Stranger in the Moonlight by Jude Deveraux

Sheila had said with her usual belligerence. Unless she was trying to sell someone something, she let people know she was ready to fight. “With a guard out front. For protection.”
    “From what?” Joe asked in the same tone. “From all the photographers hounding you? They want a picture of Joe Layton’s daughter-in-law?”
    Whenever Sheila and he got into it, Joey left the room. He refused to be drawn into their arguments. But Joe knew his son wanted to run his own business. Sometimes Joe wondered if his son had married Sheila because he knew she’d stand up to his father. There were even times when Joe thought maybe his son had put his wife up to taking over the store. Heaven knew Sheila didn’t have enough brains to figure out how her father-in-law could leave his own business.
    One afternoon when Sheila had been on Joe’s case about selling some damned curtains in his hardware store, he received a text message from some man he’d never heard of. The man said he was in love with Jecca, wanted to marry her, and how could he win her?
    Love was the last thing Joe was thinking of. Between Sheila shouting, Joey skulking off in the next room, and hearing that some guy wanted to marry his daughter, Joe cracked. On impulse—something he never gave in to—he replied to the man by asking if that little town had a hardware store. If Joe’s dear, sweet daughter was going to move there, he might as well go too. He was about to push send when he added that he wanted more photos of the pretty woman, Lucy Cooper, who Jecca had sent pictures of and who she’d raved about.
    At the time, Joe had only thought how the woman had been the mother Jecca had never had. Joe’s wife, the love of his life, had died when Jecca was little more than a baby. After that he’d been too busy with earning a living and raising two kids to try to find another bride. He’d made do with a few dates now and then, and even one sort of serious affair, but all the women came up short. Jecca said he wanted a clone of her mother, not a real person, and Joe knew she was right.
    But then, Jecca almost always was right. Not that he would ever tell her that, but that’s how he felt.
    When he’d heard she was marrying a doctor, he was sure she was making a big mistake. Jecca came from a solidly blue-collar background. How would she deal with a la-di-dah doctor? But Dr. Tris—as people called him—had turned out to be okay. More than okay. He was mad about Jecca and gave up a lot to be with her.
    It was through Tristan that Joe was going to be able to open the hardware store in Edilean. Tris pretty much gave him the old building. That it needed a massive renovation was beside the point.
    In New Jersey, over the years Joe had helped out a lot of men. When they were out of work, he’d found them jobs. When they needed supplies for a job, he’d let them have credit. When they didn’t get paid, Joe held their notes for as long as it took.
    They’d repaid him in loyalty, by going to him instead of the big franchises, but even with that, Joe’s business was going down. He would have died before he admitted it, but Sheila’s idea of opening a design department might have been a good one.
    He also would never have admitted that he had less money than he said he did. He didn’t lie exactly, just sort of rounded off the numbers.
    He and Jecca had had one of their big fights when Joe said he was bringing in construction guys from New Jersey to do the remodeling. He’d said the reason was because he trusted the men. The truth was that Joe collected on a lot of favors. He called men he hadn’t talked to in ten years. With few exceptions, they drove down to little Edilean and put in one, two, or three days of work. Some men had been with Joe so long they sent their grandsons—or daughters, an idea Joe had no problem with. His daughter had always worked for him.
    For the most part, they worked at their own expense. Joe paid some of the younger guys, but his