Yours, Mine & Ours Read Online Free PDF

her crying, the whole thing.
    It wasn’t as if that chemical-lightning thing had disappeared. If anything, the charge was more intense—but now he was braced for it. And looking at her this morning was reassuring. She looked…well…prissy. Not vulnerable and cute, like last night, with the naked navel and the wild heap of red hair.Today, her hair was scooped up, a spotless yellow shirt paired with white shorts, sandals with yellow flowers. And she had on makeup. At this hour of the morning.
    He hadn’t shaved in three days now—hadn’t brushed his hair in two. No reason to spruce up—he wasn’t trying to please or attract any female again. Still, he was glad to admit he had a heap of things he had to do—she hastily admitted the same—and they both took off in opposite directions.
    It was the truth, besides, Mike thought self-righteously. With Teddy gone, it was a perfect chance to make a trip to the hardware store.
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    Amanda let Darling out for a quick business trip in the backyard, petted Princess, grabbed her car keys and list and headed out. She’d had a spiffy Austin Healey before the divorce. Now she had a white SUV, which looked like a clone of all the soccer moms’ transport vehicles up and down the neighborhood.
    Mike was gone, she noticed. At least, his garage door was open and his truck nowhere in sight. She hadn’t forgotten what a hero he’d been for her last night, but thankfully, she’d wakened this morning certain that he was a resistible hero. They both had their hands full with major life changes right now. And she wasn’t about to forget the major life lesson that had been battered into her by the divorce.
    She wasn’t going to be the needy one in a relationship ever again.
    She backed out of the drive and turned left—then immediately realized she should have steered right. It was going to take a while before she got her bearings in the neighborhood, and hardware stores were hardly her normal milieu. This morning, though, she had a major hardware-store type of list. She wanted bricks, to make a brick walkway in the back. Mulch. Stones. Eventually she wanted a porch swing back there, too.
    In the meantime, she needed just stuff. Gardening gloves. A little spade. A little shovel. She didn’t even have a flashlight in the house. Somehow she had to figure out a way to mow the grass. And Mike—not that she wanted to keep dwelling on her neighbor—had intimated she needed a sturdier ladder.
    She located the store—after only a couple of wrong turns—and even found a reasonably close parking spot. She’d been in one of these warehouse hardware stores before. Once. But she didn’t have a clue where anything was, so she just grabbed a cart and pulled out her list. She figured she’d get the boring stuff over with first—the household tools. Hammers and screw drivers and flashlights. Picture-hanger doohickeys. Things like that.
    Thankfully that chore didn’t take long, but once she wandered into the garden center, there seemeda million choices, a million things to look at. She slowed down. Absently started humming…
    Moments later, she realized someone else was humming, too. A man’s hum. Not in the same aisle where she was looking at bricks and stones, but somewhere not far. When she stopped humming to listen, he stopped, too.
    When she started humming again, so did he.
    She glanced around the corner into the next aisle. Saw nothing. Shaking her head, she continued on. She would have to find some help, get someone to carry the bulky items for her. In the meantime…well, she wasn’t sure how she ended up in the plumbing aisle, but suddenly there he was.
    Mike.
    He spotted her about the same time she spotted him. He had a faucet set in his hand. She was still holding her list. But for a petrifying second, she forgot what she was doing altogether.
    She told herself swiftly that it was