Chapter One

      Getting Consuela Martinez out of his kitchen was proving to be a much more difficult task than Luke Adams had ever envisioned. His housekeeper had found at least a dozen excuses for lingering, despite the fact that her brother was leaning on his car’s horn and causing enough ruckus to deafen them all.

      “Go, amiga,” Luke pleaded. “Enjoy your holidays with your family. Feliz Navidad!”

      Consuela ignored the instructions and the good wishes. “The freezer is filled with food,” she reminded him, opening the door to show him for the fourth time. Though there were literally dozens of precooked, neatly labeled packages, a worried frown puckered her brow. “It will be enough?”

      “More than enough,” he assured her.

      “But not if you have guests,” she concluded, removing her coat. “I should stay. The holidays are no time for a good housekeeper to be away.”

      “I won’t be having any guests,” Luke said tightly, picking the coat right back up and practically forcing her into it. “And if I do, I am perfectly capable of whipping up a batch of chips and dip.”

      “Chips and dip,” she muttered derisively.

      She added a string of Spanish Luke felt disinclined to translate. He caught the general drift; it wasn’t complimentary. After all this time, though, Consuela should know that he wasn’t the type to host a lot of extravagant, foolish parties. Leave that sort of thing to his brother Jordan or his parents. His brother thrived on kissing up to his business associates and his parents seemed to think that filling the house with strangers meant they were well loved and well respected.

      “Consuela, go!” he ordered, barely curbing his impatience. “Vaya con Dios. I’ll be fine. I am thirty-two years old. I’ve been out of my playpen for a long time.”

      One of the dangers of hiring an ex-nanny as a housekeeper, he’d discovered, was the tendency she had to forget that her prior charge had grown up. Yet he could no more have fired Consuela than he could have his own mother. In truth, for all of her hovering and bossiness, she was the single most important constant in his life. Which was a pretty pitiful comment on the state of his family, he decided ruefully.

      Consuela’s unflinching, brown-eyed gaze pinned him. Hands on ample hips, she squared off against him. “You will go to your parents’ on Christmas, sí? The holidays are a time for families to be together. You have stayed away too long.”

      “Yes,” he lied. He had no intention of going anywhere, especially not to his parents’ house where everyone would be mourning, not celebrating, thanks to him.

      “They