This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Melinda Wooten
Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes
Cover illustration by Alan Ayers
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Bonus novella Kiss Me in Sweetwater Springs copyright © 2019 by Annie Rains
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First Edition: March 2020
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ISBN: 978-1-5387-3341-7 (mass market), 978-1-5387-3342-4 (ebook)
E3-20200226-DA-PC-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
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
Chapter Thirty-Three
Discover More
About the Author
Bonus Novella: KISS ME IN SWEETWATER SPRINGS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About the Author
Fall in Love with Forever
To Mom, who always believed that
laughter was the best medicine.
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Acknowledgments
First off, a huge thank-you to Alex Logan, my editor at Forever. You believed in the heart and humor of this book and, with a gentle hand, made it infinitely better. Thanks also to the rest of the staff at Grand Central Publishing—editorial, art, production, sales, publicity, and marketing—for gearing up for a great series launch. Big hug to my agent, Pamela Hopkins, who listens to my story ideas and somehow manages to come up with a strategic marketing plan (plus she knows how to interpret legalese).
A big thanks to my family, starting with my college-sweetheart husband, who didn’t blink an eye when I said I wanted to change careers and write romance—okay, maybe he blinked but then he said, “Go for it”—and continuing with my kids, who hand-sell my books to everyone they meet. A special thanks to my son Colby, who has a knack for adding unusual twists to plots. Thanks to my brothers, who’ve been sideline cheerleaders, especially through the passing of our parents. As anyone who has lost someone important in their life knows, it takes time to get your sea legs back after a broken heart.
Writers tend to collect a tribe of friends. I’ve been blessed to have some really great ones who encourage me, challenge me, and support me. Thanks much to Cari Lynn Webb, Anna J. Stewart, and Jane Ann Krentz. Special shout-out to Brenda Novak and a twenty-plus-year friendship. Big thank-you to the rest of my professional team—Sheri Brooks at Purple Papaya, Nancy Berland, and the staff at Writerspace. Your support gives me time to write.
And finally, thanks to my readers, bloggers, and reviewers, who spend time with me and the characters I create. I hope Lola and Drew find a place in your heart. I know they found one in mine.
Prologue
Mims Turner sucked at poker.
She hadn’t always but it seemed like she hadn’t won in months. She was always betting on the wrong hand or folding when she should call. Just once, she’d like to win. And if Mims could win only once, she’d like it to be today.
“I’ll see your five.” Mims tossed a stack of five pennies in the pot, followed by a second set. “And raise you five.”
“Ditto,” Clarice shouted, having predictably left her hearing aids at home. Her pennies bounced into the center of Mims’s card table.
“Now we’re all in.” Bitsy’s words rang with finish-line finality. She thought she was going to win. Again.
Just this once…
Mims ground her teeth. She was an outdoorswoman. She was president of the Sunshine Valley Widows Club, a group of thirty women who raised money for causes that benefited the small town of Sunshine, Colorado. She considered herself unflappable. She should be able to master a game of cards. It was just that lately, Mims’s entire life was off. She couldn’t always make the point she wanted to, and sometimes she lost track of what she was saying midsentence. It was like going through menopause all over again!
She glanced at her opponents. Clarice was a free spirit. She considered bras too establishment. But she knew how to work the hand she was dealt. And Bitsy? Bitsy looked like her ancestors had come over on the Mayflower and settled in Boston. And yet she played cards as if she’d grown up in Vegas.
The trio made up the board of the Widows Club. Privately, Mims, Clarice, and Bitsy liked to call themselves the Sunshine Valley Matchmakers Club. With every Widows Club fund-raiser, they gave Cupid a little help, a nudge to someone they felt was ready and worthy of love. Whoever won this hand would win the pot of pennies and the right to choose whom the group nudged next.
Mims’s cards stuck to her slightly damp palms. Two red kings, two red aces, a two of hearts. All that red had to mean something. It had to mean Mims could break her losing streak!
“I like Edith Archer,” Mims blurted, unable to hide her agenda any longer.
“You haven’t won.” Clarice’s loud voice reverberated in Mims’s cozy parlor.
Bitsy’s black velvet hair bow trembled above her bobbed blond hair. “Edith is old.”
“We’re all old.” If seventy was old, Mims was ancient. “Edith is widowed, which means she gets priority.” That was a rule.
“You can’t touch Edith.” Clarice harrumphed. “She’s been widowed less than t
hree months.” That was another rule. They didn’t begin matching widows or accepting them into the general membership until they’d been bereaved at least half a year. Although the club offered a shoulder to cry on, they were primarily an organization dedicated to good works.
“I like Lola.” There was something in Bitsy’s normally gentle tone that wasn’t so gentle. “Lola’s a widow. And she’s not even thirty.”
“Bitsy’s got a point,” Clarice said, still using her outdoor voice.
Normally Mims would agree that a younger widow needed more help getting back on her feet, but instead she said, “You should have seen Edith at church last Sunday.” Her short gray hair had looked as if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. “When Charlie died, she fell apart.” And kept falling.
Not that Mims hadn’t been coming apart at the seams too. Charlie had been Mims’s first love. He may have chosen Edith more than half a century ago, but when Mims had become a widow, Charlie had become her emotional rock, unbeknownst to Edith. When Charlie had died, it had been like losing Mims’s husband all over again.
Mims resented having to share Charlie with Edith, even in death. She’d do anything to keep her rival out of the Widows Club. This was her last chance. “Edith needs a man, or she’ll do something she’ll regret.”
“Mims has a point too.” Clarice considered her hand.
“She’ll have to back it up by winning.” Bitsy showed her cards. “Two pair.” Two black kings and two black aces—yin to Mims’s yang.
Impossible. Mims couldn’t breathe. She spread her cards on the table with cold fingers.
“Well, I’ll be,” Clarice murmured. She glanced at her cards and then laid them facedown. “It’s a tie.”
Bitsy looked like she’d missed one of her grandchildren’s birthdays. “We’ve never had a tie before.”
“We need a rule to cover ties,” Mims said. Such as In case of a tie, the person who’s won the least is the winner.
Before Mims proposed her rule, Clarice came up with one of her own.
“This is a sign.” A slow grin worked its way across Clarice’s thin, leathery face. “I propose we match both Edith and Lola.”
She didn’t need to ask Mims twice. “I second.”
They both turned to Bitsy, who was staring at her cards as if she were a puzzled fortune-teller.
“Just one question,” Bitsy said finally, her gaze landing squarely on Mims. “Is either one of them ready for love?”
Chapter One
If Lola Williams had known Randy would be unable to honor his wedding vows…
If Lola had known Randy would toss aside her love like he did his dirty laundry…
If Lola had known Randy was untrustworthy, unfaithful, and untrue…
She would’ve returned to New York City before his wedding ring left a tan mark on her finger. But after one year of marriage and one year of widowhood, New York was out of reach, lost to her, a log at the bottom of a fast-burning fire.
Because of Randy.
Because of Randy, Lola was no longer doing hair and makeup for celebrities on Broadway. She was doing hair and makeup for the elderly at the Sunshine Valley Retirement Home and for the dead at the Eternal Rest Mortuary.
She might have salvaged her career on Broadway if she hadn’t believed theirs was the forever kind of union. But she was a dreamer. After Randy’s fatal car crash, she’d decided their love needed a grand gesture of mourning—a year’s worth—tying up the loose ends of his life bit by bit, until the only thing left to do was go through his clothes and his side of the closet on the anniversary of his death. Only then had she learned her husband had been sleeping around.
Sitting in her driveway, Lola tossed another pair of Randy’s tighty-whities on the bonfire.
She should move her folding chair back from the small blaze before it singed her eyebrows more completely than the afternoon’s revelation had made ashes of her heart. Those ashes clogged her lungs, deadened her limbs, and numbed her brain until she couldn’t do anything besides bend slightly, reach for another pair of undies, and toss them on the fire.
Cars passed by. And slowed.
Drivers stared. And scowled.
Across the street, Mrs. Everly’s mauve curtains twitched.
The familiar burn of being an outsider—Worse! That gal from New York City—made Lola wish she’d used Randy’s fifty-year-old bottle of whiskey to light the fire instead of nail polish remover. A swig of spirits might have given her the courage to do more than send answering glowers at passersby.
Couldn’t they see she was devastated? Couldn’t they see she’d hit rock bottom?
A dented and dinged white Subaru wagon parked at the curb. The governing board of the Widows Club looked at her with interest. Lola sank deeper into the creaky webbing of her folding chair.
Yesterday, she’d been thinking that joining the Widows Club and remaining single until her dying day would be the crowning achievement of her bereavement. Today, she was thinking twenty-nine was too young to join a group of widows.
The first widow to the sidewalk was Clarice Rogers. She wielded her hickory walking stick as if it were a gentleman’s cane. Trend-wise, Clarice had never moved beyond the 1970s—not in hairstyle, not in fashion, not in the use of sunscreen. Her long gray braids made her thin, sun-damaged face look even longer. Her lime-green geometric blouse had been in and out of style at least five times in the past five decades.
Bitsy Whitlock’s black patent loafers gracefully touched the pavement next. If Clarice was clinging to the seventies, Bitsy was an eighties girl. Her dyed blond hair was held back neatly with a big black velvet bow. Pearls adorned her ears and rimmed the crew neck of her turquoise sweater, which was held up by linebacker shoulder pads.
Rounding out the Widows Club board was Mims Turner, the driver of the Subaru and their president. She wasn’t stuck in any specific era. She looked like everyone’s grandmother with her short gray curls and navy I ♥ My Grandkids T-shirt. It was the neon-orange hunting vest with utility pockets that gave away the fact that she packed heat in her pink pleather purse.
The three conferred before walking to the edge of Lola’s driveway, stopping a safe distance from the cinders of her life.
“Lola, dear.” Mims straightened her orange hunting vest and waved a hand toward Randy’s smoldering underpants. “What’s this all about?”
Was it too much to hope that building a fire in her driveway made Lola a poor candidate for the Widows Club? “I found condoms in Randy’s dresser. The receipt for them was dated two weeks before he died.”
“Lola, dear.” Mims made sympathetic noises. “Don’t throw them out. I believe condoms have a three-year shelf life.”
The horror of that statement coming out of grandmotherly Mims’s mouth temporarily silenced Lola.
She reached for another pair of Hanes, wishing she hadn’t waited a year to clean out Randy’s side of the closet. She was such a romantic fool. And she’d been one since she was nine.
Back then, at the urging of her grandmother, Lola had started a scrapbook of dreams—a flowered and rainbowed blueprint of how her life should be. Land a job doing hair and makeup on Broadway by age twenty-seven (she’d done it by twenty-five), fall in love with her one true love by age twenty-eight (she’d met Randy on her twenty-seventh birthday), have a whirlwind romance and fairy-tale wedding by age twenty-nine (she’d been ahead of the game, marrying Randy mere weeks after they met), and have babies by age thirty (her only failure).
Who was she kidding? It was all a failure. Lola should have brought the scrapbook out to burn.
“You don’t understand. We’d been trying to get pregnant for six months before Randy’s accident,” Lola said in a voice as hard as the metal coffin Judge Harper had special ordered last week. She didn’t use that tone because she was annoyed at being misunderstood by the widows (well, maybe a little), but because she’d cut off her dreams of being a makeup artist / hair stylist to the stars to be with Ra
ndy, and because she’d cut back on caffeine and wine to increase her odds of having his baby. And all the while, Randy hadn’t been cutting back on anything! “It was a large box of condoms, and it was nearly empty.” Thirty used from a box of forty. In two weeks!
Lola felt sucker punched.
“You think he was…” Clutching her pearls, Bitsy drew a dramatic breath. “Cheating?”
The word cut through the white smoke in the air and the ashes in Lola’s stomach. It cut and cut and cut until Lola thought she might flutter like ribbons into the flames.
Was she really so gullible? Was she really the woman who’d had no clue her husband was unfaithful?
Lola blew out a breath and admitted the truth. She was.
A mournful, wounded sound collected in Lola’s throat. She swallowed it back and gripped the fake-wood chair handles.
Just then the sheriff’s car pulled to the curb, lights flashing.
“Thank heavens,” Bitsy murmured.
Wearing his crisp brown-and-tan uniform and a stern expression, Sheriff Drew Taylor arrived with a fire extinguisher. He rented the run-down farmhouse Randy had inherited from his grandmother and was everything Lola’s husband hadn’t been—terse, tall, and trustworthy. Sure, he didn’t have Randy’s blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American good looks. Drew had short walnut-brown hair, a bump on the bridge of his nose, and a small nick above his right cheekbone. But he had the steady eyes and reserved smile you appreciated in an officer of the law.
Drew planted his boots on the pavement. “Ladies.”
That one word. It said, Peace will ensue.
Lola shifted in her chair, not ready to be peaceful.
Now Drew…Drew would never cheat on his wife (for the record, she’d left him and their daughter). He’d probably never cheated on anything in his entire life.
“I’ll give you thirty seconds to explain why there’s a fire here, or I’m going to have to take somebody in.” His gaze bypassed the Widows Club and landed on Lola.
It landed with a brown-eyed howdy-do that rocked Lola against her chair. It landed and made her think about empty seats across the dining room table, of shared laughter, shared pillows, and shared nachos. All the things she missed about marriage.
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