Coming Home To You. M. K. Stelmack

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Introduction

       Dear Reader

       Dedication

       CHAPTER ONE

       CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN

       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

       CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

       CHAPTER NINETEEN

       Extract

       About the Publisher

       CHAPTER ONE

      MEL GREENE WATCHED through the plate-glass window of the Tim Hortons coffee shop at a traffic accident about to happen a couple hundred feet away. A motor home had stopped on the highway and signaled to enter the side street leading to Spirit Lake’s top shop for caffeine addicts.

      But the turn was too sharp. Not much shorter than a railroad car, the unit would flip in the ditch or, worse, collect vehicles in the oncoming lane.

      No one else had noticed. The other customers drank and ate, or stood in line. Coming up on seven o’clock on a sunny July morning, it was rush hour at the Tim’s—a couple dozen vehicles were likely funneling through the drive-thru at that moment.

      “Mel.” Linda, his as-of-five-minutes-ago ex-girlfriend, sat across from him, her voice soft and confidential. “Are you listening?”

      The motor home switched to the right-turn signal. Mel relaxed. Right led to a street of businesses for light manufacturing, and a minimal risk of injury or death, if the motor home crashed.

      The unit swerved into the oncoming lane—empty at this hour—veered the other way before straightening and then trundled down a street that made no sense for it to go on.

      Mel dragged his attention back to Linda and to the end of yet another relationship. His seventh, to be precise.

      He managed a belated nod because it hurt too much to talk right now. Still, to show he was taking their breakup with grace, he sipped from his coffee with its swirl of whipped cream.

      Linda tapped her upper lip, and he wiped the froth off his mouth. A routine exchange honed over the last eight months of starting most days with a simple forty-minute coffee together.

      Not anymore.

      “You’re a good man, Mel,” Linda said.

      Not the first time he’d heard that. His third girlfriend had been the first to use that line when she’d dumped him for a guy who’d been arrested for stealing antifreeze at a convenience store.

      After the fifth breakup, he figured he might be a good man, but also an unlucky one. He’d been engaged to that girlfriend. She’d had three kids from a previous relationship, and an instant family was convenient and predictable. Then she’d become pregnant with another man’s child.

      “But—” Linda started.

      Mel disliked the word but. It undid everything good just said. Nice try but... I see what you’re saying but... Thanks for applying but... You’re a good man but...

      “—but I feel...I feel you want to be with someone, anyone, and you’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

      He would do whatever it took. Marrying a good woman was what he’d wanted pretty much all his fifty years, and Linda was a good catch. A retired nurse with a good pension. A full-time volunteer and grandmother. A widow with a good head on her shoulders and beautiful blond hair, which she did up, even this early in the morning.

      She straightened, establishing more space between them and said, “And I refuse to settle. I know what it is to love. I want it again. And...and so should you.”

      He was willing to spend the rest of his life with her. If that wasn’t love, what was?

      “I wasn’t settling,” he mumbled to his coffee, finally speaking.

      “You’re taking it awfully well, then,” Linda said. “I mean, look at you. Even now, I’m breaking up with you and you don’t seem to care. You’re staring at your coffee, or out the window at traffic.”

      He forced himself to make eye contact with Linda. He’d probably often looked away from her throughout their relationship, giving her the impression he didn’t care. In reality, he was afraid if he gazed too long, if he fixed too much attention on her, she’d get scared and leave. Maybe he’d done that in all his relationships: wanted, yet hid his wanting. In the end, they’d all left, anyway. And it was always the women who broke things off because he’d neither the heart nor the guts for it himself.

      “It’s not that,” he tried to explain. “It’s... I do care,” he finished lamely. “I’m sorry I didn’t