Love Built to Last Read online

  She can’t let go of her dead husband…

  Maddie Kinkaid believes her late husband Jack gives her advice on everything from ordering a pizza to hiring a carpenter, so when she finds Caleb Walker’s business card on Jack’s desk, she’s convinced that he’s the guy to remodel her kitchen.

  He can’t decide if she’s worth the risk…

  Caleb is a single father, and protecting his young son means avoiding romantic entanglements. But there’s heat in every kitchen, and sparks ignite between Caleb and Maddie—until disaster strikes.

  When Jack goes silent, Maddie’s guilt consumes her, and it looks as if she and Caleb will never find their happily-ever-after—at least, not without a little help from Jack…

  KUDOS FOR LOVE BUILT TO LAST

  In Love Built to Last, Maggie Kinkaid and Caleb Walker are both widowers. She’s a teacher and he’s a carpenter. They meet when Maggie calls Caleb for an estimate on remodeling her kitchen. The attraction is immediate, but there are problems. Caleb has a young son that he doesn’t want to jeopardize by entering into a relationship that later goes bad. And Maggie is still hung up on her dead husband who she believes communicates with her through the papers he left on his desk when he died. The story is cute and tugs at your heartstrings. It’s got a good, strong plot and a few twists and turns that surprised even me. A good book for a rainy afternoon by the fire with a nice cup of tea. ~ Taylor Jones, Reviewer

  Love Built to Last by Lisa Ricard Claro revolves around Maggie Kinkaid, who lost her husband Jack in a car accident, and Caleb Walker who lost his wife Gwen to cancer. From the very start, Maggie and Caleb’s relationship is problematic. Maggie still feels tremendous guilt over Jack’s death, due to an argument she had with him just before he died. She never got the chance to apologize or tell him goodbye. And Caleb is hesitant to fall for Maggie because of his young son, whom he’s afraid will get hurt if a relationship with Maggie doesn’t work out. Still the two are drawn together and a relationship develops whether they want it to or not. Then disaster strikes and everything turns to crap. Love Built to Last is a story about love, loss, and starting over that is well-written, heartwarming, and a delightful read. ~ Regan Murphy, Reviewer

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks to:

  The team at Black Opal Books, particularly Lauri Wellington and Faith, for making this a painless process. Your professionalism is appreciated. Thanks for this opportunity, and for your belief in my work.

  Melissa Stevens, The Illustrated Author, for bringing Maddie’s faerie glen to life. I never tire of looking at this beautiful cover, and can’t wait to see your design for the next two books.

  Author Terry Lynn Thomas—critique master, beta reader, devil’s advocate, and psychiatrist, often simultaneously. You talk me off ledges, spread optimism, and force me to be a better writer. You’re also a wonderful wine buddy. Thanks for everything, partner.

  The generous and gifted author Cathy C. Hall, my writing Yoda, who has said innumerable things that changed my life, not the least of which was, “You should be writing Romance.” Thank you for making a difference, and for being my go-to. I continue to be a proud grasshopper.

  Those I cannot live without—Joe, husband and love of my life, whose support, encouragement, and belief in me is steadfast. Thank you for understanding, and for building a runway for my wings. And thanks to my young’uns—Joey, Stephanie (thanks for all those bookstore phone calls), and Christina—who are my joy, and the best comic relief ever. The four of you are my heart, and I love you.

  Love BUILT to LAST

  Fireflies ~ Book 1

  LISA RICARD CLARO

  A Black Opal Books Publication

  LOVE BUILT TO LAST ~ Fireflies ~ Book 1

  Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Ricard Claro

  Cover Design by Melissa Stevens

  All cover art copyright © 2015

  All Rights Reserved

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-626942-80-2

  EXCERPT

  Guilt-ridden, she feared she’d lose Jack forever if she gave herself to someone else, but she wasn’t prepared for this…

  “Maddie?” Cal called from the kitchen. She jumped at the unexpected sound of his voice. “You left your purse in the truck. I didn’t see it until I was almost at the office.” He frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “The hall carpet is wet.”

  Cal came up beside her, paused to listen. “In there,” he said. He moved past her into the hall, pushed at the door to Jack’s office. Saturated and swollen at the bottom, the wood rubbed and caught against the soaked carpet and resisted movement, but gave way under the force of Cal’s applied pressure. He stood in the doorway, his eyes drawn to the ceiling.

  “You’ve got a burst pipe, sweetheart.” He passed her on his way back out. “I’m going to shut your water off at the main and that will stop the flooding, but you have a lot of damage already. You need to call your insurance company.”

  Cal disappeared outside. Maddie retraced his steps to Jack’s office, heedless now of the water that oozed up from the carpet to drench her feet. Dread weighed her down. Trembling overtook her before she reached the doorway. She struggled to steady her breathing, and paused outside the room. She filled her lungs like a swimmer preparing to dive and forced herself to take the final steps.

  “No, no, no.” The words shuddered through her trembling lips. Maddie’s legs disengaged and she dropped to her knees like a puppet released by its master. The water soaked into her clothes. The ceiling above Jack’s desk had collapsed. A steady flow of water gushed onto the desk and splashed to the floor. Jack’s papers lay in a congealed mess atop the desk with swollen hunks of ceiling plaster amid the debris.

  Maddie stood and slogged, trembling, across the saturated carpet to the desk. Standing in water that sloshed over her instep and almost to her ankles, she stared at the devastation.

  DEDICATION

  Mama and Daddy—always for you

  Chapter 1

  Maddie stirred. Her mind grasped at images that dipped below the surface of her consciousness and sank out of reach. Jack disappeared again, snatched from her dreams. The waking realization settled on her like an icy second skin.

  She watched the play of light and shadows on the ceiling. A shaft of sunshine slanted through the windows and dust motes floated in the hazy beam. The digital bedside clock clicked ten, its red numbers accusing her of another wasted Saturday morning.

  “Hey, Jack.” Maddie’s voice whispered soft as silk and she closed her eyes. The answering silence stabbed at her heart, the ache so familiar she almost welcomed it as a friend. She ran her hand over the empty pillow beside her. “Make me get up,” she murmured, but didn’t move.

  She curled instead under the cool sheets, cocooned in the late morning quietude. She conjured a vision of Jack lying beside her—sleepy Jack, with tousled hair, his blue eyes dark with desire.

  She held her breath and imagined his strong hands finding her, warm palms sliding along her body’s curves beneath the oversized tee she wore as a nightshirt. When his hands pulled her close, her heart beat faster.

  The phone trilled.

  Maddie snapped her eyes open and groaned. She sat up, pushed the tangled mass of dark hair from her face, and snatched her cell from the nightstand. “What?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Kinkaid? This is Caleb Walker.”

  “Who?”

  “Caleb Walker. I’m the carpenter you called. You left me a message about renovating your kitchen.”

  Maddie rolled her eyes. “You mean the message I left two weeks ago? That one?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry about that. I had problems with my cell. Not that it helps, but your message wasn’t the only one caught in the techno-glitch.
”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t help.” She twisted up and out of bed, more annoyed that he’d interrupted her Jack fantasy than at his delay in returning her call. She grabbed her glasses from the nightstand and slid them on with her free hand.

  “All I can do is apologize, ma’am. If you’re still interested in talking with me about your kitchen renovation, I can stop by this afternoon. I know this is short notice, so we can schedule another day if that would be better for you.”

  “I’m busy today until around four.”

  “Four works. I really am sorry about this delayed call back.” His apologetic words, delivered in a deep Southern drawl as smooth as a shot of Glenlivet, softened her attitude a wee margin.

  “Okay. I’ll see you at four.”

  “Hey, don’t hang up.” His intoxicating voice stopped her from disconnecting. “I need your address.”

  Maddie rattled off the information and clicked off the call. She dropped the phone on the nightstand and flopped back across the bed. “He’s got a great voice, Jack, like the DJ I loved to listen to in college, remember? The guy who hosted that cheesy love song show. What was his name?” She waited, willing Jack’s voice to pipe up with an answer.

  The clock clicked again, loud in the silence.

  By ten-forty-five, she stood in the kitchen pouring coffee into a generous mug that proclaimed Teachers Do It With Class, given to her by one of her kindergarten students on the last day of school. Showered and dressed in frayed denim cut-offs and a washed-out T-shirt bearing the words Giving You Paws above the silhouette of a dog and cat inside a paw, she was comfortable, if not glamorous. Good enough, she figured, to spend the bulk of her Saturday sitting with other volunteers outside the local pet supermarket, helping with animal adoptions.

  She carried her mug through the dining room and down the hall to Jack’s study. The worn Berber carpet scratched at her bare feet along the way and she acknowledged, as she did daily, that it needed to be replaced, along with the tile floors in the kitchen and bathrooms, and the rust-stained sinks. One of these days, Jack.

  On entering the study, she looked past the faded wallpaper that peeled in the corners and showed wear at random areas above the wainscoting, itself in need of refinishing. She ignored the warped ceiling fan with its low-slanted blades and dusty exterior. Her attention, instead, homed in on Jack’s desk.

  A gift from Maddie to Jack for their second anniversary, the desk commandeered the space, its cherry finish—the visible parts, anyway—polished to a glowing sheen. It was Maddie’s lighthouse, a beacon of joy in an aging house filled to bursting with dreams that would never be.

  It served also as a virtual time machine.

  Every paperclip, document, Post-it, pen, pencil, paperweight, notepad, receipt, and scrap of paper that Jack had left on his desk the day he made that fateful trip south to Atlanta remained intact. Even his calculator and laptop sat where he’d left them. If Jack kept it, then he needed it, and if he needed it, then Maddie would never throw it away.

  She went first to the narrow credenza behind the desk, mindful of Jack’s coaster from the accounting firm where he had worked. She appreciated the brass and leather construction of the thing because it was sleek and solid, like her Jack, so she favored it and used it now for her coffee mug.

  She took a minute to glance at the framed photos of Jack’s family and the one of herself taken on their wedding day.

  She stared at the smiling image of her younger self and marveled at her hair wound in a complicated ’do, dressed in a gown that showed off her slender shoulders and hinted, through a miracle of design, at more boobs per square inch than she’d ever possessed.

  A bride too late and a widow too soon, she mused. Had she known how things would go, she would have married Jack the second after they met in the freshman quad, instead of waiting the four years until college graduation.

  Sliding into the leather chair, Maddie faced the desk, closed her eyes, and inhaled a cleansing breath that would have made her past yoga instructors proud. She exhaled with deliberation and focused on her daily ritual of communicating with Jack. She wriggled her fingers, and the giddiness dancing in her belly prickled along her nerves in anticipation.

  “Okay, Jack. I know you told me to call this Walker guy. Should I bother getting a quote from him? He took two weeks just to call me back. Maybe you missed the mark on this one.”

  Maddie closed her eyes and slid her hands into the mountain of detritus Jack had left behind. Even now, four years after his death, she found a glimmer of amusement from the mess. In every other area of his life Jack had been meticulous, so type-A he’d made Donald Trump look like a slacker, but when it came to household paperwork, it all landed here.

  “I know where everything is,” Jack would say. “That’s all that matters. Just tell me what you need and I’ll find it.”

  And he always did. Even now.

  Maddie slid her hands through the papers, eyes still closed. She bypassed slick sheets and crumpled ones, ignored an eraser as her hands cruised to the back of the pile. She leaned forward with her chest pressed against the edge of the desk, arms outstretched across the wide expanse. Her fingers exited the mess of papers and collided with the faux Tiffany lamp in the far right corner.

  There. A business card stuck up from the pile and rested at the base of the lamp. Maddie took the card between her fingers and extricated her arms from Jack’s papery mess, careful not to knock any of the precious debris onto the floor.

  She pushed her tortoise-shell glasses up her nose and leaned back in the chair, excitement humming through her to see what Jack’s answer would be.

  “Well,” she huffed, tapping the business card against her fingers. It was identical to the card she retrieved from the pile two weeks ago when she first asked Jack who she should call for a quote to remodel the kitchen.

  Caleb Walker. The guy who didn’t return phone calls. Great. Maddie studied the card. The front side touted the man as an architect, carpenter, furniture designer, builder, and restoration specialist. On the back of the card, penned in Jack’s neat accountant’s script were the words, Call this guy.

  “You sure about this one? The guy ignored me for two weeks.” But even as she said it, she stood and slid the card into her back pocket.

  “Hey, Mads? You ready?”

  Maddie jumped. The voice calling from the vicinity of the kitchen belonged to Maddie’s best friend, Jack’s sister, Brenna Kinkaid, and while Maddie had anticipated her arrival, she hadn’t heard her come into the house. In fact, she almost never heard Brenna come in. The woman moved with the grace of a cat.

  “Hey.” Maddie strolled into the kitchen and offered herself up for a hug. She poured the dregs of her coffee down the drain and unplugged the coffee maker. Brenna had, as Maddie hoped, arrived with a jumbo cup bearing the logo for the Lump & Grind, the local coffee shop that Brenna owned.

  “Mmm.” Maddie sipped the steaming brew, smiled with appreciation, and nodded at Brenna. “Perfect, as always.” She meant the coffee, but might have been referring to Brenna herself.

  Today, Brenna, who could make a prison-orange jumpsuit look glamorous, lent her generous curves to a pair of casual capris and a T-shirt the mirror image of Maddie’s, only newer, brighter, and better fitting. She wore strappy sandals studded with princess gems that framed her French pedicure to its best advantage.

  “I’m so glad I sprang for the new espresso machine. The customers love him. He’s stainless steel, hot, steamy, buff, and I’ve named him Dirk. Nice, huh?” Brenna wriggled her brows, dark arches over eyes the color of dusky denim-blue. Just like Jack’s. “The place was hopping this morning, and I forgot to grab you one of Greta’s cinnamon buns, so I hope you ate something. Sorry about that. You ready to go?”

  Maddie nodded while she sipped the gourmet L&G java, grabbed her purse from the kitchen table, slid into a pair of worn flip-flops, and pushed through the screen door leading to the side porch.

  She
leaned against the door to hold it open for Brenna and then let it slap shut behind them as they started down the stairs.

  “Hey, you shouldn’t just leave the door wide open like that.” Brenna rested her hands on her hips and shook her head. “It’s bad enough you always come and go by your kitchen instead of using your front door like a normal person. At least lock up when you leave.”

  “Why would I use the front door when we always park on the side of the house?” Maddie said, amused by Brenna’s observation. “And I’ve told you before, I like coming in through the kitchen. It’s friendlier that way.” Maddie batted her eyelashes and exaggerated a smile, earning an eye roll from Brenna. “And why lock up? Look around.” Maddie turned full circle, her arms extended. “I’m in the middle of Nowhere, North Georgia, half a mile from the main road. Who’s going to sneak in? A deer? One of the cats? Even if someone stumbled across this place, what would they take? The only thing I worry about in there is Jack’s desk, and I can’t imagine anyone caring about what’s on it or in it but me.”

  Brenna flicked her sleek hair over her shoulders, folded her arms across her chest, and raised a brow. “Don’t you ever watch Law & Order? CSI? Dexter, for god’s sake? There are serial killers and evildoers afoot. Lock it up, Mads.”

  “Seriously?” Maddie groaned. “Oh, sweet Lord. You and your crime show obsession.”

  Maddie thrust her coffee at Brenna, fished her keys from her purse, and stomped up the porch stairs to do as she was told. It was easier than an argument she was sure to lose anyway.

  “I don’t know why you don’t sell this old place and move closer to town. Don’t you ever get spooked being out here all alone?”

  “Never. Jack and I chose this place together. I feel close to him here. And I’m not alone. I have the cats.”

  She looked toward the weather-worn barn and noted old Horace sauntering out through the open doors into the sunshine. The tomcat, who’d grown plump since his neutering, stretched his considerable bulk on his favorite patch of crabgrass and twitched his ears when a young calico raced past him and disappeared around the side of the barn.