No Place Like Home (23 page)

“
I didn’t go back to Graham,” she said.

There was the briefest possible instant of silence. “Why? Didn’t he like your explanation?”

“
I gave him his ring back that day.”

“
Of course you did,” he agreed. “A girl
always
gives a man’s ring back and then throws her arms around him and kisses him goodbye.

“
I don’t know about other girls,” she said. “But that’s exactly what I did.”

“
And what happened to make you change your mind?”

She swallowed hard, and then she said, very quietly, “You happened, Brendan.”

He looked down at her with the coldness of pain still in his eyes, and Kaye knew that the rest of their lives might well depend on what she said next.

“
I’ve had a taste of living now,” she said. “You’ve showed me that today is the only thing I can count on, that it’s fine to plan for the future, but we have to live today.”

He hadn’t moved. She swallowed hard and went on, feeling as if she was fighting for her life. “I love you, don’t you see? If I can’t have you, then today isn’t worth much, and there’s no hope at all for tomorrow. I want to spend my todays with you, Brendan. All of my todays.”

Still, he didn’t speak, and she felt sanity slipping away from her.
It can’t be too late,
she thought frantically.
But what can I say, what can I do to make him believe?

She said, softly, “Graham will be disappointed if you don’t make an honest woman of me, Brendan. He said I’d need all the help I can get, married to you, so he promised me a case of baby food as a gift for each of our children.” The tightness in her throat grew. “He guessed how I felt about you. And it was such a grand gesture, coming from him, that I just had to hug him.”

“
Damn Graham Forrest,” Brendan said, “We’ll buy our own baby food, Kaye.”

She flung herself into his arms with a glad little sob, and he kissed her hard, like a man granted a reprieve at the very foot of the gallows steps.
My God,
she thought,
how close we’ve come to disaster because we were afraid to admit the truth—afraid that we’d look like fools!

“
I won’t lie to you, Kaye. I don’t have Graham’s resources, and the first thing you learn when you go into the real estate business is not to count your money till it’s in your hand. Commissions sometimes vanish into the mist.”

“
Like when clients decide not to get married after all?” What a delicious trembling feeling it was, to be free to tease him again! “Which reminds me, how are we going to pay for the car?”

“
It’s paid for. You can’t still think that I planned to buy it with Graham’s money.”

“
A good thing you didn’t,” she said.

“
It tends to be a feast-or-famine kind of living. But I swear we’ll always have jam, as well as bread and butter.”

Did the man remember everything she had ever said to him?, Kaye wondered, and made a fresh resolve to never attempt to hide the truth from him again. “You’re all the jam I need,” she said, and he pulled her close again. “Tell the truth, Brendan,” she went on. “Were you really trying as hard as you could to find a house for me?”

He laughed a little. “Cross my heart, my love, I worked the hardest for you that I’ve ever done.”

“
Really?” She was vaguely disappointed.

“
Yes. Keeping you from liking some of those houses was the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced.”

She uttered a furious little cry.

He said, “Would you rather I’d have sold you the one in Henderson Heights? I could have. Graham could have been persuaded to buy it.”

“
I would never have forgiven you.” She put her head down on his shoulder and decided that she’d rather not move ever again.

But there was something about Nora’s kitchen that nagged at the corners of her mind, and finally, she could stand it no more. “There is a broom and a garbage can in here,” she pointed out.

“
That’s right. Bright girl, aren’t you?”

“
Why are you cleaning up the fallen plaster in Nora’s kitchen?”

“
Because it kept my hands busy and prevented me from setting the damned thing on fire.”

His hands were plenty busy now, she thought, and sighed in pleasure at the sensation of strong fingers sliding up under her jacket to massage her spine. “Arson doesn’t sound like you,” she said carefully. “Why would you want to burn this house?”

“
Because, regardless of what you think of me, I don’t always just think of today. And all I could see ahead of me was a succession of endless years alone, of walking through these rooms and seeing you in every corner, in every beam of light.” His arms tightened around her. “You see, I couldn’t think of a better way to show you that I was deadly serious about you—so I bought your house the morning after we came back from Nassau.”

“
That was pretty crazy,” she pointed out gently. It was all she could do to keep from screaming out the gladness in her heart.

“
I know it was crazy, but I didn’t come to my senses until after I’d signed the papers. Then I saw you with Graham and all I could think of was how glad I was that you would never share it with him. But today ... well, today it all seemed like a little too much.”

“
Any house would have done, Brendan. Home isn’t a place.”

“
Nevertheless, I now own a house. The bank was so anxious to get rid of it that they rushed the paperwork through in record time. So if you’ve decided you don’t like this house after all, then I don’t know what we’re going to do, because no one else on the face of the earth wants it.”

“
There’s always arson,” she said. “But that wouldn’t make Nora very happy.”

“
Besides, I’d still have the mortgage hanging over my head.”

“
Our heads,” she corrected. “And as long as we’re talking about Nora… Shall we ask her to come and live with us?”

He pushed a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear and looked down at her with deadly seriousness in his eyes. “Kaye, are you sure this is what you want?”

“
Not this,” she corrected. “
You.
Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing. That’s everything I want.”

His arms tightened around her, and Kaye knew, with a deep conviction that she could feel all the way to her toes, that this was right. This was where she belonged.

She looked up at him with a half-teasing glint in her eyes. “Hi, honey,” she said, very softly. “I’m home.”

A Word from the Author

No Place Like Home
was the first book I wrote in the McKenna Family series. Though I didn’t imagine it that way from the very beginning, no sooner did I “meet” Brendan McKenna than I knew this guy was part of a big family, all of whom were just as charming, determined, lovable, and wildly attractive as he was. So – even though I didn’t know anything about the family when I started writing this book beyond the name of one of his siblings, I found myself adding a few hints here and there about the McKenna family... like, his mother is a poet and a bit fey, and there’s a teddy bear riding around in his car which belongs to a niece who lives in Wisconsin, and his sister Anne is the youngest and the only girl.

A year after
No Place Like Home
, when I added Patrick McKenna to the clan in
A Matter of Principal
, I already had these parameters set for the family and so I had to live by them. (Though I wrote
A Matter of Principal
second, the events of that story actually happened before the ones in
No Place Like Home
– it’s Susan’s teddy bear which was forgotten in Brendan’s car.) And of course that book added more dimensions to the family because it happened in the McKennas’ hometown of Lakemont, Wisconsin. Grandma Nell came on the scene, along with little brother Colin, and dad Dennis and his fixation with trying to grow grass around the family’s Victorian house.

Though I loved the McKennas, I was having trouble keeping them all straight, and writing other books in between didn’t help matters much. So when Anne McKenna demanded her own story with
Garrett’s Back In Town
, I went back to the beginning. I read and outlined the two previous books, noting every detail about each character in a spiral notebook grandly titled The McKenna Files – so I wouldn’t trip myself up by changing someone’s hair color (or worse, personality).

Another year, another McKenna story – this one,
The Unexpected Landlord
, when Rowan McKenna came on the scene. This time I returned to Henderson, Illinois, the setting of
No Place Like Home
, and Kaye wanders in with her brand-new baby.

And then almost two years went by. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write another McKenna story, but knowing it would be the last one made me sad. It had to be a very special story, and it had to incorporate all the other characters – without letting them take over the story – in order to be a fitting end to the McKennas’ saga. (Why, oh why, I asked myself, had I said right up front that Brendan McKenna had exactly four siblings? Why not six? Eight? More?)

But ultimately, Rachel Todd – the perfect counterpart for the last remaining McKenna, Colin – turned up. Everybody in the family got involved in matchmaking, driving Colin and Rachel to pretend they were dating each other just so everyone would leave them alone, and with
Dating Games
the series was complete.

At the end of that book, the score stands at four successful McKenna marriages and one engagement; one little girl, two toddlers, and two babies on the way; three old houses and one certifiable mansion; and a couple of airplanes, a newspaper, and a bank in the family.

And an author with a very large spiral notebook to keep it all straight.

Because maybe someday there’s going to be a McKenna cousin whose story needs to be told.

–
Leigh Michaels

This book is copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced without written permission.

Leigh Michaels
is the author of more than 90 books, including 80 contemporary romance novels and non-fiction books including
On Writing Romance.
She also writes single-title historical romance set in Regency England. Six of her books have been finalists in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest for best traditional romance of the year, and she has won two Reviewers’ Choice awards from Romantic Times magazine. More than 30 million copies of her books have been published in 25 languages and 120 countries around the world. Her website is
www.leighmichaels.com