HOME TO STAY
Gabriella Carlini loves her family. But when she returns to Lyndon Point, Washington, to help save their restaurant, she’s not sure she’s the right person for the job. She’s spent her adult life avoiding her heritage. What she needs is a new chef to take the heat off her. Talented and experienced, Zachary Davenport seems to be the answer to her prayers. But he’s also a handsome complication. Gabi has always put love on the back burner. Will Zach show her that love and family should always be on the menu?
Gabi reached for one of the soft, fluffy towels to wrap her shivering charge.
As she handed off the puppy, their hands touched, and in spite of the slippery water on hers, they stood there, the contact unbroken. Once again, with Zach that close, Gabi felt the rush of…of that foreign something she’d never experienced before she’d met him. The light in his gaze seemed to echo what she felt, and his light touch against her fingers brought her the oddest sense of mutual attraction, of loneliness dispelled, of welcome, of coming ho—
She gasped when she realized where her thoughts were going. She couldn’t go there. She just couldn’t. This wasn’t home, and this man was all wrong for her.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
She had to get away. Now. No matter how many dogs she left behind. As she’d thought a number of times before, her sanity depended on it. No matter what she felt whenever she was in Zach’s presence.
GINNY AIKEN
Born in Havana, Cuba, raised in Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela, Ginny Aiken discovered books early and wrote her first novel at age fifteen while she trained with the Ballets de Caracas, later known as the Venezuelan National Ballet. She burned that tome when she turned a “mature” sixteen. Stints as reporter, paralegal, choreographer, language teacher and retail salesperson followed. Her life as wife, mother of four boys and herder of their numerous and assorted friends brought her back to books and writing in search of her sanity. She’s now the author of more than twenty published works and a frequent speaker at Christian women’s and writers’ workshops, but has yet to catch up with that elusive sanity.
A Daughter’s Homecoming
Ginny Aiken
And [I] will be your Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
—2 Corinthians 6:18
This one is dedicated to the memory of my late mother, Olga, and to my dad, Juan. Their home is on the Puget Sound, in a small town very much like Lyndon Point. Miss you, Mom. Love you, Dad.
Contents
Chapter One
Lyndon Point, Washington State
With a heartfelt sigh, Gabriella Carlini stood up from where she’d sat for a moment’s break. The top step of the back stoop to her parents’ restaurant wasn’t the finest place to rest, but it had been the best at that moment. She opened the kitchen door to Tony’s and wrinkled her nose when the unpleasant tang struck her nostrils. She’d expected to find all kinds of disorganization when she got to Tony’s, since her mother was at home caring for Gabi’s ailing father instead of running the restaurant. But the actual state in which she’d found the place went far beyond a mess.
Food had spoiled when the teen part-timers her parents employed had refrigerated new deliveries and merely pushed the older supplies behind the new. Now she had bins of potatoes and onions gone bad, loaves of cheese and logs of pizza meats gone well beyond their sell-by dates and straight to spoiled, and the vegetable crispers were full of limp and unusable produce.
She should have come home when her mother called to tell her about her father’s stroke, as she’d wanted to do. But Mama, as she still called her mother, in the old Italian way, had insisted Papa was receiving the best of care and she had everything under control....
How wrong she’d been!
Now, though, there was nothing to do but get back to work—as she’d been doing since nigh unto the crack of dawn. As she stepped inside, a flash of movement to her right in the alley out back caught her eye. When she turned to see what might have darted past the Dumpster, nothing struck her as out of the ordinary in the grubby concrete landscape. The thought of a rat turned her already iffy stomach. She scooted inside and slammed the steel door shut, then went straight to the massive metal refrigerator to throw out more of the old food.
With her hand outstretched to the refrigerator door’s latch handle, she sent a prayer heavenward. “Lord, please don’t let rats have taken up residence in the alley. I still have a number of trips’ worth of trash to haul out before I can seek sanctuary in the kitchen. I’ll clean out foul refrigerators any day, gladly wash sticky shelves, scrub grungy floors, but—ugh!” She shuddered at the thought of an encounter of the rodent kind.
“Hey, Miss Carlini.”
She jumped inches off the ground. “Dylan!” Her heart pounded like a bass drum. “You shouldn’t sneak up on anyone like that, you know?”
“Sorry, ma’am.” The lanky nineteen-year-old with a painful-looking stud through his eyebrow and a map of crooked roadways carved through his quarter-inch-long buzz-cut hair came close. Then he waved toward the kitchen. “I’m so sorry about what happened earlier. I never knew how soon all that food would go bad, plus when the delivery truck brought new cheese and sausage and stuff...well, I guess Kirstie and I didn’t think about using the old stuff up first. If there’s anything I can do...”
Feeling about a thousand years old every time he called her Miss Carlini—or worse, ma’am—Gabi let the fridge door close. Dylan had already