ALSO BY ANNA DESTEFANO
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
Three Days on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)
Christmas on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)
A Sweetbrook Family (previously available as A Family for Daniel)
All-American Father
The Perfect Daughter (Daughter series)
The Prodigal’s Return
The Runaway Daughter (Daughter series)
A Family for Daniel
The Unknown Daughter (Daughter series)
SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY
Secret Legacy
Dark Legacy
ROMANTIC SUSPENSE
Her Forgotten Betrayal
The Firefighter’s Secret Baby (Atlanta Heroes series)
To Save a Family (Atlanta Heroes series)
To Protect the Child (Atlanta Heroes series)
Because of a Boy (Atlanta Heroes series)
NOVELLAS/ANTHOLOGIES
“Weekend Meltdown” in Winter Heat
“Baby Steps” in Mother of the Year
“A Small-Town Sheriff” (Daughter series)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Anna DeStefano
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781612184548
ISBN-10: 1612184545
Cover design by Kerrie Robertson
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914351
Andrew—
This book, this story, these characters, every page…are yours, they’re ours, because you challenge me to dream, never let me give up, and carry me when I cannot make it on my own.
I’m forever where I should be for as long as you come back to me.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Before
For a man who’d sworn off risky women, Law Beaumont was fixated. He was mesmerized. On an overly warm Wednesday morning in November, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the assistant principal who’d requested a meeting with him at his daughter’s elementary school.
His divorce had been finalized a month ago. He was pulling the pieces of his life back together. But this still felt dangerous—openly staring at Kristen Hemmings the way he hadn’t let himself since he’d moved his family to Chandlerville, hoping a fresh start in this picturesque place would save them.
Three years later, there was nothing except common sense to keep him and Kristen apart. And clearly neither one of them possessed an ounce of it.
The school secretary had said he could wait in Kristen’s office, or he would find her on the playground. Of course he hadn’t waited. Of course he was walking toward her and the potential trouble she could mean for his life. Of course the sun was egging him on, shining ridiculously bright for this time of year.
She probably wanted to talk about how the divorce was affecting his daughter. Chloe had been having a hard time all school year. And he’d come for her, first and foremost. But Kristen had invited him closer, too, for the very first time. And damn it if he wasn’t moving faster with each step it took to reach her side. They’d been circling this moment forever, putting it off each time they’d casually crossed paths in town.
Not that his reaction to her had ever felt casual.
Kristen was what songs were made of. She was poetry. She was tall and curvy and effortlessly confident in her own skin. And her smile was pure tenderness as she knelt in front of his anxious child—whom she’d called over when she’d first spotted Law. Her gentle intensity soaked into Chloe, until Chloe’s hesitant grin back sparkled with a hint of her former love for life.
More every day, his daughter mentioned some nice thing Ms. Hemmings did for her at school. More every day since January, when Libby had filed for divorce, he’d resisted the urge to call the school and personally thank its second-in-command for the special interest she’d taken in his child.
“Am I in trouble?” his third grader asked, frowning as he reached her side and gutting Law with her worry. She shot him a scared look, reminding him to tread carefully, to be the father she deserved now, no matter how much else he’d already messed up.
“Of course not,” Kristen said.
“But my dad is here.” Chloe looked down instead of up at Law, making him ache for one of her hugs. “My mom won’t like it if—”
“No one’s in trouble, sweetie.” Kristen stood. Her gaze slid over him, poking holes in his composure.
“Then why am I here?” He didn’t sound entirely friendly, and maybe that was for the best.
His daughter was right. There was no telling what new hassle Libby would stir up when she heard about this meeting. School was her turf. And busting his balls for never doing anything right had become her favorite pastime.
They might be divorced, but that didn’t mean his ex had learned how to let go of the things she couldn’t have, or to value the life that could still be hers, if she’d finally grow up. And he couldn’t get a read on Kristen at all. The silent connection he’d sensed between them for years could have been a wishful figment of his imagination. His track record for making sense out of other people had been in the crapper since he was a kid.
Then her bright green eyes narrowed at the directness of his question, a second before the AP reached out her hand. Chloe’s attention zinged back and forth between them.
“Dad?” Chloe asked when he kept his hand at his side, his fingers tingling.
“It’s okay, darlin’.” He’d make everything okay for her again. “I’ll be leaving in just a second.”
Whatever it took, he’d see Chloe’s life settled. Even if it meant walking away from the breathtaking blonde before him, without ever knowing if her skin—just the touch of her hand—was as soft as it looked. He cupped the back of his daughter’s head.
“I hope you won’t leave, Mr. Beaumont.” The AP dropped her arm to her side. She wiped her palm on her suit pants, obviously nervous when she wasn’t a nervous sort of woman. But her tone said she intended to dig in those surprisingly dainty heels until they talked about whatever she wanted to talk about. “I know how terribly busy you are. But I have something important to discuss. I need your help. Yours and Chloe’s both.”
Chloe loved her dad, but what was he doing at s
chool? And Chloe liked Ms. Hemmings, not that she’d let her friends see how much. But Ms. Hemmings talking with her dad, right there on the playground in front of everybody…that meant something bad, no matter what the adults said.
Chloe just knew it, because she knew her mom—at least the way her mom had been lately.
Since the divorce, Chloe stayed only two nights with her dad at his apartment during the school week. The mornings they were together, he always went back to sleep after she left on the bus. He slept a lot of the day, because he worked so late most nights. But when the bus dropped her off in the afternoon, he was always up and trying to make her laugh and taking her out for hamburgers and milk shakes for dinner. Even on days like today, when he’d stayed up later than normal last night, arguing with her mom over the phone.
Her mom and dad fought almost every night still, even though her dad had moved out almost a year ago, when they’d separated. Sometimes she wondered if they’d always been fighting, since long before they had her, only her dad used to try not to let her know. And he’d gotten her mom to try for a while, too, until they both stopped trying for good.
Chloe loved her family. Sort of. But she hated how nothing ever felt right anymore. Not for a long time. She wished it wasn’t so hard, making Dad and her friends and everyone believe she was okay with the divorce, when all she wanted was for her parents to stop hating each other. And she wished more than anything else that her mom noticed half as much as her dad did—that everything had gotten too crazy, and that Chloe might not be as cool with it as she pretended.
Since January, Mom seemed to care only about herself.
She’d probably been mad last night because Dad had worked the closing shift again at the bar. What’s the point of him asking the judge for more time with my daughter, she kept saying to everyone, if he isn’t ever home when Chloe’s there? And her mom’s friends—Chloe’s friends’ mothers—would nod and agree.
Now Dad was at school, tired and looking sick. Someone else, her friends or Ms. Hemmings, might think he’d been drinking. Since her dad had moved out, Mom had told people that he was drinking again, especially their divorce judge. But Chloe knew it wasn’t true. She’d never seen him take even one drink. But he did look…strange, so she hadn’t run to him when she’d first seen him on the playground.
At least, that was partly why.
It had been stupid, how she’d thought right off that maybe he’d come to check her out early. They could do something together all day, something fun when no one else was around to see. Maybe they’d go to the zoo in Atlanta, she’d thought. He’d taken her there a lot until the last few months. She loved it, and he loved her, and the Atlanta Zoo had the best milk shakes, so he always took her when she asked. They’d go every week if she wanted, he’d promised—until the animals got sick of them and the zoo threw them out. She hadn’t wanted to so much since her parents split. She didn’t want to today. She really didn’t.
Because if they went, she’d worry about her friends knowing that was what she still liked to do. And they’d make fun of her and call her a baby, the way they had since the divorce, whenever Chloe forgot to pretend that she didn’t care what was happening to her life. Plus, Dad had looked totally weird when he’d stepped outside the school. So she didn’t want to talk to either him or Ms. Hemmings, no matter how nice Ms. Hemmings was.
“You need my help?” her dad asked Ms. Hemmings. He dug his hands into his jeans pockets. He did that when he was feeling a lot of things and didn’t want it to look like he was feeling anything at all.
“Can I go now?” Chloe asked.
Ms. Hemmings probably wanted to talk about the divorce again, which Chloe didn’t mind when no one was watching. But not now. Not with her dad. Not in front of every kid in her class.
All that mattered to third graders at Chandler was who they hung out with at school and on weekends, and who they talked to at night about what had happened that day, on their cell phones or chatting on the Internet. And the most popular girls in third grade talked to Chloe all the time, no matter how much everyone saw her parents still fighting like total losers.
Summer Traver and Brooke Harper had been watching from the swings since the assistant principal called Chloe away. They were talking to each other now and laughing and kept looking over at Chloe like she was the joke.
“Can I go?” she asked again, putting more pleeaaaase into her smile up at her dad.
Without checking with Ms. Hemmings, he nodded, giving in, like he had a lot more since January.
She ran before he could change his mind.
A part of her felt bad for being such a brat. But she wasn’t going to help the AP or her dad with anything in the middle of recess. She didn’t care what Ms. Hemmings wanted, and she hoped her dad didn’t either. Maybe that was why he was acting so weird, like he was there but he really didn’t want to be.
All she cared about now were her friends and whether her parents stopped messing up, so her life would stop being so totally lame.
Calling Law in to school today wasn’t the safest play Kristen had ever made, but she’d seen it as a necessary risk. Only, standing there, watching the man watch his daughter rush away from them—his expression clouding with longing and doubt and a fierceness she couldn’t describe—she realized she’d underestimated the effect being this close to him would have on her.
Or had she?
She’d kept her distance for as long as she’d known the Beaumont family. For one thing, he’d been married. And she’d been far too attracted to him, regardless. When his troubles with Libby had come to a head, it had made Kristen even more determined to steer clear—no matter how much she hated seeing the fallout from their split backing up on Law and Chloe. But now that his divorce was final, it had become a bit of a private obsession, wondering if something could really happen between the two of them.
Law and Libby’s divorce had been one for the record books. Kristen hadn’t indulged in the gossip flying around about their floundering attempts to co-parent. Still, the more disturbing of the rumors about Law and Libby—mostly of Law, spread by Libby, that he was a heavy drinker and only pretended to care about his child, and had insisted on being awarded time with Chloe in the custody arrangement only to avoid paying more in child support—had been impossible to tune out.
More than once, Kristen had overheard Chloe’s mother, a fixture in the tight-knit group of PTA regulars at Chandler, ranting to the other moms. It didn’t seem to matter that her daughter and the other kids could often overhear every word. Libby and her friends actually seemed to prefer it that way.
Small towns like theirs could be enchanting, close-knit worlds, particularly to someone like Kristen. She’d grown up in a successful New England family that many had idealized. But her reality had been a much colder, lonelier place than friends and neighbors had known—that is, until everyone had learned every sordid detail of her life in the worst possible way. By then, the words friend and neighbor had ceased meaning anything to her, and all she’d wanted was to get out.
In contrast, in honest-to-God communities like Chandlerville, there really were loving, caring people who came together, wanting to make life better for one another in small and sometimes vast ways. The often-harsh reality of the outside world magically softened in towns like this, narrowing and hugging you close. Despite recent tragedy, the indomitable spirit still thriving in their suburb northeast of Atlanta had created the kind of home Kristen had dreamed of making hers, since she was Chloe’s age.
Chandlerville still had its faults, like everywhere else. It had been through its share of growing pains—most recently a school shooting at Chandler Elementary that Kristen was still reeling from, the same as everyone else. And even in idealistic small towns, there would always be people who looked out for themselves first—sacrificing whatever they needed of others’ happiness, in order to achieve their own. Libby Beaumon
t and her band of beautiful, seemingly well-intentioned, and dedicated mean moms certainly fit that bill.
Despite the rumors Libby had spread about her ex-husband, Kristen had always believed better of Law. Watching him be so deeply affected by his daughter’s discomfort at having him at school, she was convinced all over again that she was right.
Law might be a card-carrying bad boy. But he was no deadbeat dad who’d given up on his family without remorse, the way Libby portrayed him. And he was exactly the sort of man Kristen needed—to help her save Chandler’s latest lost boy. That was why she’d asked him to meet her, despite the fact that they’d never before today spoken one-on-one.
“I have a favor to ask.” She stretched her arm out a second time to the tallest, most naturally athletic-looking man she’d set eyes on since college. “I had hoped we could meet in my office this afternoon.”
“I’m working lunch at McC’s. So if you want me”—Law crossed his arms over his chest, his energy shifting from reserved to hostile, challenging her when she never backed down from a challenge—“this is how you get me.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d take him however she could get him. She swallowed the unwise comeback.
Watching Chloe rejoin her friends, Law looked like a father laying bets that his child might one day run from him for good. Then his storm-cloud blue eyes sliced to Kristen, and he sighed, the sound like the air escaping from a deflating balloon.
“I’m assuming this is about my daughter.” His hand engulfed hers, the size and warmth of his palm making her feel delicate and feminine—an alien but not altogether unpleasant sensation.
An answering rush of awareness warmed his expression. Kristen jerked her hand away, stunned by how hard it was to let go. She had a job to do here—a difficult one that this man would likely decline to help with.
This town and this school and her staff and students had grown to mean more to her than anywhere else she’d lived—even in college, when, as her success with basketball took off, she should have felt on top of the world. Chandlerville had become her family, not just another job. Doing right by the children entrusted to her care was more than work for her, or a paycheck or a step forward in her career—even if she was taking over the principal’s spot next school year. That responsibility was what this meeting was about, not her inconvenient physical reaction to Law.
Love on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 1
