Mulberry Moon
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PRAISE FOR THE MYSTIC CREEK NOVELS
“Master storyteller Anderson has skillfully penned the heart-wrenching story of domestic abuse and its aftermath . . . compelling.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“The minute you open an Anderson novel, you can immediately feel the vision of humanity and warmth that runs through all her books. No one does heartfelt romance better!”
—RT Book Reviews
“Romance veteran Anderson is a pro at making readers weep.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Anderson] has such a way with characters, making them real and lovable, that makes it impossible to put the books down.”
—Bitten by Love
“New Leaf is about family, starting over, and the lengths you would go to for a child. . . . Anderson created good tension and anticipation, but also balanced that with moments of humor.”
—Harlequin Junkie
“I am totally hooked. . . . Thank you, Catherine Anderson, for this wonderful story.”
—The Reading Cafe
“Sweet and inspirational.”
—Smitten by Books
“Mystic Creek was a close-knit, loving community that made you feel warmth and a giving human spirit . . . [a] heartwarming romance.”
—The Reader’s Den
“Heartwarming and heart-wrenching.”
—Open Book Society
“A good winter read in which love heals the worst wounds.”
—The Romance Dish
OTHER NOVELS BY CATHERINE ANDERSON
“Mystic Creek” Novels
Silver Thaw
New Leaf
“Harrigan Family” Novels
Morning Light
Star Bright
Here to Stay
Perfect Timing
Contemporary “Coulter Family” Novels
Phantom Waltz
Sweet Nothings
Blue Skies
Bright Eyes
My Sunshine
Sun Kissed and Sun Kissed Bonus Book
Historical “Coulter Family” Novels
Summer Breeze
Early Dawn
Lucky Penny
Historical “Valance Family” Novels
Walking on Air
The Comanche Series
Comanche Moon
Comanche Heart
Indigo Blue
Comanche Magic
Other Signet Books
Always in My Heart
Only by Your Touch
Coming Up Roses
Cheyenne Amber
A JOVE BOOK
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Adeline Catherine Anderson
Excerpt from Silver Thaw copyright © 2015 by Adeline Catherine Anderson
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
A JOVE BOOK and BERKLEY are registered trademarks and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9780451488107
First Printing: January 2017
Cover art: foggy landscape © Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock Images; butterflies © jps/Shutterstock Images; forest moon © Rob Atkins/Getty Images; stepback image © Elena Efimova/Shutterstock Images
Cover design by Emily Osborne
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise for the Mystic Creek Novels
Other Novels by Catherine Anderson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Epilogue
Excerpt from Silver Thaw
This book is dedicated to Finnegan Gurnsey, a young Australian shepherd who inspired me to feature him as a secondary character in Mulberry Moon.
Chapter One
With the taste of tacos lingering in his mouth, Ben Sterling opened the door to leave Taco Joe’s on West Main and hollered good-bye to Joe Paisley, the owner. A rush of icy pine-scented air surrounded Ben as he donned his tan Stetson and stepped onto the sidewalk. It smelled like home and reminded him how glad he was to be back in Mystic Creek, not just for a visit, but living on his ranch again.
Liquidating his business as a rodeo stockbroker hadn’t been an easy decision. He’d made damned good money. But it had kept him on the road most of the time, often in flat, arid country where only a few bushy trees dotted the landscape. He’d quickly grown tired of the constant traveling, but he’d stuck it out to build a nice nest egg. Now he had finally quit, returned to his roots, and was trying to build a real life.
Because it had been sunny when he left home, he’d forgotten a jacket, so all he could do was hunch his shoulders against the frigid temperature. His new Dodge Ram waited along the curb only paces away. Against the backdrop of late-nineteenth-century storefronts that characterized Mystic Creek, it looked futuristic in the grayish light that always bathed the town as the sun started its slide into oblivion.
The smooth soles of his riding boots lost traction, warning him that the concrete was icy. In mid-September, Mystic Creek sometimes had weather fluctuations, warm one minute and freezing the next. Stupid not to bring a coat, he thought. This is high-elevation Oregon. He guessed he’d been gone too long. Climatic habits ingrained in him during boyhood had lost their hold on him.
Walking to his vehicle, he saw his dog, Finnegan, watching him through the back cab window. Eight months old, the blue merle Australian shepherd had the mottle of black, gray, and white fur common to blues, but his markings were distinct, his narrow nose and forehead sporting a tapering white blaze. He bounced from side to side on the bench seat, acting as if he’d been alone for hours.
A smile touched Ben’s mouth. A bachelor and now thirty years old, he enjoyed having a dog. When Ben first returned to live on his ranch, the big, rambling house had felt empty when he stayed there alone. He’d grown up in a large family. He preferred noise buzzing around him. Finn had provided the perfect antidote, snuggling with Ben in the recliner while he watched TV or read novels, always eager to play, barking joyously, and offering a warm presence
beside him in bed at night. Hello, when a man couldn’t find Miss Right, no matter how hard he searched, sometimes he had to settle for companionship from a four-legged friend. There were worse fates than being loved by a dog.
Not that Ben didn’t keep company with women. He just couldn’t find that one special lady he wanted to be with for a lifetime. Dating at thirty was a crapshoot with lots of promising beginnings followed by disappointing endings. He couldn’t find anyone who truly loved animals, for one thing, and his life revolved around all kinds of them. He’d met a few gals that had a cat, a bird, or a goldfish, but they didn’t want a dog in the house. Or they were afraid of horses. A number of them had even visited his ranch in high heels and gotten pissed if they stepped in manure. He couldn’t build a future with someone like that. He needed a down-to-earth person who didn’t run in terror from his free-range chickens or pick dog hair off her fancy clothes.
As he circled the truck to the driver’s door, delicious aromas drifted across the street from the Straw Hat, which served Mexican cuisine, and the Cauldron, another eatery in Mystic Creek, which specialized in home-style fare. Ben enjoyed eating at the Cauldron, and apparently so did many others. Through the front windows, he could see that the place was packed. The menu offered a wide variety of homemade choices, and the prices were also easy on the wallet.
There was only one fly in the ointment for Ben where the Cauldron was concerned: the café’s owner, Sissy Sue Bentley. She was a petite woman with cropped dark hair, blue eyes that dominated her heart-shaped face, and a figure that was perfection on a small scale. She’d caught his attention over a year ago, and he’d started patronizing her establishment, hoping to get better acquainted. Despite his efforts to be friendly, she’d treated him as if he had a contagious disease. After a couple of weeks, he’d started to feel like a stalker and chalked it up to bad chemistry. Now he avoided the place.
Sissy wasn’t the only pretty female in the area, after all. On weekend nights, he sometimes frequented the nightspots in nearby Crystal Falls, hoping to meet someone he could relate to. So far, he’d run across several gals who were stunning, and a few intriguing enough to date for a couple of months. In the end, though, even if the sex was great, there was always something to put the kibosh on the relationship. It was just his luck that the only local woman he found attractive had taken an instant dislike to him.
As Ben pulled open the truck door, Finn leaped forward and slathered his face with doggy kisses. Ben laughed and gave the pup an enthusiastic scratch behind both ears. “I missed you, too.” He gently pushed the shepherd off the driver’s seat and started to climb inside the vehicle.
A familiar sound stopped him dead in his tracks. Berk, berk, berk. He swung around and did a double take. A white hen was strutting eastward along the street. Ben had seen some strange sights in Mystic Creek. One time a skunk had joined the participants of a Fourth of July parade and cleared the sidewalks of people with one threatening lift of its tail. More recently, a black bear had moseyed onto East Main and pushed its way through the swinging doors of the Jake ’n’ Bake and devoured everything in the pastry section while Jake hid in the cooler until law officers arrived.
Now it was a chicken invading the downtown area. Where had it come from?
Just then, two more hens fell in behind the white leghorn, all three of the fowl covering ground at a pace suggesting they were late to an appointment. Finnegan barked. He was used to seeing chickens at home, but never within the city limits.
What the hell? Ben looked in the direction from which the chickens were coming and saw more feathery pedestrians appearing from behind the last building on the opposite side of the street. It housed Marilyn Fears’s One-Stop Market, a small mom-and-pop shop. Had Marilyn decided to raise chickens? It was a popular hobby, and so far as Ben knew, the town had no ordinances against it.
Marilyn had space behind her building for a coop and run. A small distributary of Mystic Creek flowed behind the shops on that side of West Main, so the land back there hadn’t been developed. Diverting the stream’s natural course wasn’t an option. In this town, nobody messed with Mystic Creek. The waterway was thought to be magical by many people, and even a narrow brook originating from it was revered.
As Ben watched, the flow of hens didn’t abate. How many chicks had Marilyn ordered? As Ben stood there, dumbfounded, even more chickens appeared. Beckoning Finn out of the truck in case he needed the dog’s help with bird herding, he gingerly headed toward the store. If Marilyn’s chickens were loose, she’d need help collecting them. The ones he’d seen were pullets, not yet full-grown, and at an age when hens were sometimes warier of humans than they might be later. He didn’t want that nice older lady to fall on the ice and get hurt.
As Ben circled the store, he noticed the dim interior beyond the front window, which sported a glowing sign that read CLOSED. It was Friday night and only shortly after six. Though a gloaming heralded the approach of nightfall, full darkness wouldn’t descend for a while. He guessed the market mostly got business from nine to five on weekdays, allowing Marilyn, who lived in the upstairs flat, to lock up early.
The oncoming birds made Ben feel as if he were going the wrong direction on a one-way thoroughfare. As he turned the corner at the back of the building, his gaze followed the line of fleeing chickens to the property behind the Cauldron. Shit. Through the deepening gloom, he saw a tiny coop in Sissy’s backyard—one of those DIY kits. Attached to it was a pathetic wire run. She probably didn’t know her chickens were loose, and even if she did, the Cauldron appeared to be packed with customers. The last time Ben had eaten there, Sissy had still been doing a one-woman show, rushing to service tables, pinning slips to the order wheel, and then racing into the kitchen to cook.
Just then Ben saw her dart from behind the coop in pursuit of a brown hen. She lunged at her target, slipped, and did a belly flop on the ground. Ben winced. The lady had been unfriendly to him in the past, greeting his polite overtures with icy disdain. He owed her nothing and almost made a U-turn. But the fowl had fled in all directions, and Ben’s dad, Jeremiah, had raised him to always offer his help when someone else was in a jam.
Snapping his fingers to keep the dog beside him, Ben hurried across Marilyn’s lawn to Sissy’s dirt yard. Finn trembled with excitement. “Do you need some help?”
Startled by Ben’s voice, Sissy whirled to face him. Even with dirt smeared on her cheek and across the front of her white chef’s coat, she was still cuter than a button. Her short, dark hair, which covered her ears in wisps to frame her cheeks, was tousled and peppered with wood chips. Some of the old folks in town said Sissy was the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn. Not long ago, Ben’s mom and sisters had insisted that he watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with them. Except for the difference in eye color, Sissy definitely resembled Hepburn.
His gut tightened. He didn’t get what it was about Sissy that drew his interest, but when she turned that wary blue gaze on him, he wanted to reassure her.
She gestured at the fleeing chickens and cried, “Nobody ever told me they can fly! What kind of hatchery sells chicks to people without telling them that?”
Ben wondered if this was a trick question. “Um, well, they are birds. Right?”
She placed her fine-boned hands on her hips. “Not all birds can fly. Penguins, for instance! And emus! Name me one time you saw a chicken soaring in the sky!”
Ben struggled not to grin. For once, she was actually speaking to him without an order tablet in her hand. Now was not a good time to pop back with a smart-ass comment. “Not often, I have to admit.”
“Not often? I’ve never seen a chicken fly!”
Ben glanced at the hens going airborne to get over the sagging wall of the run. “That could be because all the chickens you’ve ever seen had their wings clipped.”
“Clipped?” She rolled her eyes. “What parts are clipped? All I know is my whole flock i
s loose, my café is filled with customers, I have food on the stove, and—”
She gulped and her cheeks puffed out with her deep breaths.
“I’d be happy to help,” he offered.
With a jerk of her shoulders and a lift of her chin, she stood tall—well, as tall as someone of her diminutive stature could manage. In her ice queen voice, she informed him, “I think I can handle it by myself.”
That stuffs it, Ben thought. She hadn’t even bothered to thank him for offering. His father may have raised him to be a good guy, but not a fool. Just as he turned to walk away, thinking up a rejoinder he’d never say aloud to her, a white leghorn flapped past him. Before he could stop himself, he shot out a hand, caught both its legs in his grip, and tipped it upside down, a quick, humane way to prevent all the struggling and squawking that might have ensued.
I need lessons in how to be a convincing jerk, Ben thought. She doesn’t want my help. She’s made that clear. And now I’ve caught one of her damned hens. Angry with himself for being a pushover, he started toward her pathetic excuse for a run. The brown hen she’d been chasing now perched on the sagging wire. Ben snatched it up by its legs, turned it head down, and met Sissy at the jerry-rigged gate.
She flashed him an incredulous look. “How did you do that?”
“There really isn’t much to it.”
She glanced at the two birds hanging almost lifeless at his sides. Not wanting her to think his technique was abusive, Ben said, “This is how many poultry wranglers do it. All the fight goes out of the chickens, and it’s safer for them.”
“You’re hired.”
Ben nearly told her she couldn’t afford him. But in good conscience, he couldn’t let the hens run free all night. They might die of exposure, or fall victim to predators. He glanced at his dog, still quivering with excitement. The pup was already proving to be a good herder, and Ben had used him often to round up his chickens after a day of free range.
He snapped his fingers and pointed at a buff Orpington. “Good boy, Finn! Bring ’em in.”