by Natalie Ann
Text Copyright 2016 Natalie Ann
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without a written consent.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Website http://www.natalieannbooks.com
The Road Series
Lucas and Brooke’s Story- Road to Recovery
Jack and Cori’s Story – Road to Redemption
Mac and Beth’s Story- Road to Reality
Ryan and Kaitlin’s Story- Road to Reason
The All Series
Ben and Presley’s Story – All or Nothing
Phil and Sophia’s Story – All of Me
Alec and Brynn’s Story – All the Way
Sean and Carly’s Story — All I Want
Drew and Jordyn’s Story— All My Love
Finn and Olivia’s Story—All About You (coming fall 2016)
Table of Contents
Prologue
Old Things
Flirting
Alone
Thought Of Me
Look Pretty
Judging
Tread Carefully
Figure Out
Painful
Meddling
Live A Little
Left Behind
First Time
Boy Toy
Time
Fair
Protect
Any Better
Belong
Past
See You Fall
Your Family
So Wrong
Let Go
Afraid
Look Familiar
On Your Toes
Important
Ordinary
Decisions
Regret
Full Circle
In Memory
Knocked Down
What If
To Stay
Someone
Common Name
Libby’s Daughter
Just Me
Live Your Life
Epilogue
More Books
Prologue
With a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other, Jordyn climbed the stairs to the attic. This was the childhood home she’d lived in most of her life, then moved back to less than two years ago to care for her mother.
She’d been putting this off for months since her mother’s passing, but now with a bit of liquid courage, she was going to tackle it full-on.
It was time to move on, and in order to do that she needed to go through the rest of her mother’s possessions.
The door opened with a loud creak, the smell of stale dust filling her nostrils as her hand brushed along the wall for the light. As a child she’d loved coming up here to play, but now as an adult, it was just plain creepy.
The light bulb flickered a few times, then managed to stay on. She hoped it stayed on the entire time she was here. Just the thought of it going out was an incentive for her to move fast.
Scanning the room, she tried to figure out where to start and what boxes to go through first. She hadn’t been up here in years, and didn’t realize how many things her mother had hoarded.
With her determination set, she moved to one corner, set her bottle of wine and glass on the floor, and dusted off a spot to sit.
Two hours later, with more than half of the bottle gone, she’d managed to go through several of the boxes. Most were going to be thrown into the dumpster, others were filled with old clothes she would donate. A few boxes held memories of her childhood—those she’d keep.
Lots of memories were in those boxes: pictures that Jordyn had drawn, handmade gifts, all the Christmas ornaments. More things than Jordyn realized, and her head started to spin.
It’d always been the two of them. No one else, no family that Jordyn knew of. Her mother always said her family had disowned her because she’d gotten pregnant young and refused to give up the name of Jordyn’s father.
To this day, Jordyn still had no idea who her father was, if he was alive or dead, or if she had any remaining family. She’d long since stopped asking. Her mother had always been tight-lipped about this one thing.
Pouring herself another glass, she moved to an old antique chest against the wall. There was a blanket covering it, protecting it from the dust, but Jordyn knew it was there. It was the one piece of the past that Jordyn had from her mother’s life.
The chest her mother filled with her possessions when she moved to Florida, or so the story was told to Jordyn.
Libby, her mother, had said the chest belonged to her grandmother and it was supposed to be passed down. Libby didn’t want to risk not getting it, so she took it when she left, regardless of the consequences.
Again, Jordyn only guessed that part, having heard bits and pieces of conversations her mother often had with herself when she thought Jordyn wasn’t around.
Now it was Jordyn’s chest. She’d loved it as a child; such a magical piece of history, holding little snippets of her mother’s past in there. Not that Jordyn ever understood what any of them meant, because her mother never talked about them.
Shaking her head, she went to open the top and realized it was locked. That’s odd, she thought, she didn’t ever remember it being locked before. Then again, she hadn’t been in the chest in at least ten years.
Pushing herself to her feet, she went back downstairs to her mother’s bedroom in hopes of locating the key. She didn’t want to damage the chest trying to open it. Worst case, she’d call a locksmith in the morning.
After ten minutes, she found an old skeleton key in the bottom of her mother’s jewelry box. Another box she’d have to go through some day, one she couldn’t bring herself to even open until now.
Not that there was anything more than costume jewelry, but still, they were pieces of her mother. More things to cherish and help her remember the only person she’d ever been close to.
Her curiosity was getting the best of her and Jordyn found herself dashing back up the stairs—she had to get into that chest now.
All those dreams and imaginings she’d had as a child looking for treasure in that chest started to rush through her. It had to be something important; otherwise why lock it?
She slid the key in, wiggled it around for close to a minute until she heard the click, and then the top popped slightly. Lifting it up, she was assaulted by the strong smell of mothballs, almost burning her nose this time.
There wasn’t much in the chest; it was at least half empty. On one side was a blanket her mother had made when Jordyn was a child. Actually, it was a quilt. She loved it, and loved all the different animals on it, remembering fondly the nights she cuddled under that quilt until it was too small for her, then how she’d carried it around the house as a piece of security. Even the times her mother brought it out when Jordyn was sick, remembering the comfort she found in it.
Pushing that aside, Jordyn found several of the dresses she’d always played dress-up in and fought back a sniffle.
Pulling one dress out, she held it in front of her. It had been huge on her as a child, but now it would probably be too small.
Jordan went to fold it and place it back when her eyes landed on an envelope with her mother’s handwriting. The writing was shaky, almost not resembling what Jordyn had been so accustomed to seeing. The last year, everything deteriorated with Libby until she couldn’t even hold a pen.
Taking a deep breath, Jordyn picked up the envelope and read, “when
you’re ready.” She wasn’t, so she put it aside. That was when her eyes landed on another box, one that looked to have never been opened before.
The return address was Atlanta, Georgia. Odd, she couldn’t imagine why her mother wouldn’t have opened the package.
Looking more closely, she noted that it had been delivered less than a year ago. It had to have been when her mother was able to walk up the stairs still, because that would be the only explanation for how it got in the chest.
Glancing back and forth between the letter and the box the letter had been lying on top of, she had to make a decision. She knew in her heart they went together, they had to.
The question was—was she ready to know what was inside?
Old Things
Jordyn turned the volume up, so used to listening to music while she worked. It was what kept her company during the day. She couldn’t stand the silence when she was trying to concentrate. Which was strange considering she was often alone and had convinced herself she liked it that way.
Except right now there was no silence, and the music was little comfort to her. Sounds of hammers hitting tiles and saws cutting into walls, or whatever else was going on in her kitchen filled the air.
She’d been in her house for about a month now. After she finally finished cleaning out her mother’s house, she put it up for sale. Too many memories and too much history in that place. She couldn’t live there any longer. Not without feeling her heart break a little more with each passing day.
She could work from anywhere since she worked from home. That had made it easier for her to care for her mother when she moved back home almost two years prior to Libby’s death.
Not that Jordyn had that far to move back; she’d only been on her own for three years and had lived only a few miles away.
Now here she was in her first house alone, in a new city—hell, a new state—so far away from where she’d left her old life behind in Florida.
It was a crazy hunch that brought her here, but she’d felt she had no choice. All her life, she’d taken the safe route and it worked for her at the time. With her mother gone and no one with whom she could talk over a decision, she went ahead and bought a plane ticket and set out for upstate New York.
She’d stayed in Saratoga for a week, looking around and trying to figure out why there was a postcard from this city in the mysterious box left behind in her mother’s chest, but nothing stood out to her.
It made no sense. She’d taken a gamble and thought the picture of the two young men on a boat might have come from this city, and before she could convince herself otherwise, she had walked into a realtor’s office and asked to look at houses.
She’d been able to sell her mother’s house fast, and with nothing else left to do, she packed up what she needed and paid a delivery service to drive her belongings to New York. Then she loaded her car with a week’s worth of clothes, her computers and server equipment, and set off for a new life.
Now she just needed to live through the construction.
Suddenly the lights went out in her office. Thankfully, her backup kicked on and Jordyn was able to make sure everything she was working on was saved.
Pushing back from her chair, she walked out of her office and toward the kitchen where she could hear voices but nothing else. “What happened?” she asked the first guy she saw.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “We blew a fuse. I sent Eric down to the basement to flip it back over.” Jordyn nodded her head just as the power came back on. “Hopefully it was a one-time thing. We won’t run as many things at once until we know for sure what’s going on, or what caused it.”
“Thanks,” Jordyn said, and made her way back to her office. Whenever she was nervous around people she either said very little or blurted out things without thought. Being that she was alone so much, she was often nervous around people in general. She’d thought she would have outgrown it when she was an adult, but she never did.
Unfortunately, ten minutes later the power went out again. She waited a few minutes, figuring they would go down and flip the switch, and she was right.
She was immersed in the software she was writing when she heard a knock on her office door. “Come in,” she yelled, and turned her head to see one of the workers in the doorway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but we found a problem. Do you have a few minutes to come out and talk about it?”
Okay, deep breath, time to go talk to the crew. She shouldn’t be surprised there was a problem. It was an old house, and she’d done enough research to know that anything could happen when you bought an old house and rehabbed parts of it.
“Sure.”
She looked on the floor for her flip-flops and slid her feet into them. She had a feeling they would want her to walk in the kitchen and she was smart enough to not go barefoot, even though it was her preference to never wear shoes if she didn’t need to.
Following the guy down the hallway, she stopped in the kitchen and saw they’d ripped all the sheetrock off one wall completely.
“Knob and tube electrical,” she stated, and felt her shoulders droop. “Crap.”
“So you know what it is?” he said, like he was surprised.
“Yeah, I know.” She’d watched enough HGTV when she wasn’t working, and she knew this was going to cost her a pretty penny too.
“Well, then you know we have to bring it up to code.”
“Do you know if the whole house is like this?” She prayed it wasn’t, but had a feeling that prayer wasn’t going to be answered.
“I can take a guess that it is, but won’t know for sure until we start to really get into the walls in other parts of the house.”
“So how much is this going to cost me?”
Money wasn’t an issue; she had plenty of it now. Aside from the sale of her mother’s house, she had a good job and spent very little. She would have to have a social life to spend money, and right now she didn’t really have much of anything outside of work.
“I don’t know for certain. I have to call in the electrician.”
“Do you have one you use regularly, or do I need to find one for myself?”
“No, Harper’s has one employed. I’ll give him a call and see if he can come over today. Until then, we’re going to keep demoing your kitchen.”
“Thanks,” Jordyn replied, then turned and walked back to her office.
She’d gone in with her eyes open on what they might find in this house, so she couldn’t get upset if more problems arose.
It probably would have been smarter to buy a newer house, but she was so charmed by this neighborhood. The old Victorian was everything she’d dreamed of as a kid, imagining an old house a grandparent might have owned. Something that had an attic, like the house she grew up in.
She’d never shared those dreams with her mother, but someday, she’d like a family and kids to be able to run and play in a big old house like this. Play hide and seek and dress-up in an attic full of old things and memories. Something to hand down through generations.
She wished she had more things to hand down, even stories to go with memories, only she didn’t. Her isolated childhood wasn’t full of fanciful things or stories to write home about, but she wanted to have them. She figured why not start now?
***
Drew Palmer hung up the call and then placed another one to his sister, Brynn Harper. He was currently on site at another job and needed more details on the call he’d just received.
“Hey, Drew. What’s up?” Brynn answered on the second ring.
“Not much. I just got off the phone with Steve. He’s at the Montgomery house doing a kitchen rehab. He said they found knob and tube in the kitchen and the owner wants to know the price to fix it and if it’s in the whole house. What do you know about this project?”
“Old Victorian home. Jordyn Montgomery just moved here. She was here a few months ago looking at properties and asked if someone could give her a walk-through and price
quote on a kitchen and bath remodel before she bought it.”
“A few months ago? What were you doing working?”
He couldn’t help being protective of his sister even though she was older than him. She’d just returned to work this week after giving birth to his niece two months ago. Even then, she wasn’t working full time yet.
“You sound worse than Alec. I met with her two weeks before Grace was born.”
“You shouldn’t have been working then either,” he said as he imagined the scowl on her face.
He heard the snort loud and clear over the phone. “Get over it, Drew. Anyway, I quoted the price but said there were all sorts of things that could be found once we started demoing. Don’t worry, the owner was easy to work with. Send me the information on what you find and the time you’ll need to do it. I’ll talk with Sean and get a quote to you ASAP.”
“Okay. Give me an hour or so.”
Ninety minutes later, Drew opened the front door at the Montgomery home. He was one step in when he bumped right into a woman walking out of a door off the hallway. “Sorry. I didn’t know someone was going to be coming out of the door.”
She froze, momentarily shocked judging by the look on her face. “I didn’t know someone was going to be coming in my door. Do you work for Harper’s?”
“Yes. Drew Palmer. I’m the electrician. I’m assuming you’re Jordyn Montgomery.” He held his hand out to her. She took it tentatively, almost like she didn’t expect him to be so formal, yet her grip was firm and her hand was warm. “Nice to you meet you,” he said, slowly letting go of her hand, lingering longer than was probably polite.
She flushed slightly, her already large eyes widening a bit, then she cleared her throat, and said, “Yes, I’m Jordyn. And we’ll see how nice it is when I find out how much this is going to cost me.” She grimaced, then amended, “Sorry, sometimes my thoughts come out of my mouth without a filter. I didn’t mean it that way.”
His eyes lit up, then he smirked, not able to help it. “I’ll try not to make it hurt too much.”
