Read Aloha, Candy Hearts for Free Online Page B

trying very hard? I’d been happy enough without it. Complete without it.
    I had great friends and family, a great job, great home, great dogs.
    I loved my life. But now I had fallen in love. Twice. With two different guys. At the same time. Rather inconvenient to say the least.
    No, that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t be in love with Ethan Ash. We first met when I was hired to find a man who turned out to be his ex-lover. Ethan ran Ash House—kind of a frat DD6AA2AB8
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    Anthony Bidulka

    house for the senior set in Saskatoon. Oldsters who were in pretty good health but maybe needed a little help with day-to-day chores, preparing meals, or just wanted to avoid loneliness, moved into Ash House where Ethan looked after them. He also looked after his twelve-year-old daughter, Simon (short for Simonette).
    Ethan is a sweet, caring, gentle bear of a man. He’s smart, jovial, and loves to laugh. He’s a big, beefy guy, with poker-straight, shiny brown hair, rosy, dimpled cheeks, smiling eyes and an open, friendly face. The natural set of his features seems to be stuck on “happy,” but when you catch him unaware, maybe looking a little wistful, his pleasant face turns downright beautiful.
    And although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how he does it, sex appeal just oozes from his pores like syrup from a waffle.
    When I first met him, I felt an unfamiliar spark—well, actually there were several sparks, in several different parts of my body.
    During the course of the case I was on, Ethan had been badly beat-en and I visited him in the hospital. It was then, while sitting next to his bed, holding his hand, that I first fell in l…
    No!
    Not love. I had a crush. That’s all it was.
    Jeez, how old was I? When was I going to stop with the crushes?
    Normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Cases eventually end. Time passes. People move on and I don’t see them again. But that didn’t happen. As fate would have it, Ethan had become a bigger part of my life. Or at least the lives of my circle of friends.
    Ethan and my boutique-store-owing friend, Anthony Gatt, were already acquaintances. Anthony’s long-term partner, Jared Lowe, had recently ended his life as a jet-setting, internationally acclaimed supermodel. This was due both to the end of his thirties and the loss of his unblemished beauty when a maniacal stalker threw acid in his face. Although surgeries had taken care of some of the latter, when combined with the former, a screeching halt to his career was the undeniable consequence. So Jared had been looking for new opportunities, and now, he and Ethan were about to become business partners.
    An aging Saskatchewan population and booming economy DD6AA2AB8
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    Aloha, Candy Hearts

    had combined to make Ash House more successful than ever. The place was bursting at the seams. In shrewd contemplation of this, Ethan had purchased a small acreage just outside the city limits, right before local real estate prices went through the roof. His plan was to build a bigger and better facility (and a home for himself and Simon). But then construction costs went crazy and he needed a bigger loan than he could handle.
    Enter Jared with his buckets of modelling profits. With Anthony’s guidance, he’d invested his savings wisely and the asset side of his ledger had added up rather nicely over the years.
    After some research and soul searching, Jared offered to assist Ethan in the financing and building of the new Ash House, with the proviso that he could help run the expanded operation once it was done. Ethan was more than grateful to get the investment dollars, as well as the help with taking care of the much bigger property and its residents. Jared was thrilled to find something he could pour his passion into. He hadn’t been looking forward to the nine-to-five world of regular, non-model folk. When completed, the new Ash House