Hometown Hope: A Small Town Romance Anthology

by Zoe York

  I’d walked across the hallway at the back of the church and barged into Earl’s dressing room. There he’d stood, tall and handsome with his dark blonde hair and brown eyes. It was what I never saw in his eyes when he looked at me that pushed me to tell him I couldn’t marry him. When Earl looked at me, I saw a kind regard, a humored attempt to appreciate me for who I was. Yet, there was never anything close to the hot fire I’d known once upon a time with someone else. I’d apologized, but I’d also been flat pissed with him for trying to trick himself and me into thinking he really loved me.

  A dash into the late afternoon rain on a cool summer day in Alaska had felt cleansing. Until I got chilled and finally ducked into this bar. I didn’t even know what it was called. I suddenly recalled I didn’t have a penny on me. It wasn’t like I’d been carrying a purse for my aborted walk up the aisle. Oh well, oh hell. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror behind the bar and bit back a sigh. My amber hair was a damp, tangled mess.

  I didn’t think much about how I looked. To be honest, it was more that I tried not to. I was as tall as most men. I ran my own construction business to boot. I tried to never let it show, but when it came to my femininity, seeds of doubt were planted firmly inside. It didn’t help that all but one man treated me pretty much like a man, Earl included.

  I gave my head a hard shake and glanced around the bar again, scanning the collection of people. Businessmen rubbed elbows with fishermen here. Sports reigned supreme on the televisions screens mounted at various points in the bar, and a few pool tables were clustered in the corner. That’s what I’d do. I loved pool and was pretty damn good at it.

  A few minutes later, I was paired up in a game with three other guys. They’d thrown a few looks askance at my wedding dress and seemed amused at playing with me. Tipsy and deep into my don’t give a damn mode, I set out to beat them.

  Roughly an hour later, I grinned as my last ball rolled neatly into a pocket corner. “Well, boys,” I said, glancing among them.

  The boys in question had been drinking and gotten steadily more sullen as we played. One of them, a hulking sort with dark eyes and hair, glared at me. They’d bet on this game after the first two, and I was due five dollars each from them.

  Mr. Hulk, as I’d come to call him in my head, stepped close to me, too close for comfort. “No fiver from any of us. You got that?”

  I was just drunk enough not to care. I stretched up to my full five foot eleven inches. He might have more bulk than me, but I was a hair taller. “Ah, I see. You only like to bet if you’re gonna win? What an ass,” I said, my lips curling in a sneer.

  I was stretched too thin emotionally with white hot anger, a simmering anger I’d kept buried for the entirety of the two years I’d wasted on Earl, and a tad too drunk to be reasonable right now. When the jerk stepped closer and put his finger on my chest, I didn’t even think. I punched him, right in the nose.

  “You fuckin’ bitch!” he shouted as he swiped his sleeve across his face, smearing the blood from his nose on his cheek.

  He hauled off and punched me back, his fist bouncing under my eye. He had enough heft to send me tumbling to the floor, an inglorious heap of muddied silk spilling around me. I was just tipsy enough not to care that my face was throbbing. Without the mud, minus the dingy hardwood floor under me and definitely minus the crowd now gathered around, I considered the way the silk of my dress spilled in a near perfect circle would have made a great wedding photo—one of those candid shots people would love.

  In a flash, Tank was there, shoving the guy who’d punched me away. Voices above me collided with each other.

  “Dude, she hit me first!”

  “Self defense…”

  “Yeah, but she’s a girl…”

  “She’s a fuckin’ giant, and she can hit. She’s no girl!”

  I closed my eyes and wished I could crawl into a hole. The buzz that had kept me afloat this afternoon and evening dissolved into mortification. The jerk was right. I was a giant and no one would ever look at me and think girly thoughts.

  “Amelia?”

  My heartbeat came to a screeching stop and then jumpstarted with a hard kick. I’d know that voice anywhere. Through the jumble around me with Tank leaning over to ask if I was okay, that voice rang like a loud bell inside. One man. Only one man had ever looked at me with heat in his eyes, heat so hot it singed me. That man spoke my name now. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know. I did anyway. Because I couldn’t bear not to see him.

  Cade Masters stood at the edge of the circle gathered around me, another man in a bar crowded with men. Shaggy dark brown hair, green eyes, and a body of raw muscle stood before me. My heart felt as if it had been split open. I’d loved Cade in that wild headlong way that only youth allowed. No more than seven years had passed since I’d seen him, but it felt like forever. Cade had broken my heart and walked out of my life when I was twenty-two. He hadn’t just broken my heart, he’d betrayed me.

  Anger flashed hot and high inside, yet I couldn’t look away. My eyes ate Cade up. He wore faded jeans, the fabric so worn it hugged his muscled legs like a caress, and a denim jacket over a black t-shirt. He had something of an outdoorsy, biker vibe. Once upon a time, he’d taken me on long rides on his motorcycle through the nearly empty highways in Alaska surrounding our hometown. He stepped through the crowd and knelt at my side, his green gaze coasting over me. “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded without really thinking about it. He lifted a hand and ran the backs of his fingers along my cheekbone. Oh right, some guy had just punched me in the face. Cade’s presence had wiped my mind clean of everything else. With barely a brush of his touch, my heart fluttered and heat tightened inside.

  “You sure?”

  I swallowed, suddenly aware of my throbbing cheek. My entire day flashed through my mind. A gloriously shitty day. I fought against the tears, but they welled up, unbidden and beyond my control. One tear rolled down my cheek and then another and another. Of all the times and places to encounter the one and only man who still held a piece of my heart, this had to be the absolute worst.

  Cade’s eyes never left mine. Something flickered deep in the depths of them, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. Without a word, he slipped his arm around my waist and lifted me up, bundling me into his arms as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said and started to stride away.

  Tank caught him by the arm, and Cade glanced to him. “Yeah?”

  “Just making sure she’s okay,” Tank replied.

  All I could do was nod. I was so totally not okay, but I was okay in the sense Tank was asking.

  Tank’s warm gaze held mine, this bartender who barely knew me, but had somehow known I’d had a bad day and just needed to be left in peace while I had a few beers. I should’ve stayed put in my seat at the bar. My raw emotions and crazy day, all of my own making if I was being honest with myself, had gotten me into this mess.

  “You want the police involved?” Tank asked.

  I shook my head and finally found my voice. “No. Let’s call it even. I punched him, he punched me.”

  “You know this guy?” Tank asked next, nodding to Cade.

  “Uh huh. It’s okay. He’s an old friend of my family’s. No need to worry,” I managed. On its face, my explanation was true. Cade and I had grown up together in Willow Brook, Alaska. Our families had known each other for years. Yet, my explanation left out so much of what Cade meant to me, it was almost laughable.

  Tank released his grip on Cade’s arm and let us be. Cade was quiet as he strode through the bar, the crowd parting around him. I could only imagine how we looked—me in my dirty not-wedding dress and him giving off his usual back the hell off vibes. It was a shock to see him for the first time in years and even more of a shock to be held in his arms. I felt at home in his strong embrace. He held me easily. He always had. I loved that about him. Cade was a good four inches taller than me at six foot thre
e inches and had never cared about how tall I was. He pushed through the door of the bar, stepping out into the late evening. The rain had stopped at some point during the long hours I’d been hiding in the bar.

  He paused once we were outside on the sidewalk and glanced down, his gaze catching mine. “Why are you wearing a wedding dress?”

  That was Cade, never one to waste time on preliminaries. I’d loved that about him. Oh how I’d loved so many things about Cade, back before he’d left my heart bruised and battered. Right now, I couldn’t seem to recall the pain. All I knew was it felt so good—so, so, so good to be with him.

  Cade

  “I was supposed to get married today. I didn’t,” Amelia said.

  I stared down at her and tried to collect my thoughts into something sensible. But there was nothing sensible about me when it came to Amelia Haynes. Right now, in fact, I was wondering if maybe I should carry her down the street to the courthouse and marry her. I wanted to. Damn did I want to.

  The only thing holding me back was the memory of the look on her face the last time I’d seen her. She’d walked in on her former best friend trying to kiss me in bed. It didn’t matter that I’d been turning away and had been plain horrified to wake up and find Shannon climbing into the bed naked. No, what mattered was Amelia saw Shannon mashing her mouth against mine and then acting like it had happened before. Amelia’s face had gone white and then dark with fury. I never got another chance to talk to her. Nothing ever happened with Shannon, but Amelia iced me out of her life. The whole situation was made worse by the fact I’d been about to leave Willow Brook, Alaska for a year a week later. Not enough time to make things right.

  The emotional upheaval hadn’t helped me think clearly. I’d left Willow Brook for my planned year with a hotshot firefighting crew in California and mostly stayed away ever since. I’d returned to Willow Brook a few times to visit my family, but I’d never seen Amelia. At first, it was because I was pissed. She’d shut me out so completely. By the time I got around to thinking maybe I should try to at least make some peace, she was dating Earl Osborne by then. I’d bitterly accepted it was probably best to let it go. No sense in stirring up the past.

  I was in Anchorage now because I was taking care of a few errands before driving to Willow Brook tomorrow. I’d accepted a job as a foreman on a hotshot crew based out of Willow Brook. I was finally moving home because nowhere else felt like it for me. I’d hoped I was over Amelia, but one look at her and she gutted me.

  I stared down into her eyes and tried to think. Her eyes were like honeyed cognac. Her hair, amber flecked with gold, fell in tousled waves around her shoulders. It was a mess really. All of her was. Her wedding dress was dirty, a bruise was forming on her cheek just under her eye, and I was pretty sure she was drunk.

  She stared back at me, and I realized I hadn’t said a thing since she made her announcement. “You were supposed to get married today?”

  “Yup.” She nodded forcefully. “Sure was. I walked out. Couldn’t do it. You know why?” she asked, a mulish tone to her question.

  “Why?”

  She poked me in the chest with her index finger. “It’s all your fault.”

  I was lost, I truly was. How could it be my fault she didn’t get married?

  “Amelia, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I finally said.

  She rolled her eyes and sighed dramatically. “No one looks at me the way you did. That’s the whole problem. Why’d you have go and be such an asshole?”

  While I was reverberating at what she said, she kept on talking, the words spilling out every which way, here and there a word slurring. “Earl tried, oh he tried, to act like it mattered, but he was like every other guy I dated. Not that there were that many. I’m too big. I’m not feminine enough. It’s like he thought he could prove he was a man by dating me. Stupid, stupid, stupid.” She punctuated these words with a thump of her forehead against my chest, all the while I stood frozen on the sidewalk. Traffic rolled by and pedestrians stepped around us.

  Her eyes whipped up again, lasering me with an accusing glare. “You weren’t like that. But after it all, you were.”

  Anger rose inside. She’d boxed me out of her life so effectively, I’d never had a chance to even tell her what didn’t happen with Shannon. I looked down at Amelia and started walking quickly, driven by the lingering anger at what tore us apart and the fresh anger at what she said about herself. She kicked her legs against mine.

  “What are you doing?”

  I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know. It so happened my truck was parked just ahead. I kept walking and stopped beside it, easing her down. The moment her feet landed on the sidewalk, she tried to push away, only to stumble. I reached for her reflexively, catching her fast against me. A bolt of need hit me. Amelia was tall and strong with generous curves. Just as before, my body knew what it wanted. I’d always loved how she stood nearly level with me. My eyes canted down of their own accord to see the soft curves of her breasts mounding up over the fitted top of her wedding dress. I had to force my gaze up and found hers wide and locked on me.

  A familiar electricity arced to life. This was Amelia. This was us. Nothing had faded between us, if anything, it burned hotter than it ever had. In a distant corner of my mind, I tried to tell myself not to do this. If I wanted to make things right, I had to go slow. Yet, with her held against me and her amber eyes flashing fire, I did the only thing I wanted. I backed her against my truck. “You’re not too big. Don’t ever say that again,” I growled before crushing my lips to hers.

  It was as if no time had passed, well except for the fact I was pouring seven years of longing into our kiss. She arched into me and threaded a hand roughly into my hair, moaning in my mouth with every stroke of her tongue against mine. I couldn’t stop kissing her. She felt so good, so damn good. My mind fuzzed out and all I knew was the feel of her against me. A horn honked nearby, and Amelia tore her lips free.

  I opened my eyes, my heart pounding so hard, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I cracked a rib. Her head fell back against my truck. She closed her eyes, her breath heaving. Her fingers loosened in my hair and her palm slid down to rest over my chest. After a moment, she opened them.

  “What was that?” she finally asked over the pounding of our hearts.

  “I never stopped missing you.”

  Amelia

  I came out of sleep suddenly, my eyes flying open. Darkness greeted me. I didn’t know what the hell I’d been dreaming about. For months now, I’d been having anxiety-fueled dreams. Every so often I’d remember them, but they weren’t reality-based. The last one I recalled had involved me falling out of a plane in the sky. They’d started not long after Earl and I had finally settled on a wedding date. I should’ve known right away what they meant. I’d been a bundle of anxiety and nerves about the impending wedding and had known deep inside I didn’t want it and neither did Earl. Well, I couldn’t speak for Earl. What I knew was I didn’t feel much from him. Having once experienced love—the wild, thrumming kind—and passion—the out of control, burning yearning kind—I’d known we were about to miss out big time.

  I couldn’t remember where I was and suddenly became aware of the body beside me. My eyes gradually adjusted to the dark room, and I could make out the smudgy outlines of the basic furniture in the hotel room. The body behind me? Definitely not Earl. I knew this with certainty because the man was curled up around me and I could feel a rather impressive erection against my bottom. Earl tended to sleep flat on his back. In fact, I couldn’t recall a single time when he’d spooned with me. My mind gradually flickered to life from its slumber.

  Cade Masters. Here. With me. In bed. The muddled anxiety of my dreams morphed into the most confusing string of feelings I’d ever experienced. It felt so, so, so, so good to have Cade curled up around me. If I thought about it, which I didn’t like to do, Cade was the last man I’d been with who’d been affectionate like this with me. He’d almost alwa
ys touched me—no matter where we were. If we were in public, he had an arm over my shoulders, or my hand held fast in his. In private, well…we’d been young and foolishly in love. We’d snuck off every chance we could get before we were eighteen. After that, we hadn’t bothered with sneaking. In bed, we slept just like we were now—with him snugged up behind me, one of his strong, rugged hands resting on the curve of my belly.

  It felt so good to have him here, so good it was dangerous. On the heels of how good it felt, I felt sad. Again. I’d made a mess of yesterday. I’d tossed my phone into a ditch somewhere along my meandering walk through Anchorage after I’d dashed out of the church. I hadn’t wanted to answer anyone’s calls. I must’ve walked for a solid hour before I ducked into the bar where Cade found me. Oh God. I bit back a groan. I’d started a fight. If anything represented how angry I was at the state of my life, that fight did. I’d hurt Earl, but he hadn’t played fair with me either. I didn’t know what he thought he’d get out of marrying me, but he didn’t love me. Not the way Cade once had.

  Correction—not the way I thought Cade once had. That old bitterness twisted its knife in my heart. I’d lost two of the most important people in my life in one day—Cade and my former friend, Shannon. I’d been out of town for the weekend. I couldn’t even recall why. I’d returned to the small home I shared with Cade to walk in and find Shannon—completely naked—climbing into bed with him and kissing him. Aside from all the obvious reasons why that hurt like hell, it was all made worse by how Shannon just happened to be the girly, gorgeous girl all the guys chased after when we were in high school. It got under my skin to see Cade with her, and I’d never been able to shake how small I felt in that moment.

  In the years since, I had plenty of reasons to reconsider whether I might have misinterpreted what happened, but in the end, all I knew was crushing pain in my heart and burning anger.