For Sale sign come down, and through the crack in my curtains I’d watched the moving truck roll up.
Steve Jorgensen lived next door, and Paris, despite my lack of second-language skills, was starting to look mighty appealing for more than just staying close to my son. I’d learned every bone in the human body by age thirteen, so I could certainly learn French at age twenty-seven. Happily.
“Am I your neighbor?” Steve finished stating my earlier question, crossing his arms and watching my reaction. His expression was devoid of emotion, the crossed arms a defensive mechanism. One that I was exhibiting, as well.
“Welcome to the neighborhood.” I gave what might have passed as a friendly smile among T-rexes, and turned to deal with the dangling Christmas lights so I could have a moment to process his presence in my life. Obi, no longer perturbed by Steve’s arrival due to a healthy, vigorous ear rub from said man, went off to find Max.
Seeing Steve again was worse than the moment I’d pulled his name out of Mr. Chen’s hat in biology class, locking me in as Steve’s secret Santa—hadn’t it been bad enough to be partnered with him in chemistry? I’d agonized over what to get him. It would have been easy to pick up a cheap trinket or some candy, but for some reason I’d gone into obsession mode. It had felt as though Steve needed more than a meaningless bit of junk, and in the end I’d purchased him a pocketknife that had cost more than the T-shirt I’d bought for Calvin.
As far as I knew, Steve still didn’t know who’d given him the knife. Thankfully. He probably would have found a way to criticize me for the expenditure.
“How long have you been back?” he asked as I climbed the ladder. He fed me the string of lights while I attached them to the eaves.
Why couldn’t he just walk off and stay away instead of being helpful? Was he in need of fresh fodder so he could renew his hobby of judging me?
“A year,” I muttered grudgingly, when he continued to help.
“How’s Christmas Mountain? Has it changed much?”
It had. It had been on the last downhill run toward ghost town status when I’d been summoned back to play the piano for The Christmas Extravaganza with the girls last year. It had been Ms. King’s dying wish to reunite us, and in some strange way reignite the town. So far Ashley and Morgan had done pretty well, restarting some of the old community traditions that had been slowly dying out.
“It’s changed.”
“It seems less magical somehow,” Steve said, a strange longing in his voice. I wanted to peek at him but resisted. He’d lived in town for only a few years, having moved here when we were in the tenth grade. All the girls had been excited by his arrival. A new guy in a small town was pretty exciting for fifteen- and sixteen-year-old females.
Even I’d felt a little flutter the first time I’d met him, despite having just started dating Calvin. Because, really? Who wouldn’t flutter? Steve was tall. Handsome. Smart. Someone new and different, with adventures from the outside world. Someone who would mysteriously vanish at lunchtime, never saying where he’d gone, just giving this slightly haunted, mysterious half smile when anyone asked.
Initially, I’d thought Steve was a nice guy, but the moment he’d seen Calvin slide his arm possessively across my shoulders, he’d turned opinionated about my life.
Complaisant.
There was nothing wrong with being agreeable. Nothing at all.
Unlike him. He thrived on chaos and frustrating people, which was so completely not what I was about.
I hovered at the top of the ladder, old anger burning through me and igniting old memories. With Steve feeding me the lights it had taken mere moments to get the length of them attached to the eaves. Now I’d reached out as far as I could, which meant it was time to scamper down again and shift the ladder.
As soon as my feet touched the snow, Steve was there, nudging me aside, with a “let me” as he moved the ladder over several feet before climbing it.
“I can do it,” I protested.
He reached across the eaves, attaching the lights, his jacket rising above his belt, revealing what appeared to be a tanned midriff.
“Why are you tanned?” I blurted out. “It’s December.”
“I was in Morocco doing some volunteer work.”
“Without your shirt on?”
He chuckled. “There are beaches there.”
Why was my b
reath sticking in my lungs? He wasn’t my type. I needed a guy who was content to curl up and watch movies through the winter nights, not go spend time on beautiful white sand beaches helping people.
Obviously, my priorities were way off when it came to men.
No, I reminded myself. Steve loved adventure. He was not someone a single mom could count on to be there. Not that we’d ever date. The first one to fall asleep would be murdered by the other, if our banter and digs from high school were any indicator. I’d loathed being his partner in chemistry, even though it had been outright freeing how I could speak to him, no holds barred. I could insult him and he’d laugh, somehow loving my moxie and the way I’d challenge him on things.
“What have you been up to?” he asked as he angled himself to climb down.
Not anything as cool as volunteering in foreign countries.
“I can do the lights,” I said politely, reaching to steady the ladder as he descended.
“You still with Calvin?” he asked, his gaze fixed on the roof.
I sighed loudly and climbed the ladder as soon as he moved it. “Why? Are you looking to butt heads with him for old times’ sake?” I glared down at him, but all he did was smirk. A smirk that would surely grow when he learned that our marriage—like he’d predicted—hadn’t lasted.
Christmas Mountain was small, and I knew he’d have the answer soon enough. Like in about an hour, when Calvin came to pick up Max for their weekly “man dinner” with Calvin’s dad. It usually involved steak at The Chop House, a hunting lodge style restaurant thick with leather upholstery.