Hometown Hope: A Small Town Romance Anthology

by Zoe York

  “Consider it done,” he said, putting down the can and smiling. “Maybe I can earn my keep here for the weekend.”

  I was about to respond when I heard some kind of commotion coming from the east wing of the house, just to the other side of the kitchen. Chessy was upset about something. “Ah, just a minute,” I told Ryan, turning to find out what had the hen indignant at this late hour.

  I found her clucking outside one of the bedrooms I’d set up for the security team, pacing back and forth. She stopped when she saw me, squinting up at me.

  “You’re coming on too strong,” I told her. “You can’t throw yourself at him. And you can’t force your way into his room, Chess.” I scooped her up, and she settled against my chest, seeming to accept my chicken-crush wisdom. “Let him get some sleep,” I suggested. “You can charm him tomorrow.”

  I carried Chessy back to the little dog bed where she slept, which I’d tucked beneath an end table in the parlor when I’d moved Gran’s computer. We’d have to move this before the magazine people showed up too, I realized.

  Back in the kitchen, Ryan was poking around, investigating things. He looked so handsome with his slicked back hair, his strong broad chest. I could have just watched him forever. But he caught me staring.

  “That sounded… odd,” he said, the bright smile lighting his eyes.

  “That was Chessy. Gran’s pet chicken.”

  Ryan nodded. “Pet chicken. Right.”

  “What? You don’t have a pet chicken that lives inside your house and develops misplaced crushes on the security teams that pop in ahead of your famous sister?” I grinned.

  “No, I do not,” he said. “I’ll look into that. Hadn’t considered chickens as possible pets.”

  I looked around to make sure Chessy hadn’t followed me in. “I don’t recommend them. Very needy.”

  He chuckled, and then looked back toward the cake supplies. “So do I get to bake?”

  “You don’t have to, but it would actually be amazing to have help. You wouldn’t think it would be a big deal, but the cake has to be really big, and I’m not very confident. I watched a YouTube video, though, so it’s probably a sure thing.”

  “Well, then I’m sure you’d nail it.” He moved closer to me, that smile still working its magic on every female part of my body from my earlobes to my pinkie toes. I felt like I was humming. Inside. With my vagina.

  “Great. Okay. Um… I made pasta for Gran tonight, is that okay?” I worried for a minute he might be on one of those Hollywood diets Juliet had told me about before. Keto or vegan or non-GMO or non-soy, or all kale all the time, or… something different than the stuff I made for Gran.

  “I love pasta,” he said, and the words sounded genuine.

  “Go ahead and sit,” I said, again finding it was easier to talk to him if I ignored the devastating smile. And the face that went with it. “I’ll just heat it up real quick. Do you want a beer or something?”

  “Any chance of a glass of milk?”

  I poured a glass of milk, barely able to handle how much that simple request had skyrocketed my attraction for no real explicable reason. Was it because it was just so American? So boyish? So…real?

  I set his food in front of him with a slice of garlic bread, and slid into a chair across from him, worried the proximity might somehow send me into a hysterical fit. Or give me a case of the vapors or something, if those were an actual thing. Maryland was technically the South, after all.

  “This is amazing,” he said through a mouthful. “And wait,” he took a bite of bread. “Did you bake this?” He narrowed his eyes as if he’d caught me in a lie about baking.

  Oh how I wished I had in that moment. “Nope. I get it at the little local farmer’s market.”

  He nodded knowingly, and for a minute neither of us said anything. There was a warm glow from the lights above and a faint buzzing pulse from the cicadas outside, and something about sitting in a quiet kitchen as Ryan ate felt homey and safe. I felt my nerves begin to calm.

  “Never been to Maryland before?” I asked him.

  He looked around, as if the kitchen might be representative of the whole state. “Nope. First time. You grew up here, right?”

  I nodded. “You’d never know Juliet Manchester was from a place as far flung as this, right?”

  He tilted his head and looked up at me, the dark lashes around the blue eyes striking. “Not surprising really,” he said. “There’s a lot of beauty here.” This was delivered looking straight into my eyes, and a shiver went through me at his words.

  He was talking about Maryland. Which was definitely beautiful. Or maybe he was talking about Juliet. Who was also beautiful.

  “Yeah, there’s so much water, and it’s just really green and lush…”

  “That too. Tell me about the house,” he said, taking another bite.

  I leaned back in my chair, thinking about how much I loved this old house, the stories it held. I decided to tell him one of my favorite things about the place. “Have you ever heard of a priest hole?” I asked.

  The fork paused halfway to his mouth, and he shook his head lightly. “Sounds kinda dirty, Tess.”

  I laughed at that, enjoying the intimacy of the joke and the way he said my name. “It’s not, I promise.”

  “Darn. Okay, well tell me then.” Half his mouth lifted in a wry smile and then he took another bite. “Did I mention how good this is?”

  The way he was looking at me was not helping my focus. My skin was heating and I had the urge to flex muscles I didn’t think of often. Deep, inside, neglected lady muscles.

  Juliet’s boyfriend, I reminded myself.

  “Okay, well, I get carried away with this stuff, so stop me if you know this. Maryland was settled in the 1600s by a guy they called Lord Baltimore, and he was a Catholic.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said, encouraging me.

  “His real name was Cecelius Calvert, and he was fleeing persecution of the Catholics in England.”

  “Or he might have been fleeing persecution of people who named other people lame things like Cecelius,” Ryan pointed out.

  “Very judgy,” I chastised.

  He laughed. “Go on. Sorry. I’ll hold my judgment over dudes from the 1600s with chick names.”

  “Okay. Good.” I was warming to the telling of my tale, encouraged by Ryan’s warm laugh and intent gaze. “So he settled Maryland, but it didn’t stay mostly Catholic for very long. When they figured out they could grow tobacco here, a lot of low-cost labor was brought in, along with businessmen to run operations, and soon the Catholics were a minority.

  “So anyway, there were years of struggle between Catholics and Puritans, and eventually there was a Maryland Revolution that went on for two years. At the end of it, the colony was placed under royal control, and the Church of England was made the official church, so Catholics were being violently pursued, killed and run out.”

  “Oh oh.”

  “Yeah. So many of the original families down here were Catholic—descendants of the original settlers that came over with Calvert. And they were sympathetic to the priests who were being targeted directly, so they hid them in these secret hidey-holes called ‘priest holes.’”

  Ryan looked mildly disappointed, his lips and eyebrows pulling slightly down. “Not dirty.”

  I laughed. “No, but I think it’s cool. You want to see it?”

  “I’ve never had a gorgeous woman offer to show me her priest hole before.”

  I crossed my arms again and shot him a look. I’d offer to show him lots of things if he weren’t Juliet’s boyfriend. The words ‘gorgeous woman’ ricocheted around in my brain, but I kept them in a little cage up there to think about later.

  He raised his hands. “Okay, sorry. Yes, definitely. Let’s have a look.”

  I led Ryan to the pantry. “In here.”

  I opened the door and pulled the string to turn on the single bulb inside, and then bent down to roll back the rug covering the floor. There w
as a trap door below it, the outline barely noticeable in the hardwood planks. I pushed my fingers into the corner where there was a slightly bigger space, and pulled the door up.

  Ryan knelt down on the other side of the door, and we both peered into the dark space, which was really not much more than a hole cut into the earth below.

  “That’s really cool, Tess,” he said, looking up at me across the space. His intent and open gaze made my stomach flip.

  “Isn’t it? They used it for the Underground Railroad too.”

  “No shit?”

  A laugh rolled out of me, low and happy. No one ever wanted to talk history with me, and it was fun to see Ryan seem to truly appreciate my little diversion. “Yeah, no shit.”

  “I love history,” he said. “We have history out west, you know. But it’s not the same—not ours really. Not American, exactly, you know?”

  “I’d love to go out west,” I told him, closing the door again. He reached out and helped me smooth the rug over the floor, and then we stood.

  Suddenly, I was inches away from Ryan McDonnell in a space no bigger than most closets, his chest just a few inches from my face. My heart skittered as I looked up at him to find him smiling down at me, something flickering in his eyes. In any other situation, I would have said it felt like heat, like interest, like some kind of nearly sexual intensity between us. But this was not just some guy. And this guy was not available.

  And I was definitely imagining the energy drawing me closer to him.

  I stepped back, bumping into the shelves behind me and sending a couple cans crashing to the floor. The noise broke the strange moment into fragments that skittered away like mice, disappearing into the pantry’s dark corners as we righted the cans and went back out into the kitchen.

  “Did you get enough to eat?” I asked Ryan, unable to look at him now, for fear I’d fling myself into his arms.

  He cleared his throat, swallowed loudly. “Yeah, uh. Thanks, Tess. That was great.”

  I took the dishes from the table and walked to the sink. I needed to get back up to my room, to get some distance. The late hour and the headiness of being alone with Ryan McDonnell was doing things to my mind.

  “I can wash those,” he said, stepping up next to me.

  “Don’t be silly,” I told him. “You’re company. And we have a dishwasher.”

  He stood there a long minute more as I rinsed the bowl and glass, and then he stepped away. “Okay, well. I guess I’ll head up to bed then. Should we bake tomorrow?”

  I turned to face him.

  Mistake. Whatever I’d felt in the pantry was still there, burning in those eyes when I met them with my own.

  God, how did women function around this man?

  “You don’t really have to help with that,” I said quickly. I was certain he’d just been being nice. “I mean, I’ve got YouTube and the recipe.”

  “I’ll help. Tomorrow, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks.” How would I survive baking a cake with him? I wanted to throw myself into his arms, could I manage mixing and sifting instead?

  “Great.” He shot me another smile, and turned to go. At the doorway, he said, “Tess?” God, my name on his lips was like the nicest song I’d ever heard. It was better than Pitch Perfect and I was obsessed with that movie.

  I turned to find him lingering just inside the kitchen. “Yeah?”

  “It’s really nice to meet you.”

  And then he was gone.

  I collapsed into the chair he’d sat in and dropped my head into my hands, unable to process the amount of time and words I’d just shared with Ryan McDonnell, the movie star. This was not my life.

  I just wished I could keep my mind from embellishing everything that had just happened.

  He had definitely not been giving me a look in the pantry, right? He was Juliet’s boyfriend. And in my experience, when you had champagne, you didn’t go looking for moonshine.

  Chapter 5

  Ryan

  I woke to sun streaming through the tall windows of my room, and I stretched in bed and lounged longer than I probably should have, enjoying the lazy lack of anything I absolutely had to do.

  Sleep had come pretty easily, despite the unfamiliar location and bed. I was tired, for one thing, and that helped. The stranger thing, though, was that I felt oddly settled here. At home. And that was something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Maybe ever.

  I suspected some part of that had to do with Tess, but I couldn’t have explained exactly why.

  When she’d gotten me dinner, there had been something so natural about spending time with her, talking with her in the cozy old kitchen with its warm light and hidden spaces. This house—more than that, even—this place… it spoke to something inside me in a way I couldn’t understand in any terms that made sense. But I knew I liked it here. A part of me already felt sad that soon I’d be going back to the plastic people and shiny spaces that made up my regular life.

  Sure, there were great people and real things in Hollywood. But so much of my world was made up of people focused on things that just seemed somehow impermanent and flimsy to me. My own quest for stardom … what would it get me? Financial security, I hoped. And security for my dad. But beyond that? Look at what Juliet was going through, all in an effort to keep her reputation clean in the eyes of the world, all to stay on top in the minds of people who didn’t even know her.

  In another life, I’d have considered making a place like Maryland home. Maybe I had lived here in some previous life, hiding priests in tiny holes and growing tobacco like Tess said. But I’d chosen my home and my life for now. And the financial promise of the path I was currently walking made it pointless to think about things like this. Hell, maybe I’d known Tess in some past life, too. How else could I explain the way I felt around her, the closeness I sensed was already between us?

  Or maybe I was just longing for the kind of life I couldn’t have. At least not now. It didn’t stop me from thinking about it though, about what it would be like to live here with a girl like Tess in this quiet beautiful place, maybe open a little production company someday.

  After lounging in bed a while, I thought I could hear Juliet talking with her sister in low voices somewhere outside my door. I glanced out to see them both heading for the stairs and couldn’t resist the urge to let my eyes trail down Tess’s back as she disappeared from sight. Juliet was beautiful, but her sister was in a completely different class.

  The hot-as-balls class, if you wanted to know the truth. The class that made my blood pound a He-man rhythm through my veins and my nether regions come up with ideas that were altogether inappropriate, given that I was supposed to be dating her sister.

  Where Juliet was an indisputable beauty, her appeal was very obvious, almost in your face. Her sister, on the other hand … something about her made you want to look longer.

  From the long angles of her nose and chin to the round pout of that small mouth. She wasn’t tall, and she wasn’t short—she was perfect, as far as I could tell. She moved away from me, having no idea I was tracking her every move. Her body was curvy and generous, and everything about the way her hips moved as she walked made me want to drop my hands to her waist and feel the motion for myself—maybe pull it into me.

  If I was honest, Tess’s body made me think of dirty, dirty things… but I forced my mind away from them and chastised the parts of me that insisted on obsessing about what it might be like to feel her close and tight and hot around me as my hands filled themselves with her perfect breasts.

  Even though she was physically perfect, that wasn’t the thing that made Tess so strangely compelling, and I realized it wasn’t any one thing—it was everything I’d learned and seen so far. I realized I barely knew her, but something fundamental inside me had responded the second I first saw her, and now I seemed to be nursing a serious fixation. It was a little unsettling, actually, because I was a guy who spent long days around Hollywood starlets, and I’d never been more
taken with anyone than I was with this girl I’d found practically in the middle of nowhere.

  I wanted to know her. To have the privilege of learning her.

  There was the small issue of having to pretend to be smitten with her sister, however. But, I told myself there was no reason I couldn’t learn a little more about Tess Manchester on a purely platonic level while fulfilling my duties to her sister. And this little ruse wouldn’t last forever.

  It wasn’t long before Juliet came up to get me for lunch—I’d been catching up on email and general news in the room. Something about being so far from a big city made me feel oddly out of touch, despite the fact that we’d left Los Angeles just the night before. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant feeling, actually.

  “Come meet Gran,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.

  “Anything I need to know?” I tensed a bit at the thought of telling our lie to an elderly family matriarch. I wanted to make a good impression.

  While lying, of course.

  Juliet tilted her head to one side and then wrinkled her nose before speaking. “She’s quirky.”

  “Quirky how?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Juliet wasn’t lying. Gran, who I’d expected to be a frail old woman with maybe a cane or a shawl over her shoulders, was decked out in a designer sweat suit, looking a lot more Beyoncé than Grandma Moses. She was bent over the counter by the sink, giving a silver cocktail shaker a workout, when Juliet called out to get her attention.

  “Gran, this is Ryan,” she said.

  Gran looked over her shoulder with an appraising look and then turned back to her task, pouring a brown concoction into a martini glass before putting down the shaker and wiping her hands on her pants as she faced us. “Hello,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I’m Helen, but everyone just calls me Gran, so you might as well join in.”