MILLS & BOON

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      To Pat McLinn

       who talked me down from the ledge

       when jumping sounded much more pleasant

       than trying to finish this book!

      Acknowledgments

      With many more thanks to Kasey Michaels,

       for her input on my hero’s injuries;

       and to Loren Berger, who by three already

       knew more about cars than his mother ever will.

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Epilogue

      Coming Next Month

      Chapter 1

      At the moment, the only thing keeping Darryl Andrews from kicking the crap out of something was the fact that his foot was just about the only part of his body that didn’t already hurt.

      So instead he hung back close to the road, where there was nothing to kick except a few dried-up weeds, or a stray soda can, hoping maybe a little distance would make the scene easier to absorb. To accept. Slung low in a sky his oldest girl, Heather, called “forever” blue, the morning sun barely warmed his right temple through the thick wad of gauze, although the badass November wind drilled right on inside the old baseball jacket Faith’d dug out of the church’s thrift shop donation box. So he wouldn’t have to cut up the sleeve on one of his own coats, she’d said in that matter-of-fact way of hers, as if attending to that one little detail was the key to solving all the rest of it.

      He kicked at one of the soda cans anyway, hurling it out onto the paved road to clatter mournfully for several feet before getting hooked up again in a small pile of trash across the way.

      Darryl would’ve sucked in a breath, but his bruised ribs had other ideas. With his good hand, he scrubbed his eyes, only half kidding himself they were stinging because of all the wood smoke in the air. Oh, sure, he’d gotten choked up at his kids’ births. And there’d been Griff Malone’s ten-seconds-left-on-the-clock, state-title clinching touchdown his senior year, but, hell, everybody’d been blubbering at that one. Nothing wrong with a little display of emotion now and again, long as it was the right emotion, let loose at the appropriate time.

      This wasn’t it.

      He swallowed, blinking until he could clearly see his father and the claims agent pick through the tangle of shingles, twisted metal siding and two-by-fours where not twenty-four hours before his auto shop and filling station had stood. Where he had as well, come to think of it.

      Yep. The general consensus was that he was damn lucky to be alive.

      He’d never even heard the tornado siren go off, not between his radio blaring and the earplugs he wore to muffle the sound of the air compressor. But then, who the hell expected a twister the day before Thanksgiving? Let alone five, if you counted the two that touched down between here and Claremore. Most of ’em had been puny little things, but even a puny tornado had few qualms about chewing up whatever got in its way. At least the one that’d visited this part of Haven had seen fit to bypass the gas tanks. If those lines had ruptured, especially so close to the downed power lines…

      No doubt about it, coming that close to biting the big one definitely makes a man reassess his priorities. Still and all, Darryl’s means of supporting his wife and five kids had been reduced to a pile of toothpicks. Maybe that business hadn’t made him, or his daddy before him, rich, but Darryl’d been doing okay. Sure, they could have used a bigger house, even if Faith did insist there was a certain comfort in knowing she could go to the bathroom and still hear what every single kid was doing. But then, it wasn’t in Faith’s nature to complain, not about the house, or the ten-year-old Suburban Darryl kept jump-starting back to life, or even that she was still wearing the same dresses to church she had when they first got married. Those she could still get into, at any rate.

      He looked over at her now, standing where the second bay used to be, eleven-month-old Nicky balanced on her round hip. Faith’s blond curls, longer than they’d been in a while, danced around her face in the breeze; she was already dressed to go to her parents for Thanksgiving dinner later—no sense upsetting the kids any more than necessary, they’d both agreed—in her “good” jeans and a soft-looking sweater. And that puffy orange jacket she’d bought the first winter after they were married, the one that made her look like a pumpkin, although Darryl had the good sense to keep that particular opinion to himself.

      It wasn’t always easy to figure out what was going on inside Faith’s head—although most every male he knew swore it was better that way—but the creases between her sandy brows, the flat set to her mouth, didn’t leave much room for interpretation. Yeah, the insurance would cover rebuilding, but that would take months. Months in which he wouldn’t be able to work, or even help with the reconstruction, not with an arm broken in three places.

      As if she could hear his thoughts, Faith glanced over. It’d been real late by the time they got back from the hospital last night; she’d slept on the pullout couch in the living room, insisting he’d be more comfortable in their double bed without her crowding him, especially since he had to keep his cast elevated on pillows. Only, except for the times Faith had been in the hospital after the first three were born, they’d never spent a night apart. More comfortable? Hell, he might as well have been sleeping on a bed of nails for all the rest he got.

      He started when his father’s hand landed on his shoulder. “How’re you feelin’?” the older man said, in a voice not unlike an idling lawnmower.

      “You really want the truth?”

      “Think of the alternative.”

      “Trust me, I have been.”

      L.B.—short for “Little” Bud, Darryl’s granddaddy having been “Big” Bud—gently squeezed his shoulder, then folded his arms across a barrel chest. At six foot two, there hadn’t been anything “little” about L.B. for years, although none of his three sons had inherited whatever genes had determined their father’s height,