Love Rebuilt

by Stewart, Delancey

  Love Rebuilt

  Delancey Stewart

  Contents

  Love Rebuilt

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Afterword

  Also by Delancey Stewart

  Love Rebuilt

  Kings Grove - Book One

  by Delancey Stewart

  Copyright © 2017 Delancey Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  LOVE REBUILT by Delancey Stewart

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  LOVE REBUILT is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-9963421-4-8

  Chapter 1

  I came to consciousness slowly, teased toward morning by the irritating tap, tap, tapping sound that had invaded my dream and was now pulling me toward the harsh light of day.

  As I veered toward wakefulness the noise was more than insistent. It was annoying and abrasive, and only one person I knew was capable of the level of irritation that I was feeling in that moment. I rolled over on the stiff mattress and dropped my feet to the thin bubbled linoleum floor. A glance out the window confirmed it. Jack.

  I pulled on the thin robe hanging on the back of the door and clattered my way through the tinny space to the front, throwing the flimsy door open to crash loudly against the side of the trailer.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” My voice surprised me. It carried all the frustration and annoyance I’d kept bottled up and hidden under my assurances to everyone that I was fine.

  “You’re a sight, Maddie.”

  Typical. Ambiguous. Everything Jack said could be interpreted nine different ways, and everything out of his mouth sounded charming, thanks to that lilting Scottish brogue of his. He knew it, too. It was his strategy for staying out of trouble.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, it’s not a compliment, love.” He gave me his half grin and cocked his head to the side, his waves perfectly styled above his perma-tanned face. God, he was sexy. And God, I hated the bastard.

  “Don’t call me ‘love’.” I knew it wasn’t a compliment. I couldn’t recall the last compliment my bastard of an ex had paid me. But now he believed I thought that he’d paid me a compliment and I was already losing this conversational battle. This is what happened when I had to talk to Jack before I’d had coffee.

  “You’re a gorgeous woman, Maddie, but this morning you’re the spittin’ image of the mountain woman, ya are. The tatty robe, the smudgy black stuff around your eyes…” He motioned to his eyes, as if I wouldn’t be sure where the smudgy black stuff was. And then he laughed. He was smiling, but the venom in his words worked as he’d intended. The smooth Scottish accent did nothing to me now except deepen my desire to kick him in the shins. Or in another part of his anatomy that might be more fitting.

  I tried not to care about his words, but I couldn’t help it. I swiped at my eyes. I didn’t exactly practice perfect makeup maintenance now that I was living on my own. In a trailer. No one was usually around to care. “What are you doing here, Jack?” My plan was to get to the heart of the matter and then get him the hell away from me.

  “Just doin’ you a favor, darlin’.”

  I stared at the mallet in his hand, and realized that he’d been pounding a sign into the ground in front of the half-framed house that stood next to my trailer. We were actually talking to one another through the non-existent walls of the front room. The front room of my dream house. My ex-dream house. The one I had been building with my ex-husband. Jack.

  “What’s the deal with the sign?”

  “What do think the deal with the sign is?” Jack grinned and my blood bubbled hot beneath my skin.

  “It’s eight a.m. I don’t want to play guessing games.”

  Jack turned away from me as a car motored slowly up the narrow road and came to a stop behind where he stood. “I think you’re about to find out.” As he said it, he turned back around and winked at me.

  The wink threw me over the edge.

  “Don’t wink at me, you ass!” I practically screamed it, and as I did, the owner of the car emerged, his head turning my way as he ran a hand through shiny auburn locks.

  Wow. I suppressed an involuntary shiver and pulled my robe a little closer around me.

  The car was one of those practical luxury types. A Land Rover or a Land Cruiser or some kind of four-wheel-drive Land thing. I wasn’t an expert in slow, hulking cars. Actually, given that I now found myself living in a shack next to a half-built reminder of my failed marriage and was working in a diner, it turned out that I was not an expert at anything. Not marriage. And certainly not men.

  The man who approached the threshold of my trailer, taking in all my terrycloth-robed glory, had an air of practical luxury about him, too. He was tall and broad, his hair glinting with hints of copper in the sunlight. It was a little long, a little messy, but clearly some attention was paid to it, since it looked thick and healthy. He wore aviator sunglasses and they hid most of his face. But not his lips. And his lips…his lips were like a sculpture. The kind of lips that would make nuns blush and giggle. They were a little too perfect, maybe. But the guy wore flannel, like most people in this mountain town. And the short stubble covering his jaw gave him a rugged look that inspired a wild urge to rub my hand over it. Or better yet, photograph it. I longed to dart back inside for my camera, but I already looked like a loon. A robe-wearing loon with a camera would definitely not be better. The man stepped around the car, gazing up at the half-built house, and I chastised myself for staring. My fascination, beyond his movie-hunk looks, was that this man was clearly different from the other people I’d seen up here, but he still managed to fit in. Something I hadn’t mastered.

  “How much?” the man asked, speaking to Jack.

  “How much what?” I asked, my voice bordering on a high-pitched scream. What was going on here?

  Jack ignored me. “I guess given the state, and the fact that winter’s not far out, the better question is what’s it worth to you?”

  The man walked around the house, stepping into rooms, and testing structural beams with his hands and his body weight.

  While he wandered around inside my house, I stepped down the front step and stomped through the dust in my pink slippers to where Jack stood with his arms crossed.

  “What is going on?” I hissed.

  Jack raised an eyebrow as he looked at me. “Is that the teddy from our wedding night?”

  I glanced down, horrified to see a flash of leopard-print silk exposed in the deep V-neck of the robe. “No.” It was. He was right. My humiliation was practically complete.

  “You can take the girl out of the city…” Jack grinned, shaking his head.

  I pulled the robe tighter. So what if I still wore my expensive ling
erie to bed? I deserved nice things. Even if Jack had taken most of them from me. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Selling the house for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Thought you’d appreciate the help.”

  “I don’t want your help, you cheating ass!”

  The man had stopped examining the house and was looking toward me now, a tilt to his head and a half-smile on those sculpted lips. I wished he’d take off those damned shades so I could see what he thought of this whole exchange, which he had surely overheard. I don’t know why I cared.

  “This is my house, Jack. Maybe you forgot. Maybe you’re so overwhelmed by the details of managing your own house—the one that has actual walls and a roof and working plumbing and sits on a nice street in a real city—Maybe that’s all so overwhelming that you forgot this heap is mine.”

  Jack had the grace to drop my gaze for a split second. But then the smile appeared again. So freakin’ confident. “I didn’t think you really wanted it. Wouldn’t you rather have the cash?”

  I might, but definitely not with his help. “Isn’t that for me to decide?”

  “You’ve been sitting on it for four months, love. It’s gonna rain and snow and blow up here before much longer. If someone’s gonna build some walls, they need to do it now. Not good for the frame to sit out exposed like this for so long.”

  “That’s not really your concern. And since when are you a construction expert?”

  Jack took my elbow in a conciliatory gesture, and I wrenched out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me!”

  He offered me his most condescending smile, the one reserved for willful children and, of course, for me. “This gentleman is serious. He called as soon as the ad went live. He’s got money. Wants to pay cash. I still care about you, Maddie, and I’m trying to help. ”

  I sniffed. His platitudes would do very little to ease my burning desire to see him foundering in a pit of venomous pythons or drowning in a giant vat of scalding pea soup. “I’ll tell you what would help me then. Talk to my lawyer next time she calls instead of dodging her! Give me what you owe me and then get out of my life, stay out of it, and get the hell off my property.” I raised my chin and pointed it toward the strapping stranger who’d gone back to testing the foundation. “Both of you! Get off my property! It is not for sale!” I leveled my gazed back at Jack, “And take down whatever listing you put up!”

  I marched over and grasped the sides of the For Sale sign that Jack had planted and gave it a mighty tug. Naturally it wouldn’t budge, and both men were staring at me as I pulled on the thing. The entire world was conspiring to ensure that I looked like a complete idiot whenever possible. I bent my knees and really put my body into it, pulling as hard as I could, but the sign was planted like a Sugar Pine, roots deep and wrapped around granite.

  “Let me give you a hand.” The voice that rolled over my shoulder was low and smooth. Not Jack. The stranger.

  Before I had time to respond, two strong hands reached around the sides of me, grasping the sign below mine. He was standing directly behind me, practically hugging me. As if things weren’t awkward enough. And he was close enough that I could smell him—some distracting combination of the woods and baked goods seemed to waft off of him.

  “On three,” he said. “One, two…”

  We pulled together and the sign popped out of the ground. The sudden release sent me backwards, of course, right into the solid chest of this complete stranger who had just been sizing up the irritating relic of my former life. I practically bounced off him in an effort to get some space between us, and then pulled my robe back together, glancing up at him.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  He handed me the sign. I took it while looking up at his face, but I still couldn’t read him. Damned sunglasses. All I could see was a reflection of myself. Brown curls flying in every direction, pink robe barely covering the ridiculous teddy I’d slept in.

  “If you change your mind, why don’t you give me a call?” he said. Then he handed me a card that he seemed to produce from thin air. This guy was either charming or eerie. I hadn’t had time to decide which.

  “I won’t.” I put the card in the pocket of my robe without looking at it. Unfortunately, that pocket had come unstitched a month ago when I’d caught it on the handle of the bathroom door, so the card fell to the ground at my feet.

  The man scooped it up and leaned forward, tucking it into the pocket on the other side of my robe. “There you go,” he said. As he pulled away, a lingering scent of pine and cinnamon floated by. He smelled like the mountains. And like coffee cake.

  I just stared. Because pretty much every last vestige of dignity I’d imagined myself to have that morning had dropped with the card to the dusty ground through the stupid hole in my pocket.

  “Well then,” I said. “If we’re all done here.” I turned and marched back up the rickety stairs of my trailer and slammed the dinky door. It barely made a sound.

  As I made coffee, I heard both cars drive away. When I was sure they were gone, I pulled open the shades and stared out into the wall of dark green trees across the road from my lot. Alone again. Really, truly alone. Just me and my stupid unfinished house and my stupid trashy trailer. Living my stupid, stupid life.

  Chapter 2

  When the morning’s excitement was over, and I’d had three or four cups of coffee, I felt prepared to move forward with the day. Which, for me, meant pulling a long shift at the diner in town.

  Kings Grove was actually a wide spot in the road at just over six thousand feet up a mountain. We had the necessities—a post office, a market, a library, a restaurant, and a hardware store. There was a bed and breakfast and an old lodge, and the town saw its fair share of tourists thanks to the towering trees that clustered in thousand-year-old groves to watch over us like sentinels. Grudgingly, I had to admit the place had a certain amount of charm. I’d liked it enough when I was a kid, when my family came to camp on the land where I now inhabited a tin can.

  Forget that Jack had moved me here from San Diego, where we’d done wonderful things like go to the Old Globe Theater to watch Shakespeare in the summers, and eat the freshest seafood ever in La Jolla cove at a rooftop restaurant near the pink hotel where he had proposed. Forget that I’d been a girl who could find no occasion where heels were not appropriate, or that my previous wardrobe exploded from a walk-in closet roughly the size of my trailer. Where else would you store sixteen pairs of designer blue jeans? Before my divorce, an endless search for the perfect pair of jeans was exactly my kind of challenge.

  But now? Now I was stranded. Literally.

  My lawyer still could not explain to me how Jack had walked away with almost everything even though he’d been the one who cheated. When I’d pressed her, she’d thrown up her hands in frustration. Typical. Jack was the kind of guy who got everything he wanted. He was the definition of winning. Charlie Sheen had absolutely nothing on him. He got the house. He got the Escalade and left me with the racy Jag coupe I’d gotten as an engagement present, which was hardly an appropriate vehicle given the terrain of my new home—though I did love that car. He got to keep his cheap little girlfriend and his fancy life, and I got…this. A half-built shell in a dusty mountain town where I didn’t belong and hadn’t belonged since I was a kid. Oh, and let’s not forget, I also had a rickety fifth-wheel trailer on blocks that Jack had bought used and towed up here when he’d put together his master plan for getting me out of the way. A trailer that barely had plumbing and maintained only a fleeting acquaintance with electricity.

  That said, I was Maddie Turner before I became Madeline Douglas. And being a Turner meant that I would stand up, dust myself off, and fight my way forward. That’s what Turners did, as my dad would have reminded me if he were capable.

  When I tried hard enough, I could evoke his voice, “You didn’t have any of that fancy crap before, Mads. You don’t need it. You’ve got brains. Use ‘em.”

  Dad ha
d never been sentimental. When I cried as a kid, he’d wiped my tears and then sent me right back out to handle whatever situation had gotten the best of me. And that’s what I imagined he would do now if I could call him to complain about the crappy turn my life had taken.

  My imagined version of Dad continued, “It’s not forever Mads. Get your feet back under you and the wind’ll loft your sails again soon.” He was always ready with a sailing metaphor. He’d grown up on a boat, his father chartering for rich folks who wanted to sail the Caribbean but didn’t know starboard from their own derrieres.

  I tried to give myself a Dad-worthy pep talk as I pulled on the maroon polo shirt that was required for my fancy diner gig. It’s not forever. Just for now. I glared at myself in the small mirror in the bathroom. This shirt was hideous. It matched the way I felt about my life at the moment. It was fitting that I should have to endure it all while wearing a poly-cotton blend in a color that brought out the red in my skin tone.

  I knew I didn’t have to stay up here, really. In some ways, living in this trailer next to a half-conceived dream was like letting Jack win. I could leave, start over somewhere new. But I’d done that before. Moving to San Diego had been the fresh start I’d needed when things had fallen apart with my boyfriend in Los Angeles. And LA had been a fresh start when I’d lost my job after 9/11 in New York.

  I was good at fresh starts, but if I was truthful, I was tired. I didn’t want to start again. I didn’t want to plaster on that big make-new-friends smile and build my whole life from scratch again. At thirty-one, I was ready for a little permanence. This was, perhaps, an ironic desire for a woman living in a trailer to have, but it was my desire nonetheless. And then there was the small matter of money. I didn’t have much.