No One Does It Like You

by Katie Shepard

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

College sweethearts reunite to restore more than just an old inn in this new romance by Katie Shepard, author of Sweeten the Deal.

When’s the best time to tell your ex that you want them back?

Probably not in the middle of a Category 3 hurricane. But when Broadway actor Tom Wilczewski is about to dive into the floodwaters to rescue his co-lead, he calls the ex-wife he hasn’t seen in ten years to swear he still loves her and ask for a chance to make things right.

Two months later, Rose Kelly is tired of seeing pictures of her ex-husband Tom rescuing Hollywood darling Boyd Kellagher. Not that she’s jealous. Of course not. She’s far too busy taking care of her elderly aunt and worrying about the storm damage to the family B&B on Martha’s Vineyard to miss the love of her life. But after belatedly hearing Tom’s voicemail, Rosie asks him to follow through on his promises for once by helping her fix the inn. Thinking this is the perfect way to win her back, Tom agrees.

When they get there, things are…less than ideal. Rosie expected the inn to be in better shape. She expected it to have more beds. And she expected more help from her actual family—not from Tom and the rest of his Broadway cast. But Rosie begins to wonder if maybe the life she expected isn’t the one she really wants. If she and Tom can repair the inn together, can they possibly repair the damage to the relationship they both thought was long gone?

Release date: September 3, 2024

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

1

January

Boston

Rose liked parties, but she loved holiday parties in particular. She liked everything about the holidays. She liked the little rituals: the decorations, the special meals, and the seasonal music. Hand turkeys for Thanksgiving. Flag cakes on the Fourth of July. "Silver Bells" in the grocery store before Christmas. She liked going out to her aunt's inn on Martha's Vineyard and falling asleep in the third-floor bunk room with all her cousins while conversation drifted up from downstairs.

When she was in third grade, she'd leaned in to Valentine's Day. She cut out two dozen red construction paper hearts, traced the edges with Elmer's glue and gold glitter, and personalized the valentines for each kid in her homeroom class, even the ones she didn't like very much. She added stickers and pom-poms and googly eyes. She did everyone's name in cursive with puffy paint by copying the letters from a calligraphy book, and she covered a shoebox in pretty wrapping paper to carry the cards in.

At the class party, the valentines had seemed well received by her classmates. Her teacher called her a sweetheart. Rose felt good about what she'd done, and she collected the little cardboard Snoopy and Garfield cards she'd received in exchange to take home in her shoebox. But at the end of the day, when she was packing up her cubby, Rose happened to look in the trash. And there, creased and discarded, were her valentines, mixed in with the used paper plates and cupcake wrappers from the party.

When Rose was still bewildered and weepy about it that night at the family cookie exchange, her aunt Max came and cast a critical eye over the salvaged cards. Rose adored her aunt Max, a beautiful lady who always wore lipstick and smelled like Chanel No. 5 instead of cigarettes. It was Max who planned the perfect holidays and hosted the entire Kelly clan at her inn multiple times a year.

You should probably have done something with candy instead. And that glitter would have gotten all over their backpacks, she told Rose. Of course they threw them out.

While hearing what she'd done wrong had stung, there had been an undercurrent of relief beneath Rose's embarrassment. Her mistake was fixable. She could have done it right with lollypops and conversation hearts. The next year, she would. Max patted her on the head and coaxed her downstairs to the party, and Rose assumed that when she grew up, she, like Max, would know what to do about everything.

This year's holidays, coming right on the heels of the hurricane, had not been up to Rose and Max's standards. Max's inn had been caught in the fringes of the storm, and for the first time Rose could remember, they had not gone out to Martha's Vineyard for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Instead of fine-tuning her stuffing recipe or coercing her toddler nephews into reindeer costumes for her personal amusement, Rose spent most of the season writing letters to the insurance company.

"Should we get started, do you think?" her aunt's financial adviser asked significantly when Rose's family was more than fifteen minutes late to his office.

"Have you tried the cornetti yet?" Rose evaded, shoving the box across the conference room table.

She'd brought two dozen assorted baked goods from the good Italian place on Salem Street for this meeting, because if you had to set a man trap for a Kelly at nine a.m. on the first Monday of the new year, you baited it with pastry. She was expecting her father, at least one of her uncles, and a reasonable quorum of her brothers and cousins. She'd brought pastries and made them binders just in case they hadn't had a chance to read her emails about the inn's repairs.

"It's nine twenty. The gym's going to be packed by the time I get there," Aunt Max complained.

"Water aerobics isn't until three," Rose gently reminded her. "I'll get you to your shuttle."

Max paused, momentarily perplexed. "Oh, right," she said. "I was thinking about pickleball. But it's January, isn't it?"

Max's delicate, dark Kelly eyebrows gathered in confusion. Looking at Max was like looking into the future, her iron gray curls the natural conclusion of Rose's black ones, her heart-shaped face the time-progressed image of Rose's own.

She'd survived a stroke the previous year. They'd caught it quickly, and she just had a little lingering weakness on her left side, but it had done a number on her short-term memory. So Max cast around the room, trying to establish what she was doing there with her niece and her financial adviser.

"Have you put on a little weight recently?" she asked Rose when the echoing silence of the conference room grew too loud for her.

Rose frowned over her full box of pastries, which she hadn't even been eating on account of the hazelnut filling. Max wasn't usually mean, and if she shared the family opinion that Rose ought to try being taller and thinner, she'd never before aired it. Some combination of boredom and disinhibition was making her pick at Rose today.

"No, I've always been this fat," Rose said evenly. Her family consisted entirely of short fat people; what did they expect her to look like?

Aunt Max huffed and shifted in her seat. "I wasn't criticizing you. I just don't remember you looking this stressed."

"That's because you have short-term memory loss," Rose pointed out. "And you saw me two days ago at dinner. Remember? We talked about all the storm damage at the inn. That's why we're here."

Taken aback again, Aunt Max crossed her arms.

"The inn's gotten to be such a wreck," she grumbled. "I never had the money to fix it up right. Wish Peter had left me his stocks instead, but those vultures at the Harvard alumni office had their talons in him. We shouldn't have to deal with this."

Once her opinions on her late husband's poor estate planning were aired for the umpteenth time and Rose dutifully nodded agreement, Max reached into her pocketbook, coming out with a section of the New York Times. "Of course I remember we're here to talk about the inn," she said grumpily. She ostentatiously unfolded her paper and flapped it open so that Rose could see the front page of the Arts section.

Rose clenched her jaw when she saw the article her aunt was reading.

"That newspaper is three months old," Rose informed her aunt.

"Oh? Well, like you said, I have short-term memory loss. It'll be new to me," her aunt said with purposeful sweetness.

Rose recognized the picture on the page because she couldn't mentally erase the image of her ex-husband's distinctive Greek-god nose smooshed up against the equally distinctive profile of Boyd fucking Kellagher.

As if she needed something else to deal with! This was the year Tom had to make the national news with his tongue in someone else's mouth!

If the Times article was to be believed, Rose had at least another year of news ahead of her about Tom smooshing faces with Boyd Kellagher onstage. And, hell, probably offstage too, based on the equally pervasive image of Tom dragging the movie star out of the floodwaters, the other man clinging to Tom's neck like a giant, chiseled damsel in distress. Rose did not want to see it again. Those photos gave her the same uncomfortable feelings as real estate listings for homes she could never afford or other people's holiday cards, pictures that made her quickly turn the page or close the card.

It wasn't that she begrudged Tom his first big Broadway role in ten years. Or kissing Boyd Kellagher. Or even Boyd Kellagher kissing Tom. She was unsurprised he had a gorgeous boyfriend now. But if Tom was going to get everything he ever wanted-love, fame, professional success-could Rose not get just one thing? If not Tom, if not a family of her own, why could she not at least get a couple of happy weeks of vacation every year spent preparing extravagant meals and group photo shoots in matching sweaters? It didn't seem like too much to ask for.

"I've seen it already," Rose said, trying not to sound as stressed as she felt.

"So handsome," Max cooed, and she could have been referring to either Tom or Boyd. "I always liked him."

"No, you didn't," Rose retorted, snapping at the bait before she could stop herself. This was revisionist history. "None of you did. You told me not to marry him."

"Telling you not to marry him is different from liking him. I thought he was a nice boy. You should have waited for him to grow up."

Tom's age had nothing to do with it. "We just ended up wanting different things." That was her standard line on their divorce, one that assigned no blame while obscuring the painful truth that Rose, specifically, had not been one of the things Tom wanted.

"And you didn't even send us a wedding present," Rose said, certain that would get her aunt off the subject.

Max raised her eyebrows, unimpressed. "I'm sorry, but we all assumed you were in a family way and too embarrassed to admit it before the wedding. I was going to get all your nursery furniture."

Rose stiffened her shoulders in familiar hurt because she'd known what her family thought, but nobody had ever given her the chance to set them straight. She hadn't married Tom because she was pregnant, then or ever, or for tax reasons, or to get him on her health insurance, or for any of the other reasons people had speculated about their marriage at twenty-two.

She'd married him because he'd asked her and because she'd loved him-she'd been utterly, stupidly in love with him-and she'd thought it would last forever. Which had made their breakup only a year later much more embarrassing than an unexpected baby would have been.

But that was a long time ago now. What was really embarrassing was that she was still having feelings about it at all, which she decided she would stop doing at once.

"Well, I wasn't. Obviously. And I'm happy he's finding success. He's a very talented actor, so I'm not surprised he's working with people like Boyd Kellagher," Rose said, getting herself in hand and saying the things the kind of person she wanted to be would say.

"Are you going to see his new play?" her aunt asked.

"It looks like I'm going to be busy over the next few months," Rose said dourly, checking the time again. Her family's tardiness did not bode well for their contributions to fixing up the inn.

She picked up her phone and scrolled to her father's work number at the tax preparation office he managed. He should have been here, not there, but she tried calling anyway. A new receptionist picked up the phone and sent a flutter of worry through her when he confirmed that yes, Derek Kelly was there, one second, please.

"Hey, princess," her father said when he reached the phone, sounding both wary and cheerful. "Can this be quick? You know it's not great for you to call at work, and it's tax season-"

"Dad!" Rose burst out. "What are you doing? You're supposed to be meeting with me and Max right now."

There was a pause. Her father's palm shifted awkwardly on the receiver.

"Did your uncle Ken not get a chance to talk to you this weekend?"

"No?"

"Ah. Well." Her father's voice trailed off. Rose waited for him to say more, but he didn't.

"You can still come now. It's only fifteen minutes if you take a cab," Rose said, looking worriedly at Max's financial adviser, who showed signs of bolting.

"I'm sorry you didn't know. And for your time this morning. But the boys and I talked about it over Christmas," her father said, still sounding deeply uncomfortable. "And we think you should sell the inn."

"What?" Rose said, leaning back in shock. "No. No. That doesn't make any sense."

Setting aside the problem that nobody had a big enough house for them all to get together if she sold it, the inn was an income-producing property. Or it was when it wasn't closed from storm damage. It was how Rose paid her aunt's bills.

"Yeah, it does though," her father insisted. "It's going to be a big old time and money suck for months, and it's just not worth it to haul ourselves out there every winter anymore."

"What do you mean not worth it? Everyone loves that place. It takes, like, a couple hours, doorstep to doorstep. And-"

"I know, but honestly, sweetie, can't you get back to Boston easier than Martha's Vineyard? Plus, your brother's the one with kids, and even he was saying he'd rather take them down to Disney next year."

Nobody had told her this. Nobody had breathed a single word of this to her. That couldn't be right-they just didn't want to help with the repairs.

"No. It can't be like it was this year every year-we were all crammed in at dinner, we barely saw the cousins-Dad. Dad, no. Come on. I made a schedule. I made binders. And if everyone pitches in just on the weekends, it'll only take a few months-"

Her voice was winding up higher and tighter, and she didn't like how young she sounded. She regrouped. Her father wasn't listening to her, which wasn't unusual, but he didn't like to fight either. She just had to hold her ground.

She couldn't sell the inn. She'd slept on the foldout couch in her parents' house this year, tiptoed through their space, carried hot casseroles on her lap through expensive cab rides, and none of it, not a bit of it, had felt like it should.

"I have to get back to it," her father muttered sheepishly. "Ken said he was going to talk to you. You should talk to Ken about the inn. It just makes more sense to sell and be done with it."

He all but hung up on her.

Rose jerked back in her chair, quickly looking for support from her aunt's financial adviser-the person who had walked her through all the insurance paperwork two months ago. His face bore sympathy . . . but not support. Nor surprise.

After he'd eaten her pastries?

"My dad talked to you about this," she accused him.

He cleared his throat. "Your father asked me to check what the inn would sell for without repairs, yes."

"It's got to be less than what it could produce if we fix it up. What did you say?"

"That it would simplify your aunt's estate significantly-"

"Her estate?" After she died? "She's sitting right here!"