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not going to find a place to stay,” she said firmly. “Your arrival has taken me completely by surprise, but I’ll accommodate you and Cody to the best of my ability tonight. Tomorrow we’ll look at options. Maybe it will be workable for you to stay. With me.”

      “You want to share accommodations?” he asked her slowly. “With someone you don’t know?”

      “Want to seems to be overstating it a bit. None of you looks dangerous. The dog doesn’t even look like it has the energy to bite.”

      Sam felt this odd little niggle, for the second time, of wanting to be protective of her.

      Just as when she said she had a weapon when it was so pathetically obvious not only that she didn’t, but that she wouldn’t use it if she did.

       Are you crazy? You don’t invite strangers to stay with you.

      But he managed to bite his tongue. He looked at the set of her jaw and felt a sudden exhaustion. It had been a horrible day. That look on her face felt as if it would take a lot more energy than he had to sort this out right now.

      He needed to get Cody into the bathtub and into a bed. He had dealt with three of Cody’s legendary meltdowns today. For a kid who didn’t talk he was an absolute master at making his displeasure known to all. Sam was not up to another one any more than he was up to dealing with whatever the stubborn set of Alicia Cook’s little mouth meant.

      She was right. Tomorrow, they would look at options. Tomorrow, he’d deal with it. His team of lawyers could let her know he had an ironclad contract and she could find someplace else to stay for two weeks.

      He knew, despite a team of people working for him, that another place on Sugar Cone was out of the question for either himself and Cody or Mavis’s granddaughter. They’d had a devil of a time finding a condo on the busier side of the beach for Cody’s Australian auntie and uncle and their kids, arriving later in the week.

       We need to know him better. He’s all we have left of Adam.

      Sam had met them, of course. At the wedding, the christening, Christmas two years ago. At the funeral. Good people. Decent. Hardworking. Real, somehow, in the same category that the woman in front of him was real.

      And yet, when he thought of meeting them this time, he could feel his heart sinking to the bottom of his feet.

      Despite the fact he was pretty sure he was botching nearly every single thing about raising a three-year-old, just like Cody was what they had left of Adam, he was what Sam had left of his sister, Sue, too.

      And Sam had a history with this little cottage. He had been coming here for a long time. He had memories of endless days of him and Sue running on that beach as children. He desperately wanted Cody to feel the kind of unfettered joy that they had felt here.

      Sam’s parents had let the lease lapse when he and Sue were teenagers, but when they died, he had approached Mavis and asked about the possibility of leasing again. She, he remembered, had been delighted, almost as if she was waiting for him to come back. Since then, the cottage had always provided exactly what the sign, swinging at the gate with letters so faded you could barely read them, promised.

      Soul’s Retreat. Sam Walker was counting on this place to give him something that was in very short supply in his life right now.

      Serenity.

      Wisdom.

      Wasn’t there a prayer about those things? Not that he was a praying kind of man, though given the desperation of the decision he had come here to make, he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility of becoming one.

      What he didn’t need were any further complications to a life that was seriously complicated right now.

      And this woman, Alicia—Allie—with her black-tipped hair, and a tiny bit self-conscious in her wet, too-large T-shirt, and trying hard not to let it show, had complication written all over her.

      He was sympathetic about her grandmother. Of course he was. But, after tonight, she couldn’t stay here with him under the same roof.

      She looked like she was still the artsy type that her hallway art indicated. She’d probably love to go to Paris for two weeks. There. Problem solved. He would offer her a round-trip, all-expenses-paid to Paris so he and Cody could have the cottage to themselves.

      If only all of life’s problems were so easy to solve.

      His more immediate problem was this: he had a very stinky dog and a very stinky kid on his hands. Neither of them liked baths.

      “You’ve eaten, right?” Alicia asked, as she watched the shocking change in her life unfold before her very eyes.

      Sam Walker stood in the bedroom she had suggested for Cody. The bedroom was not large, at the best of times, but now it looked positively tiny. Sam’s shoulders seemed to be taking up all the space. He was rummaging through the small suitcase Cody had dragged up the walk on his wagon.

      Cody and the dog peeked out at her from under the bed. The man and the boy had identical eyes, large, dark brown and soft as suede. There was something in them that could weave a spell around the unwary.

      Which she was not.

      “Yeah, we stopped at Pizza Palooza,” Sam said, his voice a growl of unconscious sensuality. “Perfect Pal Happy Deals all the way around. Did they make me happy? No. I’m pretty sure that’s what the dog threw up. I wonder if I can sue for misleading advertising?”

      Allie felt a jab of sympathy for him. She reminded herself to be wary of spells, and overrode the sympathy. Much more sensible to see this as a reminder that he had a team of lawyers at his fingertips, and presumably, he was not afraid to use them.

      Still, she had to venture, “I don’t think the Perfect Pal Happy Deals are dog-designated.”

      “Did you hear that, Cody? The Happy Deal is not dog-designated. No more feeding Perfect Pal to Popsy. So, how about a bath, buddy?”

      Sam had extracted a pair of pajamas from the suitcase. They looked as if they would fit a good-size teddy bear, and they had fire engines on them. Allie was finding this level of adorable invading her home doing very odd things to her heart, wary as it was.

      The dog and the little boy shrank back a little farther under the bed. The man shot her a look, then got on his knees, rear in the air—and a very nice rear, at that—and looked under the bed.

      “Come on,” he said, his tone soothing, despite the exasperation Allie had so clearly seen on his features.

      The boy scooted right out of sight. The dog made a sound that wasn’t quite a growl, more like a hum of dismay.

      Allie backed out of the room to leave Sam to his challenges, which seemed substantial. She reluctantly closed the open patio door—a precaution against the possibility of a burglar in the neighborhood. She was aware she felt a little safer with Sam in the house, though this reliance on a man to feel safe made her annoyed with herself.

      Allie retreated to her bedroom, taking her tablet and her guitar with her. The bedroom proved not to be any kind of retreat at all.

      For one thing, the cottage, with the closed patio door, was hot, her tiny bedroom window open a tiny burglar-proof crack, was not providing much of a breeze. She would normally leave her bedroom door open, but with guests in the house, that wasn’t possible, especially since, as a defense against the suffocating heat, she stripped down to the bathing suit that was under her clothes. She appreciated its tininess, as much of her skin as possible exposed to the stingy breeze coming in her window.

      She picked up her guitar and strummed it hopefully with her thumb, but it told her, with a certain sullen stubbornness, no. Which was too bad, because it might have covered the other sounds coming through the paper-thin walls of

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