Levi swallowed his smile. “Got it.”
She started down the steps, only to turn around before she reached her car, a dinged-up Toyota RAV4 with a small American flag hanging limply from the antenna. “If you do a crap job on my porch? There will be hell to pay.”
“Fair enough.”
With a nod, she finished the short walk to her car, stripping out of the hoodie before getting in. And Levi couldn’t help noticing how the sunlight kissed her hair, her slender shoulders...the shoulders, he knew, that had borne far more burdens than they should have. Not only recently, but before, when they were still in school and he’d hear the sniggering. Like it was somehow Val’s fault her mother was the way she was, that her father had left them high and dry when she was a little kid.
No, he thought as she backed out of the drive, took off, he didn’t imagine trusting had ever come easy to Valerie Oswald. With damn good reason. By comparison he and Tomas had led charmed lives, with parents who loved them, were there for them, even if Levi’s had sometimes been a little more there than he might’ve liked. But it hadn’t been like that for Val, who must’ve figured it was simply easier to keep to herself than to either live a lie or apologize for her mother. Which naturally led everyone to think she was either stuck-up or weird.
Almost everyone, anyway, Levi thought, as he yanked a large toolbox out of the truck, grabbed a crowbar to start prying up the rotten floorboards. So how could the girl who’d worked so hard to overcome her past not look at Levi without being reminded of what she’d lost?
Clearly Tommy hadn’t thought that part of his plan through.
With a grunt, he wrenched up the first board and tossed it out into the yard, chuckling when the dumb dog first scampered back, then growled at the board like it was a snake.
Which pretty much said it all, didn’t it?
Copyright © 2016 by Karen Templeton-Berger
ISBN-13: 9781488002236
Dr. Forget-Me-Not
Copyright © 2016 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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Dr. Forget-Me-Not (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 19
