Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  Will an apple a day…

  Keep love at bay?

  For Cass Gentry, coming home to Lake Miniagua, teenage half sister in tow, is bittersweet. But her half of the orchard she inherited awaits, and so does a fresh face—Luke Rossiter, her new business partner. Even though they butt heads in business, they share one key piece of common ground: refusing to ever fall in love again. But as their lives get bigger, that stance doesn’t feel like enough…

  “In my experience, there’s always a shoe about to drop somewhere.”

  She raised her head as he lowered his, and their lips met in a sweet version of an age-old dance.

  “What do you do,” he asked slowly, “when the shoe drops?”

  “Oh.” Her voice sounded reedy. “It depends.”

  “On?”

  Cass laughed, not very convincingly. “On whether it’s a combat boot or a flip-flop.”

  “What about a nice, comfortable loafer? How do you react then?”

  “To tell the truth, usually it’s the combat boot, in which case I turn tail and run.”

  “Well, what’s between you and me doesn’t have to do with the orchard or the coffee shop,” he whispered. “It’s courtship simply for the pleasure of it. Nothing more and nothing less. No promises, no demands. No permanency.” He kissed her again, treasuring her sweet response. “No shoes.”

  Dear Reader,

  When people ask if I write about friends and family, I usually say, “Not really” (with a couple of notable exceptions). There will be characteristics and habits I borrow from time to time, but nothing identifiable. However, when Luke Rossiter, the hero of Nice to Come Home To, showed up with a guitar, it was my husband’s fingers I saw on the strings, tugging the notes out without benefit of a pick. When Cass, the heroine, sat at the corner table in a coffee shop with her laptop, she was every writer I know. It was a reminder of how deeply personal our Heartwarming stories are and how beloved the people that we write about are. I hope you love them, too.

  Liz Flaherty

  Nice to Come Home To

  USA TODAY Bestselling Author

  Liz Flaherty

  Liz Flaherty retired from the post office and promised to spend at least fifteen minutes a day on housework. Not wanting to overdo things, she’s since pared that down to ten. She spends nonwriting time sewing, quilting and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane, her husband of…oh, quite a while…are the parents of three and grandparents of the Magnificent Seven. They live in the old farmhouse in Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving, but really…over forty years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!

  She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com.

  Books by Liz Flaherty

  Harlequin Heartwarming

  Back to McGuffey’s

  Every Time We Say Goodbye

  The Happiness Pact

  Nice to Come Home To

  Harlequin Special Edition

  The Debutante’s Second Chance

  Visit the Author Profile page at www.Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010002

  Although their help was unwitting, I am grateful to McClure’s and Doud’s, the local orchards I visited to give Keep Cold Orchard its sense of place. I’m grateful to every barista in every coffee shop I’ve written in over the years—I hope the book does you justice. Thanks to Cheryl Reavis for giving the orchard its name and introducing me to the Robert Frost poem from whence it came. And thanks, Charles Griemsman, for everything.

  To Nan Reinhardt, friend and writer extraordinaire—this one’s for you.

  Contents

  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

  EXCERPT FROM THE RANCHER’S TWINS BY CAROL ROSS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU ever come back here?”

  They were the first voluntary words Royce had spoken since they’d left the Missouri hotel early that morning. She’d read for a long time with her earbuds in, eaten a drive-through lunch in sullen silence or monosyllabic responses to questions, then stared out at Illinois until she fell back to sleep.

  Cass Gentry looked over at the half sister she sometimes felt she barely knew. “The orchard is where my mother and aunt grew up, not me. Mother and Aunt Zoey inherited it from my grandparents and when Mother died, she left her half to me.” How many times did she have to say this? Royce was sixteen, not six.

  “Why didn’t you sell it and stay in California?” Royce looked out the passenger window again, at the seemingly endless fields of corn, soybeans and hay that filled this part of central Indiana. Barns and silos and old windmills, some of them in disrepair, sat spare and silent sentinel over farmhouses.

  There weren’t as many fences as Cass remembered. Not nearly as many cows, either, which could explain the reduction in fences. A few miles from the highway they traveled, she could see the eerie moving silhouettes of a wind farm. She didn’t remember that being here before.

  “There’s nothing here.” At the back of Royce’s disgruntled voice was a thread of fear. Cass recognized it. Remembered it. She wanted to say something sympathetic, but sensed it wouldn’t be welcome.

  “I know.” People had been saying that eighteen years ago, too, when Cass had spent that utopian year in the little community that surrounded Lake Miniagua.

  “This isn’t a place people move to,” her stepcousin Sandy had said as they’d kayaked around the lake’s six hundred acres. “It’s one they leave.”

  That had been true then and probably still was. When the summer people left the lake, its population was sparse, its activities on the slim side. The bed-and-breakfasts and Hoosier Hills Cabins and Campground shut down between October and April. The closest supermarket, movie theater and department store were in Sawyer, five miles away from the lake.

  But. “It’s the only place I was ever happy.” A sad truth speaking from the downhill slope of thirty-five, but a truth nonetheless. Memories of the childhood visits to the orchard and the year in the lake house had saved her sanity on more sleepless nights than she wanted to contemplate.

  Royce’s expression was both disbelieving and disdainful. “Come on, Sister Smart One. You were married. You didn’t have to follow Dad all over the world with the army and make new friends every couple of years. There had to be some happiness in there somewhere. You had a life. You had choices.”

  “I did my share of Dad-following, too, but I did have a life. You’re right. Let me change what I said. The year on the lake was the happiest I’ve ever been.” She’d had choices, too, and she’d too often made the wrong ones. She hoped this move wasn’t one of those.

  “You chose to divorce Tony and let him keep most of everything you guys had.”

  “It’s called a prenup.” And she’d given up more than she had to, just because she thought it had somehow all been her fault, but Royce probably wouldn’t understand that. Cass wasn’t sure she understood it
, either.

  “My mother told Dad he should come and help you, but he wouldn’t. He said you’d made your bed and you could lie in it.”

  “She has always been very kind to me.” This couldn’t be said about all of Cass’s stepmothers. The one after her own mother had been determined to marry an army officer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. She’d had a handsy son who had made life difficult for the pubescent Cass. The next one had borne shocking similarities to all the stereotypes ascribed to a Barbie doll, a fact made worse by the fact that her given name was Barbara Ann and Cass’s father’s name was Kenneth.

  Royce’s mother, Damaris, came into the picture when Cass was eighteen and married to Tony Moretti, and had been a friend from the very beginning—even more so after she divorced Cass’s father. That Damaris and Cass’s mother had become friends as well had made them into a quirky but workable family.

  Royce snorted. “Until she foisted me off on you, right?”

  “She’s deployed to Afghanistan. Not exactly her choice. Would you rather have stayed with Dad?” Cass heard the exasperation that laced her voice. Royce’s smirk said her sister heard it, too.

  She supposed this was the good side to why she and Tony hadn’t had children. If they had, their progeny would be about the age of Royce, give or take a few years. Divorce had been bad enough as it was, when there hadn’t even been pets to decide the custody of. How would Cass have handled Tony’s defection and a harrowing battle with breast cancer at the same time if grumpy teenagers had been added to the mix?

  She rubbed her arm absently. It didn’t hurt much anymore, but less than a year past chemo and radiation, she still expected it to.

  “Are you all right?”

  The solicitude in Royce’s question surprised her. It was nice to hear. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Where will we live?”

  “I’ve told you that already, several times.” Cass kept her voice even with an effort. Had she been like this at sixteen when her parents, in a rare mutual decision, had sent her to stay with her grandparents? Probably. “We have a cottage on the lake called Little Dream for two weeks. Many businesses and a lot of houses in Miniagua use Cole Porter titles—or parts of them—as their names.” She raised a quelling hand. “If you ask me one more time who Cole Porter is, I’m going to stop the car and make you walk.”

  “I know, I know. He’s a really famous songwriter who grew up close to this lake of yours. You sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ halfway across Kansas to punish me for asking the last time.”

  Cass laughed and, to her profound pleasure, so did her sister.

  “What about after the two weeks? Will we go home?” Royce sounded wistful, and Cass stared into the eastern sky as she drove toward the lake. Her heart ached.

  Home. To Royce, that was California because that’s where her friends were. It’s where the duplex was that she shared with her mother. Their father, retired somewhere in Idaho, paid her no more attention than he had Cass, but Damaris had given her daughter all the security she could within the bounds of what the US Army decreed. They’d been in California for five years. Royce had a California driver’s permit, which to a sixteen-year-old meant permanence.

  “I don’t know,” Cass admitted. But I hope not. I don’t want to go back. I was happy here once. I want to try to find it again.

  “I don’t want to start school at your lake if we’re not staying.” That she didn’t want to stay there at all was patently obvious, but she was enough of a military brat not to bother saying so.

  Cass nodded. There was still another few weeks before school started in either place and the sky wouldn’t fall if she started late—she was a good student. However, she didn’t blame Royce for wanting to know if she was going to have to start all over again. Get another learner’s permit if that was what Indiana required.

  Was she doing to her little sister all the things that had been done to her when she was sixteen that she’d never truly forgiven her parents for? Moving her all over the place with no regard for her emotional needs. Making uncertainty a major part of every day.

  “We’ll know soon,” she said, and then made a promise she hoped she could keep. “I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to.”

  “So, who’s the other owner?” Royce grinned, hiking her pretty young knees up onto the seat and twirling a lock of her shiny dark brown hair. “And I haven’t asked you that because it wasn’t my business. It’s still not, I guess, but I’m curious. Maybe he’ll be some hunk, and you and he will fight over apples until you meet up over the Golden Delicious and the Honeycrisp and fall in love forever.”

  “I’m impressed. You can tell apples apart.”

  “Only those two. They’re the ones Mom buys when she’s on a health kick and the ones your mother always had in that green glass bowl in the middle of the dining room table. I never saw her eat them, but they were always there.”

  “I understand the health kick thing. I’ve always thought apple dumplings with ice cream should qualify as fruit and dairy in the daily food pyramid.” Cass smiled with the memory her sister’s words had called forth—part of it, anyway. “Even when I was your age, Mother had that bowl in the middle of the table. I still have it somewhere.”

  Cass took the exit that put them on the first two-lane road they’d been on since they left California. “Oh, to answer your question, his name is Lucas Rossiter. Apparently he bought Aunt Zoey’s portion a few years ago and would like to buy mine, too. I imagine that’s how it will work out, but I wanted to see it first.” She sighed. Sometimes life was heavy. “I wanted to come back to the lake.”

  *

  “I DON’T GET IT. This is your orchard.” Seth Rossiter looked down from the ladder propped against a tree in the back field of Keep Cold Orchard.

  “Half of it is,” Luke corrected, hefting a box of Earligolds onto the back of the flatbed and handing an empty bag up to his younger brother. “Half of it belongs to the woman who’s coming today, Cass Gentry.”

  “Why’s she coming? What does she want?”

  “I don’t know for sure.” Luke was as confused as Seth was by the sudden correspondence from the woman who’d inherited half the orchard. Her mother and Zoey Durand’s sister, Marynell Bessignano, had been a silent partner, a woman he’d only met twice. Once at Zoey’s sixtieth birthday party two years ago and once when they’d met in the lawyer’s office to sign the agreement. He did all the work, so he got a larger percentage. Zoey had maintained ownership of the farmhouse on the property and still lived in it. Zoey’s sister had been good with that—he hoped Zoey’s niece would be, too. Actually, he hoped she’d just want to sell out.

  “You’ve never met her?”

  “Yeah, I did. Well, saw her, anyway.” She’d sat with Zoey at Marynell’s funeral in California six months before. Cass Gentry was tall and nearly too slim—her black dress had been too big on her, but her posture was military straight.

  She’d also been wearing a wig, which he’d wondered about but hadn’t mentioned to Zoey even on the long plane trip home. Zoey was a close friend, but she was as private as they came. All she’d ever said about family was, “You know that word dysfunction? Well, we invented it.”

  Cass hadn’t looked either right or left during the funeral, and when he’d gone to see if Zoey was ready to return to the hotel, her niece had disappeared.

  “So, she’s coming today?” asked Seth. “Here or to Zoey’s?”

  “I don’t know. She’s staying at the lake for a while, I guess. She might just go there. I don’t think she and Zoey are close.”

  “So.” Seth handed down the bag of apples from his shoulder, his muscles bulging with the effort. “Have you decided?”

  “Decided what?” Luke knew what the kid was talking about. He’d been asking every other day for two weeks already.

  “You know.”

  Seth had been hassling him for an answer ever since their parents had followed their dad’s auto industry job to D
etroit in June. It had been fine this summer. Seth stayed with Luke and spent the occasional “parental unit” weekend in Michigan; sometimes the folks drove down instead. It would be different during the school year. High school senioring was busy stuff, plus their father and mother still worked—they’d used up most of their time off this summer. “Have they said anything more?”

  “Mom doesn’t want me to stay here in case you get another job somewhere else. Dad’s waffling back and forth. But they’re going to let me if you say it’s okay.” Seth came down the ladder. “I know it’s asking a lot, letting me stay with you the whole school year. I cramp your style and all. But geez, Luke, I don’t want to change schools now. I want to spend my senior year as a Miniagua Lakers running back, not a benchwarmer at some school around Detroit where I don’t know anybody.” He grinned hopefully. “Don’t forget, me being here keeps you off the ladders.”

  There was that. Luke wasn’t precisely afraid of heights, but he wasn’t crazy about them, either. Zoey had nearly laughed her head off when she’d found that out. “Son,” she said, “you do realize you just bought half of sixty acres of fruit trees, right?”

  He’d realized it, all right, but when he bought into Keep Cold Orchard, he’d planned on it being an investment, his house on the lake a weekend getaway. However, when the company where he had been an engineer closed its doors three years before, he put his severance pay into his retirement account and went to work for himself at the orchard. He didn’t intend it to be his life’s work, but it was satisfying for now.

  “You are good for something.” He grinned at his brother and looked at his watch. “You need to call it a day and get something to eat before practice.” The football team was doing two-a-day practices and Seth was working several hours at the orchard between them. It was a brutal schedule.