M. Stelmack - A Roof Over Their Heads

She can’t have the man she loves...if it means losing her child!

Alexi Docker’s a widow trying to adopt the child she and her husband had taken in. Except her new rental home turns out to be a disaster reno...and she, now single, has to prove she can give the boy everything he needs. That includes a roof over his head, four walls and running water! If not for the absentee landlady’s cranky recluse of a brother, she wouldn’t have been able to cope. But now Alexi has to choose between a man she’s growing to love and the boy she needs to adopt...because Seth Greene has a past that could ruin the adoption process.

M. K. STELMACK writes contemporary romances set in Spirit Lake, which is closely based on the small town in Alberta, Canada, where she lives with pets who outnumber the humans two to one and with dust bunnies the size of rodents—because that’s what happens when everyone in the household prefers to live in their imagination or outdoors—but she can also be found on social media, where you can share your comments on her stories or her breathless one-sentence bio on Facebook or at mkstelmackauthor.com.

A Roof Over Their Heads

M. K. Stelmack

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08091-0

A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS

© 2018 S. M. Stelmack

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Her hand was suddenly in his hand. He held her fingers in his tight, full grip.

This was nothing like his handshake. This was the hold of a man who felt her pain and wanted to bring her through it. “I’ll do it,” he said, his voice raw. “I’ll help. Just—just don’t beg me. I don’t want you thinking that I’m anybody other than a guy with a hammer.”

What a strange thing to say. Anybody could see he was more than that. He cleared his throat. “Besides which, Matt’s a good kid. You don’t have anything to give me, but Matt—well, you’re the only one who can give him what he needs.”

For a solid year, she’d had to prove that to teachers, adoption caseworkers, neighbors, the police. And on the worst nights, she’d lain curled on her side of the bed, knees to chin, with only the light from the phone, wondering if maybe she was wrong. To hear it now from a man who hardly spoke and when he did, it wasn’t ever complimentary... She squeezed his hand back.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

He nodded once, released her hand and crossed to the stairs. “Hey,” he called to Matt, “let me show you how to make a knot that lasts.”

Dear Reader,

Thirteen years ago, my family moved to the house in the town where we still live and which has become the focus of my fictional town, Spirit Lake. Since moving here, the town has stretched, popped up a Walmart, Canadian Tire, Sobeys and—oh, the golden standard of an Albertan town having made it big!—a Tim Horton’s.

Tim Horton’s is wholly Canadian, our blue-collar alternative to Starbucks. Actually, that partly describes this story: a blue-collar Canadian romance about finding family. It stars a woman struggling to hold her family together and a man struggling to not surrender to yet another lost cause. The glue that sticks them together is a boy who longs for a father and for his grieving heart to heal.

Serious stuff, but everyone who’s read it so far has had plenty of LOL moments. Because that’s life, right? In telling this story, I had the pleasure of introducing the hero’s siblings, whose stories will appear later this year.

To peek at what’s happening with them, you are welcome to come to my website, mkstelmackauthor.com. You can also find me on Facebook at M. K. Stelmack.

M. K. Stelmack

In Memoriam

To Sheila.

I wish you were here to read your sister’s story of love and hope—your favorite kind.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Angela Spiller, who drew from her own experiences to share the emotional and bureaucratic journey of adoption, of cobbling together strangers, needing and worthy, into a family. Thanks also to Mark Matheson at the Red Deer office of community corrections for providing insight into how community service would look like for my hero.

Thanks to my editor, Victoria Curran, who gave my life a Point of No Return, and to Astrid Theilgaard, my tried-and-true critique partner.

With this book, I’ve gained a tribe in the form of the Heartwarming Sisters, who have filled me with the conviction that our stories matter.

May I dwell long among them.

And to the Holy Spirit, who daily drags me through my character arc, abiding and chiding through my every kick and complaint.

I am blessed.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dear Reader

Dedication

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

Extract

CHAPTER ONE

SWEAT WAS A thin glue coated on Alexi Docker, sticking her T-shirt to the driver’s seat and her hot jeans to her legs, the slimy by-product of four hours on the road with no air-conditioning and a tire change in a highway ditch.

She crawled the van with the U-Haul trailer to a stop in front of the new home, and turned to her four kids in the back seats. “So, what do you think?”

Please, please like it. Or, at least, don’t hate it.

While three-year-old Callie, behind the front passenger seat, kept her brown eyes fixed on Alexi, the other three kids regarded the white split-level and attached garage with a kind of hopeful hesitancy, as if waiting for someone to throw open the front door and boom out a welcome.