Contents
Title
Copyright
Other Books
Dedication
1
One Year Later
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
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36
Keep Reading!
Prologue
1
2
3
Dandelion Dreams
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. © 2014 by Samantha Garman. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute or transmit in any form or by any means.
Other books by Samantha Garman:
Tales of a New York Waitress (chick-lit/humor)
A klutzy twenty-something woman finds a job in a New York Italian restaurant. Insanity ensues.
Charleston Heat (contemporary romance)
A plucky woman meets a famous drummer. Things get hot. Fast.
Secrets of a Heart (historical romance)
A destitute woman encounters her wealthy, mysterious new neighbor. It’s only a matter of time before she realizes he may not be what he seems.
The Defiant Lady (historical romance)
A penniless earl falls for the illegitimate daughter of a duke. Can he convince her they’re perfect for one another?
Contact
[email protected]
Twitter: @samgarman
Facebook: Samantha Garman-Author
Acknowledgements
To those of you who helped guide me on this journey, you have my sincerest thanks.
For winter.
Chapter 1
Kai
I unscrewed the flask and chugged. Liquor was water in a desert of pain.
“Easy there, son,” Keith said, putting a large steadying hand on my shoulder.
I wiped my mouth with my fist. “I’m not your son.” My tone was harsh, wanting to remind Reece’s father that I was the one that lived.
As if the cowboy needed the reminder.
“You’ve always been a real son of a bitch. You know that, right?”
“I do,” I stated. “Are we going to get on with this?”
Keith’s clear blue eyes were resolute, clear of bourbon, and drowning in grief. He nodded once.
I had all but grown up on Keith’s ranch. When we were kids, Tristan, Reece and I had helped muck out the stables countless times, along with other odd jobs. We had learned to ride, worked with heavy, weathered saddles and camped many nights on the open trail. Memories of sweating horses frothy at the saddle and the smell of hot leather beat at my senses. It was the stench of guilt.
I hoped the bourbon would kick in soon.
A few days ago, Keith had dragged me out of some local dive, where I’d holed up and taken refuge. After sleeping off the worst hangover of my life in the guest room of the ranch house, I’d woken up only to have Reece’s mother, Alice, slap me across the face. Her handprint left an angry red stain on my cheek.
“That’s for your stupidity,” she’d said, her tone mild. “And this,” she handed me a cup of coffee, “is for your head.”
Alice had balls the size of tractors. She always called us on our shit—and boy, did we get in the shit sometimes.
The sound of the cattle iron raking across hot coals dragged my attention back to the matter at hand. I removed my shirt, took a seat on the stool, and placed Tristan’s University of Tennessee cap back on my head. I swiped hair out of my eyes, watching Keith approach with the brand, three inches in length.
Keith’s hired hand moved behind me to grip my shoulders, and I shoved my t-shirt into my mouth and waited.
When the iron touched my left pectoral I screamed, the muffled sound of a man drowning in shame. Skin sizzled and burned. My head swam, and my vision blurred. I reared like a bucking stallion into the solid legs of the ranch hand. Just as I thought I couldn’t stand the pain any longer, Keith flung the offensive rod away in disgust.
Pulling the shirt out of my mouth, I turned my head and vomited. I wiped my lips with faded green cotton, looked at Keith, and grinned.
My smile was ugly. “I’m glad it was the cheap bourbon.”
•••
My brand throbbed under its dressing, a reminder that I wasn’t hollow. The black tie around my neck felt like a noose. I wanted to strip off my suit and run naked into the woods where I grew up; I was a Southern boy weaned on the land, a mountain child wild and free at heart.
My lungs burned and a small cloud of breath condensed in the winter air. The generic words of the minister were apathetic and uninspiring. Tristan and Reece deserved more than a rudimentary burial. It was a pathetic excuse for a eulogy. I should have been the one to give it, but I had refused.
I wished I was in the mountains and it was summertime.
The woman’s hand clutched my arm, and I turned my head, just enough to see the top of her burnished red hair. I couldn’t bear to look into her eyes, knowing if I did I would see they were as lost as my own. They were eyes worthy of a love sonnet, Tristan used to say.
The coffins hit the ground with the soft sound of finality.
The minister spoke of a better place. Heaven, he called it. Fuck Heaven. Tristan and Reece were forever wandering in the mountains—there’s no place they would rather be.
But this? This was my Hell.
•••
I sat alone on a comfortable black leather couch in the library of my parents’ house and took a sip of my drink. My older brother attempted to keep me company, offering silent support. It pissed me off, so I yelled at Wyatt to leave me the hell alone.
He listened, but as he left the room I didn’t know if I was grateful or not.
The funeral had been over for hours.
I took another long swallow of bourbon, but there wasn’t enough liquor to make me forget the tears trailing down Alice’s cheeks, Tristan’s father looking somber and haunted. And Lucy…God, Lucy…Lucy’s shoulders shaking as she buckled under the weight of her own sobs, the drape of red hair unable to hide her pain.
The door opened, and my father stared at me. “Mind if I join you?”
I shrugged.
Accepting it as an invitation, Dad went to the liquor cart and poured himself a double bourbon. Like father, like son, I mused. The resemblance stopped there. Wyatt took after Dad with his light hair coloring, golden eyes, and strong work ethic. But I had dark hair, blue-gray eyes, and a dreamless future.
Loosening his tie, Dad sighed and sat across from me.
“How’s Lucy?” I asked.
Dad shook his head. “Laying down. She couldn’t be out there anymore.”
I understood, wishing I was far away. The winter sun had long since set, and a fire blazed in the hearth. The library would’ve been almost cheerful if I hadn’t just buried my two best friends.
One year later
Chapter 2
Sage
I took a sip of tea and reread the final sentence. I closed the novel, my finger tracing the spine.
Late Saturday afternoon sunlight shone through the windows, bathing the book in warm light, like a heavenly beacon.
I sat on an old, cream colored couch, aged and familiar. I had cried many nights on that couch, when the hormones and trials of being a teenager had been too much for me to handle. My mother would put an arm around me, tell me high school girls were bitches, give me a mug of tea, and we’d watch black and white I Love Lucy episodes, laughing until we cried.
The Brooklyn apartment in Park Slope had been my home since I was born, and I had no desire to prove anything by moving out. I loved it there.
I heard the key in the lock just before Mom came through the door, setting grocery bags down on the kitchen table. We had the same gray eyes, but she knew more, saw more than me.
“You finished it,” Mom said, “didn’t you?”
I nodded. “I know I’ve read it in handwritten pieces, but it doesn’t pack the same punch as holding it in my hands and turning the pages.” I smiled. “You should be really proud of this one.”
“What about the others?” Mom asked with a grin.
I peered at the dark wood shelves lined with Penny Harper’s milestone achievements. She was a prolific writer, cranking out stories like a machine. But when she stalled, it took a seasoned mechanic to grease the wheels of her mind. That job fell to me. “Those are good. This—,” I held it up, “no words, Mom. It’s…indefinable, unlike anything you have ever written.”
She smiled, pleased with my testimonial. “Thank you.”
“Make you a cup of tea?” I asked, getting up off the couch.
“Sure, thanks.” As I moved around the kitchen and steeped a cup of Earl Grey, Mom said, “You don’t have any desire to see your words in print, do you?”
“Not this again…”
She took her mug and sat down in the living room. “Make me understand. Please?”
I wondered what I could say that would make sense to her. “I have a job Mom, what more do you want?”
She snorted in obvious mockery. “How can you enjoy going to that office every day? Working for someone else instead of yourself, surrounded by other people and pickled in fluorescent light? It’s unnatural.”
“What’s it like, seeing your name on a book?” I asked instead, not bothering to defend my job.
“It’s one of my greatest accomplishments. Are you going to tell me why you don’t want to pursue writing?”
“I don’t need to see my words in print. I don’t need people to read my stories.”
“You mean you don’t want me to read your stories? Are you afraid you’re better than I am?”
“No, that’s not it,” I lied.
I clenched my jaw shut so that hurtful words wouldn’t pour out of me. It was one thing to live in another person’s shadow; quite another to eclipse it. I was a writer in raw form; words came to me. I didn’t need to coax stories; I often dreamed them.
But my mother worried that she’d already committed her best ideas to paper.
If I entered the same pool as Mom, the tidal wave of my success would wash over hers, and I wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that to her.
Mom laughed and shook her head. “God, I write characters for a living, yet I’m an idiot when it comes to understanding my own daughter. You are better than I am, and I couldn’t be prouder of that fact. I’m a good writer, Sage, but you—you’re a great one.”
She said that now, but it would break her, some day in the future. We would stop being mother and daughter and become something else. Something that would make her choke on the bile of jealousy.
Mom got up and went to her bag, pulling out a manuscript and tossing it onto the table almost cavalierly.
I stared at a stack of my neatly typed words. “What did you do?”
“I read it. I want to show it to my agent.”
I loved my mother, but sometimes she pushed me into a violent river of anger.
“You won’t do anything with it otherwise,” Mom said. “You can publish under a pen name. Do whatever you have to do. You’re too good not to, Sage.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Put the manuscript back under the mattress. It’s where it belongs. You should never have gone searching for it to begin with.”
“And yet, I knew there was something to search for.” Mom sighed in defeat. “Sometimes, I wonder if you’re really my daughter.”
I went to the coffee table, picked up her book, and flipped through the pages. “Sometimes, I wonder that myself.”
•••
“Is this good?” a male voice asked.
I continued scanning the paperbacks on the New Fiction table in the Union Square Barnes & Noble as I said, “I don’t know.”
The store was busy; the escalators were jammed with people, a reading was going on upstairs, and the line to check out was long. It was a good day to be in the book business.
“You have to actually look before you answer.”
I sighed in frustration. My day had been shit and I wanted to be at home, curled up on the couch, sharing a bottle of wine with my best friend, who was visiting from upstate. But, it was rush hour, the trains were packed, and I didn’t have the energy to stand and bump into other people, fighting for a seat. I’d wait half an hour and then begin the long trek.
This guy was adamant about yanking me out of my own little world—and I wasn’t having it. In pure irritation, I glanced up and found myself staring into blue eyes as clear as a Caribbean lagoon. Despite my surliness, I felt my anger melt a little. He held the book in question close to his face. I smiled. “Yes, it’s good. I’ve read it. Many times.”
He frowned and lowered the novel. “It just came out.”
“My mother wrote it,” I explained.
The man with golden blond hair and a tall, slender physique gazed at me in surprise. “Really? What are the odds? I’m Connor Lancaster.” He held out his hand, and I shook it.
“Sage. Sage Harper.”
“And, your mother is Penny Harper, and she wrote a book.”
“She wrote a book,” I agreed, the day no longer annoying me.
“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?”
I tilted my head to one side. “Will you excuse me a second? I’ll be right back.” Not waiting for an answer, I went to the counter and a moment later returned with a pen.
I grabbed the book out of his hands, flipped it open to the first blank page, and wrote down my number before handing it back to him. “I can’t right now, but I will go out to dinner with you—when you finish the book. Have to have something to talk about.”
Connor smiled. “How’s tomorrow night?”
“You’ll be done with it in a day?”
“What can I say? You’ve motivated me.”
I laughed. “As it turns out, I’m free tomorrow night. Bring notecards.” With a jaunty grin, I hoisted my bag higher on my shoulder and left the bookstore.
•••
The door to the apartment burst open and Jules, my best friend since high school, stood in the doorway. Black curls framed large blue eyes in an expressive pixie face that flickered from thought to thought like pictures on an old film reel.
“About time you got here,” Jules said as I stepped inside and stripped off my coat.
I headed to the bathroom and turned on the shower faucet. “Sorry, you know I hate riding the train at rush hour.”
“I still can’t believe you buy real books.” Jules lurked in the doorway while I sat on the edge of the tub and ran hot water on my feet.
“E-readers make books look cheap, and they hurt my eyes. Besides, real men read real books, and I met one today at the store.”
Jules raised an eyebrow. “Go on...”
I chuckled. “We’re having dinner tomorrow night.”
“Let me guess: tall, blond, blue eyes.”
“Oh damn, I’ve become predictable.”
“Great, I have to go to a boring seminar, and you get to have dinner with a hot guy who can
actually read.”
I laughed. “You’ve been talking about this seminar for six months, and you’ve never once said it would be boring.”
Jules taught theater to middle schoolers in upstate New York. The small town didn’t have a lot of culture—not like the city, which was culture on steroids. Jules came down every chance she could get and always stayed with us; she even had a key.
“You talk to Penny today?”
Sighing, I collapsed onto the couch and looked at my friend. Picking up a full wine glass, I downed a healthy swallow. “Briefly.”
“How’s the book tour going?”
“Fast and furious, as always.”
“Was your conversation still riddled with things unsaid?”
“Oh, believe me. Things have been said. Nothing ‘un’ about it.” My tone was drier than the wine in my glass. “She found my manuscript and wants to show it to her agent.”
“What? What manuscript? You’ve been writing again?”
I sighed heavily. “Yeah, but I wasn’t going to show it to anyone.”
“You want to tell me about it? Or let me read it?”
“No.” I closed my eyes, thinking back to the dialogue with my mother a week ago. We’d existed in uncomfortable silence until she’d left for her book tour. It wasn’t the first time we’d had that kind of conversation. In fact, they’d been increasing over the last year, but this one felt different—it was painted with new shades of my mother’s disappointment.
Jules turned on the TV, but I didn’t see the screen. I thought about my mother and the manuscript under the mattress. So much for thinking I had any secrets.
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