He was big. Bigger than his father. Kendall Kole was attractive for an older man, but his son? Darn, this man was truly handsome. In the moonlight he looked almost... magical.
The Prince! He’s come to rescue us! Ellie could imagine her daughter’s eager proclamation.
Something inside her stirred, something warm and wanting, feelings all but forgotten. As if, for just a moment, she were a woman again—not just an exhausted mother. Her heart thundered.
Whirling from the doorway, she hurried down the hall, carrying her child away from this new danger. She buried her face in the sweet warmth of her daughter’s wispy hair, but the scent only brought back painful memories.
Was it just a year ago she’d hidden her tears in her daughter’s hug on the most horrible night of her life? Her husband, her rock ‘n’ rollin’ husband, had rocked off the audition stage at Branson, Missouri, and right on down the highway...along with their ailing van and their pitiful savings. Peter had abandoned them! The realization still stunned her.
If Kendall Kole hadn’t offered her this job and a place to stay, she didn’t know what would have become of her and her kids.
Tiptoeing into the dormitory, she crept to the twin bed nearest the bathroom and nudged her six-year-old son.
“Rafe, go climb in with Michael,” she whispered.
The skinny little guy slid his feet to the floor and tugged down his oversize T-shirt. Clutching a portable phone, he curled into the middle bed next to his eight-year-old brother.
With a heavy heart, Ellie watched the two settle in together. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to share a bed. She hoped it would be the last.
In the past twelve years, the only good judgment she’d used had been trusting “King” Kole, she thought ruefully. That and the decision to stop crying over Peter—Peter who had thought playing parent was the same as doing a musical gig. When he was done playing, he just packed up and moved on.
Ellie lowered her four-year-old daughter into the stillwarm impression of her son, then turned to pull the sheet up over the two slender bodies in the middle bed, the small one light-haired, the other darker, like his father. Stealing to the far bed, she brushed a kiss on the forehead of her oldest son. A small black terrier grinned up at her from behind Gabe’s legs, tail thumping the blanket softly.
Ellie raised a silencing finger to the dog. “You are as bad as a doting grandma,” she whispered. She hurried back to the first bed, slipped out of her long skirt and oversize sweater and slid in beside her daughter.
A dog for a grandmother and a lonely shopkeeper for a benefactor and substitute grandfather. Things could be a lot worse. King had become her friend. She knew her kids loved him.
But now? With his son here, their futures were in jeopardy again. Mitchell Kole wouldn’t be happy when he discovered his Humpty Dumpty father had taken in a woman with so many kids she didn’t know what to do. And a dog who thought she was their nanny.
Ellie curled protectively around Seraphina. Seri might think Mitchell Kole was a prince, but this was hardly a fairy tale. Just plain old, nitty-gritty reality—four grubby kids, one single mom trying to give them some stability while she learned to clean teeth, and a kindhearted widower with more broken bones than she’d ever known existed.
Ellie didn’t believe in Tinker Bell. She didn’t believe in magic. And no matter how stirring Mitchell Kole looked in his sleep, she sure didn’t believe in Prince Charming.
Not anymore.
Chapter One
“Someone’s sleeping in my bed!”
Mitchell Kole squinted one eye open long enough to stop the ridiculous dream, the childlike voice that sounded a lot like Goldilocks accompanied by the distinct scent of peanut butter. He didn’t even like peanut butter.
Scrunching his eyes shut, he tugged the sheet up around his ears. Not Goldilocks. Just a very little girl with flyaway brown hair standing by the side of his bed in a pink tutu.
“What the...?” In one swift motion, he shoved up to a sitting position.
The child scurried to the foot of the double bed, her tutu bouncing like a tugboat in choppy waters. Leaning forward, she rested her elbows in the folds of the bright comforter, cupped her chin in the heels of her hands and stared back at him. The tutu popped up behind her like a limp peacock’s tail.
She couldn’t be more than—what? Three...four years old? What did he know about kids’ ages? Her fingernails, he noticed irrelevantly, glowed a bright green.
What the hell was a kid with green fingernails doing in his room? What was any kid doing here? He didn’t even like kids.
“Hello.” She studied him curiously, her big brown eyes framed by dark lashes. “I’m Seraphina. You’re sleeping in my bed. I slept with Bubba Sue last night.”
“I’m sleeping in your—?” Mitch stopped himself midoutburst, suddenly aware that everything around him looked...different. He hadn’t bothered to turn on a light last night after coming in so late. Too upset from his visit at the hospital. Incredibly none of the changes in the room had tripped him up in the dark.
“That’s my dollhouse.”
The kid pointed to a strange accumulation of stacked cardboard boxes filling the space next to the door where his electronic keyboard used to sit. Each box was decorated like a tiny room. They were all painted a headache-inducing shade of pink. Mitch resisted the urge to shade his eyes.
“Those are my animals.”
This time she pointed beneath the window where he’d kept his treasured first ski poles. A faded yellow tiger with one ear missing sat there now next to a teddy bear who looked as if he had the mange. Both of them hunkered down in a pile of crumpled tissue-paper flowers.
The kid must have decided he didn’t need help with the rest of the room, because she watched him silently while he took inventory. His Ski Aspen, Ski Vail posters were missing from the walls, replaced with pictures of figures he vaguely recognized as some of the new Disney characters. And the bed he lay on was afloat in more of the same. He had never slept in sheets covered with mermaids!
“Your room?” he mumbled, scraping a palm up the bristles on his cheek. Somewhere in the distance, children’s shouts overrode the steady chatter of morning TV cartoons. He dragged fingers back through his hair, struggling to get awake, searching to make some kind of sense of all of this...this mayhem. Through it all he caught the rich aroma of coffee.
Thank god. Evidence of adult-type beings. What were kids doing in his father’s place anyhow? Living here, from the looks of this room. What the devil was going on?
The little girl straightened. With a gesture that reminded him of a queen, she swept her thin bangs to one side.
“My name means angel,” she offered, as if she’d read his mind. “But really I’m a princess.” She studied him from the foot of the bed with those grave brown eyes.
She looked more like a waif. She was about as skinny as a puppet, and her mouse brown hair stuck out in feathery wisps from a pink thing on top of her head. On closer inspection, he saw that the netting of her tutu drooped, and the straps across her thin little shoulders had shed most of their shiny stuff.
Mitch eyed her warily. For a princess, this kid’s treasures looked mighty tattered. But she didn’t seem to know. She acted as self-assured and expectant as any royalty he’d ever entertained.
In spite of his growing annoyance, Mitch allowed himself a half smile. Such seriousness in one so little. Seemed to him that a kid her size ought to be giggling about something, not looking as if she carried the weight of a kingdom on her shoulders.
But