open window, no sound of shuffling. Maybe they’d gone out to get something to eat, he speculated. The moving van and its four men was gone.
Deciding to give it one last try, Bryce reached for the bell again when the door abruptly opened. Instead of Lisa, he found himself looking down at a woman who could have been mistaken for a slightly older version of the woman. Rather than shorts, she had on a sundress and her short, stylishly cut dark blond hair had a ribbon of gray running through it.
But she looked up at him with Lisa and CeCe’s blue eyes. “Yes?”
“I’m not sure if I have the right house, but do Lisa Billings and her daughter, CeCe, live here?” Even if he hadn’t been certain that he had the right house, one look at the woman would have assured him that he did. Still, it seemed a good enough way to begin.
Cecilia took swift measure of the handsome young man at the front door. She made decisions quickly. In her life, there hadn’t always been much time for debating.
She liked his mouth. The lines around it indicated that he was given to smiling frequently. It was a good trait. And his eyes were kind. You could tell a great deal about a man by his eyes. Her husband had had kind eyes. CeCe’s father hadn’t, but she’d found it a difficult thing to convey to Lisa at the time. You had to let your children make their own mistakes, no matter how much it pained you to watch.
“Yes.” Cecilia saw the broom leaning against the wall. The young man seemed to come with an odd assortment of things. He was holding flowers in his hand and there was some sort of thin book held flat against his side by his arm. She couldn’t begin to guess what he had in the bag. “You are selling brooms, perhaps?”
Bryce shifted his weight. It wasn’t often he felt self-conscious. “No, I—”
Curious who her mother was talking to, Lisa hurried over to the open door. “Who is it, Mother?” Peering around the door, she stopped short. “Oh God, it’s you.”
Intrigued, Cecilia stepped back from the doorway, allowing the visitor better access. “You know him?”
She hadn’t expected him to actually come over, Lisa thought. He must have watched her leave with CeCe. “It’s the fireman I told you about, the one who I found with CeCe.”
Interest transformed into something akin to pleasure. A smile bloomed on Cecilia’s face as she took hold of his wrist, drawing him into the house. “Ah, please come in, yes?”
Lisa’s immediate response was, “No,” but it was already too late. Her mother was shutting the door, after pulling the firefighter inside.
Chapter Three
There’d only been just enough time for him to grab the broom before Bryce had found himself being pulled into the house by the diminutive woman who had clamped her hands around his wrist. She was surprisingly strong, given her size.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said obediently, trying not to laugh. Obviously her mother and her daughter were a lot freer spirits than Lisa Billings was.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bryce saw CeCe come running into the room. The moment she saw him, she clapped her hands together in pure delight. Her grin was wide and welcoming.
Unlike, he noted, her mother’s expression. Nobody had to tell him that Lisa wasn’t happy about this turn of events, or the lack of immediate support she had.
CeCe fairly bounced in front of him, her eyes shining. “Hi, Bryce.”
Lisa didn’t want CeCe getting too friendly with the intrusive firefighter, even if this was just a onetime visit.
“Mr. Walker,” she corrected.
A little of the sunlight in CeCe’s eyes abated. Bryce was quick to wave Lisa’s admonishment aside. Too many children called him by his first name for CeCe to be singled out this way.
“That’s too much of a mouthful for someone her size, Lisa. Bryce is fine.”
Lisa didn’t like him calling her by her first name. It made this conversation entirely too personal. Besides, she had the feeling that he was conveying more to her than just a name preference when he said that Bryce was fine, but there was no way she was about to allow herself to be drawn into any sort of wordplay over that.
In the larger scheme of things, it was all a moot point. It wasn’t as if the man was going to be someone they interacted with on a regular basis. As soon as she managed to usher him on his way, she didn’t expect to ever see Bryce Walker again, barring a fire somewhere in the immediate area.
But before she could say anything, her mother was taking charge of the situation.
“Well, then, Bryce,” Cecilia said, smiling at him, “we were just about to sit down to dinner. Perhaps you will join us?”
For a second, the air left her lungs. Lisa felt completely outflanked. She knew from experience that sending her mother a glaring look would be utterly wasted on the woman, so she didn’t even bother—as much as she wanted to.
Instead she drew herself up and sent the withering look in Bryce’s direction. The last thing she needed at the tail end of a trying day was an invasion by an unwanted guest, no matter how handsome he was.
“I’m sure Mr. Walker has to be somewhere else, Mother.”
He returned the withering look with a long, slow appraisal that started at the top of her head and wound its way down to her bare toes. Lisa felt as if she suddenly had nothing on and felt all the hotter for it.
“No,” he assured her quietly, “as a matter of fact, I don’t.”
Triumphant, Cecilia hooked her arm through Bryce’s. She looked back at her daughter. “See?”
A thread of satisfaction wound through her words that she didn’t bother to hide. As far as Cecilia was concerned, Lisa had been hiding behind her work and her family in an effort to barricade herself away from the rest of the world and deny the fact that she had a heart that could still be hurt. If nothing was risked, nothing was gained.
Cecilia glanced at the broom Bryce was still holding. “By the way, what is all this you bring with you?”
“Yes,” Lisa seconded the question, her eyes sweeping over the bag he held in his other hand. “Just why are you dragging a broom around? Are you moonlighting as a broom salesman?” Maybe if she insulted him, he’d go away.
But instead of being insulted, he flashed a grin at her. “You and your mother think alike.”
Not hardly, Lisa thought, swallowing a groan. To her surprise, he presented the broom to her.
“It’s for you. A housewarming gift,” he explained when she only stared at it.
She raised her eyes to his face, wondering what he was up to. “I already have a broom. And a vacuum cleaner,” she added, in case he had one waiting in his car.
“Lisa, if the man wants to give you a broom, you must be polite and take it,” Cecilia told her kindly, taking the broom from Bryce as if he had just presented her with the crown jewels of England.
Bryce couldn’t read Lisa’s expression, but he figured he could take a calculated guess what was going on in her mind. Being a firefighter made him sensitive to highly volatile situations.
Time to defuse the moment, he thought. “Actually it’s an old tradition.” Lisa looked at him blankly. “The broom’s symbolic,” he told her. “You give someone moving into a new home a broom to sweep away any evil spirits that might still be lurking around, left over from the old tenants. And the loaf of bread—” he handed the bag he’d brought to Lisa “—is so that you never go hungry.”
She vaguely remembered hearing or reading about the tradition. But Bryce didn’t strike her as the kind of person who went in for old-fashioned customs. Looking at him uncertainly, she glanced inside the bag. It was a loaf of bread all right. Closing it,