All There Is (Juniper Hills Book 1)

by Violet Duke

  But, safe to say, not once had she imagined it going like this. With Jake looking back at her, eyes as bleak and tormented as they were right now, blinking as if he expected her to vanish like a mirage. He said her name again in a ghostlike whisper. A rough rasp this time, tattered around the edges with such visceral, exposed emotion that it pained her to hear it.

  And just as she couldn’t unhear him, she couldn’t unsee him, either—the teenage boy some had called a hero because of the way he’d saved her and her sister Megan from the burning house that night. Others had called him a criminal for having set off the aerial fireworks that had resulted in the fire in the first place. The same boy that her stepmother had outright called a murderer for taking her Peyton from them.

  Fourteen long years had left only a few traces of the Jake she’d first met that summer.

  Back then he’d been an effortlessly irresistible, laid-back, corn-fed farm boy if ever there was one. Classic all-American looks and charm, with a smile in his voice just for her that she had always been able to hear clear as day. Warmed by the sun and as carefree as the wind.

  That boy, who still existed in her memories regardless of how hard she’d tried to purge him, and this hardened, stoic man in front of her now were like two completely different people.

  Strangely, even though it was the teen version of him who’d once broken her without intending to, somehow she just knew that this man here with her now had the capacity to be infinitely more dangerous to her heart.

  Not because he’d grown up to become gruffly, devastatingly more handsome than she’d imagined, but because without saying a word, or even trying, inexplicably he was making that once-dormant organ in her chest feel something again.

  Pain, mostly. Along with other emotions she simply wasn’t equipped to handle.

  After the fire, her grief counselor had told her it was a coping mechanism. The way she’d closed her heart off to memories of that night, to emotions she refused to let see the light of day. The woman had gone on and on about the dangers of putting hearts behind walls like that.

  Emma still recalled the crack she’d put in the seasoned therapist’s composure when she’d told her plainly, “I’m not putting walls around my heart; I’m burying it in a casket. Alongside my baby brother. The one I didn’t save. And nothing you say will make me open that grave.”

  The woman had stopped being her therapist that day.

  In retrospect maybe if she’d let the well-meaning shrink try to “heal” her back then, it wouldn’t feel like there was a raw, open wound in her chest right now. Live and learn. Now all she could do was hope to find some stronger nails to keep the coffin closed as soon as Jake left.

  Only he didn’t leave.

  Instead he stared at her for several long moments, eyes never wavering from her face. Even though she was treating him like an eclipse and not looking directly at him, she felt his gaze on her, drinking her in. Which somehow made her throat feel parched as a result.

  Because she wanted to do the same to him.

  She wanted to secretly trail her eyes over that granite-hard square jaw of his, just like she used to back when they’d both find themselves in their respective backyards at the same time. Which, coincidentally, had been every day through the month of June. Right before sunset.

  She still remembered how he used to drape his arms over that old wooden fence between their houses and just plain light up the rest of her night by simply smiling at her.

  Though it made absolutely no sense at all, right now, looking at this haunted grown-up Jake, more than anything else she wanted to see him smile at her that way again.

  And that wasn’t okay.

  Not knowing what else to do, she turned her back to him to sever the connection.

  “I didn’t know this was your bakery,” he said softly.

  Well, that answered her biggest burning question.

  “I wouldn’t have come in here if I’d known.”

  Aaand that answered the question she hadn’t known she’d been looking for an answer to.

  Just 998 or so more burning questions to go. But considering his last admission was making her feel lost without any semblance of gravity for her emotions, she didn’t want him sticking around to actually answer any more. “So now that you know it’s my bakery, are you going to leave anytime soon?”

  “No.”

  Emma turned back in surprise and blinked at him slowly, sure she’d misheard him.

  Jake looked nearly as surprised as she felt. But he recovered quicker. “I’m a carpenter now. A good one. Your friend Paul sent me over here.”

  That was major breaking news. Her worlds were now officially colliding. Mayday, Mayday. No exaggeration, she felt like a ship about to capsize.

  “Emma, I do good work—I swear. Let me help you with these repairs.”

  “No.” She didn’t mean to throw that one-word reply back at him, but, honestly, it reflected exactly what was going through her head. She didn’t have an eloquent explanation for her feelings. All she knew was, no, she just . . . couldn’t accept his help. Not now. Not here.

  Here in Juniper Hills, she and Megan had been able to start over. Here, no one even knew the story of the Stevenses’ house burning to the ground over in Riverside. No one stared at poor Megan Stevens’s scars anymore—at least not when either of them were looking. No one whispered about the teenage neighbor that poor Emma Stevens had had a crush on before he got sent to juvie after little Peyton Stevens had been killed that night.

  Theirs lives weren’t tragic here. They’d moved on.

  So just . . . no. She couldn’t have Jake come back into her life.

  Before she could attempt to explain all this to Jake, or even analyze it better herself, however, the plumber she’d hired that morning came out of the kitchen with a friendly, outstretched hand. For Jake. “Hey, how’s it going? Sorry I didn’t get a chance to come off the ladder and introduce myself. I’m Marco. Marco Moretti. Thanks for the assist earlier.”

  “Jake Rowan. Glad I could help.”

  Emma did a double take at the unfamiliar last name.

  Not going to ask. None of my business. The man’s new last name was of no concern of hers. It’s not as if she wanted to know more about him and his life for the past fourteen years.

  Nope, no sirree. That said, she did find herself making a completely uninvolved passing observation about how much better Rowan seemed to fit him than Carmichael ever did. And that’s all the thought she was going to put into the matter.

  Still not going to ask.

  As if hearing her inner struggles loud and clear, Jake turned and took another step closer to her after Marco left to go on a supply run. “Rowan is my mom’s maiden name. She and my dad got divorced, and she got sole custody of me, my brother, and my sister.” Then he just stood there in silence and studied her for a beat, gazing at her with those intense brindled-green eyes of his that seemed to burrow straight into her soul.

  Where all her secrets and boxed-up feelings about him still remained.

  Emma told herself she didn’t want to hear any more. Didn’t want to know how long after the fire his dad had left them. If it had happened after Jake had been sent to . . .

  No. She wasn’t going to wonder. Or worse, care.

  “Their divorce finalized after I was already in juvie.”

  Damn mind reader. She recalled now how he’d always been able to read her like an open book. For some reason, the fact that he still could had her jumbled up on the inside.

  “My younger siblings, Daryn and Haley—I don’t know if you remember them—got their names changed to Rowan after all the divorce settlement paperwork cleared.” He looked away, his voice detaching as he stated matter-of-factly, “But mine was legally changed before. Before I got sentenced, in fact.”

  God, she really didn’t like thinking about him in juvie.

  His eyes softened in response to some tell on her traitorous face. “My father ‘requested’ that I take m
y mom’s name before my sentencing was fully on record. Moved mountains to get the lawyers to make that change in time. That way I officially entered juvie as a Rowan, not a Carmichael.” His jaw tightened. “Never heard from him again after that.”

  Emma flinched. That was just awful. Cold, cruel, and just deplorable. No child deserved to be returned like that, discarded like damaged goods. “I’m so sorry, Jake.”

  This time it was Jake who flinched. Or recoiled, rather. As if he’d been shot.

  She hadn’t intended for her apology to be a verbal bullet, but there it was, lodged somewhere she couldn’t see, making him hemorrhage pain right before her eyes.

  She wanted to comfort him. Wanted to tell him how her parents had split up, too. How she understood. How she knew exactly what it felt like to have one of your parents blame you for the destruction of their marriage, their family . . . of a young, innocent life.

  How she knew exactly what if felt like to blame yourself for the same.

  But instead she called on her inner Tin Man to help her pivot away from him again. Maybe if she ignored him, he would go away, reasoned her inner Scarecrow and inner Cowardly Lion in unison.

  She stifled a sigh. First Casablanca, and now The Wizard of Oz. See, the man was already making her bonkers. He needed to leave.

  Maintaining military silence, she grabbed the broom and proceeded to sweep residual floodwater toward the back door as if Jake weren’t standing ten feet away from her.

  Finally, after a good solid minute or so, she heard him quietly exit her bakery.

  A part of her felt an inexplicable, irrational sense of loss.

  Which went away a minute later when Jake trudged back in, this time with his tool belt clipped on. “Just give me a few minutes to survey the flood damage so I can give you a full written estimate.”

  Emma couldn’t do anything but gape at him as he flipped open a composition notebook, like the kind they used to have in school, and headed over to her kitchen to start his assessments.

  Stop staring at him, Emma.

  Way easier said than done.

  Earlier he’d been wearing one of those woodsy corduroy jackets with the gray jersey fabric hoods that you simply had to be rugged to pull off. Had to. Now, without his jacket on, he was still lumberjack rugged, but in a much more, errr, obvious way.

  Jesus Christ, that body.

  Through his plain white T-shirt, she could practically count each of the shredded muscles carved into his back because he was one of those guys. The kind who had the sort of physique that casual, loose-fitting T-shirts molded and clung to, contrary to the laws of physics.

  When she eventually managed to tear her eyes away from the mesmerizing dance of the rippling muscles, she gave herself a mental slap and stomped after him. “You are not doing an estimate,” she maintained hotly, keeping her eyes on a spot on the wall, a few inches above his shoulder. Mostly because the front view of his T-shirt was even more distracting than the back.

  He dignified her command with a single impertinent eyebrow raise. “Hate to break it to you, honey, but I’m not working for free.”

  Just like that, drunken butterflies began banging around in her chest. All over a simple word. Honey. Logically she knew that wasn’t an actual endearment, but her stupid heart didn’t seem to know the difference.

  That was when she made the mistake of un-diverting her attention and really seeing him.

  First off, the man was definitely due for a haircut.

  But, unfairly, he was all the more gorgeous for it.

  He still had the chiseled features and the dark, almost black, wavy hair that had always made him look so dreamy, like those old Hollywood heroes. Except now he had this ridiculously masculine beard that just brought out his deep, prismatic green eyes even more.

  “Hey, you mind if I move this big shelf to check the wall behind it?” he asked before just plain doing it anyway. With an impressive one-handed shove.

  Good lord he was burly.

  And far sexier in a tool belt than a mortal man had any right to be.

  When he turned to a blank notebook page to crunch some figures—by hand—she finally managed to shake herself out of her stupor. Why doesn’t he just use his phone’s calculator? The realization that she’d spent enough time looking at the bulge in his pocket to figure out it was a phone simply proved her biggest worry. “Jake, you can’t possibly think this is a good idea.”

  That’s when his eyes did that thing again, where they flickered through a dozen different emotions, all the while pulling her in for the turbulent ride. “I want to help you, Emma. Let me help you.” He put his number two pencil behind his ear—seriously, how did he manage to make that hot?—before leveling with her. “Look, bottom line is that there’s a lot of damage here, and you won’t be able to beat my rates. All of this should take about two to three weeks, tops. After that, I’ll be working on the library way over on the other side of town so I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Whoa, time-out. Her entire world suddenly tilted on its axis.

  Feeling her stomach down somewhere around her feet, she barely managed to articulate the words that would confirm her fears, “You’re going to work on the library remodel?”

  She watched him carry the seven in another penciled-in equation, and then multiply the total with another number before replying. “Yup. Just talked to the site foreman today. I’m only hired to do the custom finishes, though, so they don’t need me for a few more weeks—”

  “You know what?” she interrupted. “I will hire you for the bakery repairs, after all.”

  “Really?” He gave her a dubious look. “Just like that?”

  “Uh-huh, you can start tomorrow morning, bright and early . . . on one condition.”

  His brows lowered warily. “And what would that condition be?”

  She dug deep to gather up her ice-cold conviction and her best no-nonsense voice to assert firmly, “That you turn down the library job.”

  His reaction was swift. A combination of disappointment and resigned sadness. “Do you really hate me that bad? Enough that you want me to turn down a huge job that could be great for me? A job I need right now just to make ends meet?”

  Well, when he put it that way. Dammit. Now she felt like a complete jerk.

  “Emma, be reasonable. I want to help your bakery, but I’m not turning down the library contract. The job’s a huge opportunity for me, and exactly the kind of work I love to do.”

  It was the look in his eyes over that last statement that made time stop and stand still for a moment. Made her runaway emotions come to a jarring halt.

  That look in his eyes. It was the same one Megan had whenever Emma caught her running her fingers lovingly across the spines of the books in her library. It was probably the same look Emma herself had whenever she was in the kitchen experimenting with new recipes or out in front watching customers eating her creations.

  She couldn’t possibly live with herself for extinguishing the grounding passion responsible for that look. In anyone. Even the man responsible for the worst night of her life.

  But. If it meant protecting her sister, she would do everything just short of that.

  “I promise, Jake, I’ll spend every waking minute helping you find another job that’ll involve the kind of work you love and will cover your bills.” She gripped his forearm and did her damnedest to smother back a gasp at the jolt of electricity from the brief contact.

  Based on the scorching flash of heat in his gaze, he’d felt it, too.

  With a shaky voice now thick with emotion, Emma finally laid all her cards on the table. “My sister, Megan, is the head librarian here, Jake. Megan. You remember her? The little girl you carried out of the house with burns over a third of her body? Well she’s all grown up. And that library is like her second home, her sanctuary.”

  Her breath broke on a heavy shudder weighted down by years of rough memories. “We’ve worked so hard to move forward from our past, Jake. This t
own, that library . . . there isn’t much in our lives the fire you caused didn’t manage to incinerate somehow. I had to move my baby sister several counties away from Riverside just to escape it. Me, I can handle you working on my bakery.” Wow, that sounded almost believable. “But I didn’t go through everything Megan went through. So for her sake, I’m asking you to please turn down the library job. Not because I hate you, but because she deserves that much. She should be able to have one special thing in her life that’s still completely untouched from any reminders of that fire.”

  The shock on his face lasted only a second. Before stark, bleak shadows flooded his features like an overflowing tide of grief and torment.

  Emma froze. The only time she’d ever seen anguish like that was . . .

  In the mirror. “Jake.”

  He didn’t meet her gaze, but he did respond. “I’ll call the foreman and turn the library job down.” Then he hesitated for a brief moment before tearing a page out of the notebook he’d been writing in and handing it to her. “If you’re still interested.”

  She slammed her eyes shut for a beat to mentally prepare herself for the final verdict. This bakery wasn’t just her livelihood; it was her life. She was insured, of course, but her policy covered only so much. And based on her calls to her claims department, with the never-ending paperwork, the hoops to jump, and loophole-filled “qualifying claims,” not to mention drawn-out processing times, it didn’t sound as though she’d be getting a check for a few months at least.

  And since staying closed longer than a few weeks would set her too far back, her only option was to start draining her savings. Which meant that the number on this piece of paper would tell her if she’d soon be getting “account overdrawn” love letters from the bank like she used to when she’d first moved to Juniper Hills. Oh, just stop stalling and look already!