Single Mum Seeks…

Single Mum Seeks…
Teresa Hill

Gorgeous men were like chocolate… Delicious and mostly bad for you. At least that’s what single mother Lily thought. Especially when Nick moved in next door. After her divorce, Lily wanted nothing to do with men ever again. But when Nick needed help keeping the local women at bay, he turned to her.The idea was simple: pretend they were a couple to ward off the others. But as they grew closer, Lily found herself wishing ‘let’s pretend’ could be real life…

Excerpt

“Am I supposed to live like a monk just because I have a kid in the house?” Nick asked.

Lily didn’t know how to answer. Maybe he should ask one of the other mums in the neighbourhood – ones who had more active social lives. Except Lily didn’t want him anywhere near other women.

“I don’t know if I’m the person to ask about this,” Lily said. “I mean, I guess you could hope to find a woman with no kids and a place of her own and make an early night of it. So your nephew isn’t home alone for long.”

Nick looked at her, a wide grin on his face. “Not gonna work. The woman I’ve got my eye on has two little girls.”

“Oh.” Lily nearly dropped her glass.

Nick saved her by taking it out of her hand and putting it down. Then he took her chin in his hand and very slowly, giving her time to pull away if she wanted to, leaned in close, his nose nuzzling hers, lips practically on hers.

“It’s you, Lily. The woman I want is you.”

Teresa Hill lives within sight of the mountains in upstate South Carolina with one husband, very understanding and supportive; one daughter, who’s taken up drumming (Earplugs really don’t work that well. Neither do sound-muffling drum pads. Don’t believe anyone who says they do.); and one son, who’s studying the completely incomprehensible subject of chemical engineering. (Flow rates, Mum. It’s all about flow rates.)

In search of company while she writes away her days in her office, she has so far accumulated two beautiful, spoiled dogs and three cats (the black panther/champion hunter, the giant powder puff and the tiny tiger stripe), all of whom take turns being stretched out, belly-up on the floor beside her, begging for attention as she sits at her computer.

Single Mum Seeks…

by

Teresa Hill

MILLS & BOON®

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)

To all mothers who’ve survived raising teenagers. you have my complete admiration.

Chapter One

“I just don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Lily Tanner told her older sister, Marcy, as she scrambled to hold the phone to her ear with her shoulder while making sandwiches for her two girls’ school lunches.

“Fuss?” Her sister seemed disbelieving. “That’s what you call it? Fuss?”

“No, I don’t call it fuss,” Lily said, smearing peanut butter on the bread too fast and tearing a gash in the last slice she had, save for the heels. Her girls acted like she was trying to feed them some kind of brick when she had nothing but the heels of a loaf of bread to offer.

“Who’s fussing?” her youngest, Brittany, who was six, asked.

“No one’s fussing,” Lily assured her, as her daughter moved like a sloth through the kitchen, slowly sipping a cup of milk, like she had all the time in the world before Tuesday’s designated carpool driver arrived.

“And no one’s getting any fuss,” Marcy told her. “Which is fine for a while and completely understandable, given what that rat Richard put you through. But after a while, a woman’s just got to have a little fussing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I am not going to call it fussing,” Lily said, trying to salvage the torn slice of bread. Anything but the heel. She wasn’t taking lip from her daughters today about a heel of bread in a peanut butter sandwich.

“You said nobody was fussing,” Brittany reminded her.

“Fussing? Who’s fussing?” her oldest, Ginny, asked, looking worried, as she too often did these days. “Is it Daddy? Are you and Daddy fussing?”

“No. I told you. No one’s fussing,” Lily promised, rolling her eyes in exasperation. “Your aunt Marcy and I were just talking, and we weren’t actually talking about fussing at all. We were talking about—”

“Yes, please. I can’t wait to hear,” Marcy said, laughing. “Tell me what we were talking about.”

“Fudge,” Lily said, thinking it was the farthest thing from fussing she could come up with on short notice.

Marcy roared at that.

Lily shoved sandwiches into lunch boxes as Ginny looked like she didn’t quite believe her own mother.

Then Brittany piped up and saved the day, announcing with absolute sincerity, an unwavering sense of optimism and six-year-old innocence, “I like fudge.”

“There,” Lily said, managing a smile for her girls. “Everybody likes fudge.”

“Everybody certainly does,” Marcy said. “So for you to tell me that you’re perfectly fine without—”

“Marcy!” she yelled into the phone while she shooed the girls toward the front door.

“Wait,” Brittany said, stopping short and tugging on the right leg of Lily’s shorts. “Do we have fudge?”

“No, baby. Not right now. But maybe tonight,” Lily said. “Here. I’ve got the front door. You two have to get outside. Mrs. Hamilton will be here any minute.”

She hustled the girls out the door, waved to Betsy Hamilton, who was already at the curb, then closed the door and turned her attention back to the phone.

“Honestly, Marcy! Fudge?”

“Hey, it was your word, not mine. But now that you’ve coined the term, we’re stuck with it. It’s perfect. It’ll be our code word forever.”

“We don’t need a code word. We don’t need to talk about it at all. I am perfectly fine,” Lily insisted.

After all, it was just…fudge. Nothing to get all that excited about. Not when she had fifteen things to do every minute of the day and the girls ran her ragged and Richard was still as annoying as could be.

Who had time for fudge?

“May I remind you,” Lily said, “that I have a year to get out of this house? Not even that, anymore. Just a little over ten and a half months to do everything I can to upgrade it before I have to sell it and hope I get enough out of my half to get me and the girls into another house. Which is going to take every bit of time and energy I have for the next ten and a half months.”

“I know. I know.”

“And where am I supposed to find a man anyway? You know what it’s like in my neighborhood. Everybody’s married, with kids the girls’ages, and if they do happen to get divorced, the wife ends up here in the subdivision with the kids while the cheating husband moves out to some little love nest of an apartment with his new, pretty, young thing. Until the wife has to sell out for lack of money and then some new married couple moves in. These are the suburbs, in all their glory. I could easily go a month without seeing a single, eligible man, and then even if one did show up, I don’t have time to date anybody. I hardly have time to drink my coffee.”

She gave a big huff at the end of her little speech, tired and spent.

Did her sister know nothing of Lily’s current life? Of her world?