Read Somewhere on Maui (an Accidental Matchmaker Novel) for Free Online Page B

emotional spells kept happening since her hip injury. He thumbed his phone out of his pocket, hit a speed-dial button. “Charl, it’s Mama. Come over right away. She’s upset and I have to go to work.”
    He hit Off on his sister’s squawks of alarm. She’d be there soon, but for now he scooped his mother into his arms over protests muffled by the dish towel and carried her back to the master bedroom. He settled her in the antique koa bed she’d had for forty years, plumping the pillow behind her head. She emerged from behind the towel.
    “You’ll hurt yourself carrying me.”
    “I didn’t, and I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about. Charl’s on her way. I have to go to work. You just rest.”
    She put a hand against his cheek. “I’m in the way now. I’m past my expiration date. That’s what Earl used to say.”
    “Stop it. You’re fine and not going anywhere, and I’m fine and not going anywhere.” He heard the crunch of the tires on the lifted truck his sister Charlotte drove pull up next to the house, the slam of the truck’s door, the creak as she opened the back door to get the baby out. Thank God. His sister would know what to do.
    “Charl’s here, Mama. I have to go to work.” One more kiss on her brow, and he hurried back into the kitchen.
    “What’s going on?” Charl, his pretty younger sister, had applesauce on her shirt and his nephew, Kaden, on her hip. Adam took the baby automatically as Kaden reached for him, wiping applesauce off the baby’s chin.
    “I don’t really know. She got all emotional when I said I was going out after work. I think she wanted me and Tami to be going out, and that’ s not happening.”
    Charl snorted. “You got that right. Tami’s too smart for that. Well, so Mama’s not sick or anything?”
    “I don’t think so, but I have to go, and I took her back to bed.”
    “Okay. I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
    “Thanks, Charl.” He handed the baby back to her. Kaden wailed, reaching for his uncle as she carried him down the hall. Charlotte had always had a way of bringing peace and order wherever she went—until she had Kaden.
    Adam turned back and felt a stab of something between embarrassment and grief as he picked up his lunch box and thermos like a kid leaving for school. He kept asking Mama not to bother fixing it for him, but she always did anyway. He guessed it was her way of saying thank you or something, so he didn’t leave it behind. He jogged out to the Tacoma, hoping like hell Mrs. Lepler wasn’t on her usual morning torture trawl through the job site—to which he was late, for the first time ever.
    He wasn’t that lucky. Alixia Lepler was sitting on the aluminum steps that led into trailer HQ, wearing denim tube sock pants with a top like a folded handkerchief.
    “You’re late.” Her plumped-up collagen lips barely moved when she spoke—probably the Botox. He wondered how anyone could find her attractive as he fumbled through a fistful of keys for the one that would open the door.
    “Apologies. Family emergency.”
    “Something with the Mrs.?”
    He didn’t reply. Her fishing for his marital status had begun a while back, little jabs that he’d refused to answer or respond to. Adam found the key and opened the door, a maneuver that required Mrs. Lepler to get up off the top step and come in behind him.
    “Someone packs that little lunch box of yours,” she teased.
    Adam could feel the back of his neck getting hot. Anger swept over him, the desire to blast her back with a few choice words, starting with “mind your own business.”
    He stepped into the stuffy trailer, walked over to the biggest fan, and turned it on, opening the sliding windows with a slam. He remembered the breathing Dr. Suzuki had recommended. Opening the window behind his desk, he gazed out at the square of blue sky and inhaled through his nose to the count of three, exhaled through his mouth, pretending to have trouble with the clip on the window. He