My Kind of You (A Trillium Bay Novel Book 1) Read online

  Praise for Tracy Brogan

  Crazy Little Thing

  WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

  RWA RITA® FINALIST, 2013, BEST FIRST BOOK

  “Heart, humor, and characters you’ll love—Tracy Brogan is the next great voice in contemporary romance.”

  —Kristan Higgins, New York Times Bestselling Author

  “Witty one-liners and hilarious characters elevate this familiar story . . . Readers will love the heat between the leads, and by the end they’ll be clamoring for more.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4 Stars (HOT)

  “Brogan shows a real knack for creating believable yet quirky characters . . . The surprising emotional twists along the way make it a satisfying romp.”

  —Aleksandra Walker, Booklist

  “Crazy Little Thing by Tracy Brogan is so funny and sexy, I caught myself laughing out loud.”

  —Robin Covington, USA Today, Happy Ever After

  “Tracy Brogan is my go-to, laugh-out-loud remedy for a stressful day.”

  —Kieran Kramer, USA Today Bestselling Author

  The Best Medicine

  RWA RITA® FINALIST, 2015, BEST CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

  “With trademark humor, lovely, poignant touches, and a sexy-as-sin hero, The Best Medicine is Tracy Brogan at her finest. Charming, witty, and fun.”

  —Kimberly Kincaid, USA Today Bestselling Author

  Love Me Sweet

  RWA RITA® FINALIST, 2016, BEST CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

  “An upbeat, generous message about finding yourself, standing up for yourself, and living an authentic life . . . A sexy, slightly kooky romance that should please Bell Harbor fans.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Jingle Bell Harbor: A Novella

  “Brogan’s hilarious voice and word play will immediately ensnare readers in this quick but satisfying small-town romance.”

  —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review

  “Jingle Bell Harbor is a fun, funny, laugh-out-loud Christmas read that will surely put you right in the mood for the season.”

  —The Romance Reviews, 5 Stars

  “This was an incredible read! I was definitely surprised by this book and in a great way.”

  —My Slanted Bookish Ramblings, 4.5 Stars

  “Jingle Bell Harbor by Tracy Brogan is about discovering what you want, deciding what you need to finally be happy, and rediscovering a love of the holidays. It’s a quick, easy read filled with laughter and enjoyable quirky characters. If you’re in the mood for something light and funny, I would recommend Jingle Bell Harbor by Tracy Brogan.”

  —Harlequin Junkie, 4 Stars

  “This is a really cute, uplifting Christmas novella. It’s quick, light, and gives you warm fuzzies just in time for the upcoming holidays. There is plenty of humor to keep you entertained, and the quirky residents of Bell Harbor will keep you reading to see what else is in store.”

  —Rainy Day Reading Blog, 4 Stars

  Hold on My Heart

  “Successfully blends a sassy heroine and humor with deep emotional issues and a traditional romance . . . The well-developed characters and the sweet story with just a touch of heat will please readers looking for a creative take on romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Launched in hilarious style by an embarrassingly cute meet, this delightful romantic comedy will keep the smiles coming.”

  —Library Journal

  Highland Surrender

  “Highland Surrender features plenty of action, romance, and sex with well-drawn individuals—a strong, yet young heroine and a delectable hero—who don’t act out of character. The story imparts a nice feeling of ‘you are there,’ with a well-presented look at the turbulent life in sixteenth-century Scotland.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4 Stars

  “Treachery and political intrigue provide a well-textured backdrop for a poignant romance in which a young girl, well out of her depths, struggles to reconcile what she thinks she knows with what her heart tells her. Highland Surrender is a classic sweep-me-away tale of romance and derring-do!”

  —Connie Brockway, New York Times Bestselling Author

  Other Books by Tracy Brogan

  Bell Harbor Series

  Crazy Little Thing

  The Best Medicine

  Love Me Sweet

  Jingle Bell Harbor: A Novella

  Standalone

  Highland Surrender

  Hold on My Heart

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Tracy Brogan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503943247

  ISBN-10: 1503943240

  Cover design by Rachel Adam

  For Webster Girl and Tenacious D. You are my everything.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  The Wawatam County Municipal Airport had all the charm and amenities Emily Chambers had expected, which, unfortunately, meant none. The terminal building, aptly named because its pale beige paint and jaundiced lighting made it appear to indeed be terminal, was the size of a parking space and boasted four dingy, mustard-colored plastic chairs on which to wait. A hand-painted red, white, and blue sign adorned one wall while glossy lacquered trout, mouths gaping wide in one last perpetual gasp for air, clung to simple wooden plaques above each doorway providing the only hint of décor, if one used the term décor as loosely as possible, of course.

  “Mom, that airplane is not legit. It’s nothing but a soup can with wings.”

  Emily’s twelve-year-old daughter gazed with practiced consternation out a long, narrow window at a seven-seater plane sitting on the gravel tarmac. It was an astute assessment of the decrepit, duct-taped aircraft, but instead of agreeing, Emily did what any good mother would do under those particular circumstances. She lied.

  “It’ll be fine, honey. It’s a short flight.”

  Chloe tossed red-gold hair over one slender shoulder. “A short flight? I’m sure it will be. I doubt that thing can stay in the air for long. Where’d you get these tickets? Podunk Airlines? Deathtrap.com? Fly the deadly skies?” Chloe bore an air of perpetual disdain that only a preteen girl could truly master. It was a new skill that Emily did not find parti
cularly endearing, but she didn’t have the energy at the moment to point that out, and in Chloe’s defense, they were both exhausted. They’d been traveling toward Michigan since five o’clock that morning, starting back home in San Antonio, Texas. Two quick layovers meant no time to eat, and Chloe had devoured their stash of granola bars and grapes before the first plane had even left the ground. Now it was dinnertime, and here they were, stuck in this rustic wasteland waiting for one more plane to fly them over the lake to their final destination. Trillium Bay on Wenniway Island, Emily’s hometown, and a place she hadn’t returned to in seven years.

  “Honey, I know you’re not thrilled about spending the entire summer on the island, but I really need you to be a good sport about this. Your great-grandmother has hired me to renovate one of her rental properties, and it’s going to take a while.” That was essentially the truth. Not the entire truth, of course, but a reasonable facsimile of it, and it was the version that protected Chloe from having to worry about things no kid should have to worry about—like, for instance, how to pay the rent—because, not to put too fine a point on things, Emily was broke. Flat, busted, nothing-but-lint-in-her-pockets kind of broke. On the rather colorful list of questionable decisions she’d made in her lifetime, her most recent blunder had landed them in this cash-strapped predicament, but Chloe had no idea how dire their circumstances were. No one in the family had any idea except for her grandmother, Gigi, and Emily wanted to keep it that way.

  “Gigi is so excited to have us stay with her, and Aunt Lilly and Aunt Brooke can’t wait to see us, and there will be all of your cousins. And Grandpa Harlan, too, of course.” Her voice stumbled on that last bit. She had no idea if her father was looking forward to their visit. Chief of Police Harlan Callaghan did not radiate warmth, nor was he the type to forgive lightly, and since Emily had given him quite a few things to be upset about, not the least of which was running away at nineteen to marry a boy she hardly knew, there was just no telling how he’d react to seeing her. She’d come home just twice since marrying Nick, but both times she’d left the island feeling worse than when she’d arrived.

  Still, Gigi had promised Emily that this visit would be fine. Just fine. Enjoyable, even. She’d promised that Harlan would be nice. Quite nice, and that everyone from Trillium Bay was thrilled to have Emily and Chloe stay for a nice, long stretch. Simply thrilled. And even though Emily knew that Margaret “Gigi” O’Reilly-Callaghan-Harper-Smith was a master manipulator who would say just about anything if it served her purpose, Emily chose to believe her. Not that she had much choice.

  “It’s going to be fun, Chloe. I promise. You had fun the last time we were there, right?”

  “I was five, Mom. I don’t remember anything about it.” Another flip of the hair.

  “Well, see? You were just a little kid then, but this time you’ll be able to do so many more things, like hike and bike and ride horses with your cousins. There’s the big Lilac Festival, and fireworks and a parade. And fudge. You like fudge. Right?” Emily nodded, as if agreeing with herself made it that much more true. For them both. Emily knew this trip wasn’t going to be fun. It was going to be hard work interspersed with periods of elongated denial and punctuated by acute dysfunction.

  Ah, family reunions.

  Chloe turned back to the window with an overzealously dramatic sigh and stretched out her arm to take a pouting selfie. “Sure, I like fudge,” she muttered. “I just didn’t want to give up my entire summer to have some.”

  Emily paused, letting that teachable moment on the meaning of gratitude pass, mostly because she understood exactly how her daughter felt. She hadn’t wanted to give up her entire summer, either. This was so not part of Emily’s grand plan, but then again, most of the stuff that happened in her life had not been part of any grand plan. Her life was more like a series of tattered Post-it notes with hastily scribbled goals written in dull pencil. Some of them stuck. Lots of them didn’t. Like her marriage to Chloe’s father. That one definitely did not stick. Other than Chloe, nothing good had come from it.

  Emily had started to worry that her business venture into house flipping wasn’t going to stick, either, although it had started out promising. She’d participated in a dozen or so successful flips with her friend Jewel, but their most recent project had spiraled out of control. A disaster wrapped in a catastrophe sitting on a pile of misfortune. A Calamity-ville horror plagued by mold and termites and a faulty foundation. Every day had brought them more bad news, more issues that cost money to fix. Now Emily was up to her earlobes in debt, and this financial drama had forced her to make a deal with the very devil. A clandestine deal with strings attached that were like fishing lines. Invisible yet impossible to break. And in this case, the devil didn’t wear Prada so much as she wore a pink nylon tracksuit, polka-dotted bifocals, and answered to the name Gigi.

  Yes, Emily had been reduced to borrowing money from her own grandmother. Gigi had been her last resort. Oh sure, Emily could have asked Nick for money, but since he never even paid his child support, she wasn’t likely to get any additional support from him. He was a last, last resort. And there was Harlan, of course, but if the strings attached to her deal with Gigi were fishing lines, any loan from her father would be wrapped in barbed wire. Electric barbed wire. He was her last, last, last resort, so technically, Gigi, her seventy-five-year-old thrice-widowed granny, had come in third from the bottom of Emily’s last resorts. There was little comfort in knowing that she could have sunk even further.

  Emily bit back her own sigh, wishing she could indulge in feeling sorry for herself. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to fling herself onto one of those incredibly uncomfortable plastic chairs and weep—delicately and beautifully, of course. Not the ugly cry. No one ever wants to indulge in the ugly cry. Maybe she could just whimper a little and have a single tear run down one cheek. But she had to put on a brave face for Chloe. Plus, she was wearing her very best and most expensive business suit. It was white, and those chairs looked none too clean. So her fainting and weeping and whimpering would just have to wait.

  She stepped over to the dinged-up vending machine instead and jabbed at a few buttons without much optimism. The vintage contraption was held together with duct tape and only took coins. No dollar bills or credit cards, which meant no snacks for them. She tapped hard on the glass, gazing with pointless longing at an ancient bag of pretzels, hoping it might fall on its own. No such luck. If a bag fell, she’d have to give the pretzels to Chloe, of course, but maybe she could just eat the salty bits at the bottom of the bag. Damn, she was hungry. Her stomach growled in response. She tried again. Tap, tap, tap. The bag stayed solidly in place.

  Hoping to score some loose change at the very bottom of her purse, Emily dug a hand inside her bag just as the door next to Chloe burst open, pushed by a strong wind and man in a navy-blue business suit. A red tie hung loosely around his neck, and he hauled a shiny black suitcase with one hand while pressing a phone against his ear with the other. An overstuffed computer bag hung from his broad shoulder and caught on the door handle. He tugged it free with an impatient huff and continued on inside.

  “No, I’m not there yet, Bryce. Your secretary booked me on the worst flights imaginable, and don’t think I don’t know you put her up to it. Next time I’m flying charter.” He walked over to the chairs, somehow not seeming to notice either Emily or Chloe in spite of how small the area was. “Yeah, very funny, jackass. I just landed in Outer Effing Mongolia. Someplace called . . . Wigwam, or Woebegone, or . . .” He glanced at the sign. “Wawatam. Yeah, that’s it. Wawatam. Wherever the hell that is.”

  Emily bristled at his obvious disdain of the place since she’d grown up near here, but he wasn’t wrong. This airport was one D-list operation. The check-in counter was nothing more than a folding table in front of a doorway leading to an office barely spacious enough for a gray metal desk littered with papers. A crooked old man had been playing solitaire in there with an actual deck of car
ds when she and Chloe had arrived. Emily estimated his age to be somewhere between eighty-five and infinity, and come to think of it, he hadn’t moved in a full fifteen minutes. Emily peered at him a little more closely, suddenly wondering if perhaps his old soul had wandered off to that big airport lobby in the sky. Great. She seriously hoped he wasn’t dead. If he was, she was really going to regret not spending the extra money and flying through the Pellston airport. It was much nicer, and the people there, to the best of her knowledge, were younger and healthier.

  The man in the power suit set down his luggage, taking up one of the premium chairs with his computer bag, and continued talking loudly. “I’ll do my best, Bryce, but I’m sure you’re worried over nothing. This is Dad we’re talking about, and he’s certainly not going to just up and marry some bimbo that he hardly knows. That’s your area.”

  Bimbo? Emily’s attention shifted from the elderly, potentially deceased airport worker to the oblivious phone-talker, taking a quick inventory of his various attributes. He was tall, maybe six-two, with dark brown hair, cut short. Not marine sergeant kind of short, but short enough that it didn’t take much fussing other than to style the front upward. Square jaw, big hands. Power suit. Good looking in a Corporate America, I’m King of the World kind of way. She knew the type. He oozed confidence and an I must win demeanor.

  As a house flipper, most of the guys Emily dealt with these days were subcontractors who wore tool belts and cargo pants and suffered from chronic ass-crack reveal. Or they were prospective home buyers dressed by their wives in a dad-bod uniform of khaki pants and golf shirts. Unlike those guys, though, this one didn’t sport a beer belly, a bald spot, or a wedding band. Emily offered up a short, silent sigh at his businesslike hotness. Never underestimate the allure of a man in a well-cut suit.

  Emily cleared her throat and went to sit down in one of the other chairs. He took note of her then and gave an awkward I’m on the phone here kind of nod. His eyes trailed lower, and she noticed him noticing her legs. Millennia of evolution took a backseat to the primordial part of her that felt validated by his subtle appraisal. Sure, she was a girl-power feminist all day long, but it was still nice to have someone notice your legs. Out of curiosity or boredom or just pure feminine empowerment, she repositioned herself on the chair, slowly recrossing her damn fine legs to her best advantage. Chloe frowned at her from across the tiny room. Really, Mom? Emily was quite accustomed to that look.