by Alison Kent
ALSO BY ALISON KENT
The Second Chance Café: A Hope Springs Novel
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Alison Kent
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781477848456
ISBN-10: 1477848452
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910016
Cover design by Anna Curtis
To Walt, for everything you went through during the writing and rewriting and re-rewriting of this one. I couldn’t love you more.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
DAY ONE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
DAY TWO
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DAY THREE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAY FOUR
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DAY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sneak Peek: The Sweetness of Honey
CHAPTER ONE
Oscar Gatlin’s BMW had plunged off the Edwards Plateau along the Devil’s Backbone on a Sunday evening at 7:42 p.m. That day in September had been sunny and clear, the sunset a watercolor wash of pink and orange, the only sounds to be heard those of tires chewing up the uneven road and the whoosh of resistant wind as his car and the one following sliced through the late summer night.
With her eyes closed, it was all as real to Luna Meadows today as it had been ten years ago—the sights, the sounds, even the smells of cedar and juniper and pine. She’d been driving an appropriate number of car lengths behind Oscar and Sierra. Her window had been down, her elbow on the doorframe, the wind—dry and hot and fiercely cutting—whipping at her hair held wound around her hand. Her seat belt had nearly strangled her.
She’d been clinging to any hint of warmth, the pain of the trip’s purpose chilling her, when ahead on a too-sharp curve, tires had squealed, and Oscar’s car fishtailed, then vanished. Screaming, she’d slammed on her brakes, spinning in the loose gravel at the road’s edge and crashing into a barrier of boulders, barely escaping her friends’ fate. Her eyes, already closed at impact, saw all too clearly the empty space where the BMW should’ve been. She remembered nothing else—except the secret Sierra had taken to her grave.
She opened her eyes onto the present, ten years since the accident, eight years since she’d set foot on the property in front of her, which she, as of this morning, now owned. She’d driven by this house—Sierra’s house—plenty of times, watched the elements stake their claim, but she’d done nothing. How could she move on with her life when Oscar and Sierra never would? What right did she have to plan for the future when her friends had had theirs stolen away? But now, because of the house, she had to.
All this time it had sat forlorn, mourning the family who’d left it abandoned. Luna missed them, too—day in and day out, beneath moonlight and sunlight, from behind painful scars. She missed them with more longing than she’d felt for anything else in the whole of her twenty-eight years. She missed them as if they’d been her own. In many ways, they had been, she mused, straining to hear the voices that had once filled the rooms, picturing the four youngest Caffey children running circles around the legs of the two older, the siblings’ parents laughing the loudest of all.
Leaving her car in the driveway, she walked up the pebbled path to the porch where the swing still hung from now-rusted ceiling chains, where the two big rockers and the table between had weathered to the gray of old age. The lawn, in the past always lush and verdant, was dried to straw and littered with rotting leaves and acorns. The dark wood of the structure was a victim of creeping moss and clinging mold and ground cover crawling above its station.
Key ring in hand, Luna searched out the one that fit the front door and let herself into the house. The interior was dark and stale, the living room lit only by beams of light able to cut through shade trees, through windows smeared with the dirt of time and absence. The lamps had long since gone dark. There were no bursts of illumination shining into the hallway from beneath closed bedroom doors, no glow from the kitchen as Angelo, the oldest Caffey child, stood in front of the open refrigerator searching for something to eat.
Angelo. Angel. While Sierra, a cellist, had attended the St. Thomas Preparatory School on a music scholarship, Angelo had played quarterback for the Hope Springs High School Bulldogs. Workshops and recitals often kept Sierra away, but Luna never missed a game, begging rides from her father to those across town, even those across the state during play-offs. Harry Meadows loved his football. And he’d loved pretending his daughter did, too.
With so much of her life tied to this house, Luna hadn’t been able to bear the thought of it falling into a stranger’s hands. She’d lost Sierra. For all intents and purposes, she’d lost Oscar, too. Once the Caffeys had left Hope Springs, the house had become her only connection to a friendship that had shaped her. Learning it was in foreclosure and would most likely be razed, she’d jumped; if the house was gone, no one in the family would have a reason to return to Hope Springs. And that had been the deciding factor.
Seeing the deterioration wrought by the years, however, she realized listening to her heart and ignoring her head might not have been particularly smart. Who bought a place the size of the Caffey homestead without a walk-through? Fortunately, the time spent waiting to close had allowed her to settle on an idea for using it, one that would honor the friends she had lost. But she couldn’t move forward until she knew what she’d paid for.
Tucking her keys into her front pocket, she gathered up her hair and knotted it at her nape. She needed to know if it would be worth her time to sort through what the Caffeys had left behind, or if hiring a service to empty the rambling two-story farmhouse would save her as many broken fingernails as it would heartache.
She pulled a chair toward the refrigerator and stepped onto the seat. Opening the first of the high cabinets above, the one where Sierra had hidden things she wanted to keep out of her younger siblings’ hands, Luna reached inside, finding nothing but light bulbs and sports tape and loose batteries, and wishing she’d thought to bring gloves. And a flashlight. Next time for sure, she mused, and then she went still, cocking her head at the sound of footsteps on the back porch.
She didn’t need permission to be inside a building she owned, but no one knew she was here, and no one else had reason to be. She eased from the chair, her second foot touching the floor as the kitchen door opened and a man moved to fill the entrance. He stood still as he took her in, his face shadowed, his body large. Her heart thundered in her chest and her ears.
&nb
sp; She thought she’d seen knives in the block beside the stove, but she’d never reach it before he did. She dipped her fingers into her pocket, her hand wrapping around her key ring, the keys jutting between her fingers like spikes.
The man stepped over the threshold, ducking beneath the door’s facing. The light he’d been blocking followed him in, and in that moment recognition dawned, her stomach tumbling to the floor and unraveling toward him like a spool of thread.
“Angelo?”
“Hello, Luna,” he said, his voice deep and sure and aged like fine wine.
Angelo Caffey wore the last eight years well. He was thirty now, to her twenty-eight, and she very much appreciated the differences wrought by his age. Though he’d left it loose and brushed away from his face, his black hair was long enough to pull back at his nape, and strands of silver shimmered in the sea of black. She wasn’t surprised by the touch of gray.
Even knowing nothing of his current life, she was well aware that he’d earned those stripes. His strong jaw was darkened with several days’ growth of beard, his nose blade-straight and narrow, his full lips pulled into a too familiar smirk. His body wore years of use that showed on his arms in muscles and scars. His hands were a mess of healed cuts.
“You scared me,” she said, her voice a weak quaver.
“Wouldn’t want that now, would we?” He closed the door, shutting out what light had been shining through. Shutting them in the room that was full of old pain, and Sierra, and that very sad silence, and moments only the two of them knew.
She wanted him to reach back and fling the door open. She wanted him not to know how nervous she was. She wanted to ask him a thousand questions. She wanted him to leave. She wanted him to stay. But most of all, she wanted to know why he was here. And if, somehow, he’d known she would be.
After eight years in the wind, Angelo Caffey, her first love, her first lover, had returned to Hope Springs. Be careful what you wish for, Luna. Be very careful indeed. “When did you get to town?”
“No, sweetheart,” he said, stepping closer to where she stood, and smelling of sunshine and sawdust and the spicy soap she knew well. “You’re in my house now. I get to ask the questions.”
CHAPTER TWO
Except it isn’t my house anymore, is it? Angelo thought. The five acres, the house, the woodshop and the barn, the contents of all three. The trees his siblings had climbed. The one he and Luna had, too. She’d snatched up everything his family had left behind, when he’d been waiting for the day of the razing. Now his connection would remain. The only one he had to Hope Springs.
Except that wasn’t the way of things either.
Neither of them had moved, and she took him in as if daring him to challenge her right to be in this room. Here where his parents’ closest friends had prepared food and washed dishes and brewed coffee and poured drinks for the dozens of others attending Sierra’s wake. It had been an endless, miserable, suffocating day. He’d spent it torn between crumbling from the unbearable loss and being a rock for his siblings and folks.
Luna Meadows had spent most of it anesthetized in a hospital bed.
She looked nothing like he’d expected after all this time, yet she looked the same as when he’d last seen her. Her eyes were as expressive as ever, her hair as dark as ever. She was no more than five-foot-six to his six-foot-two, but she’d worked out, or filled out, or something. Her arms were buff, her nails short, her hand holding her keys, a clever weapon, as wrecked as his.
So, yeah. The same but totally different.
“You here to see what you spent your money on?” His upper hand warranted something pithier, but it was all he had, and since she had every right to be here…
She shook her head, looked down, and scuffed the toe of her shoe at the floor, as if she didn’t have it in her to argue. Especially when she knew as well as he did that neither of them was going to give an inch. That was their history. Why they’d fit so well. Why in the end neither had been able to back down. Why things between them couldn’t be fixed and had died.
Finally, she swallowed. Then she said, “You know what today is.”
Ten years ago today his sister had lost her life in a car accident, but that didn’t answer his question. “I do.”
Her hands were back in her pockets when she shrugged, when she looked at him. “Then you’ll understand why Sierra’s on my mind.”
There was a lot of that going around. “I’d tell you you’re not welcome, but since you own the place…”
“Oh, Angelo,” she said, her accompanying sigh heavy. “You made your feelings perfectly clear the day your family moved.”
No. He hadn’t. But he could understand why she thought so. He took in the colors in the scarf she wore, wondering what they meant to her, how bright the shades of red would look in the sun, because in the light from the windows they made him think of blood.
He nodded toward the chair and the open cabinet. “Looking for something?”
She waved one arm in an expansive gesture. “How many meals did your family sit here to eat? How many did I? I guess I thought… I don’t know what I thought. That there wouldn’t be so many personal things. So many reminders.”
“I think that was the point of their leaving. They didn’t want to be reminded anymore.”
She seemed to let that sink in, returning the chair to the table. The left front leg caught on the same nick in the linoleum it always had, and Angelo closed his eyes.
“I could get a service to come in and clear everything away, but I don’t want to throw out something your parents or your siblings… or you,” she said, and he looked at her again, “might want. Maybe something of Sierra’s?”
He’d argued with his parents that they pack up her room, that one day they’d want her school pictures, her recital trophies, the long tail of her hair still bagged for the donation she’d never managed to make. But they’d left every bit of her behind, as if doing so made it easier to forget she was gone. What a laugh.
Since the day she’d been ten and drawn a wooden spoon across the strings of their father’s flamenco guitar like a bow, Sierra had been the family’s Great Musical Hope, a ticket out of a life where nobody ever had enough of anything—money, time, attention, privacy. Milk. Clean clothes. Sleep. No one was going to forget.
“We all took what we needed to take.” It wasn’t an answer, but it was all he had, off-balance as he was, thinking about his sister today, feeling hollow. “What are you going to do with the place?”
“Actually, I’ve set up a nonprofit, and we’re opening an arts center.” She said it as if thankful for the change of subject. “It’s a community-based initiative, and it’ll be run by parents and educators who’ve recognized the need and want to fill it.”
Uh-huh. “You’re not a parent. You’re not an educator. Why would you be involved?”
“Because I want to be.”
“Giving back lets you buy your way out of a guilty conscience?”
“I don’t have a guilty conscience.”
“You’re not bothered by telling lies? Or at least not telling the truth?”
Her chin came up. “I’m not here to get into this, Angel.”
Something in his gut caught and held at hearing her use the nickname. Arguing with her was so familiar, and so strangely comfortable. He didn’t want to be feeling either thing, and yet they were there, those emotions, caught in the web of all the others they’d left tangled because they’d been too young, and too hurt, to fight their way out of the knot.
They weren’t so young anymore.
“Grow up, Sierra.”
“Angelo—”
“You’re old enough to get into trouble, you’re old enough to get out of it.”
Luna wrapped her fingers over the chair back and squeezed until her knuckles whitened. “You know Sierra hated it when we argued.”
She was right about that, he mused, shoving his fists into his pockets. “I can’t tell you how many times she stopp
ed me from following when you stormed out of the house.”
“She knew how much I liked getting in the last word with you.”
Because then, like now, Luna had always wanted to win. “Is that what you’re doing here? Having the last laugh on the Caffeys? Or is there something else you’re trying to prove?”
She shook her head, her hair a wave of motion as it fell from its knot. “What could I possibly have to prove?”
“Then why?” he asked, walking toward her.
She waited until he stopped, as if she couldn’t speak while watching him, as if she didn’t trust him. Or as if she didn’t trust herself. “Funding has been cut to arts and music programs across the country. The Hope Springs school district isn’t exempt. And St. Thomas only offers so many scholarships. Not every child who deserves it will get the help Sierra did.”
Something his family knew well. “And here I thought you needed a tax write-off for all that money you’re making selling scarves to Hollywood.”
She blinked once, twice. “You know what I do?”
“I know some,” he said, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Angel…”
Her voice, when she said his name, was tiny and soft, as if his keeping up with her had some meaning, when the truth of it was he was only here for the answers she’d never given him. With the house no longer in his family, this might be his last chance to get them. “I want to know what happened the night Oscar Gatlin’s car went off the Devil’s Backbone and down the ravine.”
A shiver ran through her as her gaze fell. “You know what happened.”
He waited until she’d stilled, then crooked a knuckle beneath her chin and lifted it. “No. I know what the investigators think. I know what you told me… before. I want to know the rest. I want the whole truth. I want to know what you saw. I want to know why you were there. Why, if you were following them, your car crashed at all. I want to know all of it.”
“Angel—”
But he was on a roll, and he let her go as he looked around the kitchen and into the living room beyond, the mess of the place giving him an idea. “How long do you think it will take to clear out this house? Top to bottom? Drawers, closets, attic, barn, all of it?”
