Karen Templeton - A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father - A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father

His younger brother shook his head. “If he does, he’s probably on her side. You know how they always go on about wanting us to have what they’ve had. But it’s even worse for Silas, with the two boys and all. Why she can’t see he’s okay, I have no idea.”

“Okay, tell you what,” Eli said as Noah’s cell phone rang. “If the opportunity arises, I’ll broach the subject with Dad. Although like you say, they’re usually on the same side about everything, so don’t expect any miracles.”

Although, frankly, he thought as his brother answered the call, what he’d say to his father, he had no idea. Not that he’d wish his mother’s well-intentioned nagging—let alone Sally Perkins—on anybody, but the fact was Silas was anything but “okay.” Something about all the mornings he’d come in to do the accounts—late—looking like hell warmed over because one kid or the other had been up sick half the night, or just that frazzled look from trying to keep the several dozen plates he had going at any one time from all crashing down on his head.

The thing was, much as it killed Eli to admit it, Mom rarely meddled without cause. Good cause. And the second thing was, call him old-fashioned, but in this case maybe she was right, even if her modus operandi could use a little tweaking. Not that Eli didn’t know plenty of single parents who did a bang-up job of raising their kids on their own, but in his brother’s case, the strain was definitely showing.

Just like it was with Tess, he thought with a spurt of annoyance. And something like sympathy. Maybe that’s what was bugging him about her—the way she seemed so determined to show everybody how much she had her act together when it was patently obvious she was coming apart at the seams. To him, anyway. Oh, sure, if anybody could keep a hundred plates up in the air at once, it would be Tess, but that’d been one helluva meltdown she’d had that night. Pretty good indication things weren’t nearly as okay in Tessville as she wanted everyone to believe.

And why Eli cared, he had no idea. Proving to her he’d grown up was one thing. But this insane urge to take care of her? After what he’d been through? No damn way—

“Yo, Eli…where’d you go, guy?”

Took him a second for his brother’s face to come into focus.

“Just thinking about the bid I need to be working on,” Eli said, swallowing the last of his beer and getting to his feet.

“Bid? What bid?”

“Charley’s house is back on the market. Needs some updating. Dad’s busy, so I signed on.”

“No kidding? Fred and Gilly sellin’ the place on their own?”

“No. Tess Montoya’s the agent.”

Noah frowned. “Didn’t you used to—?”

“Shut up,” Eli grunted, his brother’s evil laugh following him as he wormed his way through the noisy crowd to get the hell out of there.

Kisses duly dispensed—how long, Tess wondered, before Miguel called a halt to that?—she sat in the drop-off zone in front of the elementary school, leaning farther and farther over to watch her little boy run off to join his classmates on the playground, until some doofus behind her leaned on his horn.

Okay, so maybe I’m just a smidgen overprotective, she thought as she pulled away, Julia singing one of her tuneless creations behind her. Tess suddenly had a vision of her baby with a nose ring and pink hair up on a stage somewhere surrounded by drugged-out rockers and nearly had a heart attack.

“Birdies, Mama! Look!” the little girl cried as they passed a naked ash tree studded with big, black, scary-looking crows. One of them cawed; Julia cawed right back, then giggled, and Tess relaxed, deciding she probably had a few years yet to worry about her daughter’s induction into the dark side. Right now, her major concern was getting the kid to her babysitter’s so Tess and Eli could trek to Home Depot to choose cabinets and paint and such.

Yeah, she was so looking forward to that. Sitting next to him in the confined space of somebody’s vehicle. For a half hour. Each way. Smelling him. Hearing him—

Please, God, just don’t let him chuckle, ’kay? Thanks.

It’d been a week since the Harrises approved Eli’s bid, bless their miserly souls, wrenching from Tess a promise she’d do an open house the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Never mind that open houses right before Christmas were pretty much nonstarters. Because people were, you know, doing Christmas shopping and putting up trees and wrapping presents and who the hell went house shopping in December?

Not that she used those exact words.

And anyway, these days grasping at straws was better than grasping at nothing. Maybe.

At least the demolition phase was moving along nicely. And quickly. Eli had found worker bees from God knew where—cousins and brothers and uncles of the guys who worked in the shop, she gathered—and lo and behold, the ’60s were vanishing right before her eyes. Now all the gutted kitchen needed was new cabinets and counters to make it all purdy—not to mention inhabitable—and they’d be good to go. But since the Harrises had entrusted Tess with all the design decisions—as in, as long as the project came in on time and under budget, they didn’t give a rat’s booty what it looked like—Eli insisted Tess go with him to help choose.

Hence her rumbly tummy.

She pulled up in front of the tidy little ranch-style house where Carmen Alvarado, Evangelista’s niece and Tess’s part-time babysitter, lived. One of her own toddlers straddling her hip, the smiling, slightly pudgy young woman opened her door, calling to Julia in Spanish before Tess had fully untangled her from her car seat. It wasn’t that the area locals couldn’t speak English—most of them did, as well or better than their gringo counterparts. But if English was a pair of dress shoes worn only in company, Spanish was that favorite pair of slippers you put on as soon as you got home.

Except for Tess, whose mother had refused to let her speak Spanish growing up, or even to take it in school, a quirk—the nicest word Tess could think of—that had always made Tess feel like part of her was missing.

Julia wriggled free as soon as the car door slammed shut, running up to her sitter, babbling about birds. “Vi parajos, Carmen! Muchos parajos! En arbol! ”

“ Usted hizo? Cool! Ahora dé a su mama un beso, sweetie!”

And wouldn’t that frost Julia’s grandmother? Tess thought as she and her daughter exchanged a dozen kisses before the little girl gleefully stomped up the few steps into the uber-babyproofed house filled with toys and dolls and books and healthy snacks…and no TV.

Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t think too hard about Carmen’s extraordinary child-care skills. “I should be back no later than two,” she said, and the young woman smiled.

“No problem. Since she takes her nap from one to three, take your time.”

As she was saying.

Twenty minutes later, some radio talk show— en espanol, natch—spilled through the half-open front door when Tess arrived at the house. Devoid of the rotting blue window trim, the house now looked like that old woman without any makeup at all, mouth and eyes agape in shock. Inside, the noise was as thick as the dust—bursts of laughter, the pow! pow! pow! of a nail gun, that radio show.

“Hello!” she yelled over the din, even as she took in the remarkable progress Eli and his elves had already made. Sure, it looked like a bomb had gone off, but you can’t re-do until you un -do. Not only that, but the pow-pow-powing was due to the brand-new shelving going into the living room, replacing the sorry, warped built-ins.