The House on Mermaid Point Read Online Free

people.
    “Well, if I get that spin-off I’ll be sure to invite you on for a cameo appearance as the cougar’s disapproving daughter.” Madeline bit back a smile at the horror in Kyra’s wide-set gray eyes. “We’d better get on the road. I told Avery we’d be there in time for dinner.” Madeline climbed into the driver’s seat of the minivan. She averted her gaze from the For Sale sign as she backed down the drive for what might be the last time and reminded herself that the time had come to stop apologizing. Still, the last thing she wanted to think about was partying or, God help her, dating. Ending her marriage had been all about making the most of the life she had left, not the right to sashay through bars or pick up men.
    Fifty-one-year-old grandmothers did not belong in the dating pool when they weren’t even sure they remembered how to swim.
    •   •   •
    Avery Lawford had what some might consider an unhealthy relationship with power tools. She’d come by it naturally, the result of a childhood spent trailing behind her father on his construction sites, a bright pink hard hat smashed down on top of unruly blond curls, a training wheels of a tool belt buckled tightly around her little-girl hips.
    Before her mother ran off to Hollywood to become an interior designer to the stars, Avery went with other little girls to ballet and tap lessons, where she discovered she had no discernible natural rhythm or the slightest chance of learning to leap like a gazelle. By the time her mother left them, Avery knew how to handle the business end of a hammer and when to use a fine blade in a circular saw versus a rough cut. The whine of a band saw, not Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
, was the music that moved her.
    She spent most of puberty telling herself that her mother had been nothing more than a vessel who’d carried her father’s DNA. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday she’d finally conceded that her height, which was nowhere near tall enough for the size of her chest, and the blond hair, blue eyes, and Kewpie doll features that resulted in an immediate deduction of perceived IQ points and caused strangers to talk to her slowly, using really small words, were, in fact, unwelcome “parting gifts” bequeathed by the absent Deirdre Morgan.
    In architectural terms Avery was a Fun House façade wrapped around Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It was that façade that nullified her architectural degree and the years spent on her father’s construction sites and that had encouraged two television networks to try to turn her into the Vanna White of the do-it-yourself set.
    Avery drew a deep breath of freshly sawn wood, shook a ton of sawdust out of her hair, and smiled. It was a heady scent, filled with new beginnings, borderline heavenly, one that conjured her father and everything she’d learned from him in a way nothing else could.
    She took in the room that had been designed for Chase’s father, who’d fallen and fractured both his hip and his femur just before she and Deirdre had moved into the Hardins’ garage apartment. The newly framed walls, just-laid hardwood floor, windows stacked against one wall waiting to be shimmied into their openings. She ran a hand over the shelf of a bookcase that she’d built around the front window. The large bedroom/bath/sitting room would be warm and cozy. Most important, it would be barrier free.
    “It’s looking good.” Chase Hardin, who had once been a contender for the title of most annoying man in the world, stepped up behind her, hooked a finger in the tool belt slung low on her hips, and pulled her closer.
    “Yeah. The space will be perfect for your dad. He’ll be right here with you and the boys, but he’ll have his independence, too.” She turned in his arms and looked up at him. “I hate to leave before the addition’s finished.”
    “I know. But it means a lot to Dad that you and I have been working on his new space together.” Chase’s