The Strawberry Patch Pancake House (Dream Harbor, #4)

by Laurie Gilmore

You’re right. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.’ Yes, you do! It was him, he came over you. Don’t think about coming!

‘Iris?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Are you going to be my mom soon?’

Oh my heart

I don’t even have one mom anymore and that’s not really fair. So, if you married my new dad then I would have one mom and one dad and that would be fair.’

The man who had once only thought about his goals. About being the best. About perfection. About himself. Now just wanted a sunny afternoon picnic with his favorite girls. How was that for a surprise?

He wanted Iris. Bad. And in so many more ways than he should.

He didn’t need to be striving and striving all the time. He could be home cooking for the people he loved. Loved. The word thundered through him.

‘Iris Lyn Fraser, you are being crazy.’ ‘Thank you. I feel crazy. That’s very validating.’

‘Got you! Now you match me and Dad!’ she squealed with delight. And for some crazy reason the whole thing made Iris want to cry.

When Iris had scooped her up, Olive giggling and shrieking in her arms, Archer was a goner. They all just made sense together. Didn’t Iris see it?

In a way that they’d slept together and it had altered Archer’s entire brain chemistry, and now he had been left in a torturous limbo and he was tiptoeing around his own house. ‘I think I accidentally fell in love with her.’

That little shortening of his name, something people did all the time, sounded like the sweetest endearment from her lips. Oh Christ, he had it bad.

Relationships had been fleeting, hot and heavy for a few weekends, at most. Never this. Never this feeling of longing and desire wrapped up with comfort and friendship. Never with this feeling of home and family.

‘I’m in love with you, Iris,’ he said, in between kisses, like it was normal, like they said it to each other every day, like it didn’t suck the air from her lungs to hear it said out loud. ‘I know it’s fast, and I know it’s maybe not what you wanted. But I do. I love you. I love every damn thing about you.’

‘You can. Give me another one, sweetheart.’ Okay, maybe she really did love this man.

‘Are you going to take a break from being my dad?’ Olive asked, and his heart, the heart that was barely holding on after yesterday and this morning, officially tore in two. ‘No, Livie, I’m never going to take a break from being your dad.’