The Return

by Noelle Adams

  The Return

  Second Chance Flower Shop, Book One

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About The Return

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Rebound

  About Noelle Adams

  About The Return

  RIA PHILLIPS HAS A plan. Stay strong. Stay busy. Stay focused on what's important. And don't start daydreaming again about a certain pair of soulful brown eyes.

  No, it won't be easy. Jacob Worth was her first love. Her first time. Her first everything. Until he left town one day without explanation. He broke her heart back then, but she's not a teenager with a crush anymore. She's an adult—with a plan.

  In the past eight years, Ria has built a good life for herself in her small hometown. She and her friends have used their creativity and business savvy to turn the little florist shop she inherited into an astonishing success. She's got more than enough in her life to be proud of, and she's going to make sure Jacob sees that.

  She's not going to let him rattle her. She's not going to watch him from afar, even if he's even hotter than before. And she's definitely not going to fall into bed with him. Or, if she accidentally slips up, it will only be once.

  She learned her lesson a long time ago, and she's not going to fall for Jacob again.

  One

  FOR THE PAST EIGHT years, Ria Phillips had been the object of her hometown’s tragic love story, a tale told over and over again with increasingly dramatic (and inaccurate) detail.

  She knew people in Azalea, Virginia, still gossiped about it. They mentioned the story as requisite background when referencing either the Phillips family or the Worths. She saw kind sympathy behind the smiles of her parents’ friends when they asked about her continued single status, as if they assumed her heart hadn’t yet healed, eight whole years after it had been broken. Acquaintances were always trying to set her up with any available male they encountered in a hundred-mile radius.

  And Ria was over it.

  Over it.

  Jacob Worth had broken her heart eight years ago, packing up and leaving town the morning after the first time they’d had sex. She’d been eighteen, and they’d been dating for two years. It had been her first time. She’d thought it was love. She’d believed he’d felt the way she had.

  She’d been wrong. She’d been stupid. She’d been utterly crushed, and it had taken a long time before she’d gotten over it.

  But she wasn’t so spineless that she’d still be broken so many years later. Jacob hadn’t been back to Azalea since. Not even once. Not even when his grandfather and only living relative had a heart attack six months ago and almost died.

  Jacob had left her behind, just like he’d left everything else. He’d given her a flimsy explanation, but it wasn’t good enough. All she’d believed was sweet and gentle inside him had clearly been a cover for selfishness. She didn’t want him anymore. She didn’t want anything to do with him.

  And she really wished her town would believe her when she said so.

  On a Thursday morning in May, she was stewing over yet another conversation about Jacob. One of the old ladies who hung out at the laundromat—not to actually do their laundry, since most of them had machines at home, but to use it as the best vantage point for the three blocks of downtown Azalea—had called Ria over as she was walking home for lunch from the flower shop yesterday. The lady Ria had known all her life as Mrs. Mildred had asked her how she was doing and then sympathetically told her she’d find someone eventually. To not give up hope.

  Ria had been hard-pressed not to growl in response.

  She was fine. Better than fine. She was really good. Twenty-six. Healthy. Relatively attractive. She had a tight circle of friends and a thriving business that was starting to earn her good money. She went out with guys as regularly as was possible in a town as small as Azalea.

  She didn’t need a man right now.

  She didn’t need to recover from a heartbreak she’d already recovered from.

  And she didn’t need anyone to still believe she was hung up on Jacob Worth.

  “Hey, Ria, can you— What’s the matter?” Madeline had been talking as she walked into the back room of the shop, but she jerked to a stop in obvious concern.

  “Nothing.” Ria smiled at Madeline, who’d been one of her best friends since Madeline had moved to town in the eighth grade. “I’m good.”

  “You don’t look good. You look like you’re beating those flowers into submission.” Madeline was pretty in a quiet, curvy way with ash-blond hair and gray eyes. She projected a very serious presence that Ria knew from long experience wasn’t entirely true to her dry, clever character. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It’s nothing. Just stewing about Mrs. Mildred yesterday. I know it shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does.”

  “Of course it does. No one likes to be pitied—particularly when they have nothing to be pitied about. Unfortunately, King Asshole has been irretrievably branded into your identity for a lot of people in town. Even if you fall in love and get married, they’ll still probably talk about how you bravely overcame your heartbreak to make a new life with someone else.”

  Ria groaned and slumped onto a nearby stool. “Maybe I should do something wild and crazy just so they’ll have something else to talk about.”

  “Wouldn’t work. They’d just blame it on your tragic history. Jacob Worth demons still flagging your steps and all that. It sucks. It really does. But you can live with it or you can move somewhere else.”

  “I’m not going to move.”

  “I know that.” Madeline quirked her lips briefly in a quick flash of ironic amusement. “So try to live with it. At least they think about you as an individual unit and not only as Josh Cantor’s girlfriend.”

  Josh Cantor had been the star football player in high school, and people in town still looked at him as some sort of hero. Madeline had been dating him for years.

  “That’s true. I guess we all get pigeonholed one way or another.” Ria sighed and shook off her annoyance as she straightened to her feet. “Did you need something when you came back here?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to know if you’d gotten a start on the Nashville order. I’m blocked and need some inspiration.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I’ve pretty much got it done. I’ll show you.”

  Three years ago, Ria’s parents had died in a car accident and left her the family business, a struggling, small-town floral shop. She had an older sister, but Belinda had never shown any interest in flowers. It was Ria who’d been hanging out at the shop after school every afternoon since third grade. So Ria got what had then been called Phillips Flowers.

  For the first year, she’d tried to keep it going the way her parents had, but small-town businesses of all kinds were struggling, and the local weddings and funerals weren’t enough to sustain a profitable business. She’d been afraid she’d have to close up shop, but then she and her two best friends had miraculously turned it around.

  One of their high school classmates had come into the store one Saturday afternoon and asked for a custom arrangement as a way to a
pologize to his wife after getting into a big fight. When Ria had asked for the message on the card, he’d told her to just think of something good.

  Ria was good with flowers. She was naturally creative and artistic, and she loved designing unique arrangements. She’d put together something really special for the guy’s wife. As she did, Madeline (who’d been hanging out with her that afternoon) kept making up funny possible messages for the card. She worked at the public library, but she’d been writing all her life, and she’d ended up composing a little poem that was funny and touching both. Skye, their other best friend, had been so thrilled with the arrangement that she’d taken pictures. After getting permission from the recipient, she’d started posting the photos on social media.

  Skye had been unemployed and spent a lot of time online. One of her posts on the arrangement got the attention of an influencer with a large platform and went viral.

  Suddenly Ria had orders coming in for custom arrangements from all over the world, asking for personalized poems to go with them. At first, she could only handle the orders within a couple of hours of Azalea—in Hampton Roads or the accessible parts of northern Virginia. But Ria had gotten busy and connected with florists around the country, so eventually she could serve orders all over. Skye took over the marketing and social media and was genuinely brilliant at it.

  Since they specialized in apologies, they’d rebranded the business as Second Chance Flower Shop, and it had been thriving for the past two years. It was a huge amount of work. They still had to be selective about the orders they accepted since they didn’t have the staff to handle massive numbers. But they were able to raise their prices every six months with no loss of orders, so the money was really coming in now. Pretty soon they’d be able to buy the building the shop had leased from old Mr. Worth since Ria’s parents opened it thirty years ago.

  It was one of those flukes. As much luck and timing as skill and talent—as all success was. Ria was still astounded every time a major platform shared one of their arrangements online and they got a new flurry of orders.

  She and Madeline were talking about the design for an order they’d accepted yesterday when Skye Devereaux came bounding into the back room.

  Skye was barely five feet tall. A tiny, freckled redhead with big eyes and a big smile. Despite her small size, she always seemed to fill a room. Right now her eyes were even huger than normal, and she was gasping loudly. “Big... big news. You’ll never... never... guess.”

  “What’s going on?” Ria asked, only mildly interested. Skye was dramatic about everything, so there was no reason to assume something genuinely earth-shattering had occurred.

  She was wrong.

  It was earth-shattering.

  It left her (literally) shaking.

  Skye was still trying to catch her breath. She must have run all the way over there from wherever she’d gotten the news. “He’s... he’s... coming back... to town.”

  “He?” Madeline asked with a frown. “He who?”

  Ria had already frozen. She knew—she knew—what was coming.

  Skye turned huge blue eyes onto Ria’s face. “Jacob... Worth. He’s finally coming home.”

  JACOB WORTH HAD SPENT the past eight years trying to remake his life away from Azalea, Virginia, and he thought he’d done a pretty good job overall.

  He’d left town at eighteen after his grandfather kicked him out, finding odd jobs and gradually moving north until he finally reached Alaska. For several years now, he’d worked as a commercial fisherman, taking on seasonal work as it was available. Salmon. Tuna. King crab. Anything that was high risk, good money, and physically demanding enough to let him sleep at night.

  He had friends. He was popular with women who might be looking for a good time with no strings. He’d saved enough money that he could take time off between fishing seasons without worrying about how he would eat and pay rent. He’d done okay for himself, starting with no money, no contacts, and no education beyond high school.

  And he’d gotten as far away from Azalea as he possibly could.

  He’d never gone back home for a visit. His grandfather—his only living relative—had made it clear he wasn’t welcome. He would have come six months ago after his grandfather’s heart attack, but he’d been out on a job when it happened, and by the time the boat had returned, his grandfather had been out of danger and had told him not to bother.

  So he hadn’t set foot in Virginia in almost eight years when he arrived in Azalea on a Friday in May. His grandfather had evidently never really recovered from the heart attack. His health had been declining for months now. The doctors said he probably only had a couple more weeks before his heart simply gave out.

  Jacob was currently between jobs and didn’t want to leave something so painful hanging unfinished in his life. So he’d flown into the Norfolk airport and rented a car to drive the forty-five minutes to the small town in eastern Virginia where he’d spent fifteen years of his life.

  His grandfather was sleeping when he arrived, and the old man was scarily pale and thin. He’d wasted away from the strong, hard man Jacob remembered from his childhood.

  Martha, the woman who’d kept house for his grandfather as long as Jacob could remember, waved him to a chair near the bed and whispered he’d probably wake up soon. So Jacob sat. He looked at his phone for a while and then stared at the man who had raised him ever since he’d been orphaned at three years old.

  His stomach twisted. He didn’t like the feeling. It reminded him of day after lonely day when he haunted this big old house all alone. For years now, he’d made sure he was so distracted or exhausted that he didn’t feel the pull of those long-ago emotions.

  But he felt them now.

  Maybe it was the musty smell of the old house, still as clean as ever but in obvious disrepair. A lot of upkeep had been neglected lately. There was a draft in this room that Jacob could feel from where he sat. After a few minutes, he got up to investigate and found the source of the draft in a warped window frame across from the bed.

  He grabbed an old newspaper and carefully fit it into the thin crack to block the draft.

  His grandfather had always been so proud of this house. The biggest one in town ever since it had been built ninety years ago. Even if the old man could no longer do the upkeep work himself, Jacob was surprised he hadn’t hired someone to take care of it.

  “What are you doing, boy?” a soft, gruff voice came from the bed.

  Jacob whirled around. “Hey. Sorry to wake you, Grandpa. Trying to block a draft.”

  “You get it?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Good. Damn thing has been bugging me for weeks. Come over and let me look at you.”

  Jacob had gone through his last growth spurt when he was seventeen, shooting up to just over six feet, but he’d been a lot skinnier as a teenager than he was now. Years’ worth of physical labor had molded his body, bulking it up and marking it with scars, including a thin white slash that ran from his right ear and down his jaw to his throat from where he’d come close to being decapitated by an out-of-control line in a storm three years ago. His hair was still short and medium brown, and his eyes were still hazel. There was still a cleft in his chin. But otherwise he wondered if he was even recognizable from the boy he’d been before.

  “You grew up,” his grandfather said, after the sharp eyes ran up and down Jacob’s body from his hair to his worn shoes.

  “It’s been eight years.”

  “You look like a man now.”

  In a different context, this comment might mean any number of things, but Jacob knew exactly how to understand it.

  It was self-validation. Confirmation to his grandfather that he’d made the right decision in kicking him out.

  After all, the reason he’d done so was because Jacob was too “soft.” Too weak. Not man enough. That was what his grandfather had said. He’d had it too easy, relying on his grandfather to support him, so he needed to learn to make it o
n his own and toughen up. He’d also kept his feelings too much on the surface, letting the whole world know what he was feeling, and he needed to change that too.

  It had hurt. Badly. The shock and betrayal of the sudden declaration—announced immediately after Jacob’s high school graduation and with no warning or preparation—had devastated Jacob, who’d never gotten a lot of warm fuzzies from the old man but who he’d genuinely believed had cared about him.

  He’d been so stunned he’d been frozen with it for a long time. And when the reality processed, he couldn’t hide his hurt. His grandfather had used the emotion he’d displayed in response—nearly in tears from the pain of it—as proof that he wasn’t really a man.

  And now—after eight years of Jacob trying to prove to himself and his grandfather and the world that there was nothing soft about him—his grandfather finally felt vindicated in the heartless decision.

  It hurt nearly as much as the original rejection.

  Jacob had stupidly believed he couldn’t hurt like this anymore.

  “Doctor says I don’t have much time left,” his grandfather added.

  Jacob blew out his emotions and sat back down in the chair, pleased his voice was even as he replied, “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Getting old is a shitty thing to happen to people.”

  Having no idea how to respond to that, Jacob said, “Yeah.”

  “I’m leaving you everything.”

  “Are you?” He was genuinely surprised. He hadn’t expected it.

  “The house. The property on Main Street. It’ll all be yours.”

  “O...kay.”

  “I hope you’ll stay here. Fix the house back up to what it used to be. Do something with the empty businesses in town.”

  Jacob was determined to stay calm—not let emotion surface again—but resentment flickered as quick and brutal as a snake’s tongue. “Do what with them exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Fix them up. Try to lease them out again. Most of them have closed, but got a few left. The laundromat and Anna’s Diner and your girl’s florist.”