Book Boyfriends Wanted Book 18: His Curvy Sunshine
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Mary E Thompson
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25
Chapter 1
Kingsley
Pickup lines were invented by some asshole who wanted to watch others squirm. Who was looking to piss off as many people as possible, all at once.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and resisted the urge to honk at the car ahead of me.
Pickup lines in a bar were so much better than the ones outside an elementary school. Especially on the last day. You would think they had their shit together by the last day, but no. It was worse.
Not that I blamed the school. It was all the fault of the parents in line. The ones who wanted to talk to other parents and hold up everyone else. The ones who didn’t follow the damn rules and pulled up in the middle of the exit lane instead of staying in the pickup line and waiting their damn turn.
Because their precious child was more important than all the others who were waiting to get picked up.
“Asshole,” I mumbled as yet another parent drove right on by the rest of us and stopped to get their kid, blocking all the traffic that was trying to leave while their super special student took their sweet-ass time getting in the vehicle that was too big to climb up in alone, making the shithead parent put the vehicle in park and walk around to help their kid in. Delaying the whole process even more.
I rolled my eyes and inched forward, one car making their way out of the endless line while I searched for Isla.
I moved another inch, almost able to see the door where the teachers kept the pre-k students until they could see the parents, when my phone rang.
A glance at the dash showed my mom was calling. “Hey, Mom. I’m about to get Isla. You can say hi in a minute. How are you today?”
“Kingsley?” The word came out as a breath, barely enough of a sound for me to hear it.
“What’s wrong?” Adrenaline spiked in my bloodstream. My hands tightened on the wheel. I searched the crowd of students, ignoring the asshole parents and preparing for a fight if I needed to have one.
“Your dad had a heart attack.”
Air rushed into my lungs, relief and anger fighting for presence. I hope he died raced through my mind, the words filtered by a long ago grudge I would never let go of.
But I couldn’t say them to my mother.
“Did you hear me, Kingsley? Your father is in the hospital.”
So not dead.
“Sorry, Mom. I just spotted Isla. Are you okay? What’s going on?”
She sniffed and sucked in a shaky breath. I felt her pain from three hundred miles away.
“He’s… He collapsed at work. Sheila called nine-one-one, and they got to him in time, but the doctor is talking about surgery and medication and a new diet and—”
“Mom, take a breath.” Panic was setting in. For both of us. I knew what was coming next.
“Hi, Daddy!” Isla said, opening the back door with the help of her teacher.
Mom sniffed on the phone, the sound loud through the speakers of the car.
“Hi, sweetheart. How was your last day? Hi, Mrs. Dickson.”
“Hello, Dr. Harris. Have a great summer.”
“You, too!” I waved as she closed the door and went back to the school to get other kids and send them off for the summer.
Mom whimpered as I eased away from the curb, double checking Isla was secure in her booster seat.
“What’s that noise, Daddy?” Isla asked.
“Hello, Isla, honey. How are you?” Mom said, alerting my daughter to her presence on the phone.
“Grandma! Hi! Did you call to tell me happy summer? Everyone has been saying it all day. I’m so excited for summer. It’s going to be great. Daddy is going to take some days off because I’m home all summer, and we’re going to have fun. Are you going to come visit us?”
I made it to the end of the parking lot and waited for traffic to clear before I turned onto the neighborhood street the school was on. The majority of traffic was parents getting kids, and I felt bad for the families who lived in the neighborhood. They probably thought it was great at first, but having a thousand extra cars in your neighborhood every day would get old in a hurry.
“I’m not going to be able to visit you, Isla. But maybe you can come here to see me. Grandpa is sick.”
“Why is he sick?”
“His heart isn’t good, and he might need surgery.”
“We should definitely visit then. Daddy, can we go?” Isla asked, looking up at me in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know,” I said, balancing the conversation I didn’t want to have in front of my daughter and the one I couldn’t have with my mother.
“Kingsley, I can’t run his practice. You know that. There’s no other doctor around. I need you. Isla just said you’re off some of the summer. Can you come here? Please? I can’t do this all by myself.”
Her soft sobs squeezed at my heart. My mom was the only reason I had any contact with my parents. It never felt right to cut her out of my life, or Isla’s, but I didn’t speak to my father.
“We have to go, Daddy. You always say when people need our help, we should do everything we can to help them. Grandma is not just people. She’s Grandma.”
The logic of a four-year-old was hard to argue with, especially when she wasn’t wrong.
But I still didn’t want to do it.
“Please, Kingsley. I know this is a big thing to ask you. Please.”
I drew a breath and knew I had no choice. Not when she was asking. “We’ll pack up when we get home and be there tonight. If that’s okay.”
“Yay!” Isla shouted from the back. She clapped her hands and looked absolutely thrilled with the idea of visiting her grandparents.
“Thank you, Kingsley. So much.” Mom sucked in a sob and released another shaky breath. “It means a lot to me. You can stay here. With me. Your father is going to be in the hospital for at least a week, maybe longer.”
“We’ll find somewhere else to stay by the time he gets home.” I would not stay under the same roof as that man. Not if I could help it.
“Okay. I understand,” Mom said.
“We’re going to grandma’s. We’re going to grandma’s,” Isla sang in the backseat. “Yay!”
Mom laughed softly. “I’m looking forward to seeing you, my sweet girl.”
“Me, too.”
At least someone was excited.
* * *
By the time we made the ten minute drive home, Isla was planning her entire summer out. She missed the part about me working, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wouldn’t be able to take much time off if I was running my father’s practice. It wasn’t like the one I’d joined when I finished veterinary school. There were seven other doctors with me, and time off was fairly easy to come by.
Not when I was the one and only vet in town.
But I owed my mother. More than I could ever repay, I owed her.
“Can I bring my swimsuit, Daddy?” Isla asked as she scampered into the small house we rented, almost leaving her backpack behind.
“Yeah, grandma has a pool in the backyard.”
“Yay!” Isla took off down the hall to her bedroom across from mine.
I headed for the bathroom, knowing she’d empty her drawers into the suitcase that was in her closet. The house was small, but we didn’t need more than we had. We were a team, just the two of us.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The one person who would understand how I was feeling about going back to my hometown was gone. Stolen from me by a careless driver who was too impatient to wait for her to pass before turning in front of her.
“I’m ready, Daddy!” Isla called, dragging her suitcase from her room.
“What do you have in there?”
She shrugged, her brown eyes that matched her mother’s at the floor instead of my face.
“Isla Elizabeth Harris, what did you pack?”
She sighed like a teenager instead of a preschooler and released the handle of the suitcase. “Just the stuff I need.”
“And what do you need?” I stepped into the hall and peeked into her room, noting her completely stripped bed and closed drawers. “Did you pack any clothes or did you just take your bedding?”
“But I need that!” The whine was one of exhaustion, exhaustion I knew was the main reason she wanted her bed. She crashed most days when she got home.
“You do need that, Isla, but you also need clothes. Let’s go back in and pack some clothes for you in the suitcase, then you can bring your pillow and blanket out onto the couch while I finish packing everything else.”
“And Sabie?”
“Yes, you can bring Sabie.”
Her smile returned, her prized sabertooth tiger revealed from behind her back. It was the last thing Faith bought for Isla before she died. A gift for her first birthday. A birthday Faith never got to celebrate.
We went back into Isla’s room and opened the suitcase. She grabbed her pillow and sat on her bed while I packed her things for the summer. There was so much to do. So much to think about. But we had to go.
I finished packing Isla’s things, then turned on a show for her in the living room while I focused on what I needed to do. I’d already taken the rest of the week off so I could spend it with her before the summer camp she was supposed to attend opened. My first call was still to my boss, the managing partner of the clinic.
“How was the last day of pickup?” Harry asked as he answered.
“Those parents are horrible,” I told him.
Harry chuckled. A father himself, he knew well the hell of a pickup line for elementary kids. “Yep. Last day is the worst. You should be spending time with Isla. What’s going on?”
“My dad had a heart attack.”
“Oh, shit. Are you okay? What do you need?”
“My mom asked if I could handle his clinic for the summer.”
“Is he a vet, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize. Why aren’t you working with him?” Harry’s question was asked with levity, but I wasn’t feeling light.
“We don’t get along.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. Um, yeah. Take all the time you need. Keep us posted on how things are going, and we’ll cover for you until you can get back. Don’t worry about a thing.”
“Thanks, Harry. Means a lot.”
“Of course. Hopefully you can spend some time with Isla, too.”
“I hope so.”
Harry hung up, and I made the next call to the summer camp program to put a hold on Isla’s spot. I told them we might be back in a few weeks or not at all, and they agreed to let us go week by week, considering the circumstances.
My last call was to our landlady. She agreed to pick up the mail until I could get it forwarded or put on hold. And she said she’d watch the house while we were gone, and take the trash and recycling to the curb in two days so things weren’t left in the house to stink.
“Drive safe,” she told me before we hung up.
I always do. I would not lose someone else to a car accident.
Isla was sleeping on the couch by the time I packed my suitcase, loaded the back of the SUV, and emptied the fridge. I didn’t like rushing and felt like I was forgetting something, but I couldn’t come up with what it was.
Anxiety.
I didn’t want to go.
But we’d find a place to rent once Dad came home. It was a small town, but there had to be places to rent.
Isla woke up an hour into the drive. She cried that she was hungry, so we stopped for dinner at a fast food place that had a small play area where she could run around.
An hour later, we were back on the road, her steady chatter my sole accompaniment until she fell asleep again.
The second half of the trip was quiet, but the closer I got to my hometown, the more tense I felt. I always planned to build my life in MacKellar Cove. Faith and I met in college, and she fell hard for my hometown. We knew it was the right place to raise our family. A perfect small town for all of us. A place where neighbors knew each other and watched out for each other. Safe and simple and home.
Before I started veterinary school, we would walk around town and pick out houses we would buy one day. A starter home for just the two of us, a bigger one for when we had kids, then a ranch for when we were retired.
Leaving town for vet school was tough, but making the choice not to come back was even harder. Faith didn’t fight me on it. She knew I couldn’t stay. Not after what happened.
We thought it would be fine. I found a job in a great practice, we had Isla, and we were talking about other kids.
Then Faith died, and everything changed. All the plans we had for the future, all the things we wanted, were gone just like when we left MacKellar Cove.
Driving north along the Saint Lawrence River, past the small towns that dotted the banks, and heading into MacKellar Cove brought back all the pain of loss I felt. Faith wasn’t there. Isla didn’t know the town. The life we were supposed to have was gone.
But we were back. For a little while.
I pulled into the driveway of the house I grew up in. The paint on the front was peeling. Mom’s car sat in the cracked driveway. The landscaping had seen better days, one half-dead bush the only thing in the flowerbed in front of the house.
A lot had changed.
I parked the SUV and turned off the engine just as the front door opened. Mom waved from the porch, stepping carefully in the darkness without exterior lights to help her down the steps.
I got out, checking Isla was still asleep before I closed the door. “Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, Kingsley. Thank you for coming.” She threw her arms around my neck and pulled me in close. She trembled, a sob escaping as I hugged her. “I was so scared.”
“I know, Mom.”
She sniffed again, then pulled back. “What can I help you with?”
“Anything you can grab. I brought a cooler with food from my fridge that I didn’t want to throw away, and we have too much stuff, but Isla didn’t want to leave anything behind.”
“We will make it work. Is she going to be okay in the spare room?”
I nodded. The spare room was Dad’s office, but Mom put a twin bed in there when Isla was born. We’d never stayed there, but she wanted to make sure there was room for us to visit. Instead, Mom stayed with Isla and me when Faith died, bunking with Isla and helping take care of my toddler when I could barely get out of bed.
Yeah, I owed her a lot.
Mom and I worked to bring all our stuff into the house, leaving Isla for last. I unbuckled her seatbelt and scooped her up, holding her close as I carried her inside.
I went down the hall to the spare room, setting Isla on the bed that I’d already set up with her things. She smacked her lips a few times, then snuggled up to Sabie and kept sleeping.
“She’s so precious,” Mom whispered.
I nodded, looking back at my daughter. “She is.”
“I really appreciate you coming here.”
“Of course, Mom.”
“Your father is having some more tests tomorrow, and the doctor is trying to decide a course of action by the weekend.”
“Really? They’re taking that long to figure something out?”
Mom chuckled. “Your father said the same thing. He’s ready to get out of there.”
I grumbled something I hoped she would take as agreement. The last thing I ever wanted was to be told how similar I was to my father.
“I’m sure you’re exhausted. I know I am. And it’s late.”
I nodded. “Yeah, it is. What time do I need to be at the clinic tomorrow?”
“Dad usually starts his day at seven.”
“Okay, then I need to get some sleep.”
“Good night, Kingsley. And thank you. You’ll never know how much this means to me, and to MacKellar Cove. I know you don’t want to be here, but this town is special, and your dad is the only vet for a hundred miles. He helps people.”
“I know, Mom,” I grumbled. The last thing I wanted was a lecture about how great my father was.
Mom squeezed my hand and let me close the door to the spare room so Isla didn’t wander. I went across the hall to the bedroom that was mine growing up. The only thing that had changed was the twin bed became a queen after Faith and I were married. Otherwise, it was the same room with the same memories that haunted me for years.
Memories I had to live with for the summer.
