Free The Comfort of Favorite Things (A Hope Springs Novel) by Alison Kent Page B

been hard to stay out of the way; the size of the house saw to that.
    But it had been hard to find quiet time. Most of the time he’d done so when late night had become early morning, and he’d walked through the big corner lot with Kaylie’s dog, Magoo. The lumbering shepherd-chow mix had taken to spending a lot of his time with Dakota, the baby demanding Kaylie’s attention.
    With time, things had gotten better, the new family falling into a routine, but when Indiana had married Oliver Gatlin five months later, Dakota had moved to the cottage once his sister had vacated it. Everything in the kitchen was where she’d left it. He figured it wouldn’t take her long to get her coffee. She was back in less than two minutes, dropping to sit by his side.
    “Now,” she said, before he could ask her if she wanted breakfast. He thought he might have an egg or two left. “Somebody hired a PI who put in a whole lot of time to find you for me, and someone paid to see that it happened. Why in the world would you think about leaving again?”
    “Oliver finally made you see the light, huh?” Because for so long she’d insisted that her husband had been responsible for locating Dakota.
    She nodded as she brought her drink away from her mouth to balance it on her knees covered by the skirt of her sundress. The morning sun sparkled off the rock weighing down her left hand’s ring finger. Dakota swore he’d seen smaller bowling balls. “He told me more than once that the man he’d hired was not the one who found you. I wouldn’t listen.”
    And her man hadn’t been the one to locate Dakota either. There was a mystery third party involved. “What changed your mind?”
    “He took me to meet his PI.” She sipped at her coffee. “The man was convincing.”
    “In ways that your husband wasn’t?”
    “I thought my husband was trying to keep me from feeling indebted to him for bringing you home.” She said it with a shrug. “My PI hadn’t had any luck finding you, so it just made sense that Oliver’s had. Not once did it occur to me that someone else was looking. Why would it? And you weren’t exactly forthcoming with your version of the events.”
    “Hey,” he said, lowering his mug and nearly spitting coffee. “I told you I didn’t remember the man’s name. I’m sure he told me, but”—he twirled a finger—“in one ear and out the other.”
    She leaned a shoulder against the railing and gave him a side-eyed glance. “He never told you who he worked for?”
    “Nope. No idea if he was local. No idea who hired him. I didn’t ask. I didn’t think I needed to. All he said was that it wasn’t an emergency but my sister needed me home.”
    “So you came.”
    “I came,” he said with a nod. The timing had actually been perfect. Ironically, he’d been in Indiana, at the end of a job and ready to move on. He’d had ten of them since leaving prison. None of them had lasted much longer than a year. Seemed a year was all the time he could give to any one place. Even the place his sister and brother called home.
    Indiana’s voice was small and soft when she said, “And now you’re thinking of leaving.”
    He took a deep breath, lifted his cup to have it ready. “I am.”
    “Okay,” she said after a heavy, slow-motion moment, though she was more flippant than before. “But I’m going to need a reason why.”
    Dakota scraped one boot over a rough patch of porch step and laughed. “Is that so?”
    “Yes, it’s so. Dakota. Crap,” she said, this time leaning toward him and pushing her shoulder into his. “You leave, you gotta know I’m going to come looking for you again.”
    “Hey, now. I never said I wasn’t going to stay in touch.”
    “So far you haven’t said much of anything,” she said, smoothing down the fabric of her skirt where it had bunched up over one knee.
    “Maybe because someone hasn’t given me a chance.”
    “Then here. Take it. The floor is yours,” she said with the wave of