Mistletoe Daddy. Deb Kastner

       Chapter One

      “Texas men are built like bricks and so good lookin’, don’t you think? Especially these here McKenna boys,” elderly Jo Spencer crowed. The cheerful crowd gathered on the community green for the first annual Bachelors and Baskets auction clapped their agreement.

      Jo swept her arm, gesturing from the top of Nick’s black cowboy hat down to the toes of his boots. “Just feast your eyes on this handsome guy.”

      Vivian Grainger was definitely looking, though feasting wouldn’t have been the word she would have used.

      Critically assessing would be more accurate. She was trying to decide if Nick McKenna was the right man for the construction contractor job she had to fill. After all, that’s what made this auction different from most of the ones she’d heard of before. The organizers weren’t auctioning off dates with the men who had volunteered. Even the married men were auctioning themselves off for charity. Instead, the men agreed to perform some task or chore for the women who “bought” them. One of Nick’s brothers, Slade, had been the first man auctioned off, and when his wife, Laney, won him, she’d announced that he’d be doing dishes and laundry for a month. In turn, the ladies offered a picnic lunch for their winning bid—hence the Bachelors and Baskets theme.

      Vivian could handle her own dishes and laundry, but building construction was out of her skill set. Was Nick up for the job? She knew he was a rancher by trade, but from what she’d heard around town, he had major skills in carpentry and remodeling. Vivian needed to shave costs wherever she could but didn’t want to sacrifice on quality, since her shop would be her main career focus for the rest of her working life.

      “You think his brothers Slade and Jax have muscles?” Jo asked with a delighted cackle. The auction had been Jo’s brainchild in the first place, a way to help raise funds for a new long-term care facility and senior center for Serendipity, so naturally she was emceeing the event. And she was clearly taking great delight in parading all these handsome men across her platform.

      Jo prodded Nick’s biceps with an appreciative whistle that made a dash of color rise to the poor man’s face—or at least as much of his face as Vivian could see under his dark layer of scruffy whiskers. Viv’s fingers itched to grab a pair of shears and a straight razor and clean him up a bit, if nothing else so she could see what she was really buying. She smothered a chuckle.

      “Nick here is the biggest, brawniest of the three McKennas, and let me tell you, that’s really saying something.”

      Indeed, it was, Viv thought with a smirk. All three McKenna brothers stood head and shoulders over most of the other men in Serendipity, and with Nick’s deeply tanned, unshaven face and thick black hair long enough to brush the collar of his blue-checked Western shirt, he looked more like a mountain man than a rancher. What really made him stand out were his blue eyes, a pop of color against a background of darkness.

      Not that she noticed.

      Vivian flipped open her notepad and yanked out the pencil that was holding her bun together, causing a waterfall of straight bleached-blond hair to cascade down her shoulders. If a person looked close enough they might see the thinnest stripe of bright pink on a strand of hair on the right, Vivian’s little gift to herself to make her stand out from her identical twin sister, Alexis. Viv had always been the wilder of the two, and even now Alexis was settled down with a husband while Vivian...

      Wasn’t. And she wasn’t going to acknowledge the twinge in her gut whenever she thought about it, either.

      She threw her head to the side to brush her hair off of her face and eyed the list she’d made in anticipation of the auction. She immediately checked off several items, just as she’d known she would. She’d narrowed down the list of potential candidates from the list of eligible bachelors that had been posted at Cup O’ Jo’s Café a week before the auction. Nick was currently at the top of her inventory list.

      Strong?

      Yes, Nick McKenna was pure, lean, unadulterated muscle. There was not an inch of flab on his whole body. She scratched through that requirement. Nick didn’t even need to flex his powerful biceps for them to ripple underneath the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Tall and broad-shouldered, Vivian guessed that he stood around six foot four and weighed a good 220 pounds at least. Those beefy arms of his were practically bigger than her waist—or at least, her prepregnancy midsection. At three months along, her once-tiny tummy was now starting to swell with new life.

      She laid a protective hand over her abdomen. She wouldn’t be able to hide her secret from the public much longer, which was exactly why she needed help to get her business up and running, and the sooner, the better. In this day and age a single mother didn’t stand out as much as she once would have, but even if no one else judged her, it made a difference to her. She had betrayed everything she had once believed in, even when she knew it was wrong. She was ashamed to return to her hometown unmarried and pregnant, but with no way to provide for her baby, she’d had no other choice.

      Creating a successful business, proving she could make a good life for her and her child, would hopefully show the folks she knew and loved that she meant to make her life right with God. From this point forward, there was no way to go but up.

      But was Nick the right one to help her?

      She’d been told he was good with a hammer. His ability to remodel was the most important qualification she required and it was the reason Nick was at the top of her list. She’d asked around town and had discovered he’d not only overseen the remodeling of his mother’s house but had built from the ground up two adjacent cabins on his ranch land for himself and one of his brothers.

      He knew construction and carpentry, which was just what she needed.

      It was not one of her conditions that he be handsome...

      Jo seemed to think that was the most important prerequisite in a man—any man. Vivian chuckled under her breath and tapped the eraser against her bottom lip thoughtfully as she evaluated the man standing square-shouldered on the auction block, his expression grim but confident.

      No, Nick wasn’t handsome. Not in the classic sense of the word, anyway. Still, Vivian had to wonder why Serendipity’s single ladies weren’t bidding up a storm on him right now. He wasn’t Vivian’s type, by any means, but if a woman liked the rugged-cowboy look—and she knew that many in Serendipity did—he fit the bill perfectly.

      Granted, he could do with a haircut and a shave, which was both amusing and ironic, given the project she had in mind for him to help her build.

      A beauty salon and spa. She couldn’t help but smile to herself.

      She knew that many of the single women in the crowd intended to bid on attractive, unattached bachelors not for help with projects, but for love’s sake, or at least the possibility of it. But dating and falling in love was the farthest thing from Vivian’s mind.

      It didn’t matter to her at all that Nick wasn’t classically handsome. His attractiveness, or lack of, wasn’t even on her list, and with good reason.

      She wanted nothing—nothing—to do with men, handsome or otherwise. She’d been burned to a crisp in her last relationship. Her ex-boyfriend, Derrick, wouldn’t even acknowledge that the baby she now carried was his, rejecting both her and their precious offspring.

      It was no wonder she didn’t trust men as far as she could throw them. Hopefully Nick wasn’t looking for a relationship through participating in the auction, because if her bid won he would be sadly disappointed if he was. Viv’s thoughts were purely business oriented. That her money was going to fund a good cause—the town senior center—made her investment all the more worthwhile.

      Her intention was to try and save a few dollars by not having to hire a professional contractor. Instead, she would use a skillful amateur who knew what he was doing and could get the job done as quickly and easily as possible.

      “Which