Sisters Like Us Read online

  The grass is always greener on your sister’s side of the fence...

  Divorce left Harper Szymanski with a name no one can spell, a house she can't afford and a teenage daughter who's pulling away. With her fledgling virtual-assistant business, she's scrambling to maintain her overbearing mother’s ridiculous Susie Homemaker standards and still pay the bills, thanks to clients like Lucas, the annoying playboy cop who claims he hangs around for Harper's fresh-baked cookies.

  Spending half her life in school hasn't prepared Dr. Stacey Bloom for her most daunting challenge—motherhood. She didn't inherit the nurturing gene like Harper and is in deep denial that a baby is coming. Worse, her mother will be horrified to learn that Stacey's husband plans to be a stay-at-home dad…assuming Stacey can first find the courage to tell Mom she's already six months pregnant.

  Separately they may be a mess, but together Harper and Stacey can survive anything—their indomitable mother, overwhelming maternity stores and ex’s weddings. Sisters Like Us is a delightful look at sisters, mothers and daughters in today’s fast-paced world, told with Susan Mallery’s trademark warmth and humor.

  Select praise for Susan Mallery’s Mischief Bay novels

  The Girls of Mischief Bay

  “Mallery skillfully depicts three very different women in different stages of their romantic relationships who enter into unbreakable friendships... Will appeal to fans of women’s fiction, especially such friendship books as Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club.”

  —Booklist

  “Romance superstar Mallery begins a new women’s fiction series with a novel that is both heart-wrenching and warmhearted... A discerning, affecting look at three women facing surprising change and the powerful and uplifting impact of friends.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Once again, Susan Mallery has created an inviting world that envelops her readers’ senses and sensibilities. It’s not just a tale of how true friendship can lift you up, but also how change is an integral part of life... Fans of Jodi Picoult, Debbie Macomber, and Elin Hilderbrand will assuredly fall for The Girls of Mischief Bay.”

  —Bookreporter

  “Fresh and engaging... There’s a generational subtext that mirrors reality and the complexities of adult relationships...filled with promise of a new serial that’s worth following.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  The Friends We Keep

  “Gabby, Haley, and Nicole are down-to-earth real women with whom readers will be able to identify, and Mallery successfully balances each story line. The women’s stories and the depth of support they provide one another make this an engaging read to be savored all the way through.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Another terrific read from Susan Mallery! Very highly recommended.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Mallery returns to Mischief Bay with another set of friends dealing with dramatic yet relatable turmoil, which she treats with compassion, discernment, and subtlety.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The characters will have you crying, laughing, and falling in love... Another brilliantly well-written story.”

  —San Francisco Book Review, 5 Stars

  “Contemporary women’s fiction at its finest.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  A Million Little Things

  “Mallery is the master of blending emotionally believable characters in realistic situations. Her engaging and comically touching Mischief Bay series continues to satisfy lovers of women’s fiction.”

  —Library Journal

  “Mallery has written a delightful book, with realistic characters facing problems and situations in genuine, believable ways. There isn’t a false note in this book or series.”

  —Booklist

  “Hard to put down...deliciously fun. Highly recommended.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  SUSAN

  MALLERY

  Sisters Like Us

  Also by Susan Mallery

  Secrets of the Tulip Sisters

  Daughters of the Bride

  Happily Inc

  Second Chance Girl

  You Say It First

  Mischief Bay

  A Million Little Things

  The Friends We Keep

  The Girls of Mischief Bay

  Fool’s Gold

  Best of My Love

  Marry Me at Christmas

  Thrill Me

  Kiss Me

  Hold Me

  Until We Touch

  Before We Kiss

  When We Met

  Christmas on 4th Street

  Three Little Words

  Two of a Kind

  Just One Kiss

  A Fool’s Gold Christmas

  All Summer Long

  Summer Nights

  Summer Days

  Only His

  Only Yours

  Only Mine

  Finding Perfect

  Almost Perfect

  Chasing Perfect

  For a complete list of titles available from Susan Mallery, please visit www.SusanMallery.com.

  I acknowledge it is very, very wrong for an author to have a favorite book. Books are like children and we should love them all equally. Yet I will confess (but only to you) that I had great fun writing this one. So much fun. And I love all the characters, even Bunny, and I admit that Lucas turned out to be much more amazing than I’d ever anticipated.

  This book is for those of you who will unexpectedly fall wildly in love with Lucas...even though you think you shouldn’t!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Reader’s Guide

  Suggested Menu

  Discussion Questions

  Potatoes Grand-Mère

  Strawberry Avocado Salad

  Chapter One

  THERE WASN’T A holiday on the calendar that Harper Szymanski couldn’t celebrate, cook for, decorate, decoupage, create a greeting card about or wrap in raffia. There were the biggies: birthdays, New Years, Fourth of July. But also the lesser celebrated: American Diabetes Association Alert Day, Auntie’s Day, National Massage Therapy Awareness Week. Why weren’t there greeting cards to honor that? Didn’t everyone need a good massage?

  Despite a skill set that made Martha Stewart look like a slacker, Harper had never figured out a way to monetize her gift for setting a table to commemorate anything. She’d tried catering about ten years ago, but had quickly discovered that her need to overbuy and overdeliver had meant losing money on every single
job. Which left her in the awkward position of trying to make a living the hard way—with two semesters of community college and sixteen years of being a stay-at-home mom.

  Retail jobs and the pay that went with them hadn’t been close to enough to support herself and her daughter post-divorce. Three online aptitude tests had left her even more confused—while getting her degree in biochemistry and going on to medical school sounded great, it wasn’t actually a practical solution for an over-forty single mom with no money in the bank. Then an article in the local paper had provided an interesting and almost-viable idea. Harper had become a virtual assistant.

  If there was one thing she knew it was how to take care of the details. You didn’t get good at a basket weave Fourth of July cake without paying attention. One year after filing her business permit, Harper had five main clients, nearly a dozen more who used her services intermittently and almost enough income to pay her bills. She also had her mother living in the apartment over the garage, an ex-husband dating a gorgeous blonde who was—wait for it—exactly fourteen years younger than Harper because they shared a birthday—a sixteen-year-old daughter who had stopped speaking to her and a client who was desperately unclear on the concept of virtual in the world of virtual assistants.

  “You don’t have to drop off your bills every month,” Harper said as she set out coffee, a plate of chocolate chip scones that she’d gotten up at five-thirty that morning to bake fresh, a bowl of sugar-glazed almonds and sliced pears.

  “And miss this?” Lucas Wheeler asked, pouring himself a mug of coffee. “If you’re trying to convince me coming by isn’t a good idea, then stop feeding me.”

  He was right, of course. There was an easy, logical solution. Stop taking care of people and they would go away. Or at least be around less often. There was just one problem—when someone stopped by your home, you were supposed to take care of them.

  “I can’t help it,” she admitted, wishing it weren’t the truth. “It’s a disease. I’m a people pleaser. I blame my mother.”

  “I’d blame her, too, if I were you.”

  She supposed she could take offense at Lucas’s words, but he was only stating the obvious.

  In some ways Harper felt as if she was part of the wrong generation. According to celebrity magazines, fifty was the new twenty-five, which meant almost forty-two should be the new what? Eleven? Everyone else her age seemed so young and carefree, with modern attitudes and a far better grasp of what was in style and popular.

  Harper was just now getting around to listening to the soundtrack from Hamilton and her idea of fashionable had a lot more to do with how she dressed her dining room table than herself. She was like a 1950s throwback, which might sound charming but in real life kind of sucked. On the bright side, it really was her mother’s fault.

  “Speaking of your mother, where is she?” Lucas asked.

  “At the senior center, preparing Easter baskets for the homeless.” Because that was what women were supposed to do. Take care of people—not have actual careers that could support them and their families.

  “I, on the other hand, will be paying your bills, designing T-shirts for Misty, working on the layout of a sales brochure and making bunny butt cookies for my daughter.”

  Lucas raised an eyebrow. “You do realize that bunny butt is just a polite way of saying rabbit ass.”

  Harper laughed. “Yes, but they’re an Easter tradition. Becca loves them. Her father is dropping her off tomorrow afternoon and I want the cookies waiting.”

  Because maybe if there were bunny butt cookies, her daughter would smile and talk to her the way she used to. In actual sentences that shared bits of her life.

  “You sorry you didn’t go?” Lucas asked.

  “To the memorial? Yes.” She thought for a second, then added, “No. I mean I would have liked to pay my respects and all, but Great-Aunt Cheryl is gone, so it’s not like she would miss me showing up.”

  The drive from Mischief Bay to Grass Valley would take practically the whole day. Harper couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than being trapped in a car with her ex, his girlfriend and her daughter. Okay, the Becca part would be great, but the other two?

  The worst of it was that while Great-Aunt Cheryl was actually Terence’s relative, Harper had been the one who had stayed in touch, right up until her death two months ago.

  “Terence is forty-four. What is he thinking, dating a twenty-eight-year-old?” She glared at Lucas. “Never mind. You’re the wrong person to be having this particular conversation with.”

  Because while her client was a handsome, single, fifty-year-old man, he also dated women in their twenties. In his case, their early twenties.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Is it all men or just you and my ex? Oh, dear God, the one thing you have in common with Terence is me. Did I do something to make you all date twentysomethings?”

  “Calm down,” Lucas said mildly. “I was dating younger women long before we met. It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” She glanced pointedly at the clock on her microwave. “Don’t you have crimes to solve?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m going.”

  He rose and carried his dishes to the sink. Lucas was about five-ten, nicely muscled with a belly way flatter than hers. He wore jeans, cowboy boots and a long-sleeved shirt. He was a detective with the LAPD, and from what she’d learned about him in the nine months she’d been working for him, he’d always been a cop.

  He returned to the table and slipped on his shoulder holster, then grabbed his blazer. “How do you make bunny butt cookies?”

  She laughed. “It’s easy. You take a round sugar cookie frosted in pink icing, add two small oval sugar cookies decorated with pink candy for feet, use a miniature marshmallow for the tail and viola—bunny butt cookies.”

  “Save me a couple.”

  “I promise.” She would put them in a little box that she would decorate for the holiday. Because she simply couldn’t hand someone cookies on a plain paper plate. If she tried, the heavens would open and release a plague of locusts at the very least.

  Oh, to be able to buy packaged cookies from the grocery store. Or prepared spaghetti sauce. Or a frozen entrée. But that would never happen because it wasn’t what Harper was supposed to do.

  She carried the rest of the dishes over to the sink, packed up the uneaten food, then retreated to her large craft room with its built-in shelves and giant tables and cupboards. After finding a nice bunny-butt-cookie-sized box, she studied her ribbon collection before selecting one that would coordinate. While her glue gun heated, she sorted through her fabric remnants to find one that was Easter appropriate and wondered what other women did with the time they saved by not making every stupid thing by hand.

  But Harper was her mother’s daughter and had never been very good at bucking tradition. Her sister, Stacey, was the rebel while Harper did what she was told. It wasn’t that she didn’t like making bunny butt cookies or decoupaging gift boxes, it was that she wanted just a little more in her life. More challenges, more money, more communication with her daughter. And while it was fun to blame all her problems on her mother, Harper couldn’t help thinking that in reality, everything she wanted but didn’t have was very likely her own damn fault.

  * * *

  The smell of waffles and turkey sausage filled the kitchen and drifted down the hall toward the master bedroom. Stacey Bloom slipped on her sleeveless dress, then glanced at herself in the mirror. With the loose style and knit fabric, not to mention her body shape, she looked as she always had. No one would guess, which was the point. She didn’t want the questions that would inevitably be asked—mostly because she didn’t want to be judged for her answers.

  She knew that was her problem, no one else’s. The judging thing. If it were any other topic, she would be able to provide a brief but accur
ate response, one that would explain her position while making it clear that while the questioner might think his opinion was important, she did not. Except for this time.

  She stepped into her lace-up hiking boots and tied them, then pulled a blazer from the row of them in her closet. She had learned years ago that having a kind of work uniform kept her mornings simple. She bought her black sleeveless dresses online, three or four of them at a time. Her blazers were of excellent quality and lasted for years. She changed them out seasonally—lighter fabric in summer, heavier in winter—although the temperate climate in Mischief Bay, California, meant her decision to switch one for another was based purely on convention and not necessity.

  As for the hiking boots, they were comfortable and offered a lot of support. She spent much of her day standing in a lab or walking between labs, so they made practical sense. Her mother kept trying to get her to wear pumps and stockings, neither of which was ever going to happen. The shoes would cause foot pain and pressure on her lower back—these days more so than ever. Besides, something about her hiking boots seemed to intimidate the men she had to work with, and although that had never been her purpose, she wasn’t going to deny she liked the unexpected benefit.

  She walked into her kitchen and hung her blazer on the back of her chair. Her husband, Kit, stood at the stove, humming to himself as he turned the sausage. The table was set and there was a bowl of sliced fruit by her place mat. A thermal to-go cup stood next to her backpack. She wanted it to be filled with delicious hot coffee, but knew instead it contained a vegetable-infused protein shake. Without looking she knew that her lunch was already packed in her backpack.

  Kit turned and smiled when he saw her.

  “Morning, sweetie. How are you feeling?”

  “Good. And you?”

  “Excellent.” He winked, then went back to his cooking.

  As it was the last Friday of Spring Break, he wasn’t teaching today, so instead of his usual khakis and a button-down shirt, he had on sweats and a T-shirt with a drawing of a cat on a poster. Underneath the poster, it said Wanted Dead or Alive: Schrodinger’s Cat.

  She wasn’t sure which she loved more—that he fussed over her by fixing her meals and making sure she was taking her vitamins, that he called her sweetie, or that he had a collection of funny science T-shirts. She supposed there was no reason she had to pick any one thing. Until meeting Kit, she’d never been sure that she believed romantic love existed. She could have explained the chemical processes that took place in the brain but that wasn’t the same as believing in the feelings themselves. Now she knew differently.