About the Author
Nora Everly is a life long reader, writer, and happily ever after junkie. She is a wife and stay-at-home mom to two tiny humans and one fat cat. She lives in Oregon with her family and her overactive imagination.
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1. Sneak Peek: Love in Deed, Book #6 in the Green Valley Library Series by L.B. Dunbar
2. Nora’s Booklist
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Sneak Peek: Love in Deed by L.B. Dunbar, Book #6 in the Green Valley Library Series
Ten years later: Fall 2019
[Beverly]
At my age, I no longer believe in love at first sight.
The breathtaking, thigh-clenching, blood-rushing sensation of seeing a person for the first time and sharing a moment.
But I am in lurve with Tripper Hanes, construction project manager of Nailed, a home improvement television show where he and his wife fix up old houses. He’s married to the beautifully exotic Virginia Hanes, who masterminds the decorative ensemble of a newly restored house like none other. I should know, as I spend a great deal of my time watching daytime television and do-it-yourself programs.
And I’m currently being interrupted from my favorite show by a sharp rapping on my front door.
“What the…?” I whisper as Tripper makes his introductory announcement: “Let’s nail this one, baby. See what I did there. Nail. Nailed.” Tripper Hanes is the full package: humor, handy, and handsome.
My thoughts wander back to love at first sight. I’d believed in the lie once—such a damn fool—and chased Howard to the very porch where someone now stands. Back then, I was young—just seventeen—and pregnant with Hannah. I’d grown up fast on this farm as a wife and a mother.
“It’s demo day,” Tripper announces from the flat screen, thankfully breaking up my recollections of Howard, and I smile despite myself. I love the antics of this ginger-bearded man as he tears down walls and builds up homes.
Only, the front door thunderously rumbles in the jamb once again.
“Nobody’s home,” I mutter as I stare at the television, listening to Tripper call out to his wife a parting, “Love you, GinGin.” He has a nickname for her, and it’s sickeningly sweet. I’d gag a bit except I like them as a couple. Their relationship is something I’ve never had.
My comfort-cozy rocking chair angles toward the front window, directing my gaze—should I wish to gaze—at the least-traveled road in Green Valley edging my property. The television set sits off in the corner. Hours of my day are spent in this chair because moving about my house is difficult at best.
You could walk again, doctors said.
I can walk; I’m just choosing not to, just as I’m not answering the rambling front door.
“Go away,” I mumble as my eyes remain on the television screen. Tripper rushes at a brick wall, hoping he’s loosened the concrete cutout enough so the section will fall from the impact, but the barrier doesn’t budge and he bounces back with enough force to knock his hard hat off his head. I wince as if I can feel the thud of his body, both against the solid structure and then collapsing on the wooden floor.
My door rumbles once more.
“What in tarnation?” Slapping my hand on the armrest, I feel my irritation growing. Patience is a virtue, my mother used to tell me, so I figure I can outlast the rabble-rousing of an intruder on my porch. Since my wayward husband’s disappearance and the unfortunate accident, I’ve spent most of my days sitting here. Waiting.
Waiting on a man who isn’t going to return.
Waiting on a miracle for the homestead he left behind.
Waiting on my daughter to be the next to exit.
Eventually, the porch intruder will get the hint.
“Tripper, honey, can you move that wall over there and this doorframe here?” The sweet Southern drawl of Virginia Hanes draws me back to the television set briefly before another powerful knock on the upper portion of the Dutch door interrupts my viewing once again. My eyes drift to the door panel where a large mass with broad shoulders is outlined behind the etched glass. Judging from the stature, I’m surmising whoever’s knocking on my door is a stout man.
Maybe he’s a bill collector. The thought makes me plant my feet on the floor, stilling my chair and attempting to scoot it backward a few inches (which would be nearly impossible for me to do).
Lord knows, we owe on this property.
With my disability and Hannah working two jobs to provide the essentials for us, it’s been ten years of debt. My beautiful girl grew up too fast, just like me. Thankfully, it wasn’t exactly like me. At least she wasn’t pregnant by a worthless man.
We all become victims of our circumstances at some point.
As firm knuckles tap the glass panel one more time, my attention snaps back to the gentleman outside. Is he a gentleman? His head lowers as he pauses from the incessant knocking. One hand lands on his hip, and I hold my breath as if the sound of exhaling could expose my position and redouble his efforts.
“Howard?” The deep masculine timbre, boisterous like a lumberjack bellowing, sends a shiver up my spine. Must be a bill collector as no one seeks out Howard. His gambling debtors. His philandering girlfriends. They’d called after his disappearance but had tapered off over the years.
“Howard, you in there?” The man pauses another beat and then paces to the porch railing, staring out at the property. It’s October, and the front pasture needs mowing. His broad back to the bay window gives me better access to view him, and my head tips, drawing lines across a leather harness strapped over his shoulders and crisscrossing between his shoulder blades.
Is that a holster? Is he carrying a gun? Have the Iron Wraiths come for their revenge? It’s been a decade of solitude without a glance from the motorcycle men living nearby.
It was an accident.
My eyes flick to the television set as Tripper and Virginia stand with their arms around one another, making some joke I can’t hear through the blood rushing in my ears.
What does it take for a man to love a woman like he does?
Abruptly, the stranger turns back toward the house, narrowing his eyes at the window even though the glass is thinly veiled by sheer curtains. My breath catches. For a moment, I wonder if he can feel my gaze. Does he know I’m looking at him? If I rock backward, the movement will give me away, and if I try to stand, I’ll definitely draw attention to myself, so I hold still like a deer in the forest sensing the approach of a threat. He can’t possibly see me because I’m too far back from the glass. Like an animal inside a cage at the zoo, I’m hiding in the shadows, hoping he’ll go away.
Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
He steps toward the window. One large stomp forward. Then he shields his eyes with a palm at his brow and rests the edge of his hand against the glass.
“I see you,” he states.
For some reason, my eyes leap to Tripper on the screen, about to reveal a finished kitchen. If only he could see me and help me out by getting rid of this poser on my porch. I’m ridiculous. What I should be is frightened. I should scream, but who would hear me? I’m alone in this big house with acres of distance to the next property.
If a person screams with no one around to hear it, is there really a sound?
“Go away,” I bellow toward t
he window. “Howard isn’t here.”
A pause passes as he observes me, and I look back at him. If I were to romanticize the moment, I’d be certain our eyes lock, but they don’t, and I’m no romantic.
“Beverly?”
My throat clogs. How could he know my name? “What do you want?” My voice comes out a screech like an owl. Who are you?
“I’m looking for Bev.” No one except family calls me Bev. Ever. Nicknames are stupid.
“Then why did you ask for Howard?” I yell. He retracts his hand from the window and shakes his head.
“I’m looking for Howard’s wife.” Howard’s wife. After all these years, it’s strange to hear the label, and it proves this man doesn’t really know me or us. Howard’s been gone for seventeen years. Disappeared.
“Howard isn’t here, but…but I have a gun.” I reach for the nearest large object and hold it up, aiming it toward the window as though I intend to shoot.
A deep chuckle ripples through the glass. “That’s the oddest shaped gun I’ve ever seen, and you’re holding it wrong.” He chuckles a second time. “It looks like a baseball bat.”
Darn it. He’s observant albeit incorrect. The large needle used for chunky yarn knitting is one of Hannah’s attempts to find me a hobby. Chunky knit—it’s all the rage. Hannah’s encouraging me to make blankets. I’m not very good at it.
“Bet my swing is better than yours.” He laughs at his baseball joke and holds up his left arm. Ignoring his guffawing, my eyes trace the outline of his appendage, thinner and leaner than the opposite one. A glint flashes from the metal in his hand.
He has a gun.
He definitely has a gun!
“Go away,” I shout again, sitting up straighter, finding boldness I don’t feel. “If you’re with the Wraiths, I apologize. If you’re a bill collector, we don’t have any money.” My daughter has taken over our finances. I won’t consider selling. I don’t want to leave, but I can’t answer why.
Waiting.
So much waiting.
“I don’t know who the Wraiths are, and I’m not here collecting on a debt.” He pauses again, lowering his hand with the gun and lifting his other hand to shield his eye for the window. “Well, not exactly.”
I don’t have the slightest idea what he means. All I do know is I want him off my porch.
“We don’t have anything of value,” I holler, finding it strangely comical that we are caterwauling at each other through double panes of glass. What I stated is the truth, though. All the pretty items women would have received from a wedding—china, crystal, silver—I don’t own. “Being pregnant out of wedlock does not garner a girl a trousseau,” my mother told me after I’d informed her of my impending nuptials and motherhood. Real love, I’d told my parents. A dream come true.
What a nightmare in reality.
“That isn’t true.” His voice is deep, sergeant worthy, and it takes me a moment to realize he means items of value and not my nightmare. He pulls back from the window, facing the front property, twisting his neck to survey the land with a slow sweeping crane of his head. Then he spins for the window, curling his forefinger and thumb around an eye like a monocular, observing me once again. “Everything of value is within my line of sight.”
My skin prickles like a sleeping limb fighting to awaken, and I have so many dormant body parts left restless and yearning for too long. It’s longer than I care to remember since I’ve been with a man. And something in what he said and how he said it in that too-loud lumberjack voice makes me shiver.
My eyes flick to the television set just as Tripper kisses his wife’s temple. Then my sight lowers to my left leg, thinner than the right, withered like a wilted tomato vine. No man is going to be interested in me. The thought pisses me off. Even my own husband wasn’t interested after the first few years.
“You were never going to be enough for me, Beverly,” Howard had said.
“Leave my porch,” I squawk, my ire growing. I hold the knitting needle higher as if I’ll javelin throw it at him if he comes closer, which is preposterous as he’s behind the barrier of the window.
Or am I the one barred inside?
“I think I’m getting off on the wrong foot here,” he mutters loud enough I can still make out the depth of his voice through the window.
“Is that a joke?” I hiss. Wrong foot? Is he implying how I can’t effectively use mine?
You’ll walk again.
Doctors. All liars. I’d been vain enough back at thirty-five to consider a limp a weakness, but at almost forty-five, I couldn't care less. No one sees me anyway.
My eyes narrow at the stranger as the weight of his glare presses back at me. He’s taking me in, assessing me. No one has really looked at me—seen me—in years. People either consider me old and senile or they feel sorry for me. Moreover, they pity Hannah—stuck with an invalid, homebound mother—as if her plight has been worse than mine. I snort.
“Beverly, may I please come in? Or maybe you could step out?” he questions. “I have a proposal for you.”
The man on the porch pulls back from the window once more and hangs his head when I don’t respond. A hand scrubs over his face while the other dangles at his side. My eyes squint, and when I twist my head for a better view, I realize he isn’t holding a gun. The metal glint coming from his hand, or rather where a hand should be, is a two-pronged claw like a small garden utensil used for raking. Some kind of material wraps up his arm and over his elbow, then tucks under the edge of his T-shirt. The straps I assumed were a gun holster are the supports for a prosthetic arm.
My shoulders slump a bit. Oh my.
While there’s nothing this man could propose that I want to hear, staring at his arm causes all kinds of sensations to conflict in me. My heart races behind my ribs in a way I’ve never felt. Maybe I’m having a heart attack. My stomach twirls like a whirligig. Lowering the knitting needle, I reach for my arm crutches and slowly raise myself from the rocker, pulled by an almost magnetic force to an unsuspecting metal object. Like attracts like, my father-in-law used to say, and even though I don’t know him and it’s preposterous, I sense a familiarity with the porch invader.
After all this time, maneuvering around my living room is still awkward and clumsy at best, and ridiculously robotic. My crutches are the kind that cuff around my forearms; however, it’s been nearly ten years, and Hannah prefers to push me in a wheelchair. Her long strides are constantly in a rush compared to my slow hobble. Plus, I sit most of the day, so my legs don’t work the way they did before the accident. Not to mention, my left leg lags due to the hip injury.
Sweating and out of breath once I reach the entry, I fumble with the latch for the upper half of the old Dutch door. I struggle to hold the knitting needle in my other hand as a precautionary weapon in case I come to my senses about opening the door to a stranger.
Only I drop the giant stick.
Cheeseoncrackers.
I bend at the waist, the foot of each arm brace slipping behind me on the hardwood flooring. If I don’t counterbalance myself somehow, I’ll fall over, and falling would be mortifying. I’ve slipped up enough in this life. I don’t need witnesses.
“Are you all right in there? Do you need some help?” The concern in this stranger’s thunderous voice rattles me even more.
“I don’t need anything,” I holler, but my voice cracks as I wiggle my fingers for the fallen knitting needle, before finally reaching it and slamming it on the floor one time in my irritation.
I don’t need anything I reiterate, because I’ve always taken care of myself—myself and Hannah. Well, at least until the accident.
My arm crutches slide free and clatter to the entryway wood, so I use the ledge in the middle of the door as leverage to right myself. My mobility is awkward as the large knitting utensil remains in one hand, bulky under my palm. I refuse to stand without this potential weapon even though the power of his voice suggests this man could do more harm to me than I’d ever do
to him.
Shakily stable against the door, I finally release the catch and swing the upper half inward. I nearly smack myself in the head with the wood barrier and snake around it, keeping my hand with the needle on the edge of the upper partition as my other hand reaches forward for the lower half. My body is weak, and I hate the sensation. I’m standing, but my legs tremble uncontrollably. A heavy exhale empties my lungs.
“What do you want?” I growl, out of breath from the exertion.
Then I look up.
My breath hitches at the sight.
Before me stands a man with the most scrutinizing brown eyes, like soil after a rainstorm, rich and earthy. His cheeks are molded clay, etched and chiseled, and his hair is solid silver cropped close to his skull. He appears shaven, but it’s not even noon and it’s already growing back to pepper his chin with sprinkles of chrome and ink coloring.
Would he think it odd if I rubbed my hand over his jaw? Is it soft or prickly? Would it tickle or scratch?
He’s tall, and while one bicep bulges with thick muscle and veins running up his forearm, the wrapped arm is mechanical with a metal claw on the end. It’s neither here nor there to me. He looks imposing, intense, and impossibly good looking.
And that love at first sight thing—breathtaking, thigh-clenching, and blood-rushing—could be happening again, if only he was a television star instead of reality because I no longer believe in love.
** END SNEAK PEEK **
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Also by Nora Everly
Sweetbriar Hearts
In My Heart
Heart Words
Carpentry and Cocktails: A Heartfelt Small Town Romance (Green Valley Library Book 5) Page 23
