Free Somewhere on Maui (an Accidental Matchmaker Novel) by Toby Neal Page A

since he was a kid, the sound of rain had filled him with a contentment he couldn’t put into words. Rain meant no outdoor chores. Enough rain meant he wouldn’t have to go to school. Rain meant their father had the day off from his construction jobs and would stay home and play with him and his sisters, and rain usually meant Mama spent the day indoors, cooking delicious things.
    Now rain just meant lost hours working, potential damage and setbacks on the job site, and staying home with Mama, whom he loved but was worried about.
    He shut his eyes, picturing what he wished rain meant.
    Mama healthy and happy, talking to his wife in the kitchen—a wife who’d let him sleep in. Diego and Serena, knowing rain meant he’d be staying home, blowing the door right open and running in to jump on the bed for tickles and hugs.
    His wife. He didn’t believe in living together without a commitment. There was not a question in his mind that he’d get married again—it was just that he was going to wait for the right woman this time. No matter how long it took. He’d gone in too fast and for the wrong reasons with Cherisse.
    This imaginary woman was someone kind, someone who loved kids and his mom, someone who laughed and cried easily, someone who made his hands want to tangle in her hair. Maybe he could wish her into being. When he shut his eyes and wished, what he saw was a pair of green eyes.
    Adam sat up abruptly, spooked, and threw the covers off. He was worse than a chick, lying in bed daydreaming of a life that would never happen instead of dealing with the realities of what was.
    He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, frowning at his stubbly face, hair all directions, boxers drooping off his narrow hips. He heard his mom in the kitchen, rustling around, turning on the water to make coffee.
    He decided to shave. No sense looking like hell just because he felt like it. He lathered up his face, dragged the razor down, the song of the rain accompanying the scrape and tap of the razor. He was blotting his face with a towel, wondering when Alixia Lepler was going to make her next move, when he heard a crash from the other room—the distinctive sound of someone falling.

Chapter 9
     
    Adam followed the ambulance, his hands sweaty on the truck’s wheel. He tried to get close enough to ride its wake, ignoring red lights and other vehicles. The white square vehicle with its nightmare cry and strobing lights outraced him, and he found himself stomping on the brake way too far into an intersection.
    He cursed and backed up behind the line, ignoring another driver’s angry honk. He used the moment to speed-dial Charl. “Mama fell. Something with her heart. I’m following the ambulance.”
    “Oh no! Did you call Mele?”
    “She’s next. See you at the hospital.”
    He held down the speed-dial for his youngest sister. “Mele? Mama’s been taken to the hospital. Something with her heart.”
    “Oh my God! Is she okay?”
    “Obviously not. I’m chasing her ambulance.” Mele, the youngest, always seemed to need everything explained a second, sometimes a third time when she heard something she didn’t like. “See you at the hospital.”
    He hung up on her excuses. She’d come eventually. He didn’t need to sit there listening to her process of adjusting to the situation that had already broken over him like the storm that was slanting hard rain onto the truck’s windshield.
    The light changed and he lurched forward, speeding past Ka` ahumanu Center on the left. Maui Memorial Hospital was only a few miles farther.
    He remembered his mother’s face, drained of color, her hands curled against the breast of her house muumuu. The knot on her forehead where she’d hit her head on the corner of the stove had swelled immediately. Her gasping breaths and gray color were the stuff of nightmare.
    She’d been conscious but unable to speak when he’d roared in from the bathroom, already calling 911 on his ever-present cell