The Trick To Getting A Mom

“Why did Kit have to go?”

Sean sat beside his daughter and put his arm around her shoulder, fragile as a bird’s wing. “Kit’s not part of the family, hon.”

“Why’d you follow her?”

“I…thought Kit’s feelings might be hurt. I wanted to apologize.”

“Aunt Mariah wasn’t real friendly to her.”

“No, she wasn’t.” He chucked Alex under the chin. “Hey, sport, if you want to see your new cousin, we’d better get a move on.”

Alex stayed put. It was no secret she’d inherited his stubborn streak. “I like Kit.”

“I know you do.” He rubbed the back of his neck, massaged the tense muscles. “And she likes you. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

What was wrong was his inappropriate attraction to a woman who rocked his sense of responsibility. When she’d jumped on her motorcycle, his first thought had been to climb on with her.

“I just wanna be her friend,” Alex whispered. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Kit only came back because her mother messed up and she has to help her out. She’s not happy about it and she can’t wait to leave. Alex, honey, it’s hard to make friends with a person who has no intention of sticking around.”

Dear Reader,

When I was in my early twenties and just starting out in the world, I used to play a mind game to help me cope with people who drove me nuts. I would imagine the difficult person and me in a very personal situation far removed from any situation we’d face in reality. My scenario might place me at a table for two with the guy who sold newspapers on the street corner and who could never manage to be civil. I would submerge myself in the fantasy, thinking what could I find out about this person that would make him more human? Perhaps the tough guy rescued stray dogs or ran the volunteer book cart on the hospital pediatrics ward. The fantasy never repaired these individuals’ real-time annoying habits; the exercise just reminded me that things—especially other people’s lives—are never as they seem. It made me more accepting.

Acceptance is such a simple word, but it appears to be a difficult concept to implement. In The Trick to Getting a Mom, Kit Darling has never been accepted in her hometown. She is an outcast and a rebel, surviving only by forging a who-cares exterior and an itinerant lifestyle. Sean McCabe seems to accept his role as a single parent, but beneath the surface simmers a wanderlust that bows before family responsibility. One rootless, the other rooted, the two resist an unacceptable attraction. It takes an eight-year-old, Sean’s daughter, Alex, to teach the adults true acceptance.

Amy Frazier

The Trick to Getting a Mum

Amy Frazier

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

WHAT KIND OF FATHER WAS HE if he couldn’t keep one little girl out of trouble?

His gut in a knot, Sean McCabe pushed through the double doors of Pritchard’s Neck Elementary School. Alex, his eight-year-old daughter, had been suspended from school. For fighting.

At the end of the long echoing corridor that smelled of floor wax and chalk dust, Alex sat outside the principal’s office, alone, perched on an enormous bench that made her seem very, very small. Small and adrift on a sea of polished tile.

She looked up, and, even from a distance, Sean could see the shiner, reddish-purple and puffed and already closing one eye.

Instinctively, he rushed to her. “What happened?”

“I finished my work before everybody else,” she replied, her head cocked at a defiant angle. “So I raised my hand to go to the bathroom.”

“And?” Sean prodded, suspicious. Alex had a way of complicating simple tasks.

“And I thought about how Seafaring Cecil—” Seafaring Cecil was Alex and Sean’s favorite travel writer “—says you can adventure anywhere just by drawing a map.”

“So…?” Sean didn’t trust this train of thought. Alex had inherited his wandering soul, and, more and more in her “explorations,” she pushed the limits of what he considered safe for her.

“So I started a map on one of the paper towels from the bathroom with a pencil I found wedged behind a radiator, and I ended up in the fifth-grade-wing.”

This wasn’t the first time Alex had strayed. Or the first shaggy-dog explanation she’d given Sean. It was, however, the first time his daughter faced suspension from school for her adventuring.

He leveled a stern look at her. “Ms. Simmons told me you were fighting.”

With a stubborn one-eyed squint that showed no sign of tears, Alex met and matched his steady gaze. “I hit a fifth grader.” She sounded neither proud nor remorseful. To her it was only unvarnished truth.

He gently grasped her tiny face with his big weathered hand, turned her head to examine the darkening eye. Tried to steady the racing of his heart. “Why, baby? Why?”

“She said I smelled like bait.”

Sean’s gaze dropped to the miniature boots Alex seldom removed—the ones he’d had custom-made to match his own. “Our boots do smell like bait, sweet pea. So what was the real reason you hit her?”

Alex’s self-assurance wavered. Her chin wobbled and her shoulders sagged. “She…said…you must be a crummy dad if I had to go out lobstering to take care of you.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “You’re not a crummy dad. You’re the best.”

“Oh, honey.” He pulled her into his arms.

She was fierce, his daughter, fierce and proud and loyal far beyond her age and size. A chip off the old McCabe block.

“Ahem.” Candace Simmons, the school principal, appeared in the doorway to her office.

Sean stood. “Candace—” He caught himself. “Ms. Simmons.”

“Mr. McCabe.” She looked as if she didn’t relish either the necessary formality or the task at hand. “I’m afraid we have a zero-tolerance policy toward fighting. As I told you on the phone, Alexandra is suspended from school. For two weeks.”

“You said she’d be suspended for one.” He recognized the need for punishment, but two weeks was harsh.

“That was before Alexandra produced this from her boot.” Candace held out a letter opener Sean recognized as a freebie for taking out a loan at the Ocean National Bank. It had a faux scrimshaw whale for a handle. “We also have a zero-tolerance policy toward weapons.”

“Alex?” A headache forming behind his eyebrows, Sean looked at his daughter for an explanation.

“It’s not a weapon, Dad. I carry it in case of snake bite.”

“You know perfectly well there are no poisonous snakes at Pritchard’s Neck Elementary.” Sighing deeply, Candace turned to Sean. “It’s this inability to distinguish reality from fantasy that gets your daughter in trouble.”

“Clearly, she didn’t intend to hurt anyone with the letter opener or she would have used it during the fight.” He believed children should accept responsibility for their actions, but he also knew Alex. “She might fight, but she doesn’t fight dirty.”

“Sean.” Candace spoke softly, but looked him right in the eye. “The rules are there for the safety of the children. Even if I wanted to, I can’t make exceptions where safety is concerned. So…one week for fighting. One week for possession of a potential weapon. Two weeks suspension.”

“But there are only two weeks left of school.”

“Yes. The maturity Alexandra shows in completing her work outside of class will affect our decision to promote her…or not.”

“You’re telling me she might not pass?” Sean felt his blood pressure rise. “Hey, she’s one bright kid.”

“We both know that.” Candace’s pause spoke volumes. “But she’s disruptive. She has tremendous difficulty staying on task. Difficulty, too, interacting with her peers.”

“You know she’s used to being around adults.” Mainly because he was raising Alex in the home he shared with his father and his brother. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course not. But Alexandra’s behavior is beginning to hinder her education.” Candace rested her hand gently on Alex’s head. “When you take her to her pediatrician to look at that eye, please, discuss her classroom behavior.”

“What are you suggesting?” Defensive, he slipped his arm around his daughter.

“I’m saying that there are sometimes physical reasons for behavior patterns.” Candace’s expression softened. “It’s just wise to check.”

“You’re talking hyperactivity—drugs to counteract it?”

“You know that, by law, I can’t make a medical diagnosis.”

But she could push him in that direction, he thought, his jaw set. He would not drug his child. His active, inquisitive, normal child.

“In the meantime,” Candace continued, “these are the class assignments for the rest of the year.” She handed Sean a hefty packet. “I’ll personally monitor Alexandra’s suspension but she’ll need adult supervision at all times.”

“Of course.” Taking Alex’s hand, Sean stood, feeling as if they were two against the world.

Under the best of circumstances, Alex required almost constant supervision. Unfortunately, Sean’s circumstances weren’t the best at the moment. In addition to pulling his own traps, he was building a lobster pound with his father and brother, a potential family business they’d laid their life savings on and had hoped to have up and running before school’s end. Until the start of summer day camp, school had been Sean’s only viable child-care option.

This suspension also brought home the hard fact that the time had come to rein in his adventuresome daughter.

Before Jilian had died, Sean had made her a solemn promise to keep their baby safe, but with each passing year the task grew more difficult. Especially with a child like Alex, who never colored inside the lines.

CHAPTER ONE

DID SHE HAVE THE STAMINA to spend one more minute in this town, a town that had essentially dropkicked her from the nest?

As thunder rumbled in the distance, Kit Darling lifted the hair off the back of her neck and prayed for a breeze, a breath of fresh air, any movement at all to break the unusual June heat of this strength-sapping afternoon.

Rain would be a welcome relief. Rain would mean she could close down her stupid yard sale.

“How much is this?” A woman held up an oversize velvet painting of Elvis draped in a skimpy toga. Her companion, a second woman, snickered.

“The tag says five bucks,” Kit snapped. She knew neither woman had any intention of buying the painting, or anything else for that matter. Knew they’d only come to gawk at her mother’s tacky things and gossip about Cynthia “Babe” Darling, the woman who’d run off with Millicent Crenshaw’s husband, leaving chaos, recriminations and a pile of unpaid bills in her wake.

Turning her back on the two women, Kit stalked to the shade of Babe’s sagging front porch and tried to turn her thoughts to the weather. Anything other than the woman who was her mother in name only.

Why didn’t it rain? And wash away the ghouls who’d come to pore over the leftovers from Babe’s sorry life.

Kit hated the overt cheesiness of her mother’s possessions. The erotic paintings. The tasseled, satin pillows in garish colors. The hundreds of candles with fragrance like Naked Lunch and Lusty Musk. Items Babe had bought to enhance her femme fatale image, now spread over the yard in an attempt to take a bite out of her mother’s debts, since it was her unfortunate responsibility to pay them. Kit hated Babe for sucking her back to the hometown she’d discarded nine years ago. The hometown that had discarded her years before that.

Responding to a flash of heat lightning in the distance, the two women, the only customers left in the dusty front yard, scurried to their car.

Good riddance. Kit might need the money, but she sure didn’t need the spotlight. Rumors of Babe’s latest outrage had spread like a virus through this insufferable burg. People had flocked to the yard sale to see if the rumors were true. If Babe had indeed flown the coop, her little love nest.

Would she ever be able to claw her way out from under her mother’s reputation? she wondered bitterly. Not in this town.

Nursing a powerful thirst, Kit bent to open a cooler on the porch step—the utilities in Babe’s rented house had been cut off—when a movement in the shrubbery near the end of the porch caught her eye.

“You got any books?” A small child emerged from behind a wilted hydrangea.

Despite the heat, the kid wore rubber boots and a faded flannel shirt tucked into much-worn overalls. Her hair—on second glance, Kit could see it was a little girl—looked as if it had been combed with an electric mixer. Strands stuck to a face so grimy and sweat-streaked, Kit almost overlooked the black eye. A scrapper for sure, this newcomer couldn’t be more than five or six.

Kit felt an instant affinity for the kid. She herself had been a scrapper.

“What’s your name?” she asked, stepping off the porch.

“Alexandra Melinda McCabe. But my dad calls me Alex.” The child looked her straight in the eye. “You got any books?”

Alexandra Melinda McCabe. The McCabes were an upstanding family in Pritchard’s Neck. Which one of them didn’t know better than to let a little kid run loose? And why wasn’t the child in school on a Tuesday? “What grade are you in?”

“Three.” She was small for her age.

“Why aren’t you in school, Alex?”

“I got ’spended. For fighting.” Alex rammed her tiny fists on her hips. “That’s three questions I answered. Now, you. You got any books?”

“No. I’m sorry. I have books in my apartment in Boston, but not here.” Babe had never been a reader. Men were her hobby. With Ed Crenshaw, she’d begun to specialize in younger men.

“Where are your parents?” Kit turned the conversation back to Alex.

“My dad’s working.”

Kit never failed to feel a stab of empathy when she saw a young child on the street, unsupervised.

“So your dad leaves you by yourself while he’s working?”

“My Aunt Emily’s watching me.”

Kit glanced up and down the street. “I don’t see her.”

“She’s gonna have a baby. She’s lying down ’cause she can barely walk.” Alex shot Kit a don’t-push-your-luck look. “You ask as many questions as Ms. Simmons did before she ’spended me.”

Kit suppressed a smile. She liked this kid. Liked her forthright manner and unconventional clothes. Her grime and her grit.

“You’d better head home before your aunt worries about you.” She opened the cooler. “It’s hot. Want a soft drink to take with you?”

Before Alex could answer, a pickup truck came to a sliding halt at the end of the driveway.

“Alex!” A big, dark-haired man leaped out of the driver’s side, scowling. “Your Aunt Emily’s been worried sick about you,” he barked as he charged up the driveway. “She called me at the pound to say you’d disappeared. You were supposed to stay in her yard.” His anger rolled before him like breakers on the beach.

Standing firm before his wrath, Alex pointed at the yard sale sign listing on its stake. “I saw the sign and came down for just a minute, Dad. To see if there were any Seafaring Cecil books.”

Kit pricked up her ears at the mention of Seafaring Cecil. But she hesitated to speak, cautious about coming between the man and his daughter.

“Alex—” the father’s anger quickly abated, replaced by weariness evident in the tiny lines fanning the corners of his eyes “—how could you see the sign if you weren’t already halfway down the street?”

Alex fumbled in the pocket of her overalls. “With this.” She retrieved a folding telescope Kit recognized as one of the offerings on Seafaringcecil.com.

The man seemed torn between exasperation and relief.

“She’s only been here a couple minutes,” Kit offered. “She told me she needed to get back. So as not to worry her aunt.”

Alex flashed her a grateful look.

As the man turned his attention to Kit for the first time, she sucked in her breath. She would know those dark eyes anywhere.

He held out a hand. “Sean McCabe.”

Oh, yeah.

Back when they’d gone to high school together, he’d been the cream of the crop, both scholastically and athletically. Every girl with a hormone to her name had lusted after him.

And Kit had not been immune.

Once, right before graduation, Sean had unexpectedly asked her out. Once and only once. And even then, he’d stood her up.

Kit could have sworn he’d only asked her out as some locker-room bet. The guys were always trying to find out if she was as easy as her mother.

At the unpleasant memory, Kit stiffened, but extended her hand, nonetheless. “Kit Darling.”

As his big, work-roughened hand enveloped hers, a flash of recognition crossed his face. One corner of his generous mouth twitched.

“Do you know this lady, Dad?” Alex tugged on her father’s jeans.

Kit swallowed hard. No one in Pritchard’s Neck had ever called her a lady. With one innocent question, this little girl managed to lay bare a vulnerability Kit didn’t want exposed. Especially not to Sean McCabe.

“We went to school together, punkin.” Sean spoke to Alex, but never took his eyes off Kit.

Could he possibly remember how he’d stood her up as if she hadn’t mattered? He’d been such a big man on campus. So why was Mr. Most-Likely-To-Succeed standing before her now in a T-shirt, jeans and lobstering boots instead of pinstripes and wing tips?

Kit withdrew her hand from his, unwilling to admit, even to herself, that he still made her pulse race.

Standing surrounded by the castoffs of her mother’s reckless life, Kit felt on display and unguarded in front of the one person in this podunk town she’d ever allowed herself to admire.

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She needed to wrap up Babe’s affairs and hit the road before she was tarred—once again—with her mother’s brush. But the problems she’d inherited from Babe required cash, and right now Kit had a cash-flow problem. She needed to stay in town long enough to liquidate what her mother had left behind to salvage her own credit rating. And to prove that at least, she, Kit, had character.

The clouds on the horizon had grown thick and dark. An uncomfortable prickly tension charged the air.

Alex sensed something was going on between her dad and this lady with the cool name—Kit, like the adventurer Kit Carson—but Alex couldn’t figure out what. Dad had said they’d gone to school together. He’d gone to school with lots of people in town, but he never looked at them the way he was looking at Kit.

Dad didn’t pay much attention to looks and always urged Alex not to either. But it was hard not to with Kit. She had purply-red streaks in her hair, two gold hoops in her left eyebrow and a cool tattoo like a skinny vine on her upper right arm.

Maybe Dad was interested in the motorcycle Alex had seen parked around the side of the house. When she and Dad read their adventuring books and planned their trips, they talked about how they’d get there. Alex always picked a motorcycle, and Dad eventually said okay—because it was all just pretend. This lady rode a motorcycle for real. Red. Like her cowboy boots. It was Alex’s favorite color. The color of the travel lines she and Dad drew on their maps.

A big raindrop fell on Alex’s head.

Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get moving, scout.”

More raindrops fell. Alex glanced at all the stuff spilling over the front yard, then at Kit. Her eyes had a squinched-up look. Like she was trying hard not to cry. Or scream. Alex would scream, too, if her things were about to get ruined.

The rain began to hammer on the porch roof.

“Dad, we gotta help put away!”

She wasn’t sure he would. Though he’d do anything for his family and friends, he was real stand-offish with strangers. But Kit wasn’t a stranger. Dad had said they’d gone to school together.

“Please, Dad!”

“Not necessary!” Kit cried out as she kicked off her boots and dashed out into the yard barefoot. She looked mad as she hauled a nearby box full of shiny pillows out of the rain and onto the porch. Like maybe she hated all this stuff. Or the rain. Or Dad.

No way! Everybody liked Dad.

Alex pulled on his hand. “Puh-leeeese!” She suddenly needed Kit to like her dad, too.

“Okay,” he said, his voice real rough and funny sounding. “I owe Kit one.”

Now, what did that mean? Sometimes Alex did not understand grown-ups.

Reluctantly, Sean followed Kit into the rain.

Kit Darling.

The last person he expected to find his daughter hanging with. Damn. Alex had enough wild ideas of her own without picking up pointers from Kit.

Still, he’d heard the rumors. This yard sale had to hurt her pride. Big time.

And…he did owe her one.

He picked up a card table loaded with half-burned candles and headed for the porch, passing behind Kit who wrestled unsuccessfully with a stationary bicycle. Putting the table down, he went to help her.

“Go away!” she snarled, rounding on him like a cornered alley cat. A stray with attitude.

So, she didn’t want him here. He opened his mouth to call Alex. Started to turn his back on Kit, whose claws-bared approach to life had always made her more enemies than friends.

But her makeup did him in.

The rain sluiced down her face, making the heavy black mask she’d drawn around her eyes run in a muddy mess. She reminded him of Alex the day she’d fallen off their wharf at low tide. Covered by gray muck, his daughter had been mad as all get out. Mad laced with scared and fragile.

Sean knew for a fact Kit wasn’t fragile, but that childlike, smeared face, those enormous gray eyes got to him just the same.

Moved, Sean reached into his pocket for a clean handkerchief, then tried to wipe away the black goop streaming down Kit’s face.

With lightning-quick reflexes, she grabbed his wrist before the handkerchief touched her skin. “Don’t,” she growled, her small white teeth bared. “I’m fine. Just the way I am.”

And she was. She looked like some ancient warrior princess, done up in battle paint, too young to defend her honor and her turf, but willing to fight to the death in the attempt.

“I know,” he conceded, pulling his hand away and pocketing the handkerchief. “You always were.”

Nine years ago he’d found her fascinating. The wild child of a wild child. Buried in responsibilities, he’d watched as Kit cut a swath of anger and anarchy through the school and community.

In their senior class, she’d been fifteen years old to his eighteen, having skipped twice. That didn’t help make her popular.

She’d refused to sit for senior portraits, and someone on the yearbook staff had cruelly printed under the blank space that should have been Kit’s photo, “Most likely to self-destruct by age twenty-one.”

Kit had taken matters into her own hands. She’d ripped up her yearbook and left pages as calling cards wedged in the lumps of manure she’d dumped on and in the cars of the high-school principal, the yearbook adviser, the class president— Sean—the head cheerleader—Jilian, his girl—and a host of others Kit had obviously considered her tormentors.

He’d admired her guts.

By the time a school administrator knocked on Babe Darling’s door, Kit had left town. At fifteen. Without waiting to collect her diploma.