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

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      “From what I could tell, she’s seriously on his case about how he needs to move past Lori, start looking around for a new mother for the boys, how it’s too hard, him raising two babies on his own.” Noah grimaced. “You know how she gets.”

      Didn’t he just? However…“The boys aren’t babies anymore. Tad’s, what? Three now?”

      “And Ollie’s in kindergarten, I know. But far as Mom’s concerned, long as they have baby teeth, they’re still babies. And there’s something unnatural about men raising babies by themselves.”

      “Silas is a big boy. I imagine he can handle Mom just fine.”

      “He also doesn’t want to hurt her feelings, not after how bad Dad and her felt when his marriage bit the dust. No, I’m serious,” he added when Eli shook his head. “Silas told me he went to pick up the boys the other day, and Sally Perkins was there.”

      Swallowing, Eli set down his beer. “From church, Sally Perkins?”

      “The very one. Now you know that’s just twelve kinds of wrong. So I thought maybe you and me could, I don’t know, run interference or something.”

      “No.”

      “Bro. Sally Perkins.”

      Yeah, Mom must be getting pretty desperate if she was flinging Sally Perkins at his brother. And Mom desperate was not a pretty picture. “Okay, fine,” Eli said on a released breath. “I’ll think of something. But if Si finds out, you do realize he’ll kill us, right?”

      “Can’t be worse than the torture he inflicted on us when we were younger,” Noah said, and Eli chuckled. Hard to remember their geeky brother’s hellion phase. Minute he had his first kid it was like he became a new person. A better person, Eli thought with a trace of bitterness. Man, what was up with the past being all up in his face tonight?

      “Does Dad know?” he asked. “About Mom?”

      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.

      Chapter Six

      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 СКАЧАТЬ