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Authors: Shirley Jump

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BOOK: The Sweetheart Rules
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Mistakes and blessings. Luke knew all about those. If he hadn’t been in that accident and hadn’t moved back to Rescue Bay, he never would have met Olivia. Six months ago, he thought his life was over. Today, he saw that his life had a new direction, a renewed passion. “Your grandmother, like mine, was a wise woman. Very wise.”

“Yeah, she was. Too bad I never got…” Mike cursed under his breath and went back to his beer. “Let’s drop the subject. Okay?”

Another below-the-ocean topic. “Sure,” Luke said. “Chicken’s done. Let’s eat, and try to restrain our caveman tendencies around the ladies.”

Mike grinned. “Might be hard to do. I’m still working on mastering utensils.”

Luke loaded the meat onto a platter, and the two men ambled over to the table and joined the women. Mike sat diagonally across from Diana, clutching his beer and pretending not to watch her out of the corner of his eye. His girls scrambled onto the space beside Olivia, jostling for space near the dogs, who had positioned themselves below the table in prime scrap-retrieval position. Luke dropped onto the bench beside Mike and handed him the tongs. “Dig in, folks.”

“Looks great, Luke.” Olivia smiled at him. “You’ve come a long way since the day we burned those steaks.”

He chuckled. “I had a good reason.”

“Yes, I’d say it was a good reason. A very good one.” She gave him a sassy smile, then reached for the potato salad.

Mike listened to their banter and, for a second, envied Luke. His friend had it all—the American dream, right here in this little corner of Florida. If Mike had been a different man, he might have wanted the same. But he’d never really been cut from the mold of a family man, although he’d made a halfhearted attempt at it when he’d married Jasmine. Within a few weeks, the bonds of matrimony had begun to chafe, hanging like thick chains on his neck. Mike cut his leave short, promised Jasmine he’d be back soon, and stayed away until Jenny’s birth. In the seven years of his marriage, he’d been home maybe a dozen times, mostly for long weekends. Even then, he’d been climbing the walls by day two and finding things to do instead of being the family man Jasmine wanted him to be.

At first, their reunions had been like mini-honeymoons; then resentment bred in his absences, and Jasmine grew more and more angry and cold during his visits. Instead of trying harder, Mike had worked more and come home less. When the divorce papers arrived in Alaska, he’d been more relieved than surprised.

He wasn’t made for staying in one place, any more than a shark was. As soon as Jasmine got back to Georgia, Mike was going to return the girls, make sure his ex was set up in a proper home for the kids, and then hurry back to the only home he really loved—the Coast Guard. That was where he fit best, living on the edge of the world, battling the Bering Sea and Death with nothing more than his wits, a tin can with rotors, and a few of America’s finest.

Then why did he keep glancing at Diana and wishing like hell she’d look back? Why was he still thinking about what Luke had said about Diana not seeing anyone right now? And why was he dumb enough to hope that maybe she’d worn a dress today because she knew he would be here?

Olivia passed the bowl of salad to Mike. “I don’t know if you have anything lined up already, but I saw there’s a great art camp for kids starting up soon. Might be something the girls would like to do.”

Jenny’s attention perked. “Art? Like painting and drawing?”

“Yup. I know the woman who’s teaching it. Some of her watercolors are hanging in one of the gift shops on the boardwalk. If you want to go see them, I’d be glad take you sometime.”

“I like coloring,” Ellie said. “And drawing horsies. ’Cept I make my horsies blue because I think blue horsies are prettier than brown horsies.”

Mike drizzled some dressing on his salad, then reached for the barbecue sauce. “Sounds like a winner all around. When’s it start? Tomorrow, by any chance?”

Olivia laughed. “No, no. Not until after the Fourth. But it runs the entire month of July.”

“Can we do it?” Ellie asked. “Please? I wanna draw horsies and color them. Lots of horsies. Do you think the lady will let me color them blue?”

Mike shook his head. “No can do, El. You two will be back at your mom’s house by then.”

“Your leave is up that soon?” Luke said.

Mike nodded. “Back on base by the third of July. I’ll be freezing my butt off in Alaska and missing the beach.”

More than the beach,
a part of him whispered. Just like he’d missed her the last time he’d gone back to Kodiak. Diana Tuttle had been in his mind every day since then, even if he wanted to pretend otherwise.

“Honey, aren’t you eating?” Diana said to Jenny.

For the first time, Mike noticed his eldest daughter’s empty plate. All the dishes had made the rounds of the table, and Jenny hadn’t taken so much as a strawberry. “I’m not hungry.” Jenny crossed her arms over her chest.

Oh, crap. Here it came again. The mule digging in her heels. “Jenny, you promised me—”

“I don’t care. I’m not hungry. I want to go home. Can I go home?”

“Me too,” Ellie said, pushing her plate, filled with a handful of strawberries and nothing else, to the side. “I wanna go home and watch SpongeBob. He’s funny.”

“Girls, we’re not leaving. Now eat.”

Jenny crossed her arms tighter. “Dude, you can’t make me eat if I’m not hungry.”

“Me too.” Ellie mocked her sister’s movement and stuck out her lower lip. “I wanna go home.”

“Eat, girls.” Mike waved at them, his voice stern, low. He hoped like hell that Diana, who seemed to have an easy touch with his girls, would pipe in with something to smooth the waters, but she just watched him. He wanted to tell her he had all the parenting skills of an earthworm, but instead he resorted to what he knew best. Military style. “Eat. That’s an order.”

Luke made a sound that was half laugh, half choke. “An order, huh, Napoleon?”

“Shut up.” Mike elbowed him, then turned back to the girls. “Go on now, eat.”

“No.” Jenny glared. Tightened her arms.

“No,” Ellie echoed.

The women and Luke stared at Mike, waiting for him to
do something
with his kids. The dogs waited at the end of the table, tails swishing, calling dibs on anything Ellie didn’t want.

Luke leaned over to him. “Uh, maybe if you—”

“I got this.” Last thing Mike wanted was for Luke, who had no kids and therefore no room to preach, to show him how to parent. Mike was the parent, for God’s sake. Okay, a crappy parent, but he at least had the title on his life resume. “Eat, girls. Please.”

There. That took it from order to request.

“I don’t wanna eat. I wanna draw horsies!” Ellie burst into tears. Great big honking sobbing tears. Jenny wrapped an arm around her little sister and shot Mike the evil look-what-you-did-now eye.

Then he put it together. Why the conversation had derailed so fast, the girls’ good moods evaporating in an instant.
Where you go, I go. I promise.

Then he’d gone and reminded them all that his promise had a thirty-day expiration date. Shit. Apparently there were new levels of crappy parenting yet to be reached. “Girls, I—”

Ellie sobbed louder, muffling Mike’s voice. Olivia got to her feet. “Uh, I left dessert on the counter. I think I forgot to—”

“Let me help you,” Luke said, scrambling to his feet. The two of them headed into the house. Fast.

Mike would have done the same, if he weren’t the parent, and expected to do something about this… mess. There was no teddy bear to buy a quick peace, and the situation was disintegrating quickly into a temper tantrum. The chicken wafted tempting smells under his nose, but damned if he was going to get time to eat now. Plus, this wasn’t the time or place to explain the complexities of leave and how that impacted his promise. Better to get the girls focused on eating. That’d keep them from focusing on a conversation he didn’t want to have. “Girls, you need to eat now. I’m telling you—”

Diana reached out and touched his hand, a light, feathery touch, but it stopped him in his tracks. “Let me try.”

He dropped back onto the bench. Thank God. Maybe Diana, the one with experience here, had some kind of magic word that he didn’t know. The entire day had been an exercise in frustration, from the messes to the tantrums and now to the eating protest. “Be my guest. Please.”

Diana turned to Jenny. “Adult parties stink, don’t they?”

Jenny nodded. Ellie kept crying, but turned down the volume, one ear cocked in Diana’s direction.

“I remember sitting through them when I was a little girl.
Boring
.” She mocked a yawn, then grinned at the girls. “Listen, while you have to suffer around all us grown-ups while we talk about super boring stuff, why don’t we make it fun?”

“Fun?” Jenny said.

“Yup.” Diana thought a second. “Every time you hear one of us say the word…”

“Work,” Jenny supplied.

“Work,” Diana agreed. “Then you and Ellie get to have a Hershey’s Kiss. I happen to know where my sister hides them.”

“Candy?” Ellie perked up, the tears gone. “I want candy!”

“Me too. But there’s one rule at this house. You have to eat healthy food before you can have dessert. Healthy food like chicken and—”

“Strawberries!” Ellie piped up. “I gots strawberries!”

Diana laughed. “That’s fabulous, Ellie. Add a little chicken and maybe some potato salad and we’ll call it even. You, too, Jenny.”

Jenny looked at her plate, her lips twisted into indecision.

“Besides, I think I heard your tummy rumbling,” Diana whispered into Jenny’s ear. “That way, you get that healthy stuff out of the way so you can have the Kisses. To the victor go the spoils.”

“What’s that mean?” Jenny asked.

Diana reached for the chicken and put a small piece on Jenny’s plate, then grabbed the potato salad and dished up some of that while she talked. “Well, it means the winner gets all the good stuff. Like in a battle. With a bad guy, not your sister.” She gave Jenny a wink.

Jenny smiled. “Yeah, I get that.”

Diana slid Ellie’s plate over and put some potato salad and chicken on it. Before she gave it back, she stripped the drumstick meat from the bone and cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces, something Mike hadn’t even thought to do, and arranged the berries in a little smiley face with a strawberry nose. Ellie giggled, the plucked the strawberry nose up first, plopping it into her mouth with a victorious grin.

When the girls started in on their food, Mike caught Diana’s gaze. “Thanks.”

She shrugged. “It was nothing.”

“For you, maybe. Not so much for me.” He grinned. “I’m still a rookie at this.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. That’s the thing about kids. They’re sink or swim. Instant education.”

Lord help him, the word
education
had him thinking down a whole other path, one that had nothing to do with kids at all. One that spiraled him back six months in the past, after a whirlwind couple of weeks of stolen kisses and racy flirtations, peaking when he’d crushed Diana to the wall of her bedroom and she’d turned that pert little chin up toward his and dared him to expand her carnal knowledge. Never had anyone made the words
teach me
seem so sexy. In the end, she’d been the one who’d surprised him with her inventiveness and intuitive knowledge of what made him go weak in the knees.

“Seems I still have a lot to learn,” he said, his gaze locked on her mesmerizing green eyes. “Maybe there’s a class I could take.”

She laughed. “You’d be the one sent to the principal’s office for causing a ruckus.”

“I’d much prefer to be the teacher’s pet.”

She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Diana’s cheeks flushed a pretty shade of pink, a blush that Mike knew also cascaded down the valley between her breasts and came with that shy little smile of hers that both tempted and teased him. What he wouldn’t give to see that sight again, to see her in his bed, beneath his body, not just here, sitting across a picnic table in his best friend’s yard.

Luke and Olivia returned to the table, and relief flooded Diana’s features. The blush faded, the simmering tension dissipated, and they all went back to being a bunch of friends at a barbecue. Mike told himself he was glad. Hell, relieved even. He already knew where flirting with Diana led. To the bedroom—and hot damn, he wanted that again, but he knew as well as he knew his own name that before the sheets cooled, something else would invade the space between them.

Expectations.

Diana was a woman who didn’t want a fling. She wanted permanence; a man to grow old with. And Mike wasn’t the kind to sit on a porch and sip lemonade for the next fifty years. In the end, Mike was going back to Alaska, just like he had before. Better to do that without regrets this time, and without memories that haunted his nights and ached in his gut.

I love you.

She’d whispered those words in his ear when she’d been curled up in his arms, still caught in the warm afterglow of amazing sex. The words had surprised him, and he had lain there, not sure of what to say. An awkward silence passed, and Mike took the coward’s path, feigning sleep until Diana nodded off and he could slip out of her bed, leave that note and head back to Alaska.

Which was what he’d do again at the end of this month. Better to remember that than to get caught up in a woman with mysterious green eyes and an easy way with kids.

After a while, conversation began to flow over beers and barbecue. When Luke mentioned the word “work,” Jenny and Ellie both exclaimed, then laughed hard when Luke said, “What’d I say? I just asked Mike how work was going.”

That sent the girls into even more fits of laughter. It was a merry sound, filling the air like church bells, and for a moment, Mike wondered why he’d been in such a hurry to leave.

Six

Diana did her best to keep her attention focused on everything and everyone but Mike Stark. She’d come to the barbecue, intent on her plan of pretending like he didn’t affect her anymore, that she had forgotten all about that night in January and how he’d made her body sing in ways it never had before. If there was an Oscar for faking disinterest, Diana figured she wasn’t even a runner-up. My God, all the man had to do was look at her and her body started to hum. And when he’d said the words
teacher’s pet
 . . .

She had nearly melted on the spot. Her brain kept drumming the same
he’s all wrong for you
song, but apparently the message wasn’t making its way south. The rest of her didn’t care that Mike was married to his job. That he had no desire to settle down again and that he came attached to an undependable past as an ex and a father. That he had dated her and wooed her, and like the clichéd ending to a health class life lesson, run from her bed the second he got what he wanted.

But then every once in a while she saw these snippets of another Mike, one who loved his kids and was struggling to build a connection with them. The same man who was playing with the dogs in the yard while his daughters watched from the sidelines. Ellie danced and clapped every time Chance caught the ball, then rushed back to capture Miss Sadie in suffocating toddler hugs.

God, she was a sentimental fool. Just because a guy acted like a grown-up once in a while didn’t mean he was settle-down material. Mike had made it clear six months ago that he wasn’t sticking around. For anything or anyone. Not then, and not now. Tossing a ball to a golden retriever didn’t make him suddenly morph into Ward Cleaver.

Mike looked over his shoulder, caught her watching him, and sent Diana a grin.

Damn.

She told herself she didn’t still have feelings for him. Wasn’t affected at all by seeing him.

Yeah, and it was a major miracle she didn’t go up in flames right that instant. Maybe if she repeated the lies to herself enough, she’d believe them.

She scrambled to her feet and grabbed several dishes. “Let me help you clean up,” she said to Olivia. “I figured I’d go check on the animals in the shelter before I go home. I want to go before it gets too dark.”

And before she got swept up in that grin of Mike Stark’s and began reading things in his smile that didn’t exist.

Olivia put out a hand. “Luke and I can get those. Don’t worry about it. In fact, let me wrap up some leftovers while you’re over at the shelter. Saves you some cooking.”

“Thanks, Liv.” Diana smiled. “You know me too well. I’ll take the easiest cooking route possible. Which means the one where someone else does all the work.”

As Diana turned to go, Olivia laid a hand on her sister’s shoulder. The men were across the yard with the girls and the dogs, leaving Diana and Olivia alone. “Hey, you okay? You seem distracted and distant lately.”

“I’m fine. Just a lot on my mind.” Diana forced one of those it’s-all-good smiles onto her face. She had learned long ago that it was best to keep her troubles to herself, rather than letting them spill into someone else’s world. That kept her worries contained. Controlled.

Olivia frowned, clearly not buying it, but she didn’t push the issue. “Well, if you want to talk, I’m here.”

“I’m good. Really.” She gave her sister a quick hug, then headed across the lawn toward the Rescue Bay Animal Shelter. Work would take her mind off Mike Stark, off Jackson, and off whatever Sean was trying to do with this custody thing. Work kept her from traveling down paths she had last visited more than a decade ago, paths that led to dusty bottles and big mistakes. Work would distract her and exhaust her, and right now, that was what Diana needed more than anything.

She paused outside the freshly painted white-and-blue building and marveled at the transformation. Six months ago, the shelter had been falling apart, a disaster waiting to happen. Olivia and Diana had pooled their funds and made the necessary repairs to get the main part of the shelter up to snuff. The back half was still waiting for funding to make the rest of the repairs, which would give the shelter some much-needed room to take on more animals. With Diana’s practice newly relocated to the front of the building, it created the perfect combination of services for Rescue Bay’s four-footed friends.

Diana opened the door to a symphony of barks and meows, a melody that always lifted her heart. She’d gone into veterinary medicine because she loved animals, loved their uncomplicated natures, their forgiving souls and unconditional love. Every time she walked in this building she was grateful that she and her sister had gotten it running again, saving the lives of so many lost and deserted pets.

Six dogs and ten cats were housed here this week, a lot for the little shelter, already nearing capacity. Diana made a mental note to run some kind of adoption event soon to get the word out and help make some space, plus raise more funds for the ongoing needs of feeding and housing the animals. She headed down the concrete aisles, pausing to give an elderly poodle an ear scratching, and a rub under the chin to a sweet lab mix. She dispensed a little attention to each of the dogs, while also taking the opportunity to give them a quick once-over and update their charts. The stray she’d tended in her office earlier came up to the cage door, tail wagging, one paw pressing against the chain-link to connect with the human who’d showed her a kindness. Diana glanced up at the chart and noticed that Olivia had given the stray a temporary name, something they did for all the shelter animals, to make them seem more like pets than furry strangers in a cage.

“She named you Cinderella. My sister is such a romantic. Probably hoping a little of that will rub off on me.” Diana laughed, and wriggled her fingers through the holes to show the stray some love. She was healthy, and showed signs of having been well cared for. Surely someone was missing this cute little bugger.

“You sure have that magic touch. With all creatures, great and small.”

She froze at the sound of Mike’s deep baritone voice. Even now, even after all these months, the sound sent a delicious shiver down her spine, a pool of heat in her gut. She remembered her vow to pretend she had moved on, past him, past that one night, and staked a mental steel rod in her wobbling intentions. Then she turned to face him.

He was leaning against the doorway, tall and delicious and already slightly tan, in exactly the same place and in exactly the same way as the first time she’d met him this past winter. She’d been sitting inside this very kennel with her son, her sister and a rambunctious litter of puppies that Jackson had found, wrangling the slippery furballs, who were doing their level best to avoid a bath. One look at Mike, and her heart had stuttered, and to be honest, it had never stopped. The man still had the same effect on her, damn him. She remembered, very, very well, how her body fit against his, how his skin lit hers on fire, how he tasted when she had taken him in her mouth.

Damn him.

He stood there, casual as all hell, as if he hadn’t just upset the apple cart of her life again, one shoulder braced on the jamb, his broad, strong frame filling the space so much it seemed to drain all the oxygen from the room. Because she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but stare like a lovesick teenager in algebra class.

He looked as solid as a tree, as welcoming as a king-sized bed at the end of a long day. She tensed, her fingers curling around the metal chart in her hands, wishing they were curling around him instead. For hours, she’d tried to avoid him, to act like she didn’t care, but now, in the enclosed, intimate space of the kennels, it was clear the jig was up.

She had to use two hands to rehang the chart on the hook, because for some weird reason, she couldn’t manage to fit the big hole of the clip over the slender metal hanger. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to thank you again. What you did with the girls back there…” He shrugged. “Thanks.”

“It was no big deal. Really. I remember Jackson going through a difficult phase.” Then she laughed. “Who am I kidding? He’s fifteen. He’s
still
going through it.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “Great. Something to look forward to. Between the attitudes and the messes, I’m going to go crazy.”

“Oh, kids aren’t so bad. Yes, kids are messy, but that forces you to let down your hair once in a while. And I think that’s just as good for us stuffy adults as it is for the kids.” She smiled and thought of all the times when Jackson had driven her crazy. “I remember one time when Jackson was, oh, maybe four or so. It was Easter and we were going to church. I’d bought him a little light blue suit and tie, the whole shebang. Poor kid. He looked like an Easter egg.” She laughed.

“Light blue? Oh, man. You probably scarred him for life.”

She grinned. “Ah, he survived. He looked so cute, too. I told him to stay in the house while I finished getting ready, and under no circumstances get one inch of that suit dirty.”

“Let me guess. He fell into a puddle? Climbed a tree?”

“Worse. He snuck out and went frog chasing in the creek behind the house. Soon as he saw me come outside, he came running back, but it was too late. He was a mess, head to toe, that blue suit all dirty and torn and wet. Oh, I was so mad. Ready to read him the riot act, maybe ground him for the next five years. And then I stopped mid-lecture.”

“Why?”

“My little boy, that rambunctious monkey, was carrying a muddy fistful of dandelions. He looked up at me with those big green eyes of his and said, ‘Here, Momma, for Easter.’” Her smile softened with the memory and her heart warmed. “Who can stay mad at that?”

Mike pushed off from the doorway and closed the distance between them. The dogs had quieted and the entire space closed in around them. “Maybe I need to pick some wildflowers so you’ll stop being mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Liar.” He put a finger under her chin and tipped her face until she was looking at him again.

She stared up at his steely jaw, his teasing blue eyes, and his cockeyed grin, and her heart did that stutter-step again. He only had one finger pressed against the valley beneath her jaw, but the touch sizzled all the way to her toes. She swallowed hard, and tried to find her willpower, but it had slipped away when she wasn’t looking. “I’m not mad at you,” she repeated.

“Then we’re still friends?”

“Uh-huh. Friends.”

His grin curved a little more. He leaned down closer, and her breath seized in her throat. “I have a lot of friends, you know.”

“That’s… that’s good.”

“I don’t think I need any more.”

“Okay.” Her gaze flickered between his eyes and his lips. She knew how he tasted, how he felt against her, how he moved inside her, and every bit of that knowledge fluttered through her brain, like speed-reading the Mike Stark pages of the encyclopedia.

“I’d much rather we were something other than friends.”

“Something…” The meaning dawned, a little slowly because she was still caught up in his eyes and his touch and his lips, and, well, all of him. She shook her head and his finger dropped away. “That’s not a good idea, Mike. We want different things.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Uh-huh.” Except right now she couldn’t remember a single thing she wanted. Heck, she couldn’t remember her own name. But she could remember making love with Mike Stark, hot, furious, curl-your-toes and fry-your-brain sex that had left her satisfied and drained and amazed.

“Yeah, me too,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he meant he was sure, too, or if he was reading her mind and thinking how incredible that one night had been.

She opened her mouth to tell him that she had to leave, but the words didn’t come. Her lips parted, her breath whispered in and out, and her heart stilled, waiting, anticipating, hoping. Mike’s blue eyes captured hers. Fire flickered in his gaze, and before she could think twice, his arms were around her, she was molded against him, and he was kissing her.

No, not kissing. They’d never just kissed, like some happy ending to a romantic comedy. Mike
commandeered
her mouth, and took her on a wild, frenzied, heated ride that sent fire through her veins, pooled liquid in her gut, and had her panting and arching against him, pressing her pelvis to his, begging for release.

And that was just the first three seconds.

He pressed one hand against the sensitive dip above her ass, while the other tangled in her hair and drew her closer. His tongue slipped between her lips, claiming another stake. She grabbed at his back, almost clawing at the muscles that flexed beneath the soft cotton of his shirt.

He snaked a hand between them to cup her breast, and when his thumb rubbed a rough circle against the cotton fabric, she gasped.
Oh, God, I want him. Now. Here
.

At the same time:
Oh, God, don’t make the same mistake again.

The word
mistake
drummed in her head, over and over. She’d been down this road. She knew where it led.

Smack dab into a dead end.

Diana jerked out of Mike’s arms. She collided with cold metal, and the kennel fencing protested with a sharp creak. The dogs start barking again, louder this time, as if sensing she was about to flee. “I… I have to go.”

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