As someone who taught in a junior college with a population that included many students who had been raised by one parent or in a foster family, I’ve always wondered why some of the students were successful and why some repeatedly shot themselves in the foot. Johnson takes two adults without traditional family backgrounds and makes it believable that getting together is the best that could happen to them.

Detective Niall MacLachlan is having a bad day: He finds his elderly landlady dead in her kitchen and then after getting to work shoots a bank robber who’s trying to get away with a hostage. As the middle brother in a family where the father is in prison for dealing drugs and where the mother consequently walked away from her three boys, Niall doesn’t have anyone to turn to when bad days crop up since he isn’t close to either of his siblings. His older brother is the captain of the police force and his boss, while his younger brother, a DEA agent, is currently on assignment.

To make matters worse, loner Niall, the King of the One Night Stand, finds that his new landlady is an attractive young widow with a six-year-old son, a four-year-old daughter, and a mongrel dog, all of whom immediately gravitate to his cottage door and want to befriend him.

Niall tries to stay as far away from gorgeous Rowan Staley, her charming son Desmond, precious daughter Anna, and rambunctious dog Sam, but they railroad him into loving them.

The beauty of this book is that Niall’s transformation while quick (it’s only 288 pages, after all) isn’t abrupt. In fact, Niall has a number of backsliding moments when he can’t face the Staley family and hides out in his cottage, ignoring them for all he’s worth. Watching him come to understand how wonderful a family can be is a joy.

For her part, Rowan isn’t without her problems, starting with her dead husband’s parents who want as much control over their grandchildren as they can get. Extracting herself and her children from their influence is a tightrope walk that could easily go wrong.

Still, with all their faults, anxieties, and misgivings, Niall and Rowan are a totally believable couple. When a peeping Tom threatens the neighborhood and scares Desmond, Niall not only steps up as a cop, but recognizes the feelings he has for the boy as fatherly.

This second in the series is stronger than the first book, Between Love and Duty, about Niall’s police captain brother, so I have very high hopes for the last book about the DEA agent brother. Johnson is a new writer to me, and I plan to glom her backlist while I wait for the end of this series.