This Loving Feeling (A Mirror Lake Novel)

by Miranda Liasson

  ALSO BY MIRANDA LIASSON

  Heart and Sole

  A Man of Honor

  The Mirror Lake Novels

  This Thing Called Love

  This Love of Mine

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Miranda Liasson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503937307

  ISBN-10: 1503937305

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  For Marissa

  CONTENTS

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  Samantha Rushford took one step out of the old gym and headed off the posse of lanky, slightly acne-prone teenage boys at the pass. “You know, Calvin,” she said, speaking to their leader, “if you bring anything into this gym that even remotely resembles an intoxicating substance, I’m going to have to report you, and you’re one of my best students. Being that graduation is just around the corner, I really don’t want to do that.”

  Calvin nervously adjusted his tux tie and had the decency to look at least a little guilty as he contemplated his options.

  “Listen to her, Cal,” a shorter, stockier boy to his right said. “Her brother’s the police chief.”

  Smart boy, Leo. Sam stood straighter and crossed her arms in authoritative teacher fashion.

  The tall boy in front gave her a wink. “Aw, c’mon, Ms. Rushford, haven’t you ever been eighteen?”

  Oh, Lord, yes. Yes, she had been, and she didn’t want to remember it. “That’s why I’m giving you all a warning instead of blowing the whistle right now.” She turned her gaze back to Calvin. “So, I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that flask you just tucked into your tux jacket as long as you head up over the hill and get rid of it. Deal?”

  For an instant, his expression turned defiant. Please, please listen, she pleaded silently. He’d come such a long way from an across-the-tracks kid to a talented artist who’d earned a scholarship to Rhode Island School of Design, one of the most prestigious art programs in the country. “Besides, don’t you guys have real dates to keep you out of trouble?”

  Calvin flashed a grin. “My date and all the other girls are inside waiting to see if Lukas Spikonos shows up—as if a big recording artist like him would actually come back to a place like Mirror Lake.”

  Sam placed a hand over her chest. That sudden twinge was probably reflux. Her body rebelling against the slice of pizza with everything that she’d eaten an hour ago. Her heart couldn’t possibly have knocked loudly at the sound of that name. Not after all these years.

  Lukas Spikonos. Greek god and recording artist who’d been compared at different points to John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, and “The Boss.” The wildly popular hometown boy who left their sleepy little tourist town to become the newest breakout singing sensation.

  Oh, yes, there had been a special buzz about the gym, fueled by rumors that someone had thought they’d seen a big black tour bus pull off the highway outside of town, but Sam knew better. Lukas Spikonos was through with Mirror Lake for good. Not to mention her. “There’s a good chance everyone will be waiting a long time for a celebrity who’s too busy to show. You guys will just have to make your dates extra happy to see you—without the happy sauce, right?”

  The boy walked up the grassy hill behind the gym and emptied the booze into the bushes. “Better toss the flask, too,” she called. She knew the cops would be making the rounds because her brother Tom, who was head of the Mirror Lake PD, wouldn’t dare tolerate any shenanigans at the high school prom under his watch.

  “Stay out of trouble, right, Cal?” she said as she held the gym door open.

  “Right, Ms. Rushford,” he grumbled, holding up his hands in surrender. Once the boys all filed inside, she tugged the big metal door closed. She could only hope she’d shut out the trouble, too.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so easy on those boys.” Her fellow teacher and best friend, Jess, had suddenly materialized at her elbow. “They’ll think they can get away with anything.”

  “They’re good kids,” Sam said. She watched the guitar player in the student band on the stage at one end of the gym lean down and take a request from a pretty teenage girl in a red dress. It was a personal mission to convey to her students, especially the more troublesome ones, that someone cared.

  She lowered her voice. “Besides, if it weren’t for my brother finding our stash of booze in my trunk on our prom night junior year we’d have gotten in even worse trouble.” Her oldest brother Brad, a successful restaurateur, had made them pour it out one bottle at a time while he stood and watched. Then she’d had to clean the restaurant toilets for the next month.

  Jess shook her head. “We did push limits sometimes,” she said. “Some of which I regret.”

  “We were teenagers. That’s what teenagers do. Although I am sorry about the Bite Me tattoo on my right butt cheek.” Which would be there forever. Sam had done a lot of limit pushing to irritate her controlling oldest brother who’d helped raise her after her parents had died, but it had been more to exert her independence than to rebel outright.

  She’d also had the worst high school experience ever after being bullied senior year. It was at that time, when she was angry and abandoned by nearly all her friends except for Jess, that she could have gone down a much darker path. Ironically, it was her attraction to a bad boy that had turned her around and saved her. That bad boy had been Lukas Spikonos.

  There went that spasm in her chest again. An image appeared in her mind of a young Lukas staring at her, his face illuminated by the blue glow of dashboard lights, looking for all the world like he wanted her more than breathing or eating or living.

  Which ultimately turned out not to be the case. There was too much water under the Lukas Spikonos bridge to take a dip in again. But suffice it to say, Sam understood the value of intervention at critical moments in life when you’re young and stupid and one misstep can cause your life to take a very, very wrong turn.

  “Hey, ladies,” Evan Wolensky, the AP physics teacher, said as he joined them. He pushed up his glasses with his wrist as he balanced two punch cups, handing one to Sam.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He held the other one out as an offering. “Would you like some, Jessica?”

  “Oh, thanks, Ev, hon,” she said. “Well, guess I better go man my corner of the gym. Wouldn’t want any bumping and grinding going on, now would we?” She beamed her usual friendly-but-striking smile, and as she reached for the punch, her gorgeous blonde hair shimmered, and her big blue eyes sparkled with humor.
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  Jess couldn’t help being a knockout, but she was always careful to rein in her charisma around Evan, who had a big crush on her. Yet Sam could tell that even a simple smile had atomic impact on him.

  Evan swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. He looked at Jess as if he were imagining a completely different kind of bumping and grinding. One involving him and her.

  “Teachers, to your stations, please,” Joe Malone, their principal, said as he swept the area. He shot Sam a kind smile. And a wink. “Remember to leave enough room for the Holy Spirit between these children. No dirty dancing at Mirror Lake High prom. We have a reputation to uphold.”

  “Right.” She knew Joe was only half kidding. But then, he always used humor to enforce the rules. That was one of the things she liked so much about her boss. He was kind and reasonable. She knew she was one of his favorites. Not in an icky way—with his bald head, tall frame, and slightly rounded middle, he gave off the air of a benevolent father—and he was a genuinely kind person.

  She’d always been grateful for his help when she was a confused teen. He’d even pulled strings to get her a job at the town diner, Pie in the Sky, when she lost her job at the craft store after she’d gotten suspended her senior year. Somehow, he’d seen something in her that she hadn’t been able to see herself, and it had changed everything.

  That was all part of her dark past, and life was so much better now. Any remaining rebel that remained in her had been quashed at nineteen when her brother Kevin had suddenly died, along with his beautiful wife, in a tragic car accident that had left their tiny baby girl orphaned. After that, she’d made peace with Brad and stopped pushing limits. In fact, Kevin’s death had turned her into a person who rarely took risks. Life was too short, family meant everything, and rocking the boat was something you did as a teen but not when you’d matured.

  Her own experiences had taught her to dig beneath the surface of her students’ behavior. She, more than most, understood how one teacher could make a difference.

  Joe put an arm around her shoulder and dropped his voice. “You sure I can’t convince you to renew that contract? I hate to start the job search if there’s some hope . . .”

  “True love calls,” Sam said with a shrug. It was calling her to Boston to be with her almost-fiancé Harris.

  “Can’t it call you closer to home?” Jess added.

  “All right then,” Joe said. “C’mon, Evan. I’m feeling restless. Let’s stir up some excitement, maybe confiscate some weed or something.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

  “Bye, ladies,” Evan said, leaving them with a little wave and a polite smile.

  “He’s a nice guy, Jess,” Sam said a little mournfully. Okay, so he was tall and a little on the thin side. He was probably athletic—you simply couldn’t tell under his baggy clothes.

  “Maybe he is nice. But I have no interest in physics.” She wrinkled up her nose as if she’d said Black Death instead of physics. “We have nothing in common.”

  As they watched Joe and Evan disappear into the crowded gym, Jess said, “I wish you weren’t leaving. Who else is there to save me from Mrs. Higgins?” The grand dame of the English department, she’d been teaching there since Hawthorne walked the earth. Okay, maybe just since Hemingway. “Don’t go, dammit. Who will I complain about Mr. Malone to? And my students. My awful, awful students. You can’t go!”

  “I’m only going to Boston,” Sam said. To a brand-new high school there, even though Harris had insisted she didn’t even have to work unless she wanted to. The same melancholy pricked her heart as always whenever she thought about leaving Mirror Lake for good. “Maloney Baloney is a cool boss. And deep down, you love your students.”

  Jess rolled her eyes. “You probably won’t even miss me as you shuffle between your new place and Harris’s parents’ beach house in Nantucket, while I stay here and slave away, struggling to teach teenagers to be literate.”

  “You know you can come up any weekend you want,” Sam said. An edge of panic pierced her stomach. She knew she should be thrilled to be moving with her boyfriend to a dignified old row house with tons of character, with access to a gorgeous beach house to escape to any weekend. It was important for Harris to start his political career in the Boston area, where he was from, and she would be by his side. Love required some sacrifices, right?

  Her new life would be perfect. Everything she’d always wanted so desperately was about to come true. She’d found an amazing guy with noble ambitions and big dreams. One day they’d be married with a real family, something she could barely remember since her parents had died when she was five, and Brad and her grandma Effie had taken over raising her and her brothers.

  Her stomach flopped again. What was wrong with her, anyway?

  She wasn’t ungrateful. Harris was just so busy building his career. He had lots of stress, not to mention all the driving back and forth he and she both did on weekends. Things would calm down a lot after they were finally together in the same city—she knew it. They’d make love more often, because it had been a while. Yeah, actually quite a while. She’d make his life easier for him and he’d relax more, then she’d relax more, and be able to enjoy all this good fortune that had come her way.

  Right?

  The pulsing beat of a too-familiar song suddenly pumped through the gym, compliments of the student band, Wild. A group of girls in the front row started dancing, waving their arms, and singing along to the lyrics of Lukas’s signature song, a serious earworm called “You Don’t Know Me,” which blasted around Sam’s head and made it throb.

  She hated that song. No, she really Hated. That. Song.

  Calm down, she reminded herself. There was no way in hell Lukas would show, and once the kids realized that, they’d stop talking about him and playing his obnoxious music.

  Jess raised her voice over the noise of the band. “Those girls actually think Lukas Spikonos is going to show up here. I mean, you don’t think he will, do you?” Her words held a hefty edge of doubt. Her tone suggested that Sam of all people might actually have a clue whether the elusive singer would ever have the guts to show up in his hometown again.

  “There’s no way. I hope they won’t be too disappointed.” Lukas Spikonos. The mere sound of his very Greek name evoked all the exotic sensuality of ancient, sun-kissed isles like Santorini or Mykonos, which rhymed with his name. Not to mention his very Greek looks, from his rich bronze skin, the color of sand in some exotic desert, his dark, haunting eyes, and his over-the-collar hair, as sinfully black and shiny as pitch.

  Every molecule of his long, lean body was rebellious. Risky. Thank God Sam was so over him. She had enough maturity and distance from her naïve nineteen-year-old self to realize that no matter how attracted to him she’d been, their breakup, painful though it was, had been a blessing in disguise.

  “When did you get so pessimistic?” Jess asked. “You’re usually the fun teacher. Supporting dreams and all that.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Ever since the kids sent that video to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, they’ve been out of control. But his PR person said his schedule was too booked. Plus, he hasn’t been back here for six years.”

  “He has to show up sometime if he ever wants his car back.”

  Sam scowled. “You mean my car. I have all the repair and auto-body bills to prove it.” She headed for the gym floor. “I’d better get out there and start ungluing a few kids from each other.”

  “He could come, you know,” Jess called. “Mirror Lake’s his hometown.”

  “He has no family here. No friends. This town means nothing to him.”

  “It has one thing no other town has.”

  Sam stopped in her tracks. “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  Sam’s cheeks went hot. Good thing the lighting in the gym was dim. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at Jess’s hopeless romanticism. It didn’t help that at the same time, the chorus of that damn song rang out and the kids
started chanting it over and over.

  I thought I knew you, I thought I loved you, but I didn’t know you at all. Sam smiled at the kids having a great time when all she really wanted to do was cover her ears and run because hearing that cheesy chorus one more time was about to make her hurl.

  Songs often transported people back to the past, reminding them of intense memories. The summer she was nineteen, she’d poured all her teenage angst into those three short phrases after Lukas Spikonos had dropped her like a hot gyro.

  He’d taken more than her heart with him.

  He took the poetry she’d written way back then in all her angst and turned it into the number one song in America, his breakout hit. She envisioned him holding the rumpled sheet she’d torn out of her college-ruled spiral notebook as he shamelessly borrowed her words, her feelings.

  The bastard.

  Frankly, she didn’t care about the stolen words. The day he finally left town for good, a year after their breakup, he’d kissed her. Really kissed her, passionately and with feeling. A knock-your-socks-off, seeing stars and twinkly lights and getting dizzy kind of kiss, which was full of the promise of lots of other kisses. She’d just broken up with Harris. She was free to make a different choice, and she’d chosen him.

  And then he never called. He’d left—forever, she’d come to think—to find fame and fortune. He’d wanted success far more than he’d ever wanted her.

  Suddenly the lights dimmed, making the disco ball spill a Milky Way of stars all across the old gym. The band stopped playing. It was as if the old building itself were holding its breath.

  A giant spotlight rose up to follow a solitary figure carrying a guitar as he ran through an aisle of parted bodies and burst onto the stage.

  She would recognize his lithe form anywhere. Oh, he had a wild presence, dressed all in black, golden muscles covered with elaborate swirls of ink, flexing as he fingered his guitar like a lover. He strode back and forth lifting his arms and encouraging the kids to sing along to the song they all knew by heart.

  Lukas Spikonos had actually shown up. Surprise mingled with shock as Sam watched him from afar.