Heroes are My Weakness (45 page)

Authors: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #General, #Contemporary Women

BOOK: Heroes are My Weakness

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Charlie jumped up, and raced toward the house, his legs pumping. But just as he got to the front step, he stopped and whipped around. “I get to drive!”

“No you don’t!” his mother countered, slipping Scamp from her arm.

Charlie stomped inside, and his father laughed. “I love that kid.”

“Now, there’s a surprise.” Charlie’s mother gazed at the sleeping baby. The toddler’s wild honey-blond curls couldn’t be more different from her brother’s stick-straight dark hair, but the children shared their father’s blue eyes. They also had their mother’s irreverent personality.

Annie leaned back in the chaise. Theo never got tired of looking at his wife’s quirky face. He reached over and took her hand, running his fingers over the diamond-encrusted wedding band she’d declared too lavish but loved all the same. “What time do we get rid of them?”

“We’re dropping them off at Barbara’s at four. She’s giving them dinner.”

“Leaving us the whole evening for drunken debauchery.”

“I don’t know about the drunken part, but there will definitely be debauchery.”

“There’d better be. I love those little demons with all my heart, but they sure do play havoc with our sex life.”

Annie curled her fingers around his thigh. “Not tonight, they won’t.”

He groaned. “You’re killing me.”

“I haven’t even started.”

He reached out for her.

As Annie felt his hand in her hair, she wondered if it was wrong of her to love playing the femme fatale so much. To love the power she had over him—a power she used only to keep the shadows away. He was a different man from the one she’d seen seven years ago standing on the staircase holding a dueling pistol. They were both different. This island she’d once hated had become her favorite spot on earth, a refuge from the busyness of her normal life.

In addition to working privately with troubled children, she conducted puppet-training seminars for doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers. She’d never imagined loving her work so much. Her main challenge was balancing it all with the family that meant everything to her and the friends she cherished. Here on the island, she had time to do the things that sometimes slipped past her the rest of the year, like the tenth birthday party she’d thrown for Livia last week when Jaycie and her new family had visited from the mainland.

She turned her face into the sunlight. “It’s so nice just sitting here.”

“You work too hard,” he said, not for the first time.

“I’m not the only one.” It wasn’t entirely surprising that the Diggity Swift books had become so successful. Diggity’s adventures took his young teen readers to the edge of horror without pushing them into the pit. Annie loved that her goofy drawings inspired her husband and pleased his readers.

Charlie came barreling out of the house. Theo rose reluctantly, kissed Annie, grabbed one of the cranberry nut cookies from the container he’d found on the farmhouse doorstep that morning, gazed down at his sleeping daughter, then headed for the beach with his son. Annie drew her heels up onto the chair seat and hugged her knees.

In her old gothic paperbacks, the reader never got to see what happened to the hero and heroine when real life set in and they had to deal with all its messiness: household chores, children squabbling, head colds, and the challenges of dealing with extended family—his, not hers. Elliott had mellowed with age, but Cynthia was as pretentious as ever, and she drove Theo crazy. Annie was more tolerant because Cynthia was an astonishingly good grandmother—much better with children than with adults—and the kids loved her.

As for Annie’s family . . . Niven Garr’s widowed sister Sylvia, along with Niven’s longtime partner Benedict—or Grampa Bendy—as Charlie called him, would be arriving soon for their annual summer visit. At first, Sylvia and Benedict had been suspicious of Annie, but after a DNA test and some awkward early visits, they had become as close as if they’d always been part of each other’s lives.

Tonight, though, it would just be Theo and herself. Tomorrow they’d pack up the kids and drive to the other end of the island. She imagined them waving at the family from Providence who’d rented the schoolhouse cottage for the season, then heading up the badly rutted drive to the top of the cliff and the island’s best view.

The outbuildings of Harp House had been demolished long ago, the swimming pool filled in for safety. Only the vine-covered turret remained of what once had been. She and Theo would lie on a blanket sampling a good bottle of wine while Charlie ran free as only an island kid could. Eventually Theo would pick up their daughter, kiss the top of her head, and carry her to an old spruce stump. He’d crouch down, gather up the beach glass that was still scattered there, and whisper in her ear.

“Let’s build a fairy house.”

About the Author

Susan Elizabeth Phillips
soared onto the
New York Times
best sellers list with
Dream a Little Dream
and has stayed there ever since. Her books have been published in over thirty languages, making her a favorite of readers all over the world as well as an international best seller. A resident of the Chicago suburbs, she’s also a hiker, gardener, reader, wife, mother of two grown sons, and someone who believes that life is too short to read depressing books.

Visit Susan at www.susanelizabethphillips.com and also on Facebook and Twitter.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

A
LSO BY
S
USAN
E
LIZABETH
P
HILLIPS

Nobody’s Baby but Mine

Cover design by Amanda Kain

Cover photograph © by 2/Dougal Waters/Ocean/Corbis

Author photograph by Peter Irman

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

HEROES ARE MY WEAKNESS
. Copyright © 2014 by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Susan Elizabeth.

Heroes are my weakness / Susan Elizabeth Phillips.—First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-06-210607-0 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-06-210619-3 (paperback) 1. Authors—Fiction.

2. Actresses—Fiction. 3. Maine—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction.

I. Title.

PS3566.H522H47 2014

813'.54—dc23

2014007547