Second Chance Girl--A Modern Fairy Tale Romance

by Susan Mallery

  Their eyes met in one of those intimate gazes happy couples often shared. Mathias liked to think that he and Carol looked at each other the same way.

  They’d been together nearly four months. Each day was better than the one before. He was working on new projects—spending as much of his time creating “art” as making his dishes. Carol was busy with the new herd of giraffes. Come spring, the botanists would arrive. Nearly five acres had been put aside for an attempt to grow endangered plant species. She was working with the newly hired veterinarian and there were ongoing discussions about bringing in a male giraffe.

  This getaway was the only one they could manage for the next few months. After the wedding, they were going to spend a week in the Caribbean before heading back to Happily Inc.

  “I’m going to check on the next course,” Violet said as she rose.

  “I’ll help.” Mathias rose and went with her into the kitchen. But before she could speak to the cook, he drew her into the corner.

  “Quick question. Is it tradition here for the bride to toss the bouquet?”

  Violet’s green eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Then she shrieked and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Really? Are you going to—”

  He pressed his index finger to his mouth. “I’d like to keep it a secret for now.”

  Violet nodded vigorously. “I swear, I won’t even tell Ulrich until after you’ve proposed. About the bouquet, I have no idea, but everyone already knows I’m American, so they’re used to my odd quirks. I’ll say I have to do it and then toss it to my sister. It will be great fun.” She glanced around, then lowered her voice even more. “When and where?”

  “I’ve arranged for a private seaside dinner on the beach next Monday.” He had the ring upstairs. He’d designed it himself.

  Violet hugged him again. “I’m so happy for both of you.” She grinned. “Ulrich and I want to start our family right away. It would be so great if you and Carol did the same.”

  Kids. They’d talked about a family. They both wanted children and he was hoping for a little girl, just like her mom.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he murmured.

  Violet laughed. “That’s the spirit. I’m really happy for both of you.”

  She went to speak to the cook while he returned to the dining room. Carol smiled when she saw him. As always, the sight of her set his world to rights. He’d been lucky to find her. Funny how sometimes she joked about being his second chance girl, but he knew he was the one who’d been given a second chance to find happiness. And now that he’d found her, he was never, ever letting her go.

  * * * * *

  If you enjoy Susan Mallery’s FOOL’S GOLD and HAPPILY INC series, you’ll love MISCHIEF BAY!

  Keep reading for a sneak peek of SISTERS LIKE US, the latest blockbuster in Susan’s MISCHIEF BAY series...and your next favorite beach read!

  #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery delivers a captivating new novel about the problem with secrets, the power of love and the unbreakable bond between sisters. Watch for

  Secrets of the Tulip Sisters

  Available Now!

  One of today’s most beloved authors, Susan Mallery mixes her signature cocktail of love, laughter and family drama in this must-read novel of the year. For anyone who has survived the wedding of a sister, mother, friend or daughter, don’t miss

  Daughters of the Bride

  Get your copy today!

  “Heartfelt, funny, and utterly charming all the way through!”

  —Susan Elizabeth Phillips on Daughters of the Bride

  And you won’t want to miss

  You Say It First,

  the first book in Susan Mallery’s Happily Inc series!

  Experience the best in contemporary romance with the charming Fool’s Gold series by Susan Mallery. Be sure to get all of the titles in this captivating series full of hope, laughter and love to last a lifetime.

  A Kiss in the Snow (novella)

  Best of My Love

  Marry Me at Christmas

  Thrill Me

  Kiss Me

  Hold Me

  Yours for Christmas (novella)

  Until We Touch

  Before We Kiss

  When We Met

  Christmas on 4th Street

  Three Little Words

  Two of a Kind

  Just One Kiss

  Halfway There (novella)

  A Fool’s Gold Christmas

  All Summer Long

  Summer Nights

  Summer Days

  Almost Summer (novella)

  A Christmas Bride

  Only Us: A Fool’s Gold Holiday (novella)

  Only His

  Only Yours

  Only Mine

  Sister of the Bride (novella)

  Finding Perfect

  Almost Perfect

  Chasing Perfect

  Love. Laughter. Happily-Ever-After.

  Complete your collection!

  For more enchanting romance, revisit the delightful little town of Los Lobos, California, with

  Someone Like You

  Falling For Gracie

  Pick up your copies now!

  * * *

  Did you know that Harlequin My Rewards members earn FREE books and more?

  Join

  www.HarlequinMyRewards.com

  today to start earning your FREE books!

  * * *

  Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Other ways to keep in touch:

  Harlequin.com/Newsletters

  Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

  Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

  HarlequinBlog.com

  Sisters Like Us

  by Susan Mallery

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE WASN’T A holiday on the calendar that Harper Szymanski couldn’t celebrate, cook for, decorate, decoupage, create a greeting card about or wrap in raffia. There were the biggies—birthdays, New Year’s, the Fourth of July—but also the lesser celebrated: American Diabetes Association Alert Day. Auntie’s Day. National Massage Therapy Awareness Week. Why weren’t there greeting cards to honor that? Didn’t everyone need a good massage?

  Despite a skill set that made Martha Stewart look like a slacker, Harper had never figured out a way to monetize her gift for setting a table to commemorate anything. She’d tried catering about ten years ago, but had quickly discovered that her need to overbuy and overdeliver had meant losing money on every single job. Which left her in the awkward position of trying to make a living the hard way—with two semesters of community college and sixteen years of being a stay-at-home mom.

  Retail jobs and the pay that went with them hadn’t been close to enough to support herself and her daughter, postdivorce. Three online aptitude tests had left her even more confused—while getting her degree in biochemistry and going on to medical school sounded great, it wasn’t actually a practical solution for an over-forty single mom with no money in the bank. Then an article in the local paper had provided an interesting and almost viable idea. Harper had become a virtual assistant.

  If there was one thing she knew, it was how to take care of the details. You didn’t get good at a basket weave Fourth of July cake without paying attention. Three years after filing her DBA, Harper had five main clients, nearly a dozen more who used her services intermittently and almost enough income to pay her bills. She also had her mother living in the apartment over the garage, an ex-husband dating a gorgeous blonde who was—wait for it—exactly fourteen years younger than Harper because they shared a birthday, a sixteen-year-old daughter who had stopped speaking to her, and a client who was desperately unclear on the concept of virtual in the world of virtual assistants.


  “You don’t have to drop off your bills every month,” Harper said as she set out coffee, a plate of chocolate-chip scones that she’d gotten up at five thirty that morning to bake fresh, a bowl of sugar-glazed almonds and sliced pears.

  “And miss this?” Lucas Wheeler asked, pouring himself a mug of coffee. “If you’re trying to convince me coming by isn’t a good idea, then stop feeding me.”

  He was right, of course. There was an easy, logical solution. Stop taking care of people and they would go away. Or at least be around less often. There was just one problem—when someone stopped by your home, you were supposed to take care of them.

  “I can’t help it,” she admitted, wishing it wasn’t the truth. “It’s a disease. I’m a people pleaser. I blame my mother.”

  “I’d blame her, too, if I were you.”

  She supposed she could take offense at Lucas’s words, but he was only stating the obvious.

  In some ways Harper felt as if she was part of the wrong generation. According to celebrity magazines, fifty was the new twenty-five, which meant almost forty-two should be the new what? Eleven? Everyone else her age seemed so young and carefree, with modern attitudes and a far better grasp of what was in style and popular.

  Harper was just now getting around to listening to the soundtrack from Hamilton and her idea of fashionable had a lot more to do with how she dressed her dining room table than herself. She was like a 1950s throwback, which might sound charming but in real life kind of sucked. On the bright side, it really was her mother’s fault.

  “Speaking of your mother, where is she?” Lucas asked.

  “At the senior center, preparing Easter baskets for the homeless.” Because that was what women were supposed to do. Take care of people—not have actual careers that could support them and their families.

  “I, on the other hand, will be paying your bills, designing T-shirts for Misty, working on the layout of a sales brochure and making bunny-butt cookies for my daughter.”

  Lucas raised an eyebrow. “You do realize that bunny butt is just a polite way of saying rabbit ass.”

  Harper laughed. “Yes, but they’re an Easter tradition. Becca loves them. Her father is dropping her off tomorrow afternoon and I want the cookies waiting.”

  Because maybe if there were bunny-butt cookies, her daughter would smile and talk to her the way she used to. In actual sentences that shared bits of her life.

  “You sorry you didn’t go?” Lucas asked.

  “To the memorial? Yes.” She thought for a second, then added, “No. I mean I would have liked to pay my respects and all, but Great-Aunt Cheryl is gone, so it’s not like she would miss me showing up. And there’s no way I could have gone with Terence and her.”

  The drive from Mischief Bay to Grass Valley would have taken practically the whole day. Harper couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than being trapped in a car with her ex, his girlfriend and her daughter. Okay, the Becca part would be great, but the other two?

  The worst of it was that while Great-Aunt Cheryl was actually Terence’s relative, Harper had been the one who had stayed in touch, right up until Cheryl’s death two months ago.

  “You’re never going to say her name, are you?”

  It took Harper a second to realize he meant the girlfriend and not Great-Aunt Cheryl. “Not if I don’t have to. I don’t care if that makes me shallow. Terence is forty-four. What is he thinking, dating a twenty-eight-year-old?” She glared at Lucas. “Never mind. You’re the wrong person to be having this particular conversation with.”

  Because while her client was a handsome, single, fifty-year-old man, he also dated women in their twenties. In his case, their early twenties.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Is it all men or just you and my ex? Oh, dear God, the one thing you have in common with Terence is me. Did I do something to make you all date twentysomethings?”

  “Calm down,” Lucas said mildly. “I was dating younger women long before we met. It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” She glanced pointedly at the clock on her microwave. “Don’t you have crimes to solve?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m going.”

  He rose and carried his dishes to the sink. Lucas was about five-ten, nicely muscled with a belly way flatter than hers. He wore jeans, cowboy boots and a long-sleeved shirt. He was a detective with the LAPD, and from what she’d learned about him in the nine months she’d been working for him, he’d always been a cop.

  He returned to the table and slipped on his shoulder holster, then grabbed his blazer. “How do you make bunny-butt cookies?”

  She laughed. “It’s easy. You take a round sugar cookie frosted in pink icing, add two small oval sugar cookies decorated with pink candy for feet, use a miniature marshmallow for the tail and voilà—bunny-butt cookies.”

  “Save me a couple.”

  “I promise.” She would put them in a little box that she would decorate for the holiday. Because she simply couldn’t hand someone cookies on a plain paper plate. If she tried, the heavens would open and release a plague of locusts at the very least.

  Oh, to be able to buy packaged cookies from the grocery store. Or prepared spaghetti sauce. Or a frozen entrée. But that would never happen because it wasn’t what Harper was supposed to do.

  She carried the rest of the dishes over to the sink, packed up the uneaten food, then retreated to her large craft room with its built-in shelves and giant tables and cupboards. After finding a nice bunny-butt cookie–sized box, she studied her ribbon collection before selecting one that would coordinate. While her glue gun heated, she sorted through her fabric remnants to find one that was Easter appropriate and wondered what other women did with the time they saved by not making every stupid thing by hand.

  But Harper was her mother’s daughter and had never been very good at bucking tradition. Her sister, Stacey, was the rebel while Harper did what she was told. It wasn’t that she didn’t like making bunny-butt cookies or decoupaging gift boxes, it was that she wanted just a little more in her life. More challenges, more money, more communication with her daughter. And while it was fun to blame all her problems on her mother, Harper couldn’t help thinking that in reality, everything she wanted but didn’t have was very likely her own damn fault.

  * * *

  THE SMELL OF waffles and turkey sausage filled the kitchen and drifted down the hall toward the master bedroom. Stacey Bloom slipped on her sleeveless dress, then glanced at herself in the mirror. With the loose style and knit fabric, not to mention her body shape, she looked as she always had. No one would guess, which was the point. She didn’t want the questions that would inevitably be asked—mostly because she didn’t want to be judged for her answers.

  She knew that was her problem, no one else’s. The judging thing. If it were any other topic, she would be able to provide a brief but accurate response, one that would explain her position while making it clear that while the questioner might think his opinion was important, she did not. Except for this time.

  She stepped into her lace-up hiking boots and tied them, then pulled a blazer from the row of them in her closet. She had learned years ago that having a kind of work uniform kept her mornings simple. She bought her black sleeveless dresses online, buying three or four of them at a time. Her blazers were of excellent quality and lasted for years. She changed them out seasonally—lighter fabric in summer, heavier in winter—although the temperate climate in Mischief Bay, California, meant her decision to switch one for another was purely based on convention and not necessity.

  As for the hiking boots, they were comfortable and offered a lot of support. She spent much of her day standing in a lab or walking between labs, so they made practical sense. Her mother kept trying to get her to wear pumps and stockings, neither of which were ever going to
happen. The shoes would cause foot pain and pressure on her lower back—these days more so than ever. Besides, something about her hiking boots seemed to intimidate the men she had to work with, and although that had never been her purpose, she wasn’t going to deny she liked the unexpected benefit.

  She walked into her kitchen and hung her blazer on the back of her chair. Her husband, Kit, stood at the stove, humming to himself as he turned the sausage. The table was set and there was a bowl of sliced fruit by her place mat. A thermal to-go cup stood next to her backpack. She wanted it to be filled with delicious hot coffee, but knew instead it contained a vegetable-infused protein shake. Without looking she knew that her lunch was already packed in her backpack.

  Kit turned and smiled when he saw her.

  “Morning, sweetie. How are you feeling?”

  “Good. And you?”

  “Excellent.” He winked, then went back to his cooking.

  As it was the last Friday of Spring Break, he wasn’t teaching today, so instead of his usual khakis and a button-down shirt, he had on sweats and a T-shirt with a drawing of a cat on a poster. Underneath the poster, it said Wanted Dead or Alive: Schrodinger’s Cat.

  She wasn’t sure which she loved more—that he fussed over her by fixing her meals and making sure she was taking her vitamins, that he called her sweetie or his collection of funny science T-shirts. She supposed there was no reason she had to pick any one thing. Until meeting Kit, she’d never been sure that she believed romantic love existed. She could have explained the chemical processes that took place in the brain, but that wasn’t the same as believing in the feelings themselves. Now she knew differently.

  He set two plates on the table, then sat across from her. A pot of herbal tea sat in the center of the table. She poured them each a cup. Kit wouldn’t drink coffee in front of her although she guessed he had it when she wasn’t around.

  “Harper called,” he said. “She invited us over for dinner tomorrow night. Becca will be home from the memorial.” He frowned. “Who is Great-Aunt Cheryl? She didn’t come to the wedding.”

  “She’s not related to Harper. She was Terence’s great-aunt, but she and Harper were always close, which our mother found threatening. Great-Aunt Cheryl was an army nurse during World War II and some kind of spy in the 1950s. She raised dogs.”