Harlequin Special Edition July 2013 - Bundle 2 of 2: The Widow of Conard CountyA Match for the Single DadThe Medic's Homecoming

by Rachel Lee

  She liked to believe she’d become an expert at hiding that response behind a breezy smile. “Good morning, Garrett. The music was especially nice today.”

  “I just play some chords,” he said with a little shrug. “Jay chooses the songs. But I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “I was just going to tell her about my birthday plans, Daddy,” Kix said, bouncing up and down on her white sandals. “I’m so excited!”

  Maggie smiled indulgently at the littlest McHale sister. As she almost always did, Kix wore her favorite pink, which clashed cheerfully with her flame-red hair but looked just right, somehow, on the adorable girl. “Sounds intriguing. What’s the plan, Kix?”

  “We’re coming here,” Kix almost shouted in reply. “For a whole week! Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Not quite a week,” her father corrected. “Monday afternoon through Sunday service.”

  Kix waved off those details as unimportant. “Daddy rented a cabin and we’re coming a week from tomorrow. My birthday is that Tuesday and we’re going to have a party in the cabin—and you can come! And Grammy and Meemaw are coming, too. And we’re going swimming and fishing and hiking and boating and Daddy’s going to take the whole week off work and we’ll make s’mores and—”

  “Kix,” her father interrupted firmly, “take a breath.”

  “I hadn’t heard you were coming,” Maggie said in the brief ensuing lull. She wondered why the information shook her a little. After all, she saw Garrett—er, the McHale family—every Sunday, so why did the thought of him—er, them—being here every day for almost a week throw off her usual equilibrium?

  “Kix just sprang this request on me last week,” Garrett admitted. “I was actually surprised a cabin was available on such short notice, especially considering it’s the Fourth of July week. I told Kix I couldn’t promise anything, but fortunately for us there was a late cancellation, so we were able to grab the reservation.”

  “I’m glad we could accommodate you,” Maggie said automatically, then glanced at Kix. “So you wanted to spend your birthday week here, so close to home?”

  “I wanted to go to the beach.” Payton looked and sounded utterly bored. “Like Padre Island or somewhere cool. But no, Kix had to come here where we come every single Sunday. Lame, huh?”

  “But, Payton— Ouch!”

  “Payton, did you just punch your sister?” Garrett demanded sternly.

  “No, Daddy,” Kix assured him, innocently wide-eyed as she not-so-surreptitiously rubbed her arm. “She just sort of bumped into me.”

  “There’s a bunch of geese swimming by the pier,” Payton said quickly. “Can I take Kix down to look at them?”

  He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Don’t get too close to the water. And we can’t stay long. I have things to do today.”

  “You can talk to Maggie while we look at the geese,” Payton told him before turning to dash toward the lake with her sister.

  Something in the teen’s voice made Maggie blink a couple of times. Surely Payton wasn’t trying her hand at matchmaking? But Garrett didn’t react, so she told herself she must have misunderstood. After all, why would Payton want yet another adult in her already oversupervised—according to her, at least—life?

  “How have you been, Maggie?” he asked politely when they were alone.

  “Fine, thank you,” she replied, equally cordial. “And you?”

  He shrugged. “Busy. But fine.”

  She knew that in addition to taking care of his daughters, his mother and his grandmother, Garrett taught flying lessons and piloted charter flights out of the small local airport. During the past few months, Payton and Kix had told her he’d left the military, in which he’d most recently served as a flight instructor at Laughlin Air Force Base, after the unexpected death a little more than a year ago of their mother, his ex-wife. He had moved back to this area to be closer to his mother and grandmother.

  Garrett and the girls’ mother had divorced when Kix was only a baby. They had shared custody afterward, though the girls had lived primarily with their mother. Their home with her had been in San Antonio, a three-hour drive from the base, so they’d seen their father on alternate weekends and holidays for the most part, which had meant a huge adjustment for all of them when he’d become solely responsible for them.

  In listening to the girls chatter about their lives, Maggie had gotten the impression that they had loved their mother but had spent as much time with nannies and babysitters as with her. “She was gone a lot,” Payton had said simply. “She was a lawyer, so she worked long hours and she had lots of professional clubs and parties and stuff she had to go to most evenings. She liked to hang out with her friends on weekends, because she said she worked so hard during the week that she needed down time.”

  Time away from her children, Maggie had interpreted in a knee-jerk reaction of disapproval she’d tried to suppress. She told herself she had no right to judge a woman she’d never even met based on perhaps-exaggerated stories from two children.

  “Maybe you need a vacation as much as the girls do,” she suggested to Garrett. “We’ll try to make sure you have a good time while you’re here.”

  She spoke, of course, as a representative of the resort. No personal messages intended.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She cleared her throat silently. Darn, but this man made her teeth tingle. How very inconvenient of him.

  “So, um, your grandmother is coming with you for the week?” she asked with a lift of her eyebrows.

  His smile turned rueful. “She is. She doesn’t want to be left out, even though she has given me an earful about how she’ll be spending six days in enemy territory.”

  Maggie couldn’t help laughing. Her grandmother, Dixie Bell, and his, Esther Lincoln, were lifelong rivals who saw each other as mortal enemies. It had begun back when they were in junior high competing for the attentions of the same boys, though Esther was a year ahead in school. The rivalry had continued when they participated in county-fair cooking contests after they’d married, competing for blue ribbons and each bitterly accusing the other of underhandedness.

  “I’m sure Mimi will be a gracious host,” she said, mentally crossing her fingers. “They probably won’t see each other much, anyway. Mimi’s usually in the offices or the store.”

  “I’ve already told Meemaw that she has to be polite while she’s here,” Garrett replied with a chuckle.

  She found it incredibly appealing to hear this serious-natured, somewhat stern-looking ex-military officer talk about his “Meemaw.” But then, she found entirely too much appealing about Garrett.

  He glanced at his watch. “I’d better collect the girls. I’ve got some appointments this afternoon. Nice to visit with you as always, Maggie. We’ll see you next Sunday morning.”

  “Actually, I’ll be out of town next weekend. I’m visiting my sister in Dallas to spend some time with her and the baby while her husband’s at a conference in Chicago. But I’ll be back Sunday evening, so I’ll be around if your family needs anything during your stay.”

  Garrett nodded, then looked at her with a bemused expression. “I have to admit Kix’s request to spend her birthday week here caught me by surprise. It seemed to come out of the blue. She said she didn’t even need another present, just the time here.”

  “Maybe she just wanted to spend a week with her family without the usual distractions at home,” she suggested.

  Garrett appeared skeptical. “According to her and Payton, they spend too much time with family as it is. Payton wanted to go to Padre Island for our vacation, but Kix was insistent on coming here, so Payton agreed since it’s Kix’s birthday.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “Yeah.” But she noted that Garrett still seemed perplexed by his daughters’ behavior when he bade her goodbye and walked away.

  She wished him luck dealing with two girls of that age. It was certainly more responsibility than she’d want to take on.


  * * *

  “Let’s go to the playground!” Kix hopped out of the SUV immediately upon arrival at the resort just after noon on the Monday of their vacation week. “C’mon, Payton, let’s see who can make it all the way across the monkey bars without falling.”

  “Whoa. Hold up there.” Garrett moved to stand in front of her. “We have a ton of stuff to carry inside, and you’re helping.”

  “Okay,” she said cheerfully enough, changing course to head for the back of the vehicle. “We can go to the playground later.”

  “Don’t you be running off without permission or supervision,” Garrett’s mom fussed to Kix. Sixty-year-old Paulette Lincoln McHale was medium height, broad-shouldered and hipped, with crisp gray hair and strong features. Yet despite her sturdy, rather imposing appearance, she was a compulsive worrier who tended to hover over the girls. “There are strangers in the campgrounds and the motel and the other cabins. One of us adults will need to go with you when you wander around the resort, you hear?”

  Garrett watched as his daughters swapped exasperated looks and heaved long-suffering sighs before loading their arms with bags to carry inside the cabin.

  Eighty-one-year-old Esther Lincoln, known in the family as Meemaw, was stronger than her daughter emotionally, though her body was going frail. Her hair was a cap of bright white curls around her soft face. Her shoulders were stooped and she relied on a walker to steady her gait, but her fiery spirit was undimmed. “Let the girls have some fun, Paulette. They’re not going to run wild around the place, and they know to be careful.”

  “You can’t be too careful these days,” Garrett’s mother retorted darkly.

  Garrett juggled two suitcases and a bag of groceries he’d removed from the well-packed vehicle. “Let’s just take the stuff inside and then we’ll make plans.”

  Though it bore the number six, the cabin to which they’d been assigned sat in the center of five lakeside rentals numbered four through eight. The cabins ranged in size from the little one-bedroom A-frames at each end of the row to the four-bedroom cottage where Garrett’s family would spend the next six days. A long, welcoming front porch held rockers and a swing. Inside, the living area, kitchen and dining nook made up the open central floor plan. There was a separate bedroom for each adult and a sleeping loft for the girls to share. A big back deck furnished with wrought-iron tables and chairs invited guests to sit and admire the lake.

  Kix looked forward to gathering around the fire pit in the evening to roast hot dogs and marshmallows, both of which Garrett had brought along. Between the groceries he’d purchased and the home-cooked goodies his mother and grandmother had insisted on preparing and bringing along, they probably had enough food for at least twice as many days as he’d booked for their stay.

  He insisted the girls help put everything away before they played. He’d already launched the boat he’d towed behind the SUV, secured it into a slip he’d rented for the week and parked the trailer in the provided lot near the marina. The lot had been crowded; even this early in the holiday week, business was brisk at the resort.

  He’d owned the fish-and-ski boat for several years. The girls always liked going out in it, one of the few things they seemed to enjoy doing with him these days. When their mother was alive, he’d spent many of his custody weekends taking them boating on waters near the base. They hadn’t considered him quite so lame back then, he thought regretfully. Probably due to a combination of them being younger and seeing him more rarely, making him less of a constant authority figure to be rebelled against.

  Breanne had been more indulgent with them, spoiling them with material possessions to assuage her guilt for spending so little time with them. She hadn’t been a bad mother, just a distracted one. Breanne had been easily bored. Most especially with him.

  Shaking off thoughts of his late ex-wife—and what had brought her to mind, anyway?—he nodded in approval when the girls reported that their things were all stowed away upstairs.

  “Okay, what’s on the agenda?” he asked, having promised to leave the activities for the week to them—within reason.

  Kix bounced around him. “We want to go out in the boat and have milk shakes at the diner and hike through the resort and play board games and cook hot dogs and—”

  “Breathe, Kix.”

  She giggled.

  “Let’s go find Maggie and see if she wants to go out in the boat with us,” Payton suggested.

  Both the girls had expressed disappointment that they hadn’t yet seen Maggie. A resort employee introducing herself as Rosie had checked them in at the main desk, and Maggie’s uncle, C. J. Bell, had assisted with the boat launch and slip parking at the marina. They had seen a few other faces familiar from Sunday services and Saturday boating-and-swimming visits to the resort, but there’d been no sight of Maggie.

  “Maggie is working now,” he told his daughters firmly. “Remember you both promised not to bother her.”

  Kix frowned in dissatisfaction. “She owns the resort. Can’t she take off when she wants to?”

  “Her family owns the resort, and Maggie takes her responsibilities seriously,” he chided. “Just as you can’t ditch school whenever you want, Maggie can’t just stop her work.”

  “Let’s go for a walk down by the water,” Garrett’s mother suggested. “I think I saw some ducks.”

  Kix was already moving toward the door. “They’re geese, Grammy. Canada geese. There’s a whole flock of them who live here.”

  “It’s a gaggle, not a flock,” Payton corrected her, heading more slowly toward the back door.

  “Y’all go on for your walk, I’m going to sit here and rest awhile,” Garrett’s grandmother announced, lowering herself into an armchair. “Garrett, honey, hand me my yarn bag, please. Payton, sweetie, be a lamb and fetch Meemaw a bottle of that strawberry-flavored water we brought along.”

  Because the chair looked comfortable and faced a nice view of the lake, Garrett figured his grandmother had found her roost for the duration of the vacation. She would be perfectly content to sit right there and be waited on hand and foot for the next five and a half days, though he and his mother would nag her into getting at least a minimum of exercise, as her doctors recommended.

  “Are you coming with us on our walk, Daddy?” Kix asked from the back door.

  “I’m going out to make sure we got everything from the car. I’ll catch up with you in a little while.”

  “Tie your shoelaces, Kix,” he heard his mother say before the door closed behind the trio. “You’ll trip over them if they’re loose.”

  A green utility golf cart emblazoned with the resort logo pulled into the driveway behind Garrett’s vehicle just as he was checking the door locks. He smiled when he saw Maggie at the wheel. Her thick, sun-streaked brown hair, a little tousled from the drive in the open cart, fell loose to her shoulders, framing her pretty face. She wore a short-sleeved lavender top with a deep scoop neck that just flirted with a tasteful hint of cleavage. Jeans and brown leather wedge-heeled sandals completed her casual outfit. She seemed to favor wedge heels, and he had to admit they did great things for her long legs. As she slid out of the cart, Garrett wondered how she managed to look so sleek and put-together even in casual clothing suitable for her work.

  “Hi, Garrett. Are you all settled in?” she asked, leaning against the front of the cart. “Is there anything you need?”

  He’d heard some say that Maggie’s older sister, Hannah, was the beauty of the Bell family with her dark hair and emerald eyes and near-perfect features. He’d met Hannah a couple of times and agreed that she was lovely. But there was something about Maggie, with her clear hazel eyes and not-quite-so-perfect face, her pleasant smiles and friendly manner. She radiated competence and efficiency, projecting a quiet calmness in the middle of occasional chaos. With his own life so often in uproar, he appreciated the serenity that seemed to surround Maggie.

  She was too young for him, of course—at least a decade younger—though
he had to remind himself of that fact often when he was with her. Of course he was attracted to her—what red-blooded single man wouldn’t be?—but he had no intention of doing anything about it. He doubted that a woman her age would be interested in an older man with his heavy responsibilities. Especially a man who’d been divorced by his wife because she found him too boring to make their relationship worth the effort required.

  He didn’t think of himself as boring, but he could understand how his enhanced sense of duty—to his family, his job, his country—made him less appealing to someone who thrived on spontaneity and self-indulgence. Not that Maggie seemed to be that type, but being young, pretty and single, she was certainly free to live on impulse if she wanted. Unlike himself.

  “We don’t need anything, but thanks for asking.” He patted the closed tailgate of his SUV. “I’m pretty sure my family would have brought along everything they own if I hadn’t set limits. You wouldn’t believe how full this thing was, especially considering we’re less than fifteen miles from home.”

  She laughed. “I never mastered the art of packing light. My dad used to fuss whenever we loaded the car to go anywhere.”

  Leaning back against his vehicle, he crossed his arms casually over his chest. “So where do resort owners go for vacation?”

  She smiled ruefully. “Mostly we went to visit family in Shreveport and Tulsa. A few times we drove down to Galveston to stay in a beach cabin, and once we went to the mountains in Colorado. With a family-owned business, it isn’t easy to get away for vacations. We had to trade off weeks with my uncle’s family, usually during off-season here at the resort.”

  During the past months, Garrett had learned that the Bell Resort and Marina had been founded by Maggie’s grandparents, Carl and Dixie Bell, on land previously owned by Carl’s parents. Carl and Dixie’s sons, Carl Jr. and Bryan, along with their wives, Sarah and Linda, had worked alongside their parents to build the resort into a successful vacation destination. Each member of the family had taken on a particular area of operation according to his or her personal interests. Carl Jr. ran the marina, his wife worked the grill, Bryan was responsible for grounds and maintenance and Linda ran the convenience store. Full-time and part-time employees were hired from outside to work the check-in desk, man the front gate and assist in other areas as needed.