Homecoming (Speakeasy)

by Rebecca Norinne

33

  Preston

  Eighteen months later

  Gloria barged in without knocking. Again. She was lucky I was eating a bowl of granola and not her daughter’s pussy. Cunnilingus really was the best way to start your day.

  “Good morning,” she sing-songed, casting her eyes about. “Where’s my grandson?”

  “Mal!” Rosalie called, clicking her tongue against her teeth. “Come say hi to grandma.”

  From down the hall, we heard the springs of the mattress in the guest room creak before fifty pounds of overeager mutt came bounding into the room, his tail wagging joyfully as he greeted my soon-to-be mother-in-law.

  Gingerly, she crouched down to put her face level with his. “Who’s a good boy?” she cooed as his tongue lapped at her cheeks. She fell back onto her butt, laughing.

  I glanced Rosalie’s way, my head tilted and my eyes slightly bugged out. We were trying to teach Mal not to lick people’s faces, and now we knew why he was having trouble catching on. Between this and his inability to stay off the furniture, Gloria was turning our rescue dog into a poorly-mannered brute.

  Not that he’d been all that well-behaved to begin with.

  Six months ago, I’d taken a job turning an old, deconsecrated church in Montpelier into a brewery and restaurant. A few days after the dumpsters arrived, Mikey had discovered a litter of puppies tossed inside. On the drive to the veterinarian’s office that morning, the puppy we now called Mal had chewed a hole through the seatbelt in Mikey’s truck.

  Between my crew and Rosalie’s co-workers, all six Labrador Retriever mixes had found good homes—including this monster. One look at Mal’s sweet, stupid face, and Rosalie had immediately declared him hers. I wasn’t convinced that bringing a dog into our lives when we were both so busy with work and other commitments was such a good idea, but I couldn’t seem to deny her anything. All she had to do was bat those insanely long eyelashes my way and I turned to putty in her hands.

  Which explained why we were having a big wedding here in Colebury instead of eloping to Vegas the day after I’d proposed like I’d wanted to.

  When Mal’s exuberance reached a fever pitch, I pointed to his dog bed in the corner of the kitchen and ordered him to go lay down. Thankfully, this was one command he did regularly obey. I wasn’t sure why, but he loved that damn bed. We were both going to cry if it ever fell apart.

  Gloria pushed up from the floor and joined us at the kitchen table, stealing a triangle of toast from Rosalie’s plate.

  “Hey!” Rosalie exclaimed, sliding her plate out of her mom’s reach. “The bread’s on the counter. Make your own.”

  “I only wanted half a slice,” she explained, setting the toast down to reach into the macrame satchel slung across her body to pull out a thick cream envelope with sage green script written across the front. “I need to change my RSVP.”

  Warily, Rosalie slid the envelope toward her and took out the small white card we’d asked our guests to return two months ago. Gloria claimed to have lost hers, but it wasn’t like we couldn’t just run next door and ask if she wanted the duck or the salmon.

  Rosalie’s gaze jumped between the card and her mom’s face. “You’re bringing a date?”

  Gloria nodded and chewed her lip nervously.

  “I didn’t know you were seeing someone.” If I could hear the hurt in my fiancée’s voice, I knew her mom could, too.

  Since Rosalie had moved home nearly two years ago, mother and daughter had grown incredibly close. Even after she’d moved into the carriage house with me, they’d continued to have dinner together at least one night a week. And when Rosalie had fully taken over running the library book sale from Patricia, her mom had become her right-hand woman. For as flighty as Gloria pretended to be at times, she’d turned out to be an excellent general when it came time to marshal the forces. I hadn’t known a small-town book sale could be such a well-run production.

  Then again, with Rosalie at the helm, I’d have been crazy to ever doubt it. The woman was seriously talented when it came to what looked like herding a bunch of bewildered cats. Even our wedding was running like a well-oiled machine.

  From the way Mikey spoke leading up to his own wedding a couple of months ago, Rosalie and I should have well and truly lost our damn minds before now, but our wedding planning had trotted along without a single interruption. Then again, the woman I was about to marry was the love of my life, not someone I’d knocked up during a one-night stand. That Mikey had actually gone and fallen madly in love with his new wife was a source of constant amusement for everyone who’d ever known him.

  “Well,” Gloria hedged. “The thing is … hmm … it’s kind of a long story. It might be better if I just showed you.”

  “Showed me?” Rosalie asked, casting a confused look my way.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know any more than she did.

  Silently, Gloria rose from the table and stepped out the door onto the porch where we heard urgent whispering. Then she walked in holding hands with a tentative-looking Patricia.

  The town librarian lifted her right hand in greeting. “Hi, guys. Long time, no see.”

  Gloria chuckled. The four of us had had dinner together only a couple of nights earlier. When the book sale had proven such a huge success, Rosalie had joined the library’s board, balancing her role there with her job at Speakeasy with grace and a real gift for spreadsheets. As its recently-elected President, she met with Patricia once a week to talk library business. Come to think of it, turning the meeting into a working dinner had been Gloria’s idea. Apparently she’d had ulterior motives.

  Still, I was shocked that my future mother-in-law was dating a woman. She had a bawdy sense of humor; her repertoire included jokes about dicks and how much she liked them. I’d had zero sense her preferences might also swing the other way.

  And from the look on Rosalie’s face, neither had her daughter. “You’re dating Patricia?”

  Gloria pushed back her shoulders and straightened her spine, her posture turning immediately defensive. “I hope you don’t have a problem with that.”

  Rosalie shook her head slowly back and forth, her gaze curious as it darted between the two women. “No, of course not. I’m just … have you always liked women?” She cocked her head to the side and flicked her eyes upward in an expression I’d come to recognize. She was combing through her memories, attempting to pull one out that would point to whether or not she should have suspected this all along.

  Gloria’s features softened as she glanced down at the much-shorter Patricia, who gazed adoringly up at her. “There was that one time at Burning Man, but otherwise, no. Just Patricia.”

  Rosalie’s eyes turned misty. “How long?”

  Gloria did a poor job at hiding the guilt that temporarily flashed across her face, clueing me in to the fact that her answer was going to be a doozy. I folded my hands on the table and gave the scene my full and undivided attention. It was probably wrong of me to enjoy Gloria’s sudden discomfort, but after all the shit she’d put Rosalie and me through in her quest to bring us together, I was secretly enjoying it. She was finally getting a taste of her own medicine.

  “So. Umm. It’s both new and not-so-new,” she stammered uncertainly. “We’ve, uh, known each other a long time, and we’ve been getting much closer for a while, and now…” She waved her hands vaguely in the air in faintly curving motions.

  There was only one thing that made a person blush like that, I thought as Patricia’s cheeks turned bright red and her gaze darted around the room. And I definitely did not want that image in my head.

  “What does that mean?” Rosalie asked, making me briefly wonder if the reason she’d taken to Mal so thoroughly was because she saw a kindred spirit in the adorable but not terribly bright pooch. But then she cast me a surreptitious wink, and I realized she was enjoying putting the screws to her mom as much as I enjoyed watching it go down.

  “You know,” Gloria said, glancing meaningfully down at her
girlfriend.

  “I really don’t,” Rosalie said, her tone innocent.

  Gloria threw her hands up in frustration as her chin wobbled.

  Ah, shit.

  “Hey,” I said, pushing back from the table and walking over to them. “It’s okay.” I hugged them both, one after the other. “Rosalie’s just messing with you. We’re both very happy for you.”

  She huffed out a small laugh and turned to her daughter. “That wasn’t very nice, Rosie.”

  “I seem to recall saying the same thing to you when you insisted on embarrassing me in front of Preston every chance you got. You’re lucky I didn’t start playing Marvin Gaye.” She held her phone aloft. It was connected to a Bluetooth speaker system I’d installed on the main floor of the carriage house a couple of months before.

  “And it’s a good thing I did,” Gloria countered. “If I hadn’t, you two would still be dancing around one another, pretending you were just friends. Anyone with a pair of eyes in their head could see you were meant to be together.”

  My fiancée moved to my side, twining her arms around my middle. “We really were,” she said as I tucked her up against my body. “Which means it probably would have happened sooner or later, regardless of all your mad schemes.”

  “From where I’m standing, sooner was the best option.”

  Rosalie smiled up at me. “Now that’s something I won’t argue with.”

  “Did you really not know about us?” Patricia asked quizzically as the four of us took up positions on the sleek leather sectional in the corner of our living room.

  “Thinking back, there were a bunch of clues,” Rosalie answered. “If I hadn’t been so busy with work, and the library, and then planning the wedding, I might have thought to ask why you were spending the night at Patricia’s house so often.”

  The two older women chuckled softly in that way that couples with a shared secret often did as Patricia patted Gloria’s knee affectionately. “To be fair,” she said, “this one really shouldn’t be driving after dark.”

  “My eyes are fine,” Gloria groused.

  “It’s not your eyes I’m worried about,” Patricia countered. “Face it, Gloria. You drive like a little old lady.”

  “Because I am an old lady!”

  Much as Rosalie and I both hated to admit it, Gloria was getting older. She was well into her seventies, and she’d recently suffered a nasty bout of bronchitis that had slowed her down considerably. And even though she still did yoga regularly, she wasn’t as spry as she once was. The difference between when I’d first moved here and now was evident. It was why I was so concerned about Mal jumping all over her. He was a big, excitable dog and we didn’t want him to injure her.

  “That actually brings up another reason we wanted to tell you now,” Patricia prompted, nodding at Gloria.

  She reached into her purse a second time. “The RSVP isn’t the only thing I wanted to give you,” she said, passing Rosalie a manila envelope. “Consider this an early wedding present.”

  “What’s this?” Rosalie asked, unclasping it and pulling out a sheaf of papers held together with a small black binder clip. Her brows dipped into a deep vee as she scanned the text. When she’d reached the bottom of the page, she looked up at her mom. “Are you sure?”

  Gloria and Patricia linked their hands together, and Gloria nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.” Her gaze swung between her daughter and me as Rosalie silently passed the documents my way.

  I glanced down to see the deed to the farmhouse. “You’re giving us the house?”

  “It’s more than I can take care of anymore, and I want you two to have it. It’s where you first fell in love, and I hope it’s where you’ll build your life together.”

  “It’s too generous,” I said, sliding the documents back into their envelope and setting the bundle on the coffee table. Gifting us her house was an amazingly generous gesture, but I didn’t feel right accepting it.

  Rosalie cleared her throat, calling my attention back to her. We shared a long, speaking glance where we seemed to have an entire silent conversation in the span of just a few seconds. I nodded, and she smiled.

  We’d been talking about buying a house with some land where I could build a couple of outbuildings to run my business out of. While the restoration project that had brought me to Colebury in the first place had eventually gone belly-up—the Lindholms ultimately selling to their neighbors who’d turned around and leveled the house, auctioning off its centuries-old lumber and trim to nearby architectural salvage shops—I’d been busy with other, equally rewarding projects. Now, I had more business than I could feasibly take on and I was looking to expand.

  “We appreciate the gesture, Mom, but we can’t accept it.” Gloria opened her mouth to interrupt, but Rosalie lifted her hand in a gesture of silence. “Instead, we want to buy it from you.”

  “Buy it from me?” Gloria asked, her face screwed up in offense. “That’s ridiculous. I want you to have it.”

  “Mom, please. You’ve already done so much for me. For us. We couldn’t possibly ask you to give us your house.”

  “You’re not asking me,” she countered. “I want you to have it.”

  “And we will, if you let us pay you for it,” Rosalie said, scooting over to sit next to her mom. “We can’t tell you how much the gesture means to us. Truly. But let us do this for you.”

  Gloria looked to Patricia for guidance. “I told you this might happen,” the other woman said, her voice kind.

  Gloria blew out a breath. “Okay, fine. The selling price is three dollars.”

  I barked out a laugh of surprise. Leave it to Gloria to go down swinging. Her daughter was a fighter, too. It was one of the things I loved so much about both of them. Something, I realized, I didn’t tell her often enough. I’d been estranged from my own mother since my dad had effectively disowned me, but Gloria had more than filled the void.

  “You’ve been so good to me,” I told her, the words catching in my throat. “More of a mother to me than my own, even, and I just want you to know how much it means to me that you’d do this for us. I love you, Gloria.”

  Rosalie’s eyes filled with tears as she mouthed “I love you” to me.

  Next to her, Gloria lifted her hand to cover the “oh” of surprise my words had brought forth. She glanced between her daughter and me and, dropping her hand back down, said, “I love you too, Preston. And I can’t wait for you to officially become my son.”

  As I glanced around the room at this rag-tag foursome that was now my family, I’d never felt more loved. It had taken me nearly thirty-seven years and the complete destruction of my faith in humanity along the way, but I’d finally found my home. It had been a long time coming.

  T H E

  E N D

  Thank you for reading Homecoming by Rebecca Norinne! Want a bonus epilogue for Rosalie and Preston? Get it here.

  You can get all the links to all the Speakeasy books here. Or turn the page for more great recommendations for Rebecca Norinne and World of True North titles

  You Will Also Enjoy…

  The Speakeasy Series:

  Touchstone by Karen Stivali

  Heartwood by J.H. Croix

  Sideways by Lisa Hughey

  Wildflower by Mae Wood

  Firefly by Krystyna Allyn

  Starlight by Christine DePetrillo

  Stargazer by Wendy S. Marcus

  Safeguard by Stephanie Rose

  Rebecca Norinne’s Books Include:

  River Hill Series

  The Professors Series

  The Dating Game

  Bonus Recipe

  Want to make Preston’s lemon artichoke pesto? Read on for this quick and easy recipe you can master in no time flat. Best of all, it’s inexpensive! While Preston makes his own pasta, store-bought fettuccine is a great alternative.

  Preston’s Lemon Artichoke Pasta

  Ingredients:

  2 cans of artichoke hearts (if in oil, rinse thoroughly)


  ½ cup of good extra virgin olive oil

  10 stems of fresh parsley, leaves removed

  3 cloves of garlic

  ½ a large, juicy lemon

  1 cup of finely grated parmesan cheese (Preston uses a hand-held microplane zester/grater tool)

  ½ teaspoon of sea salt

  Pinch of fresh pepper (red pepper flakes work well, too)

  Instructions:

  Put artichoke hearts, parsley, and garlic in a food processor (or blender, if you don’t have one) and squeeze lemon over top.

  Pulse 2-3 times to roughly combine

  Add olive oil and blend until mixture forms a thick, chunky paste. (Chunks are good!)

  Remove from food processor and place in a bowl.

  Fold in grated cheese, salt, and pepper.

  Serve over warm pasta with a drizzle of olive oil.

  Preston recommends doubling the pesto recipe so you’ll have extra on hand to enjoy as a bruschetta, as it can be refrigerated for up to a week.