Victoria Pade - It Takes a Family

The sight of her there, cuddled against his chest, her long lashes resting on her chubby cheeks, cracked the wall he’d erected around his heart. And suddenly he was flooded with memories.

He clamped his eyes shut, fighting the emotions, the images of Amy at that moment, the images of them both at different intervals in the future, that horrible hope that he didn’t want to have.

She isn’t mine…. She isn’t mine…. She isn’t mine….

He took a deep breath and returned Amy to her crib, relieved that she remained asleep as he covered her.

But there was another moment when he couldn’t make himself move away from her bed. When he stood there watching her sleep.

When, just for that one moment, he couldn’t help wondering, what if?

What if she was his…?

Dear Reader,

It struck me a while ago that in a lot of families there’s someone who does most of the cleanups—and not just the ones that involve dirty dishes after holiday meals. Someone who is always there to lend a helping hand.

That started me thinking, what if? (That is always where the books come from.) And this time I began to think, what if the responsible person had some really, really big life-altering catastrophe to clean up after? What if it had managed to completely rock her own world, to the point of losing everything? And what if, with no one to turn to, she was left in such a bind that she had to turn to a stranger? A stranger who had had to do some cleanup of his own because of that very same mess-maker?

That’s where this story was born. And since my little town of Northbridge, Montana, seemed like a good place to take a life that needed starting over, that’s where we are in It Takes a Family.

I hope you’re as glad to be back as I am.

Happy reading!

Victoria Pade

www.millsandboon.co.uk

is a native of Colorado, where she continues to live and work. Her passion—besides writing—is chocolate, which she indulges in frequently and in every form. She loves romance novels and romantic movies—the more lighthearted, the better—but she likes a good, juicy mystery now and then, too.

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

“Okay, sweetheart, we made it. We’re here,” Karis Pratt said.

There was no response from the back seat and Karis glanced over her shoulder at the fifteen-month-old baby girl buckled into a child carrier behind her and to her right.

It was late for Amy to be awake and Karis wouldn’t have been surprised to find her niece asleep. But instead Amy was peering out the side window, her two middle fingers in her mouth, kicking her feet up and down the way she did when she was tired.

There was absolutely nothing about the scene that should have brought tears to Karis’s eyes, but there they were anyway. Hot and stinging.

She blinked hard and swallowed to keep them from falling.

“You don’t know how much I don’t want to do this,” she told her niece. “How much I don’t want to do either of the things I’ve come here for. If there was anything else I could do—”

Karis’s voice cracked and she paused to clear her throat, to fight for some control.

When she had a semblance of it, she sighed and said, “But there isn’t. And there’s nothing else I haven’t already done, or we wouldn’t be here.”

Here, in the middle of a snowstorm that had made visibility so slight they’d been driving for the past two hours at a snail’s crawl to the place Karis’s sister had called a “one-horse town, hick hole-in-the-wall.”

Northbridge, Montana.

It was after nine o’clock on the last Friday of October and Karis hadn’t intended to arrive so late. If she was going to show up on someone’s doorstep, she thought it should probably have happened earlier in the day or evening. But she couldn’t turn back time and she also couldn’t risk keeping Amy with her overnight. Not when she was going to have to sleep in the car. So she resigned herself to get started on what she was dreading and unbuckled her own seat belt.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, unsure whether the reassurance was for herself or her niece. “This is for the best.”

Karis got out of the compact sedan and peered through the snow at the red brick house she was parked in front of. It was a moderate-sized two-and-a-half-story structure with a covered front porch and big black numbers running vertically alongside the door, letting her know she had the right address. The address she’d used to answer the sole letter her sister had sent when Lea had lived here.

Karis was glad to see the buttery glow of light in the curtained front window. Hopefully that meant the man her sister had been married to for barely ten months was inside and she wouldn’t be taking Amy into this cold for no reason.

She pulled her own coat close around her, smoothed her chin-length auburn hair behind her ears and went around the car.

Amy raised big, trusting blue eyes to Karis the moment the door opened and Karis felt her heart clench.

How am I going to do this…?

But just then a frigid gust of wind hit her from behind and once more the thought of spending the night in the car was all the motivation she needed. She ducked inside, pulled up the hood on Amy’s coat to cover her short reddish-brown curls and to keep her tiny ears warm. Then she unfastened the seat from its moorings, and took out baby and carrier.

Karis didn’t hesitate to rush for the house then. To climb the four steps to the porch. To ring the bell.

While she waited, she bent over and kissed Amy’s forehead and again said, “It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.”

The door opened a moment later and Karis straightened, peering through the screen at the man who stood there. Tall, broad shouldered, imposing—that was about all she could make out with the light coming from behind him.

“I’m looking for Luke Walker,” she said.

“That’s me,” he answered with curiosity in his tone.

“I know you don’t know me…”

How could he when they’d never met? But she was loath to tell him who she was. For Karis this entire trip and the two ugly errands she had to do were just added humiliations heaped on a whole pile of them that had made up the nightmare she’d found herself in the past several weeks.

But with Amy in mind, she shored up her courage and said, “I’m Karis Pratt. Lea’s sister.”

His first response was to reach for the edge of the door he’d just opened, as if he were going to slam it in her face.

But he didn’t. Instead he kept his hand on it as his head dropped enough so, even though Karis couldn’t see his eyes, she knew he’d looked down at the baby carrier she held in front of her with both hands.

He muttered an epithet under his breath that certainly wasn’t welcoming, and then pushed open the screen door.

“Come in out of the cold,” he commanded, as begrudging an invitation as she’d ever received.

But Karis was in no position to be particular about the amenities. She took Amy into the warmth of the entryway, moving far enough to the side of the door for Luke Walker to close it.