Any Way You Build It

  Any Way You Build It

  An UPPER CRUST Novel

  by Monique McDonell

  Any Way You Build It, Copyright Monique McDonell

  Published by Redfish Publishing

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author. Please contact the author at monmcd@bigpond.net.au This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For more information on the author and her works, please see

  http://moniquemcdonellauthor.com/

  Contents

  Any Way You Build It

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  If you liked Any Way You Build It, please leave me a review. Good reviews make an author’s day.

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  It was dusk when Sarah finally pulled the car up in front of her aunt’s old home. Or, her own new home to be precise. The warm summer breeze seemed to guide them to the house. Sarah expected to find it run-down and a little sad looking. She thought the lawn would be long and the flowers dead.

  She was wrong. Someone had been taking very good care of her late aunt’s home in the last six months. She nearly cried tears of relief. This had been the longest year of her life, and it was only half over. Small things, small gestures of human kindness reminded her that things would get better.

  She’d come here for a better life and it was already looking up.

  The kids were in the back seat. Restless and eager to get out. She could hardly blame them; they’d been on the road for days.

  “We’re here,” she declared, and they let out a cheer.

  Zach unbuckled himself and was out on the driveway instantly.

  “I want to see, too, Mama,” Olivia shouted from her seat.

  “Coming baby.” She climbed out and did a quick stretch before lifting her daughter from the back seat.

  “So this is our new home. What do you think?” She watched the kids take in the two-story house. The white clapboard and green shutters, the front porch complete with a porch swing, and the big yard.

  “It has a lot of stairs,” Livi said quietly. She was right, it certainly did have a lot of stairs.

  “Nothing to worry about.” It was Sarah’s job to assure everyone that life was about to get better.

  Zach was tumbling across the grass. “I like it. I thought you said it might be a mess. This isn’t a mess; this is the nicest place we’ve ever lived.”

  He was right, and they hadn’t even made it inside yet. “Let’s go take a look inside.”

  She carried her daughter up the first lot of stairs and deposited her on the porch swing. She remembered sitting on that swing with her aunt reading to her when she was a girl. The key was hidden under a ceramic pot beside the front door. The lawyer had come and hidden it there today.

  “Do you want to do the honors, Zach, as the man of the house?” she asked her son. He was only seven but he was way older than his years, poor kid. He’d had to be. He took the key from her and turned.

  “Come on,” he said, and she picked Livi up and carried her in.

  Someone had been in here recently. It didn’t have the musty smell of a house closed up. It was clean and dusted and fresh as a daisy. The tears pricked her eyes again. Zach ran through the house calling from room to room. She knew the house like the back of her hand. She used to spend her summers here as a teen, working at a nearby summer camp and staying with her aunt.

  “Which room is mine, Mom?”

  “You choose from either one at the end of the hall upstairs,” she called to him, following him up to the second floor. She placed Livi down on her aunt’s bed. The same floral comforter covered it as it always had. A wave of sadness hit then. She missed her aunt terribly. She’d been her only living relative, and even though they lived hundreds of miles apart, they had talked often. Her sudden death had been a shock, and then the shocks kept on coming. She really hadn’t had time to mourn.

  “Are you okay, Mama?” Livi asked as she blinked back a tear.

  “Yes, I was just thinking about Aunt Esme who left us this house. I miss her.”

  “She’s with Daddy and the angels in heaven,” the sweet four-year-old said.

  “She is. And I know she would be very happy that we finally made it here.”

  Todd was in his tree house office looking out on the street when he saw the beat-up station wagon with the U-Haul trailer pull into Esme’s drive. Well, it wasn’t her drive anymore of course, she’d been dead for months, and the house now belonged to her niece, Sarah. A niece who hadn’t even bothered to show up for the funeral. That would have broken the old woman’s heart.

  He had been so angry about it himself. Esme spoke about the girl as if she was a treasure, but that had tarnished her for Todd. It was unacceptable. Todd was a pretty laid-back guy. He spent his days mostly designing apps and raking in the money. In between, he met his friends at the diner, played some poker, and in the summer went water-skiing. He wasn’t normally a judgmental type, but Esme had been like a mother to him and she deserved better than that.

  At first, he’d stopped mowing the lawn and raking the leaves because he didn’t want to help her niece out, but the sight of his old friend’s house, her pride and joy, declining had been too much for him, so he’d resumed his duties as if she was alive.

  He noticed the younger woman had carried one child in. She came out again with the older boy and headed to the car. He should go and offer to help them unpack. He knew that was what Esme would have expected him to do, but he didn’t feel inclined. He was pretty sure they couldn’t see him from this vantage point. The little boy turned and said something to his mother, and then pointed to his tree house.

  A grown man having a three-story tree house in his yard was unusual, so he could hardly blame the kid for pointing. He pulled back from the window a little to be extra sure he wasn’t spotted. He needed a beer. He crossed to the bar fridge and pulled one out. The lid twisted off and he heard the gentle fizz of the drink. It was a warm summer’s evening. When Esme was alive, he would have been over on her porch now, shooting the breeze and solving the world’s problems. He missed her. He crossed back to the window in time to see Sarah unfold an ancient wheelchair onto the porch. A wheelchair? Who the heck needed a wheelchair?

  There wasn’t much about Sarah’s life that Esme hadn’t shared with him. The truth was he’d always liked the sound of her and hearing stories about her. There was never a wheelchair in any of the stories. A dead husband and two kids but no wheelchair.

  Then he had a sick feeling in his stomach. That child she’d carried in looked too old for a stroller. He flicked back through the stories; she was four or maybe five. Too old to be
carried.

  Todd downed the beer in one and headed outside to help his new neighbor.

  #

  “Hi,” she heard Zach say.

  “Hi, welcome to the neighborhood. I’m Todd.”

  Sarah turned to see the famous Todd. Her aunt had loved Todd. In fact, Todd had taken such good care of her she wondered if he had wanted to inherit the house. He was tall with a head of dark hair. He wore a red T-shirt and khaki shorts. He had a day or two worth of stubble and a dimple on his right cheek that his easy smile was showing off.

  “Do you live in that tree house?” Zach asked.

  “No. I live in the house, but I work in the tree house.”

  “I didn’t think adults had tree houses.”

  “I’m kind of an unusual adult.”

  Unusually attractive, she thought. Then she reminded herself that all men were currently off-limits in her life. She needed a job, she needed to settle her kids, she needed to get life back on track, and what she did not need was one more complication. Men were a complication. They led you astray; they talked you in to things best avoided. Every crazy-ass decision she’d made in her life was because of a man, and those days were over.

  “Hey, Todd, I’m Sarah.”

  He extended his hand to her. “Oh, I know all about you. We’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

  “We?” Maybe Todd had married in the last little while. That would make things easy. If Todd was off-limits, she would be able to ignore how nice his warm hand felt when it took hers. And how a little zing of electricity shot through her body when he gave her that smile. She never ever dated married men.

  “The whole town.”

  “The whole town has been waiting for us?” Zach asked.

  “Yes,” he said, releasing her hand and smiling down at Zach. “And now you’re here.”

  Sarah remembered Livi was upstairs alone. “Excuse me a minute.”

  It was a good excuse to get away from him. She was already beyond exhausted and feeling fragile. The long drive, the long months, and now the house being in such great shape. Kindness in the form of a sexy stranger was not what she needed.

  She raced upstairs and got Livi who she’d left playing a game on her phone. “Okay, honey, let’s go.”

  She negotiated the stairs back down slowly. The stairs were going to be an issue, but they’d work that out. At least they weren’t homeless. A few stairs were nothing really.

  When they came outside, Zach was telling Todd about how they’d been driving forever and how they’d stayed in motels that all had donuts for breakfast. Great, she sounded like mother of the year material. The truth was she could barely afford the motels, so the free breakfasts had been a godsend even if they had more sugar than a candy bar.

  “This is Livi,” she said, placing her frail daughter in her wheelchair.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said to the child who looked up at him from under her wispy bangs. She was shy these days. She didn’t used to be, but with all she’d been through no one could blame her. “I live over the road.”

  “Look, Liv, he has a tree house.”

  He turned his gaze back on her, and Sarah felt the warmth rise in her cheeks again. “Can I help you unload?”

  She should probably say no but she was exhausted. The truth was she wanted to return the trailer as soon as possible. Why waste the money?

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if I did,” he said. “Plus, I’m worried Esme will come back and haunt me if I don’t help you.”

  “She was a pretty strong force; we can’t rule it out.”

  “Exactly.”

  An hour later, the meager belongings were unpacked.

  “When will the rest of your stuff arrive?” he asked, closing the trailer.

  “This is it.”

  He was pretty sure the entire contents of three people’s lives usually took up more space than this. There was a story here. How had the little girl, Livi, ended up in that chair? He’d known Sarah was a widow with two young children, but somewhere along the line it was clear life had tipped into some precarious territory.

  “Okay, then. Do you want a drink? I can go grab some stuff from my place.”

  “Ah, I guess I should have stopped in town.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. She was bent over a plant on the front porch, and he could see her fine rear encased in those short shorts. She was a very pretty woman. No doubt about it, pretty but tired. She looked exhausted. Not just from the long drive from the Midwest, though that would be enough. She looked world-weary.

  Todd walked into his kitchen. He grabbed a cooler, and then went to the fridge. He grabbed beers, wine, soda, some cold cuts, mayo, and bread. He grabbed a bag of chips, cookies, milk, and a box of cereal. That would keep them going until tomorrow.

  He stopped short in the kitchen. Just because when he touched her he felt the electricity between them. Just because she was beautiful didn’t mean she was his responsibility.

  Todd had a couple of rules in life. He didn’t date women with kids, and he didn’t get involved. Sarah was the very sort of woman he needed to avoid. Yes, he was just being neighborly right now but that was all it was ever going to be. Esme would expect that of him, but this was not a regular thing.

  “You know the rules, buddy,” he said to himself before crossing the street.

  He knew the house almost as well as his own and headed through to the kitchen with the cooler.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a few things to settle you in.”

  She peered into the cooler, and then looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “Ohmygosh, thank you. The thought of making dinner or . . . well, thank you.”

  “Hey, it’s no big deal.”

  But he had the feeling it was to her. A very big deal indeed. He could almost hear the siren wailing danger.

  She was alone, she was vulnerable, and the way she was biting her bottom lip was about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

  She reached out and put her hand on his forearm. “Thank you.”

  Warmth spread through his whole body. Yep, she was the kind of woman who could have him breaking all his rules, but some rules were simply not meant to be broken.

  “No problem. I’ll leave you guys to settle in.” Yep, best to make a hasty retreat.

  “Oh, you’re leaving.” She still had her hand on his arm. “I haven’t spoken to another adult in days. I don’t suppose you could stay and have just one drink with me.”

  He knew he should walk out, or maybe run, but he couldn’t bring himself to say no to a pretty woman, and being in Esme’s house, where he could almost feel her egging him on, didn’t help.

  “Okay, just one.” He leaned in and took a beer from the cooler. And handed her one.

  “This house doesn’t seem to have changed much. Well, apart from Aunt Esme not actually being here.”

  “No, well, she had it how she liked it. When did you last visit here?”

  She sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and took a sip of her beer. “College. She visited me every year since, but once I had Zach . . .”

  “Hard to travel with kids,” he suggested.

  “That plus work and finances. She offered to fly us out. I wish I’d said yes now, for her sake. She would have loved it.”

  She would have. He knew they spoke every week and that Esme looked forward to that. “No point having regrets.”

  “I try and tell myself that and I do okay in general. Some days it’s harder than others.”

  He wasn’t going to ask what about. He wanted to but he reminded himself to keep his distance. “For everyone.”

  “So, I suppose you’re the one I should thank for keeping the house up.”

  He was hoping she wouldn’t guess, he didn’t want anyone feeling beholden to him. “I did it for her. She wouldn’t have wanted it looking run-down.”

  “Sure
.” She was peeling the label off the beer. She looked a lot younger than her years. He wasn’t exactly sure how old she was, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. When he looked closely, he could see her dark eyes were a little sunken and she was clearly exhausted.

  “You should get an early night. You guys have had a long trip.” He pushed up to go.

  “Thanks again for your help. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem. I’m just over the road, mostly. I travel a bit.”

  “Good for you. Although, right now I have to say I’ll pretty happy to stay put for a while.”

  “Well, welcome to Rangers Bluff. I hope you’ll be happy here.”

  Chapter 2

  Sarah had been in town three days now. She’d found the park, the grocery store, and the ice-cream parlor. They’d managed to return the trailer, unpack a little, and watch a whole lot of bad television. Summer was in full flight, and in a perfect world, she would spend the entire time with her kids. Still, she was a realist. She was a single mother, with two kids, one with a disability, her life was a million miles from perfect.

  She sat on the front porch with a notepad and pen and made a list of things she needed to do.

  1. Find a job.

  2. Find a good doctor for Livi.

  3. Find some kids for Zach to play with.

  Her bank account contained four hundred and ninety-seven dollars and some change. Find a job had to be top of the list. She was pretty frugal and they could last a while now that they were living rent free and she’d get a small amount in VA benefits each month. She sent her millionth silent prayer of thanks up to her aunt. A job with insurance would be a huge help for the second item on the list. The doctors back in Ohio had thought moving was a bad idea, but the truth was she’d had no choice. She had no money, and as much as they wanted to, the dance studio couldn’t keep paying her indefinitely when she couldn’t work, and she hadn’t been to work since the day of the accident. She was quite sure the doctors were right about consistency of care, but living in a box by the roadside with her kids wasn’t an option either.