Where It All Began
Page 1
This book was given to Nitesh Kumar on Instafreebie.
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Where It All Began
Blue Moon
The Prequel
Lucy Score
Published by That’s What She Said Publishing Inc. 2017
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: BLUE MOON PREQUEL
June 23, 2017
Copyright © 2017 Lucy Score
Written by Lucy Score
All rights reserved
Table of Contents
Dedication
About This Book
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
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Author’s Note to the Reader
No More Secrets – Blue Moon - Book 1
About the Author
Lucy’s Titles
Where’s Lucy?
Dedication
To my readers. You are beautiful and bright, and I’m thankful for you every day.
You also have excellent taste in literature!
About This Book
John Pierce has plans for these two hundred rundown acres. He sees a farm, a family, a future. He’s not about to drag someone in on the ground floor, not before he’s put in the work to turn rubble into home. The grad student he agreed to take on for the summer was supposed to lend a hand. Hell, he was supposed to be a man. Not an opinionated, smart-mouthed woman who does nothing but distract him from dawn to dusk.
She’s ruining his nice, quiet life. And he can’t wait for her to finish her thesis and get out of his hair.
Chapter One
Present Day
Phoebe Merrill liked to cry on her birthday. Each year, she allowed herself thirty full minutes of absolute solitude in which she could cry her eyes out with a mix of gratitude, grief, joy, and generally a very large glass of wine.
Today, on the very fine spring day of her fifty-fifth birthday, it was a chilled glass of a nice Prosecco that sat on the desk in her still new kitchen. It was a bright and airy space with country white cabinets and large windows that served up sweeping views of field and forest. A space that had been a long time in the making.
Phoebe wasn’t the type of woman to shy away from the beautiful symmetry of life. This was the exact spot on which she’d loved and lost and loved again. She’d learned, in these fifty-five blessed years, that an ending was never an ending.
There were big plans in the works today. Plans that made the peaceful background noise of farm country in the spring even more valuable now. In less than an hour, her sons would stampede through her front door, most likely bickering as they had since they were boys. They’d take her to lunch, regale her with stories of her grandchildren, and then tonight was the surprise party she wasn’t supposed to know about.
But mothers always knew. Especially when they lived in a small town that broadcasts the goings-on of every resident’s private life.
Tonight, she’d celebrate with loved ones, enjoying glasses of champagne, hugs from her beautiful grandbabies, and the laughter of good friends. But for now, in this quiet, private moment, her thoughts were of the two men she’d been lucky enough to love in this life.
Franklin, her husband and best friend, had been the one to buy her the oversized wine glass at her elbow and the one to design this home for her with input from her sons. The intention of the home was to hold their very large, very loud blended family on celebratory occasions.
John, her first husband—may he rest in beautiful peace—had given her the land on which the house stood and three wonderful sons for whom she felt alternating but equal pulls of pride and annoyance. John had been the soulmate she’d never expected, the surprise of her lifetime.
It had been fifty-five years filled with love, and Phoebe wasn’t in any hurry to come to the end of it. She had children, grandchildren, a man who loved every damn thing about her—including the fact that she was too free with her advice—and friends that made her laugh until she had to pee and held her hand through every rough patch she’d ever faced. She lived in a community that bordered on commune. A town in which everyone was so wrapped up in everyone else’s lives the residents were all family minus the DNA.
Her life was miraculous. And there wasn’t one single thing she’d change.
With that comforting thought, Phoebe opened the folder on the desk and began her ritual. The sheets of notebook paper had been folded and unfolded so many times the creases were like canyons. The handwriting scrawled across them still heartbreakingly familiar as if a ghost was reaching out to touch her. It was an essay she’d never transcribed to typewriter, or later a computer, as she had dozens of others.
This one meant more because of the blue ink and leaning scrawl. This one was just for her.
She took a fortifying sip of wine and began to read.
Phoebe, my wife, my heart. When you read this, know that you have been the greatest miracle in my life. And as weighty a thing as that is, don’t believe for a second that your life is dimmer just because mine has ceased.
It’s past midnight. And all three of our boys made it home to see me before I make my final journey. I can feel my time slipping away and, while I hate having our sons see me like this—frail, sick, unable to take a single one of them in a wrestling match—I want them to understand that death is nothing to fear. It is part of our journey, and as I’ve come to believe, perhaps it is the most beautiful part.
The looming shadow of death, the promise of the beginning of the next adventure, makes a man consider his life, his regrets. There’s one I fear, one that keeps me awake even now. One that you have the power to save me from. I need to ask something of you that might sound impossible now, but I’m confident that with the healing power of time and the mule-headed commitment of our town, you will rise again, love again.
I need you to be someone else’s miracle.
That heart of yours can’t stop its gifts after I’ve returned to the earth and the air that I’ve loved so much in this lifetime. That would be an injustice. You are young. You are beautiful. You are brilliant. And someone out there is going to deserve your heart and mind even more than I ever did. Hiding from that, allowing grief to rob you of future happiness, would be my one and only regret.
So, please, Phoebe, don’t let that happen… or I’ll haunt you forever.
I’ve thought a lot about our life together these past few weeks. Being immobile and staring up at the fluorescent lights does that to a person, I suppose. I decided that between needles and nurses and the constant beep of machines more concerned with quantity than quality, I’d pinpoint the exact second that I knew you were it for me. That there wasn’t another breath
I’d want to take without you by my side.
This is where it all began…
Planting
Chapter Two
June 1985
The lemon-yellow Triumph kicked up a cloud of dust behind it as Phoebe maneuvered the slow curves and easy hills of upstate New York’s country roads. She glanced down at the map on the seat next to her, the path marked with highlighter, and hoped to God she was headed in the right direction. She’d just driven through a town that looked as though time had frozen it in the mid-sixties. Bell bottoms, tie-dye, and, by her count, eight VW vans parked around the main square. It was so authentic she wondered if they were shooting a movie in town.
She’d have stopped to poke around if she’d had the time. The video and record shop looked like it might house some treasures, and the bakery with its vibrant pink awning tempted her. But she was already running late, a sin in her book. If she was going to spend most of the summer on a man’s farm picking his brain, the least she could do was show up on time.
Phoebe nearly missed the drive. The broken-down fence that lined the road split for a sliver of dirt lane. A hand-painted sign hung crookedly from an unpainted post.
Pierce Acres read the wry script.
She bumped down the lane, swerving to miss the biggest of the ruts until the farm came into view and was relieved to find that there was indeed a house on the property. It was a traditional two-story that had seen better days. The serviceable white clapboard siding was clean, and the roof looked brand new, but the porch bowed and sagged, and the flowerbeds were overgrown with weeds. Phoebe noted there were no curtains in any of the dingy windows, though privacy didn’t appear to be an issue out here with no neighbors for a quarter mile in each direction.
Across the drive from the house sat a dilapidated barn in faded red, though the fence around the scrap of land in front of the barn was new and freshly painted. The barn itself looked like a good stiff breeze would have it tumbling in on itself.
There was no welcoming committee visible, so she turned off the car and hefted her suitcase and typewriter out of the trunk. When she slammed the lid, the first signs of life stirred. A frantic yip came from the screen door on the porch. It bumped open an inch, closed, and then bumped again. A brown and white mottled dog the size of a toaster oven shoved its nose through the opening and muscled its way out.
“Hey, buddy,” Phoebe said, dropping her baggage and sinking down. The dog hunkered down in suspicion and inched forward. It gave her hand a careful sniff and must have downgraded her threat status because he flopped on his back inviting a belly rub.
It was character that made the dog cute, not anything physical, Phoebe decided. He had one eye, an ear that flopped up, and an obscene length of tongue that lolled from the side of his mouth.
“Lousy guard duty, Murdock.” The voice as rough as the gravel beneath her knees came from over her shoulder in the direction of the barn. Phoebe rose and then froze.
Farmers did not look like the man ambling toward her. They were older, weathered, craggy.
This guy looked like he’d walked off the set of Dukes of Hazzard. His dark hair was long, curling a bit at the ends. Grey eyes peered at her from a tanned face that carried a rough layer of stubble. His long, muscular legs were encased in tight denim. The dirty plaid shirt was tight across a set of spectacular biceps that bulged as he hefted two buckets filled with what looked and smelled like shit.
The man made carrying shit sexy. She’d had no idea that was possible. Now, if he was as smart as he was hot, her summer had just gotten a hell of a lot more interesting.
“John Pierce?” she asked, one-eyed dog and bags forgotten.
The man set the buckets down and peeled off his work gloves before offering her a large, callused hand. “That’d be me. And you are?”
Phoebe blinked, returning his strong grip. Just how many visitors was this farmer expecting? “I’m Phoebe. Phoebe Allen, the grad student you said could spend the summer.”
He looked at her blankly.
She tried again. “Thesis? First generation farms and the obstacles they face post-farming crisis?” John was staring at her as if she’d just announced she was here to perform a craniotomy on him. Maybe he was daft? Maybe he’d hit his head on a piece of farming equipment and had lost his short- or long-term memory, whichever held the information that she was coming to stay with him for the summer and interview him for her thesis.
“Phoebe Allen?”
“Uh-huh.”
He finally released his grip on her hand and swiped an arm over his forehead. “Son of a bitch.”
“I beg your pardon?” It wasn’t that Phoebe was opposed to bad language. She was a bit of a connoisseur of four letter words. But to lead an introduction with it was odd and didn’t bode well.
“I was told you were a grad student named Allen.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Technically I am.”
“I was told you were a man.”
“Who the hell told you that?”
“A meddling, exasperating liar, that’s who.” He was scowling now, his expression dark.
“Let me guess. You have a problem with me being a woman.” Phoebe was used to the attitude. She was the only woman out of fourteen master’s students in her class at Penn State University and one of only three in the entire College of Agriculture.
“Of course I do.”
Phoebe settled her hands on her hips and drummed her fingers against the denim of her skirt. “Just because I’m young and female and a little on the short side doesn’t preclude me from an interest in farming economics and rural sociology.” She was gearing up to launch into her just-because-I-have-a-vagina lecture when he gave a short laugh.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” Phoebe was toe-to-toe with him. Given the contents of the buckets he’d been hauling, she probably should have kept her distance, but she was mad enough, annoyed enough, to forget about her sandals and bare toes.
“I mean we can’t live under the same roof all summer alone together.”
Phoebe, never at a loss for words, found herself struggling to come up with any at the moment. “What? Why not?”
“I’m a single man. You’re a single woman. We’re not shacking up.”
Phoebe looked over both shoulders. She had to be on one of those Candid Camera TV specials. “Do you have a calendar?” she asked finally.
“Not on me.”
“It’s funny because I could have sworn that it was 1985, not 1955. And that respectable, responsible adults who are working together don’t need chaperones.”
“You have no problem staying with a man you just met on a farm where the only witnesses to your potential screams would be a handful of chickens and a cow with a limp?”
“What kind of screams are we talking about? Murder or sexual?”
He didn’t look amused. John was back to quietly staring at her, his gray eyes nearly silver in the softening light as day wound down into evening. She tipped her head back. “This would be a lot easier if you had a sense of humor.”
“This would be a lot easier if you were a man.”
“Look, John. Can I call you John, or should I stick with Mr. Pierce?” She didn’t wait for an answer since he probably wouldn’t get the joke anyway. “I’m an adult. I’m twenty-three years old, not a virgin, and not looking to do anything this summer but work on your farm and my thesis.
“If you don’t think you can control yourself around me, say so now, and I’ll scramble to find another guy who just decided ‘Farming crisis, schmarming crisis. I think I’ll start a first gen produce farm and carve out a living after thirty percent of my brethren got foreclosed upon in the last five years.’ Shouldn’t be a problem. Shouldn’t throw off my thesis or push back my graduation at all and ruin my chances for a job in August.”
Sarcasm was another one of her finer qualities that John Pierce obviously
wasn’t going to appreciate.
“I don’t like being manipulated into things,” he said.
“Who does?” Phoebe shrugged. “But if anyone did any manipulating here, it wasn’t me, and I resent being held accountable for someone else’s bad behavior.”
He studied her quietly, and Phoebe felt a little tingle race from her toes to the roots of her hair. She held her breath. She was so close to graduation, so close to a job that excited her, so close to finally making things right for her parents. She wasn’t going to let John Pierce—handsome devil or not—or anyone else wreck those plans.
Murdock let out a yip at John’s feet. His stump of a tail wagged in the dirt.
“Guess it’s close to supper time,” John said, squinting up at the sun as it eased toward the horizon in the west. He looked back at Phoebe, and she squirmed under his amusement. “Guess you’ll be wanting a place to put your suitcase.”
“I guess so,” she said, debating whether or not she should apologize for jumping down his throat. She was used to the razzing—and sometimes outright harassment—that came from her classmates and had come to expect it as an annoying downside to her chosen path. Technically, John didn’t seem as concerned about a woman being interested in farming. He was more concerned about sharing a house with one, which to her was just as stupid.
“You gonna yell at me if I carry your suitcase?” he asked blandly.
Phoebe blew out her breath. “I think I can hold back on my verbal insults for the moment.”
He leaned around her and picked up the case. “Can’t ask for more than that. I’ll show you Allen’s room.”
Had the serious farmer just make a joke? Was he relenting and inviting her to stay? Phoebe couldn’t tell on either count.