The Sweetheart Bargain (A Sweetheart Sisters Novel) (41 page)

“Oooh, do we have a new letter to answer?” Esther asked. “Because it was such fun to see this one come true.”

Greta hadn’t told the girls that the letter that had started all of this hadn’t been written by Olivia after all. Greta had asked her about it last week when Olivia came in to Golden Years, with a rock on her finger and a smile on her lips. Either way, the letter had been sweet serendipity. Maybe even a little gift from her daddy up in heaven or the Big Guy himself.

“I’ve got a new letter right here.” Pauline dug in the pocket of her sweater and unfolded a white sheet of paper. She got out her reading glasses and put them on her nose to see better in the dim light. “Dear Common Sense Carla, I’m a single dad with two kids who needs to—”

“May I have this dance?”

Greta whirled toward the interruption. Harold Twohig stood in front of Greta’s chair, one hand out, like a beggar needing a quarter. Her six-foot-two nemesis, though he didn’t look much like a nemesis tonight. Especially fully clothed. She blinked, sure she was seeing a mirage. “You own a
suit
?”

Harold tugged at his cranberry tie, then smoothed a hand down his dark-gray jacket. Some women might have said he looked handsome, dapper even. Though Greta wouldn’t admit that to a single soul.

“I thought I’d dress up for the Sweetheart Dance. Because I might like to ask a sweetheart to dance.” He gave her a wink.

Pauline nudged Greta. “He means you,” she whispered.

“He’s drunk,” Greta whispered back. “Or senile. Or both.”

“I’m sober as a judge, Greta Winslow, and though I have my moments when I forget where I put my keys, I’ve also got all my marbles.” He knocked on his thick head of white hair, then put out his hand again. “So, may I have this dance?”

She hesitated, then glanced at Luke and Olivia, who were watching her with approving grins on their faces. They waved encouragement and pointed to a vacant spot on the dance floor near them. Only for her grandson would she subject herself to this torture.

Greta let out a long-suffering sigh, took Harold’s hand—surprisingly, it wasn’t sweaty or covered in eczema—and headed for the dance floor. As Harold put one hand on the small of her back and took her other in his hearty palm, she heard a gasp go through the crowd. “It’s just a dance,” Greta said to the nosy old biddies already talking about her and Harold, “not a truce.”

“Why do you hate me so?” Harold asked.

She refused to answer the question, instead sidestepping them closer to her grandson and his wife-to-be. “What on earth made you ask me to dance?”

If he was put off by her sharp tone, Harold didn’t show it. He just gave her that patient-as-a-loony-monk smile of his. “I’m just following the advice I read in Common Sense Carla last week. She advised grabbing the bull by the horns and going after the woman you love. She said not to let anything stand in your way. Not even a little revulsion.”

Greta shot a glance over her shoulder at Pauline and Esther, who were sitting on the opposite side of the room, thick as thieves and laughing like hyenas.

Luke leaned in toward Greta. “I hear you’re not the only one with a little matchmaking ability, Grandma,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not, he’s not—” Greta cursed. She hated being flustered. And with Harold Twohig, of all people. “I have no interest in this man. At all.”

“That’s what I said,” Olivia said with a smile, then flashed her left hand. “And look where I am now.”

“You never know where or when your happy ending is going to find you, Greta,” Harold said, leaning in close enough to kiss. Or clobber. “So you might as well let it—”

“Drag me away, kicking and screaming?”

Harold winked. “If that’s what it takes, Greta Winslow, I’m your man.”

Lord, have mercy
, Greta thought. Or maybe the Lord was having a little laugh at her expense. She never should have stolen Esther’s thread. She’d put an extra dollar in the collection plate this week. Maybe two.

She whirled out of Harold Twohig’s arms before the man got the idea that she did anything other than despise him. Luke and Olivia chuckled and kept on dancing.

That was the kind of happy ending Greta liked best. One that left Harold Twohig sputtering and alone, and her free as a bird and heading for the cookies.

With a little detour first to the punch bowl.

Turn the page for a preview of the next book in Shirley Jump’s Sweetheart Sisters series

The Sweetheart Rules

Coming in February 2014 from Berkley Sensation

One toddler meltdown in the center of Walmart and Lieutenant Mike Stark, who had battled raging winter storms in the violent, mercurial Bering Sea to pluck stranded boaters from the ocean’s grip, had to admit he was in over his head. Mike stood between a display of As-Seen-on-TV fruit dehydrators and a cardboard mock-up of a NASCAR driver hawking shaving lather and watched his own child dissolve into a screaming, sobbing, fist-pounding puddle of tantrum.

“I want it now!” Ellie punched the scuffed tile floor and added a couple of kicks for good measure. “Now, Daddy. Now, now, now!”

Mike looked over at Jenny and gave her a help-me smile. “Do something. Please.”

Jenny shrugged and turned toward the shaving cream. “This is your department, dude.”

When did his oldest daughter get so cold and distant? For God’s sake, she was eight, not eighteen. On the outside she was all kid, wearing a lime-green cartoon character tank top and ragged tan shorts, her dark brown hair in a long ponytail secured with a thick pink elastic. Ellie had opted for denim shorts and a
Sesame Street
T-shirt that made her look cute and endearing.

Except when she was pitching a fit.

A mother at the other end of the aisle, whose toddler son sat prim and polite in the child seat of her cart, shot him a look of disapproval. Then she whipped the cart around the corner. Fast. As if tantrums were contagious.

“Give it
to me
!” Ellie’s voice became a high-pitched siren, spiraling upward in range and earsplitting. “Now!”

“No, Ellie,” he said, aiming for patient, stern, confident. The kinds of tones the parenting books recommended. Not that he’d read a parenting book. His education about how to be a father was mostly the drive-by kind—meaning once in a while he skimmed the forty-point headlines on
Parenting
magazine. “I told you—”

“I don’t care! I want it! I want it! Buy it, Daddy.
Please!
”

Across from him, Jenny shot a look of disdain over her shoulder, then went back to mulling over men’s shaving lather. Clearly she wasn’t going to be any help.

Not that Mike could blame her. On a good day, Ellie was a category five hurricane. When she was tired and hungry and in desperate need of the third new stuffed animal of the week, she was a three-foot-tall nuclear explosion in Keds. One most people ran from, but Mike, being the dad, was supposed to step in to
deal with
.

The trouble? He had no idea how to handle his daughter. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen his kids since they started walking and talking. It wasn’t something he was proud of, and on the long list of regrets Mike Stark had for the way he had lived his life up till now, being a sucky father topped the list.

Now he had thirty days to change that, and if he was smart, he’d start by laying down the law, being the stern parental figure who didn’t put up with this temper tantrum crap. Yeah, take a stand, be a man, set an exam—

“Daddy! Please!” Ellie’s raging fit ramped up another level, more fist-pounding, more kicking, and then the shriek that could be heard ’round the world. Several shoppers turned around and stared. “I neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed—”

“Here,” Mike said, yanking the stuffed animal off the endcap display and thrusting it at Ellie’s flying fists.
Take it, please, and just stop that screaming before my head explodes.
“But that’s the
last
time.”

Uh-huh. Just like the toy he bought this morning and the two he bought yesterday had been the last time, too. Not to mention the cookies before dinner and the pizza for breakfast he’d caved on. No more. He was going to have to take a stand before Ellie became a spoiled brat.

In an instant, Ellie turned off the screaming fit and scrambled to her feet, grinning and clutching the cream-colored bear to her chest like a prize. A toothy grin filled her face and brightened her big blue eyes. “Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

When her little voice came out with the extra lilt on the end of
Daddy
, it was all Mike could do to keep from scooping Ellie up and handing her the world on a plate. “You’re welcome, Ellie.”

Jenny shot him a look of disgust and shook her head, then marched over to the cart and plopped her hands on the bar. “Come on. We need peanut butter.”

She sounded so grown-up that, for a second, Mike had to remind himself he was the one in charge, the adult. Then he glanced at his triumphant preschooler, who had just reinforced her belief that tantrums brought results. Okay, the adult figurehead, at least.

Why was it that he could take apart a Sikorsky MH-60 helicopter, work his way through the complexities of the engines, rotary, and hydraulic systems, figure out the problem, and put it all back together again, but he couldn’t manage a three-year-old child?

“If you give her what she wants all the time, she’s just going to be a brat,” Jenny said as they rounded the corner and headed toward the market side of the store. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Who do you think is the parent here?”

Her arched brow answered the question. “Peanut butter’s this way.” She shifted the cart to the left, one of its wheels flopping back and forth like a lazy seal.

He bit back a sigh. What did he expect? He’d come home on leave to see the kids only to have his ex, Jasmine, dump the girls in his lap and tell him she was going on an extended vacation and they were his problem now. The welcome mat to Jasmine’s place didn’t include him and he wasn’t about to leave his kids in the dump she owned, so he’d packed up the girls and taken them to his friend Luke’s old house, vacant since Luke had moved in with his fiancée, Olivia, next door.

The kids hadn’t wanted to leave their house, or their neighborhood, or their rooms, but Mike had taken one look at Jasmine’s house and decided there was no way his girls were spending another night in that run-down trailer masquerading as a home. Last time he’d been here—heck, six months ago—Jasmine had been living in a rental house on the south side of Atlanta, a rental house Mike was still sending her a monthly check to finance. At some point, she’d moved into this hellhole, and when he’d asked, she’d refused to say why.

No way was he going to leave his kids in that hurricane bait for one more second. But he’d underestimated what he needed to feed, clothe, and entertain two young girls, which had brought him here, to the fifth level of hell, also known as grocery shopping on senior citizen discount day. In Rescue Bay, Florida, with two kids who barely knew him and barely liked him, when he’d expected to pop in and visit Ellie and Jenny for a few days, then head for a secluded beach on St. Kitts with a buxom stewardess who had promised to “forget” her bikini top. The only thing that could make this worse was—

“Mike?”

That.

Diana Tuttle’s surprise raised her voice a couple octaves. He turned around, and when he did, his body reacted with the same flare of desire as it had every time he’d seen Diana, ignoring the memo from his brain that Diana was the exact opposite of the kind of woman he wanted.

He hadn’t seen, talked to, or emailed the veterinarian in months. Not since the night he’d left her sleeping in her bed and taken the coward’s way out of ending things between them. Other than a scribbled note he’d left on her kitchen table, he’d had no other contact with her.

From the minute he met Diana, it had become too easy, too quick to pretend he was a stay-in-place, dinners-at-the-family-table kind of guy. She had a way of wrapping him in that world, like the proverbial lotuses that captured Odysseus’s crew, and he’d forget reality for a little while.

The reality was that he was a crappy father who lacked staying power and was in no shape to be someone’s depend-on-anything. Especially right now.

“Daddy?” Ellie said. “I’m hungry.”

“Okay,” he answered, but his attention stayed on Diana’s wide green eyes, and the combination of surprise and anger lighting them.

He’d known, of course, that he would see her if he came back to Rescue Bay. In such a small town, they were bound to run into each other. Mike had convinced himself that he’d see her and move on. Forget.

Yeah, not so much.

Diana still looked as beautiful as he’d remembered. No, even more so. Her shoulder-length blond hair, so often in a ponytail, hung loose around her shoulders, longer than he remembered, dancing above the bare skin with a tease that said
I can touch this and you can’t
. The blue floral dress she wore scooped in an enticing V in the front, then hugged tight at her waist before spinning out in a bell that swirled around her knees and drew his attention to long, creamy legs accented by strappy black sandals and cardinal-red polish on her toes. In the few weeks he’d known her, he’d never seen Diana in a dress. Jeans, yes; shorts, yes; but never anything like this, and a flare of jealousy burst in his chest for whoever the lucky guy was who’d get to see her like this: sweet, sexy, and feminine.