Navy Christmas. Geri Krotow

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      “She and Pepé came by the clinic. I should go visit her at the house and let her get to know me better. Hopefully she’ll realize I’m not some ogre intent on stealing her new home.”

      “Aren’t you, Jonas?” Paul’s voice reflected Jonas’s conscience.

      He sighed, spinning the ball on his finger. “I was, I am— If there’s any chance she’ll give the house up, I don’t want to risk it going to some stranger.”

      “I still think Dottie had some reason for doing this, other than Serena showing up. Dottie could have left Serena the money and you the house. Why didn’t she?” Jim cocked a brow at Jonas, his knowing gaze annoying as hell.

      “Let’s leave the problem-solving to Paul. Dottie wanted the house kept in her family—her biological family.” As he said the words Jonas didn’t completely believe them. Dottie had always had a motive for her actions. She hadn’t become the most successful Realtor on Whidbey Island for nothing.

      He looked at his brothers. “It is what it is. Nothing we can do right now. So...let’s play ball.”

      Jonas tried to get his mind off his heartache and his brothers off the topic of the house and back onto basketball. But he made a mental note to ask Mary a few questions about Serena. It never hurt to go into battle with an assortment of ammunition.

CHAPTER SIX

      Whidbey Island Friday after Thanksgiving

      SERENA LISTENED AS Pepé sang along to the music from Walt Disney’s Frozen while she drove them back on island. They’d spent Thanksgiving Day at Beyond the Stars as planned.

      Since they’d lost Dottie this past summer, she and Pepé were alone on Thanksgiving. She could have taken them back to Texas, but she wasn’t ready to face her extended Mexican-American family at a big holiday. Not yet. She and Pepé needed time to forge their own traditions, their own family way of doing things. She sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that Juanita had been so gracious about her decision to stay on Whidbey through the holidays. Otherwise, it would have been hard to fight her mother’s pleas to come home to Texas for Christmas.

      Pepé had made many friends in his school on Whidbey and their families had in turn befriended Serena, so she never felt alone.

      But when Val Di Paola, the director of BTS, had sent out the Thanksgiving invitation, Serena had jumped at it. Pepé had been excited to go back to San Juan Island, too, where he’d learned to jump off a diving board into the deep end of a pool.

      Serena smiled. She could still hear Pepé’s squeal of delight when he found out that Val kept the BTS pool and sauna tub heated and running year-round, at her husband Lucas’s insistence. Pepé had frolicked in the water, and made Serena stay in the pool, as well, until they’d resembled the dried cranberries that had been in the turkey stuffing.

      The air was crisp and clear and she was glad to be off the ferry after their rough crossing. Ferries were a necessity in Puget Sound, but Serena was a land girl through and through—give her a four-by-four truck any day. She drove the crossover hybrid, a fuel-conserving SUV that she’d traded in her truck for, off the ferry with care. The water was beautiful but bouncing around on it when the gales blew wasn’t her idea of fun.

      Black Friday—the American shopping holiday. Back home in Texas she’d be standing in long lines as she and her sisters strategized which department stores had the best deals for Christmas gifts. She’d be tired and annoyed that she wasn’t back home with Pepé, who’d be curled up with her mother, his beloved abuela, while Serena shopped. A prick of guilt made her realize how much Pepé needed his family, all of it. She’d planned to spend this Christmas with Dottie, and her step-cousins. Paul Scott had been wonderful to her from the minute she’d met him at his law firm. The other brothers hadn’t completely warmed up to her but she’d hoped they would, in time, and with their shared memories of Dottie’s magic smile.

      It hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, but in some ways it was better. She and Pepé were cementing friendships all over the Puget Sound area, and she’d made strides toward mending her relationship with Juanita.

      Nevertheless, Serena needed to figure out what to do to make her Christmas with Pepé extra special.

      She pulled onto the long drive to the house.

      It had been only been six months but she was proud of the progress she’d made on the property. Dottie had been a skillful gardener and landscaper, but her age and busy social life meant the grounds had taken a backseat during the past few years, at least since she’d been widowed. Serena knew that was eighteen years ago. Her stepson and Jonas’s older brother, John Scott, was Dottie’s personal landscaper but the grounds required more regular care, in Serena’s opinion.

      The flower beds were covered with mulch and leaves for the winter, but in the spring they’d burst with daffodils and tulips, if squirrels didn’t eat the hundreds of bulbs that she and Pepé had planted last month.

      The fir trees were naturally Christmassy and the way they lined the drive was so attractive. She’d found twinkling lights at the dollar store that she planned to wind around the lower trunks of several this weekend.

      Doing everything on her own wasn’t easy, but she didn’t mind it, either. Serena was happy to spend time with herself. Dottie had understood—the first person to “get it” since Phil died.

      That was another thing she and Dottie had shared—they’d both been unexpectedly widowed. Dottie’s only husband had died of cardiac arrest with no warning. Dottie had never married until she met Louis Scott, a real estate colleague who’d been widowed with four sons to raise. Dottie had kept her name, Serena’s biological father’s name, Forsyth.

      Even so, she’d raised the Scott boys as her own. Jonas must have been particularly close to her as the youngest. Dottie had mentioned Jonas to Serena time after time, saying he and his brothers were the children she’d never had, and how grateful she was to have been able to be a mother to them. She’d told of how Jonas had taken to her and started calling her “Mom.” Serena blinked back the tears that the memory of the warm conversation with Dottie evoked.

      But it was difficult to imagine Jonas Scott as anything other than the devastatingly, annoyingly handsome man with the surly attitude she’d met last week.

      He hadn’t had an easy life from the bits she’d pieced together. His biological mother had died when he was two years old, and his father married Dottie within eighteen months of that. Louis, his father, had died when Jonas was still a teen—before he’d left for college. It had obviously been a crushing blow, yet Dottie and the stepsons Serena had met seemed to love one another and be happy in their lives.

      Unlike Serena’s mother, who’d always been bothered by the fact that she’d gotten pregnant by a stranger in her small Texas town. She’d never forgiven herself, and this had passed the sense of shame down to Serena.

      Serena thanked God every day that she’d gotten out of that Podunk town to go to college and then ended up married to a military man whose job took her around the country. She’d hoped to see more of the world, but so far Whidbey Island was as far as she’d come and she was happy enough with that.

      Jonas had looked chagrined when he’d realized that she and Pepé had heard his harsh words to Dr. Franklin.

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