Читать книгу Fairy-Tale Family - Pat Montana - Страница 9

Prologue

Someone was sleeping in her bed Ellie Sander hugged her daughter closer and backed carefully from the doorway of the moonlit room.

What should she do? Call the police? She’d have to wake Rafe to find the portable phone. Wake all three boys and try to herd them quietly downstairs? “Quietly” was not part of her sons’ little-kid vocabularies. Stand there and scream bloody murder? That was what she felt like doing.

She was so tired. Two minutes before midnight, and she’d just come upstairs from The Old King Kole Music Shoppe to find her four-year-old daughter sleeping with the dog—again. The day’s receipts from Kendall Kole’s store had refused to add up to the same total twice. She hadn’t even started studying for her final in her dental hygiene class at the community college. And since Kendall’s automobile accident four days ago, she and the kids hadn’t made it to the hospital to visit him—not even once.

Now some jerk had decided to break into all this mess—and catch a few winks on the job? What were the standards of breaking and entering coming to these days?

Ellie. tightened her hold around Seraphina’s sleepheavy little body and rested her cheek against her daughter’s head. Maybe, if she waited a second or two, some prince would come to their rescue.

Right. Except that all he would find were countrymouse kids and a frazzled mom fresh out of glass slippers. Hardly the makings of a fairy tale.

She let go a slow, silent sigh. Decision time again. Time to take some action. If she just weren’t so tired. Her gaze traveled to a jacket hung on the old desk chair. She squinted to make out the letters stitched across the back. Winterhaven, Colorado.

Ellie froze. Omigod.

The man in the bed mumbled through a snore.

She leaned forward to stare at him, careful not to step on the squeaky board just inside the door.

Darn, darn, darn. How could she have forgotten?

The man lay tangled in her daughter’s sheets, one arm flung across his face as if to ward off the moonlight flooding through the flimsy white curtains. But his arm didn’t hide his dark, wavy hair, tousled like wind-tossed midnight on Seri’s pillow. The same dark hair dusted his arms and the planes of his broad chest and tugged her reluctant gaze down the flat ridges of his stomach...to the folds of the sheet.

Ellie scrunched her eyes shut. Her heart pounded. She’d had no idea Mitchell Kole would look like this.

He was big. Bigger than his father. Kendall Kole was attractive for an older man, but his son? Darn, this man was truly handsome. In the moonlight he looked almost... magical.

The Prince! He’s come to rescue us! Ellie could imagine her daughter’s eager proclamation.

Something inside her stirred, something warm and wanting, feelings all but forgotten. As if, for just a moment, she were a woman again—not just an exhausted mother. Her heart thundered.

Whirling from the doorway, she hurried down the hall, carrying her child away from this new danger. She buried her face in the sweet warmth of her daughter’s wispy hair, but the scent only brought back painful memories.

Was it just a year ago she’d hidden her tears in her daughter’s hug on the most horrible night of her life? Her husband, her rock ‘n’ rollin’ husband, had rocked off the audition stage at Branson, Missouri, and right on down the highway...along with their ailing van and their pitiful savings. Peter had abandoned them! The realization still stunned her.

If Kendall Kole hadn’t offered her this job and a place to stay, she didn’t know what would have become of her and her kids.

Tiptoeing into the dormitory, she crept to the twin bed nearest the bathroom and nudged her six-year-old son.

“Rafe, go climb in with Michael,” she whispered.

The skinny little guy slid his feet to the floor and tugged down his oversize T-shirt. Clutching a portable phone, he curled into the middle bed next to his eight-year-old brother.

With a heavy heart, Ellie watched the two settle in together. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to share a bed. She hoped it would be the last.

In the past twelve years, the only good judgment she’d used had been trusting “King” Kole, she thought ruefully. That and the decision to stop crying over Peter—Peter who had thought playing parent was the same as doing a musical gig. When he was done playing, he just packed up and moved on.

Ellie lowered her four-year-old daughter into the stillwarm impression of her son, then turned to pull the sheet up over the two slender bodies in the middle bed, the small one light-haired, the other darker, like his father. Stealing to the far bed, she brushed a kiss on the forehead of her oldest son. A small black terrier grinned up at her from behind Gabe’s legs, tail thumping the blanket softly.

Ellie raised a silencing finger to the dog. “You are as bad as a doting grandma,” she whispered. She hurried back to the first bed, slipped out of her long skirt and oversize sweater and slid in beside her daughter.

A dog for a grandmother and a lonely shopkeeper for a benefactor and substitute grandfather. Things could be a lot worse. King had become her friend. She knew her kids loved him.

But now? With his son here, their futures were in jeopardy again. Mitchell Kole wouldn’t be happy when he discovered his Humpty Dumpty father had taken in a woman with so many kids she didn’t know what to do. And a dog who thought she was their nanny.

Ellie curled protectively around Seraphina. Seri might think Mitchell Kole was a prince, but this was hardly a fairy tale. Just plain old, nitty-gritty reality—four grubby kids, one single mom trying to give them some stability while she learned to clean teeth, and a kindhearted widower with more broken bones than she’d ever known existed.

Ellie didn’t believe in Tinker Bell. She didn’t believe in magic. And no matter how stirring Mitchell Kole looked in his sleep, she sure didn’t believe in Prince Charming.

Not anymore.