Family Next Door (Harlequin American Romance Series #1209)

Removing the old playhouse from the slope behind Diane Bittner's house had been on her to-do list for ages. But she'd put it off because the ginger cat that hung out in her yard liked to sun itself on the roof. Also because her late husband, Will, had put a lot of love into planning and overseeing the construction. Whenever she looked at it, she saw him once again, grinning at their daughter's eagerness to stage her first tea party.Now, at twelve, Brittany had outgrown the playhouse, which was succumbing to dry rot. Eventually, Diane planned to hire someone to remove it, but September had arrived already and she was busy with her fourth-grade class.Perhaps she should have been grateful then, when one Saturday afternoon the new neighbor behind her--the man whose hammering and sawing had been making her life miserable for weeks--dropped a tree on it.But she wasn't.First, the crash scared the stuffing out of the cat, Lucy, who leaped off her perch just seconds before the pine slammed down. With a screech of protest, Lucy sailed through the air, hit the ground running and disappeared.Second, the crash startled Brittany into jerking a spatula out of the cake batter she was mixing. Yellow goo fanned across the kitchen table, nearly splattering Diane, who sat writing welcome notes to her students."What was that?" Her daughter stared through the kitchen window toward the slope. "Mom, there's a tree on my playhouse!"Diane sat frozen, as her heart thundered inside her chest. The crash had yanked her backward two years to another boom that had erupted out of nowhere. One minute she and Will had been strolling happily through a street fair, and the next, he was crumpled on the pavement, with a bullet in his chest. Diane's childhood sweetheart and husband of nearly a dozen years had died as paramedics struggled to save him."Mom!" Her daughter's voice pulled her back to the present.Shaking off her anxiety, Diane got to her feet and peered out the window. The playhouse lay crushed beneath a large tree that had tumbled over the iron fence separating her yard from the one behind.This new neighbor was dangerously careless, Diane fumed. Why on earth had he sawed into a tree without calculating where it would land?Noisy renovations had begun almost immediately after the man's arrival. The fellow--a divorceacute; with a daughter, according to Diane's neighbors in the Harmony Circle development--hadn't bothered to stop by and introduce himself, let alone apologize for the racket. People were usually more considerate in Brea, a smallish town tucked into a cozy inland corner of Orange County, California.That must be her neighbor now, opening the gate in the fence. At last he was going to have to apologize.As he descended the stone steps embedded on one side of the sloping perimeter, Diane reluctantly noticed the easy sway of his jeans-clad hips and the muscular expanse of his chest. The breeze ruffled the man's dark-blond hair as he surveyed the damage."Gee, he's kind of cute," Brittany declared. "I mean, for an older guy."There was something familiar about him. Something that, despite his good looks, made Diane uneasy. "What's he doing?" she groused."I think he's looking inside, to see if anybody got hurt." Brittany started for the back door. "Aren't you coming?""Of course." Diane decided she could hardly blame a man for fixing up his property--and mistakes did happen. While these weren't the best circumstances for a first encounter, at least he'd apparently come to set things right.On the bright side, he'd no doubt offer to remove what was left of the structure, which would save Diane the expense. Private-school teachers didn't earn a lot, and her finances had been on a tight leash ever since her husband's death.After mopping up the cake batter, she followed her daughter through the den and out the sliding glass door to the patio. Shading her gaze agaiDiamond, Jacqueline is the author of 'Family Next Door (Harlequin American Romance Series #1209)', published 2008 under ISBN 9780373752133 and ISBN 037375213X.