Yours To Keep

by Shannon Stacey

  Mike and Lisa’s family was a lot taller than the last time he’d seen them. He managed to find out Joey was now fifteen, Danny twelve, Brian nine and Bobby seven before Mary started hushing the kids and herding them all toward the dining room.

  “Dinner’s ready to come out of the oven,” she said. “Let’s eat while it’s hot.”

  As he’d expected, the massive dining room table was practically groaning under the weight of his welcome-home feast. She’d even made garlic bread that was soft and buttery on the inside and crusty on the outside. Far cry from his own pathetic efforts to recreate it by sprinkling garlic salt on a buttered slice of white toast.

  “I swear, Aunt Mary, the whole time I was in Afghanistan, the only thing I could think of was your lasagna. Except for when I was thinking about your beef stew. Or your chicken and dumplings.”

  She gave him a modest tsk but he could tell by the slight blush on her cheeks she was pleased by the compliment. “You always did have a good appetite.”

  The company was as good as the food, and stories flowed like the iced tea as they plowed through the lasagna. He told a few watered-down tales of Afghanistan. Joe told the story of blackmailing Keri into joining the entire Kowalski family on their camping trip. Mike told him about Kevin fainting like a girl the day Lily was born.

  He laughed at the description of his cousin going down like a cement truck that blew a hairpin turn and crashed through the guardrail, holding his stomach because he hadn’t been able to resist the third helping his aunt had pushed on him.

  “It’s game night,” nine-year-old Brian told him when the talk had died down and they were clearing the table. “Are you going to stay and play?”

  “Sure.” It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. “Just give me a few minutes to let my dinner settle, okay?”

  “Sean’s playing,” the kid bellowed as he raced back to the others. “He’s on my team!”

  “We don’t even know what we’re playing yet,” Danny pointed out.

  “Don’t care. He’s on my team.”

  While the family debated which board games to drag out with the ferocity of a cease-fire negotiation, Sean stepped onto the back deck for a little fresh air. When he closed the sliding door and stepped to the left—out of view of people in the house—he almost bumped into Lisa.

  Sean had always liked Mike’s wife. She was on the shorter side of average—maybe five-three—but she had six feet of attitude and didn’t let anybody push her around.

  “Ran into a friend of yours today,” he told her.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Tall. Hot. Batshit crazy?”

  It was a few seconds before understanding dawned in her eyes, followed by a hot blush across her cheeks. “She didn’t.”

  “Oh, she did. Knocked on my door and told me she was my fiancée, and that you knew she was throwing my name around.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “It was harmless, Sean. Really. She was just trying to make her grandmother feel better about being in Florida.”

  “Did she tell you her grand plan?”

  The flush deepened. “Oh, no. Tell me she didn’t.”

  “She did.”

  “I thought she was only joking.”

  “I thought it was a prank your husband and his cohort brothers cooked up, but she was serious.”

  Lisa shook her head, but he could see the amusement tugging at the corners of her mouth. “What, exactly, did she tell you the plan was?”

  “What did she tell you it was?”

  “She was kind of hinting around that maybe you could pretend to be the boyfriend.”

  “That almost sounds sane.” He gave a short laugh. “The plan’s now evolved into me moving in with her and pretending to be her fiancé for an entire month.”

  She didn’t meet his eyes. “Maybe she did mention that, too, but she laughed, so I thought she was kidding.”

  “Nope.” Sean folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the house. He should go back in and see if there was any blueberry cobbler left. Emma Shaw was nothing but a weird blip on his radar and he should forget her. But it didn’t seem she was a forgettable woman. “So what’s her deal, anyway?”

  “Her grandmother kept talking about selling the house because she’s afraid it’s too much for Emma. Emma doesn’t want a different house, so she made up a guy.”

  “Making up a guy would almost be normal. She made up an imaginary life for me. That’s not normal.”

  “It’s a really nice house.” He just looked at her until she laughed and shrugged. “Okay, it’s crazy, but—”

  “But it’s all out of love for her poor, sweet grandmother. Yeah, I got that part.”

  The look she gave him let him know she hadn’t missed his less-than-flattering tone. It was a look that probably would have cowed him if he had to live with her, sleep beside her and depend on her for a hot meal. But he didn’t, so he grinned and gave her a wink.

  She blew out a breath and then her face grew serious. “Emma’s parents were killed in a car accident when she was four, on their way to do some Christmas shopping. Cat and John—her grandfather, who died about ten years ago—were watching Emma. When the state police gave them the bad news, they didn’t even consider giving her up. They were all she had and, as their friends enjoyed their empty nests and started traveling and retiring, the Shaws started all over with a grieving four-year-old.”

  “I’m sure they’re nice people, Lisa, but come on.”

  “Cat tried to hide how much she wanted to go down to Florida with her friends, but Emma knew. And it took her an entire year to convince her it was okay to go. And even then, every time they talked on the phone, Cat talked about moving back to New Hampshire because Emma was alone and the house was too big for one person and there was too much lawn to mow and this whole list of stuff. So Emma made up a man around the house and Cat was free to enjoy her book clubs and line-dancing classes.”

  Sean was going to point out the rather significant difference between lying about having a boyfriend and asking a stranger to move in for a month, but his aunt stepped outside and closed the slider behind her.

  “I knew I’d find you out here.” She smiled to let him know she wasn’t offended he’d try to sneak a few quiet minutes away from his own welcome-home dinner. “What are you two talking about?”

  “I ran into a friend of Lisa’s today,” he told her, enjoying the way Lisa’s eyes got big and she started trying to communicate with him by way of frantic facial expressions behind her mother-in-law’s back. “Emma Shaw.”

  “Emma Shaw… Oh! The one who does the landscaping, right?” Lisa nodded. “She’s such a nice girl, but I haven’t seen her in ages. Not since I ran into you two at the mall and overheard you talking about her engagement. How are she and her fiancé doing?”

  Lisa opened her mouth, but closed it again when Sean folded his arms and looked at her, waiting to see how—or even if—she was going to get out of the conversation without lying outright to Aunt Mary.

  “I…think they’re having some problems,” she finally said. Nice hedge, if a bit of an understatement.

  “Oh, that’s too bad. What’s her fiancé’s name? I meant to ask that day, but you started talking about some shoe sale and I forgot.”

  It was a few seconds before Lisa sighed in defeat. “Sean.”

  “Isn’t that funny,” Mary said, smiling at him before turning back to her daughter-in-law. “What’s his last name? Maybe I know his family.”

  That was a pretty safe bet.

  “She told her grandmother she was dating our Sean,” Lisa mumbled.

  When his aunt pinned him with one of those looks that made grown Kowalski men squirm, Sean held up his hands. “I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know.”

  “How could you not know you were engaged?”

  “I was in Afghanistan. And I met her for the first time a few hours ago.”

  Her eyebrows knit. “I don’t understand.”
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  “It’s nothing, really,” Lisa said. “She didn’t want her grandmother to worry about her, so she told her she had a boyfriend and Sean’s name was the first one that came to mind.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  Sean grinned at Lisa. “Told ya.”

  The slider opened and Joey’s head popped out. “Sean, you got drafted for Monopoly and they’re going to start cheating if you don’t get in here and take your turn.”

  Since he’d rather go directly to jail and not pass go then listen to Lisa try to explain Emma Shaw to Aunt Mary anymore, he gave the women a whaddya-gonna-do shrug and followed Joey to the family room. He was late to the game, so he got stuck being the stupid thimble, but he just grinned and pulled up some floor next to the oversized coffee table.

  He then proceeded to have his ass handed to him by his cousins’ kids, who had the real-estate instincts of Donald Trump and the sportsmanship of John McEnroe facing off against a line judge. A guy’s attention couldn’t wander to a mass of dark curls and pleading brown eyes for a few minutes without hotels popping up all over the damn place. One moment of distraction, remembering the way his body had responded to hers, and he found himself promising Bobby a trip to Dairy Queen in exchange for the loan of a fistful of paper money.

  He didn’t fare any better at Scattergories, though he did come up with “landscaper” when the letter was L and the category was occupations. Stephanie smoked them all, managing to find alliterative adjectives to go with her answers. Prissy Professor. For an F fruit, she came up with fresh figs. Sean’s was blank.

  After the scores were tallied, he scratched down a few adjectives for his profession pick. Lovely landscaper. Lush landscaper. Or maybe…lusty landscaper?

  “The grown-ups are breaking out the cards for some five-card stud,” Kevin told him. “We don’t take checks.”

  Shit. At the rate he was going, he’d be bankrupt by the third hand.

  Chapter Two

  A cleaning service, Emma thought as she attacked another nest of rapidly procreating dust bunnies with the vacuum wand. That’s what she wanted the birthday fairy to bring her.

  Actually, she really wanted Sean Kowalski for her birthday, but he’d scratched himself off her wish list, leaving her with nothing to do but take out her frustrations on the dark, dust-bunny-breeding recesses of her house. No. Her grandmother’s house.

  Should she tell Gram over the phone that she and Sean had broken up, or wait until she got there?

  It was a question she’d been asking herself since leaving his apartment the day before, but she still didn’t have an answer. Gram would be heartbroken for her. And she’d want to fix it, which she couldn’t do from one thousand, five hundred and thirty-one miles away.

  Her phone vibrated in her back pocket, so she slapped the off button on the vacuum and tugged the phone free. A picture she’d taken of Lisa at Old Orchard Beach the previous summer filled the screen and she seriously considered hitting the ignore button. Lisa never called her in the morning because Emma was usually working and, as far as she knew, didn’t know she’d rescheduled some appointment to free up time to obsess about the house before Gram arrived. That meant something was going on and she had a gut feeling that something was Sean Kowalski.

  After a bracing deep breath that didn’t do much to brace her, she hit the talk button. “Hey, Lisa.”

  “Did you seriously ask Sean to move in with you?”

  Emma groaned and sank onto the couch. “I really did.”

  “Did he shut the door in your face?”

  “No, he was very polite and careful not to make any sudden moves.”

  “I think the phrase he used was ‘batshit crazy’.”

  Ouch.

  “But hot,” Lisa said. “‘Tall, hot and batshit crazy’ was his exact description.”

  The hot part made her feel a little better, but in remembering his expression, she didn’t think hot meant hot enough to overcome the batshit crazy part. “I guess I’ll wait until Gram gets here to tell her my fiancé and I called it quits.”

  “That sucks. If you say it just happened, she’ll wonder why you’re not broken up about it. But if it happened long enough ago so you’re over it, she’ll be upset you didn’t tell her.”

  “Last week, when she said she was looking forward to meeting him, I said he felt the same way.” She needed something hard to beat her head against. “How did I get myself into this?”

  “Your mouth’s quicker than your brain.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “So what did you think of him?” Lisa asked, her voice dropping down into the let’s dish range.

  It should have been an easy question to answer since she’d been thinking about him pretty much nonstop—except for when she was obsessing about Gram—since she left his apartment yesterday. “I don’t know. Tall, hot and, unfortunately for me, not batshit crazy. But it’s not like I haven’t seen his face before.”

  “Pictures don’t do that man justice. Even a very happily married woman like me can see that.”

  No, they didn’t, Emma thought, her gaze drawn to the ridiculous photo of Sean hung above the wingback chair. It was ridiculous because he’d had his arm around Lisa’s niece, Stephanie, at a family barbeque but, in response to a request from Gram, Lisa had helped her Photoshop herself into it instead. She didn’t even want to imagine what Sean would think of that.

  “I wouldn’t throw him out of bed,” she admitted when Lisa waited for her to say something.

  Maybe it was for the best that he’d said no. Her sleeping on a couch a few feet away from Sean Kowalski sleeping in her bed had seemed like a fine idea in theory. But, after meeting the man, being that close to him when the lights went out and not being in the bed with him wasn’t a fine plan at all.

  Work kept her pretty busy. She wasn’t one for hanging around in bars and none of the guys she already knew really got her motor running, so she’d been in a bit of a drought. Based on her reaction to simply meeting the man, Sean had the potential to rev her engine like she was nosed up to the start line of a quarter-mile run.

  “Crap, I’ve gotta run,” Lisa said. “The boys all have dentist appointments in an hour and I just saw my youngest run by with a handful of Skittles.”

  “Have fun with that.” Emma wasn’t sure how she did it. If Emma had four boys, she’d spend her days in the bathroom, taking nips off the bottle of NyQuil in the medicine cabinet.

  “If I don’t talk to you again before your grandmother arrives, good luck.”

  “Thanks.” She’d need it.

  After shoving her phone back in her pocket, Emma dragged the couch away from the wall, revealing a new nest of dust bunnies to vent her frustrations on.

  She used her toe to turn on the vacuum, hoping the drone of the motor would drown out the no-longer-quiet purr of her own neglected engine.

  Sean matched the number on the directions to the middle of nowhere Lisa had given him to the number on the mailbox—it had daisies painted on it, of all things—and turned his truck onto Emma Shaw’s driveway.

  The massive, traditional New England farmhouse at the end of the drive was a thing of beauty. White siding—painted clapboards, not vinyl—with dark green shutters painted to match the metal roofing. A farmer’s porch wrapped from the front around one side to what he assumed was the kitchen door, and hanging baskets full of different-colored flowers hung on either side of every support post.

  There was an eclectically painted grouping of wooden rockers and side tables on the porch, inviting him to sit and chat awhile, and flower beds surrounded the sides of the house he could see. Not surprising, he guessed, as he parked alongside a pickup bearing magnetic signs with the same Landscaping by Emma logo she’d had on her sweatshirt.

  After climbing out of his own truck, he climbed the steps to the front door and, after taking a deep breath—which didn’t help because oxygen didn’t cure insanity—he rang the doorbell.

  It was almost a full minute befo
re Emma opened the door. She looked cute as hell, with her hair scraped into a sloppy ponytail and a streak of dust down her nose. He stuck his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t reach out and wipe it away.

  Her eyes widened when she saw him. “Hi.”

  “Gotta minute?”

  “Sure.” She stepped back and let him into the foyer. Immediately to the left was a good-sized living room, and all the furniture was dragged to the center of the hardwood floor. The air was thick with the scents of Murphy Oil Soap and lemon-scented Pledge. “Getting ready for the white-glove inspection?”

  She grimaced and swiped at her face, but she only made it worse. “Gram’s not like that. I just have a lot on my mind and when that happens, I clean. It’s a sickness.”

  He wasn’t sure where to start. “I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s last night.”

  “How are they doing? I haven’t seen Mrs. K in ages.”

  “They’re good. Got a chance to talk to Lisa, too. She says you’re not crazy.”

  “I already told you I’m not crazy.”

  “Crazy people don’t always know they’re crazy.”

  She blew an annoyed breath at the wisps of hair escaping the ponytail. “Trust me, I know the circumstances are crazy. But I’m not. Do you want a drink or something? I have lemonade. Iced tea. I think I’m out of soda, which explains the frenzied, caffeine-fueled cleaning spree.”

  “I’m good, thanks.” He didn’t expect to be there long enough to drain a glass. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. This all came about because your grandmother moved to Florida and couldn’t have a good time because she was too worried about you?”

  She nodded and perched on the arm of the couch. “Instead of enjoying herself, she was constantly worrying about me. About me being alone in this big house. Worrying that I won’t remember to change the batteries in the smoke detectors or that I’ll fall off a ladder trying to clean out the gutters. It seemed harmless at the time to tell her there was a man around the place.”

  “Why not tell her you’d hired a handyman or something?”