Read Online Happily Ever After by Susan May Warren - Free Book Online

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     the commitment papers and tenaciously hung on despite his moves to dodge it.
    Joe berated himself for not staying and shouldering his mother’s burden. Yet he knew if he had, he would have shattered. He
     had to leave. In the end, his mother seemed to understand. She’d even suggested that her eldest son had done the best thing.
     But Gabe was different. Would he ever forgive Joe for not sticking with them through the hard times?
    The question would have to wait for another day. He couldn’t tackle it quite yet. One hurdle at a time. He was glad he’d made
     it this far and had Mona’s place to hustle back to and regroup. Joe rolled the comic book.“Can I borrow this?”
    Gabe smiled, his angled eyes lighting up. “Bring it back with a new one.”
    Joe grinned. Nope, different Gabe. More confident.
    Full of fun, perhaps even forgiveness. “No problem.”
    “Are you in town for a long time?” Gabe’s smile dimmed.
    “We’ll see.” He avoided Gabe’s face when he said it.
    “Where ya stay in’?”
    Joe stared past him, out the window. The last thing he needed was Gabe or Ruby tracking him down and forcing a sticky face-to-face
     with his new boss. The less Mona knew about his little brother tucked in the woods, the better for them all. “Is that a strawberry
     patch?”
    Gabe jumped to his feet. “Yes. That’s our business.
    We sell strawberries.”
    Joe grinned and shook his head in amazement. Ruby was from the same stock as Mona—ambitious. “Well, maybe I’ll stick around
     long enough to taste one,” he said, peeking at Gabe. Gabe lit up like a Christmas tree. Joe couldn’t help but smile in the
     face of his brother’s intoxicating enthusiasm.
    “Come and meet the others,” Gabe said in a rush.“They know all about you.”
    Joe slapped his knee with the comic book. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he muttered as he followed his brother from the room.

5
    Mona licked an escaping trail of chocolate chip ice cream sliding down the side of her waffle cone and fielded Brian Whitney’s
     next question.
    “So then you went to the University of Minnesota?”
    His green eyes, searing her with focused intensity, made her squirm, but his interest in her life seemed genuine. She tried
     to relax.
    “I graduated in five years with an English major.” She caught another drip off the end of her cone. “I always wanted to teach
     or maybe write. Then I realized my true love was reading and sharing the joy of literature. So I swapped my teaching certificate
     for a glitzy higher-paying job as a law secretary, saved every dime I made, and poof! Ten years later I’m fixing up the money
     pit on Route 65.”
    “Five weeks left. Think you’ll open on time?”
    Mona conceded defeat and surrendered her cone to the trash. “I hope so. I hired a handyman, and he seems to know what he’s
     doing. He straightened the gutters today, and tomorrow he’s going to jack up the porch and recement the front posts.” Joe’s
     crooked smile flashed through her mind. That and the way he’d hung on her shed door, looking rumpled yet impossibly handsome,
     his grin lighting up his face and unraveling the knot in her heart with some sort of masculine magic.
    “Sounds like a good man to have around.”
    She heard Joe’s voice, gentle and so masculine, as he suggested there might be treasures hidden in Deep Haven, and it sent
     a soft smile to her face even now. Mona nodded in agreement. “So, you have family here?”
    Brian suddenly focused on his ice-cream cone. “Nope.Had some once but they all moved south. I’m the remnant, holding down
     the family homestead.”
    Mona watched his long fingers turn his cone. Elegant fingers. Unaccustomed to labor. The image of Joe’s rough-hewn hands flashed
     through her mind, and she blinked to focus on the man she should be thinking about. “Not such a bad place to hold down.”
    Brian studied her with a peculiar expression. “No, not such a bad place,” he