A Kowalski Secret (The Kowalskis #12)

Chapter One

Siobhan Rowe had gotten through some hard times in her life, but she was afraid spending an entire week camping with the Kowalski family might be her undoing. She didn’t like taking a week off of work. She didn’t like camping. And she definitely didn’t like the Kowalski family.

Except for Steph, of course. She and Stephanie Kowalski had been friends for years, which was how she’d ended up agreeing to be her last-minute replacement maid of honor at a campground wedding in the middle-of-nowhere northern New Hampshire.

“How many diapers are you taking?” Robin asked, looking at the pile on Siobhan’s bed.

She sighed and looked at the woman who’d become a good friend since Siobhan moved into the apartment across the hall. Without Robin, she wasn’t sure how she’d get through the exhaustion of being a working single mother of a boy two months shy of his second birthday.

“All of them?” she said. “I don’t know.”

“You’re not taking him for a trek along the Oregon Trail. They have stores up there.” Robin was obviously amused by Siobhan’s packing pile, which wasn’t a surprise.

As the oldest of five kids, Robin didn’t sweat the small stuff when it came to little ones. As an added bonus, she was totally comfortable hanging out at Siobhan’s in leggings and comfy T-shirts, eating pizza because going out on the town meant throwing off Oliver’s sleep schedule.

When Oliver’s sleep schedule went awry, Siobhan had a very bad day. A week of trying to get him to sleep in a campground was just going to add to the fun.

“Explain to me again why you’re going camping for a week with people you don’t like? It seems so sudden and you keep starting to tell me and then getting distracted.”

Siobhan sighed. “I don’t dislike all of them. Most of them, I don’t know very well. And obviously, Steph and I are friends. But Brian Kowalski—one of the four brothers who bought the campground—was married to my sister, Kelly.”

“Oh.” Robin’s eyes widened. “So you’re spending a week with your former brother-in-law and his entire family?”

“Right. He’s Steph’s cousin. She and Kyle—the groom—met at that campground when they were teenagers and, since her cousins bought it in March, they decided it was the perfect place to get married. But Steph’s maid of honor had to drop out at the last minute, and I was the next friend on deck.”

“You could have said no,” Robin pointed out.

“It’s not that easy to say no to a friend in distress because her wedding’s ruined,” Siobhan replied wryly.

“And I’d been having a miserable day when she called.

I had left work early because Oliver had an appointment with his pediatrician, and traffic was backed up more than usual because they decided to pave that day.

Also, the air conditioner in my car wasn’t keeping up with August in Boston.

The phone rang at the one possible moment when an all-expenses paid, week-long vacation in the woods in the middle of nowhere sounded good. ”

“With your ex–brother-in-law and his family.”

“I didn’t really think about that part until after. I was mostly focused on helping Steph and on the woods.”

While they spoke, Robin was rummaging through the piles on the bed, winnowing out what she deemed unnecessary. “How do you and… Brian? I think that’s what you said. How do you get along?”

“That’s the fun part.” Siobhan pulled the package of diaper wipes out of Robin’s hand and put them back in the pile.

She was taking all the wipes she had because they were going camping and, if nothing else, she knew there would be marshmallows in Oliver’s future.

“We didn’t really like each other very much from day one and it went downhill from there. ”

“Why?”

“I didn’t think Kelly was in the right headspace for a relationship, and for me it was about Kelly and where she was in her life, but Brian thought my reservations were about him. We just clashed a lot. And, of course, when she left him, he blamed me.”

“Of course.” Robin held up a small bag that was stuffed with tiny shoes. “Why are you bringing every pair of shoes Oliver owns?”

“One, I’m not. And two, he’ll be running around a campground.

His shoes will get wet or muddy or he might step in something sticky.

” She watched as her friend took two pairs of sneakers out of the bag and set them on the bed.

Then she dumped the rest back into the bin Siobhan used for shoes.

“We’re staying in a camper, so we have plenty of room for shoes. ”

“I’m not worried about the camper. I’m afraid you won’t actually have room for Oliver in your car by the time you’re done packing his stuff.” She cocked her head. “Whose camper are you using?”

“It belongs to somebody in the family, I guess. Steph borrowed it for her maid of honor, and now that’s me.”

“Way better than a tent.”

Siobhan laughed. “There was a zero percent chance my answer to her asking me to be in her wedding would have been a yes if it involved me staying in a tent with a toddler. Honestly, I’m not staying in a tent at all, but especially with a kid who’s figured out the basics of a zipper.”

Robin put her hands on her hips and nodded, apparently satisfied with what remained on the bed. “What time are you leaving?”

“Shortly after Oliver wakes up from the nap I didn’t want him to take.” She sighed. “I’m sure he’ll sleep in the car, too, since it’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive. In a new place—especially in a camper—with bonus naps? My son’s going to be line dancing at two in the morning.”

“Let’s get you repacked, then.”

As if on cue, Siobhan heard the tinny electronic engine sound of Oliver’s favorite truck and knew she was out of time.

A minute later, her son padded into the room, his truck clutched in his arms. His blue eyes were still sleepy and his dark hair was sticking up in several different directions, and Siobhan smiled because it was one of her favorite looks.

“Auntie Robin,” he said, lighting up when he saw her packing things into a duffel bag. “We go camping!”

And that’s what it was all about, Siobhan reminded herself. She was going to stand next to Steph while she married the love of her life, and Oliver was going to have the fun adventure of camping for a week in the great outdoors.

For that, she was willing to ignore her former brother-in-law.

* * *

“I’m not sure how you plan to ignore the maid of honor for a week when we’re hosting the wedding.”

Brian looked at his brother Rob and shrugged. “It’s not going to be that hard. She’ll be fussing around Steph, since that’s what the maid of honor does, and if she needs something campground related, she can ask you or Joey or Danny.”

“And that’s why you’ve been standing in front of that window with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face for the last half hour?”

He shrugged. “That’s different from any other day how?”

“Fair,” Rob admitted. “The being totally still for a half hour’s different, though. People driving by probably think you’re some kind of angry mannequin and are really confused about why we’d put you in our window.”

Brian didn’t really care what people thought.

He had a lot on his mind and, regardless of what his facial expressions were doing, watching the birds circling over the river in the distance usually calmed his mind.

Not so much today, though, because their family was descending upon them to kick off his cousin’s wedding week.

And so was Siobhan Rowe.

She hadn’t liked Brian before he married her sister. She hadn’t liked him while he was married to her sister. And she definitely hadn’t liked him since the divorce.

It didn’t make sense to him. She’d made it clear from their first meeting that she didn’t want him with Kelly, so her sister dumping him and walking out the door with no warning should have made Siobhan happy.

But by the time the divorce was finalized, he’d become convinced that nothing short of him falling off the face of the earth would make her happy.

And they were going to spend an entire week together. Wasn’t that fun?

“Dude, you’re literally growling right now.” Rob clapped his hand on his shoulder. “Either eat something or take a nap.”

“I ate. And I don’t have time for a nap. The family’s going to start arriving any minute.”

“Speaking of people arriving, Steph sent a group text asking us to babyproof Siobhan’s site as much as possible. You never told me she had a baby.”

Brian turned away from the window. That was news to him, probably because he’d been ignoring his phone for the last hour. “How old is the kid?”

“Almost two, she said.”

“Since Kelly and I were already divorced when she would have had him and Siobhan didn’t leave me on her Christmas newsletter list, how would I have known?”

The bell over the door rang, and Brian sighed. The combination campground office and store was also something of a social hangout thanks to the chairs and the abundant amount of snacks for sale, and every time that bell rang, he wanted to rip it down and run it over with his truck.

Seeing Hannah Shelby walk through the door cheered him up, though.

Rob’s fiancée had come into their lives as a seasonal camper in the spring, intending to leave at the end of last month, but now she’d be a permanent fixture in their lives.

Brian liked her and she not only made Rob happy, but she fit right in with the family.

She held the door so Stella could follow her in. Brian’s yellow Lab was the best dog he’d ever had in his life, and she loved everybody she met. Of course, she loved him best, but she’d spent the morning roaming around the campground with Hannah, doing last-minute cleanup before the family arrived.

“Your mom sent me a text,” she informed them. “They’re about five minutes out.”

Brian sighed again. “Let the chaos commence.”

“I sent them the campground map yesterday,” Hannah said. “I marked which sites everybody’s in, but we’ll see how that goes.”

Rob chuckled. “What are the chances they pull into the campground in the order they need to arrive so they won’t jam each other up?”

Chaos was the right word for the next two hours. As the family arrived—most of them pulling campers and definitely not in any kind of order—Brian and Rob helped get everybody parked at their sites. As soon as Joey arrived with his wife and daughter, he jumped in to help.

Even though he owned a quarter of the campground and should have been around to help, their brother Danny wasn’t arriving until Saturday afternoon.

Just because she was getting married in a campground didn’t mean Steph was skimping on the details, so he’d be picking up the white chairs, tables and the arch from the rental place on Saturday and driving them up.

He’d miss out on some of the festivities, but nobody wanted to do four hours round-trip of driving the day before the wedding.

When a small red car he didn’t recognize pulled into the campground, Brian assumed Siobhan had arrived. The way Steph squealed and ran toward the car confirmed it.

Since he was stuck helping level his grandparents’ very large motor coach–style RV, the dirt road that led to the camper Siobhan would be staying in was directly in his sight line. She drove slowly because Steph was walking beside the car, talking the entire time.

When Siobhan parked and got out, the first thing she did was stretch.

Brian tried not to look, but—again—she was in his line of sight.

And she was wearing a red tee that hugged her curves, so that didn’t help.

Her hair was a darker blond than Kelly’s, but the sun showed off lighter highlights running through the strands.

He knew from the many times she’d tried to set him on fire with them that her eyes were the same hazel as her sister’s.

“That’s not how ignoring works,” Rob said as he walked by, keeping his voice low so it wouldn’t carry. “And stop growling like that. I swear, you’ve been turning more and more feral since we bought this place.”

Brian turned his back on Siobhan as she opened the rear door of her car. “Are we done here?”

“Yeah. I’m going to do the hookups for them, but you can resume the angry mannequin position in the store again if you want. You know, if you stop shaving and put on a flannel shirt before posing, you’ll look like Paul Bunyan and we can become a tourist attraction.”

He almost rose to his brother’s baiting, but then Brian took a deep breath.

His family was gathered to celebrate a happy occasion and even though they were a pain in his ass, there was no bottom to the depths of his love for his family.

He was not going to spend the week growling and scowling at people.

Siobhan Rowe was a nonfactor, and he wasn’t going to be a gloomy dark cloud casting a shadow over Steph’s wedding because of her presence. They didn’t like each other. That was fine. They were adults, and they could be in each other’s orbit for a week with no drama.

Then they’d go their separate ways and, if he was lucky, they’d never see each other again.