by Jodi Thomas
PRAISE FOR JODI THOMAS’S NOVELS
“Tender, heartfelt and wonderful.... I loved every word.”
—RaeAnne Thayne, New York Times bestselling author, on The Little Teashop on Main
“Compelling and beautifully written, it is exactly the kind of heart-wrenching, emotional story one has come to expect from Jodi Thomas.”—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on Ransom Canyon
“Deeply poignant moments and artfully rendered characters create a rich story that transports readers to an idyllic place.”
—Publishers Weekly on Mistletoe Miracles
“Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review) on Sunrise Crossing
“A pure joy to read.”—RT Book Reviews on the Ransom Canyon series
Also by Jodi Thomas
Novels:
Mornings on Main
The Little Teashop on Main
Christmas in Winter Valley
Mistletoe Miracles
Indigo Lake
Wild Horse Springs
Sunrise Crossing
Lone Heart Pass
Rustler’s Moon
Ransom Canyon
One True Heart
A Place Called Harmony
Betting the Rainbow
Can’t Stop Believing
Chance of a Lifetime
Just Down the Road
The Comforts of Home
Somewhere Along the Way
Welcome to Harmony
Beneath the Texas Sky
Anthologies:
A Texas Kind of Christmas
Be My Texas Valentine
Give Me a Cowboy
Give Me a Texan
Give Me a Texas Outlaw
Give Me a Texas Ranger
One Texas Night
A Texas Christmas
The Cowboy Who Saved Christmas
BREAKFAST AT THE HONEY CREEK CAFÉ
JODI THOMAS
ZEBRA BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR JODI THOMAS’S NOVELS
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
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
Sunday
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Monday
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Wednesday
Chapter 44
Teaser chapter
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 by Jodi Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, or events, is entirely coincidental.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Zebra and the Z logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4201-5128-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-4201-5130-5 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4201-5130-4 (ebook)
For Tom
I’ll meet you at the Gate
Prologue
Wednesday, May 23
Mayor Piper Jane Mackenzie
The mayor of Honey Creek, Texas, walked slowly down the long hallway to her office on the fourth floor of city hall. It wasn’t dawn yet and she already felt a heavy weight bearing down on her slender shoulders.
This may be her last day in public office. It may be the end of the Mackenzies occupying the mayor’s seat since the building had been built over fifty years ago.
And she’d be the one at fault.
As she turned the key to the private entrance to her office, she glanced at her grandfather’s picture. “Morning, Granddad.” No one would hear her this early, she may as well talk to him. “I screwed up bad this time. You know how you always told me that sometimes doing nothing, saying nothing, can get you in more trouble than doing or saying the wrong thing?” Piper patted her chest. “Well, that’s me. I didn’t lie, but I wasn’t honest either.”
Her granddad seemed to be smiling back just at her.
Piper touched the glass as if brushing his beard. “I wouldn’t mind if you sent in the cavalry about now.”
She heard the elevator door opening and rushed into her office. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to the press.
As she closed the door, she noticed a square white envelope on the floor. Someone must have shoved it under the door—the private door that few people ever noticed tucked away in the corner.
Before she could turn on the light, the phone rang. Piper dropped the envelope and moved to the window. The first hint of dawn bloomed to the east, but the town was still only shadows.
The phone rang again.
Piper didn’t move. She needed time to think. Fear crawled up her spine.
Her pretend boyfriend’s body was probably floating down the Brazos River by now, and somehow everyone thought she had all the answers.
Kicking off her four-inch heels, Piper seriously thought of hiding under the desk, but she was a Mackenzie and Mackenzies stand their ground.
As light moved through the windows, she picked up the mail and slit it open.
One note folded once. Two words written inside.
SAY NOTHING.
Chapter 1
Friday, May 25
Dawn
Sam
Samuel Randall Cassidy pulled his dusty blue Audi into the rest stop parking lot forty miles from Honey Creek, Texas. It was time to clean up and step into the parallel life he might have lived if he’d turned down another road after college.
He laughed softly to himself and wondered if the Devil was joining him in the joke of thinking Sam had finally gone mad. Five years of seminary school, then ten years in the army flying, and another five as a firefighter in the Rocky Mountains. He’d been called a student, a captain, and a smoke jumper, but now he was stepping into a new identity . . . a preacher.
He’d spent almost half his life shifting, just being one of many. Moving among the crowds, never standing out, and now he was headed to
ward a little town where everyone would be inspecting his every word and action.
At thirty-eight, he knew it was impossible to rewind his life and go back to a simpler time. If he could truly look into his childhood, he might discover that it wasn’t as peaceful as he remembered. But he had to try. His life, his sanity depended on it. He’d been invisible so long he’d lost himself. It was time to go back to his roots and see what might have been.
He’d passed through this part of Texas several times as a kid. His father had even preached a revival a few times in the small town he was headed for.
As he walked across the deserted parking lot, a gray cloud floated over the pale sunrise. Humidity peppered with dust, he thought. The kind of dawn no one would want as the backdrop for a selfie. Not that he had anyone to send a picture to. He used his phone mostly for directions and weather reports.
Today, though, there were no directions helping him travel down the path he hadn’t taken that fall after school.
Sam had been born in Texas, spent most of his youth here moving from school to school, following his dad’s work. But Texas wasn’t home.
Nowhere had ever been. Even the small farm his parents went to between jobs wasn’t home. It was just a little house his mother had inherited because no other relative wanted it. When Sam inherited the place, he’d sold it to fund his last year of school and a trip to Europe after graduation.
Sam lifted his old suitcase shoulder high to stretch his muscles, then walked into the public restroom designed to look like one in a turn-of-the-century train station—lean, steel and porcelain, empty. The place was about as welcoming as disinfectant. A line of stalls. A line of sinks. A line of tall windows.
He pulled off his T-shirt and hung it on a stall door, then opened his shaving kit and began removing his short beard.
After that, he changed into a funeral black suit that matched his hair, pulling the price tags off as he went.
He felt as if he were traveling backward through the layers of his life. He couldn’t tell whether he was running toward or away from his destiny.
Fate had chosen his path, and he’d been fool enough to follow. A letter from a small church in a place called Honey Creek traveled though half a dozen former addresses to reach him. Sam knew before he opened the tattered letter that the mail was meant for his father. Samuel Cassidy, Sr., had been dead more than a dozen years, but the churches he’d preached in still wrote asking him to return to fill in for a sick pastor or stay long enough for them to find another shepherd.
For once Sam didn’t toss out the letter meant for his father. Instead, he decided to take the two-week calling. He might not have been in a church since his folks died, but he grew up on Sunday school crackers and funeral food leftovers.
One thing was certain. This assignment would pull him back to the past and maybe help him remember a period when the world was calm. This time he wouldn’t be flying for the army or fighting forest fires. This time, he’d be reliving the life of a man he’d never understood.
Just out of high school, he’d boarded a plane to head for seminary with his parents waving proudly. He’d felt the whisper of a calling to preach, to be a man of the cloth like his father and grandfather, or maybe become a missionary in a land he’d never heard about. Sam longed to see the world and this might be his ticket.
Five years later, three months after he graduated, he’d stepped on another plane after swearing in at the army recruiting office in Dallas. No one stood waving or wishing him well that time. But the calling to serve his country had been loud after the bombing of the London Tube he’d witnessed that summer.
After a few tours in the army, he left his uniform behind and drifted. No callings spoke to him. He’d crossed the country, stopping now and then to rest. By the time he’d finally stopped wandering, his hair was over his collar and his clothes rags. Sam decided to be a chameleon moving with the seasons. With no family, no roots, he just blew with the wind.
Until he met April Raine in San Diego. Sunshine wearing a ponytail and honey brown eyes that saw him completely, she became his home, his heart. He told everyone that he loved her from the moment they met.
He took a job as a firefighter their first summer when wild fires seemed rampant in California. Before long he was boarding planes to fly everywhere he was needed. He loved the rush of excitement when he parachuted behind the fire line.
Sam was a born leader, and his skills as a pilot made him even more valuable to the team.
April had said what he did was a gift. The world needed men like him.
He flew on a moment’s notice fighting wherever he was needed, but it seemed every time Sam left, he missed her more. When the mission was over, he’d go wherever she was. April had been a travel writer whose home was on wheels. When he wasn’t working, he was seeing the world through her eyes.
Buttoning his clerical collar, Sam gazed into the tin mirror wondering what had happened to the man who used to laugh. The man who took gulps of life. The Sam who camped out with April beneath the stars. The wild man who’d fallen in love with a free spirit and howled at the moon just to make her laugh.
In his reflection now, he saw his father, a traveling preacher who never had his own church. But Sam saw no peace in his own dark eyes.
“Hi, Pop.” Sam raised one side of his smile like his dad always did. “I’m finally going to use that divinity degree you wanted me to have.”
Silence. The hint of a smile vanished.
Sam swore under his breath and continued his transformation. He combed his black hair back, letting the widow’s peak show. April would have hated it this way. His California girl would tell him he looked “New York slick.” Then she’d tease him and say preachers’ sons never learn to look sexy.
He stood perfectly still for a moment as if waiting for her to dig her fingers into his hair and mess it up. “Let it curl,” she’d say, laughing.
April had loved him and she never seemed to need more than what he gave. When they were together, the world was theirs. Tomorrow didn’t matter as long as they had today.
But she hadn’t been waiting for him the last time he’d come home from an assignment. When he finally found her RV parked at a police lot, she’d been dead two weeks and no one had told him.
“She wasn’t your wife,” one clerk of the station said. “You’d listed no living relatives, Cassidy. I heard you say your folks died when you were in college, so we had no one to notify.”
April had died without anyone knowing she was his world, his anchor. The doctor who checked her said her heart just stopped beating. Sam had taken the words calmly, but he felt his heart had stopped beating too.
He’d said he would survive, he’d heal, he’d march on, but in truth, a big piece of him died that day—the most important part. He didn’t know how to be anything without her. He couldn’t be a fighter in a world he didn’t care to live in. He’d lost his mate and had no plans of ever allowing anyone close again.
Samuel Cassidy continued to work, but mentally he was drifting. Never staying one place long enough to get to know anyone. His only goal was to survive until the next fire came in. He was no longer on a mission to see new things, no longer counting days before he’d be home with April. All the fight, all the passion, all the peace he’d known was gone.
Then the letter came. A chance to go back in time for a while. The offer for Samuel Cassidy to fill in at a church in Honey Creek might be just what he needed. A change. A place where he could hide out from his life.
He stared at his reflection in the tin mirror. He could play the part of a preacher.
The metal door on the public restroom rattled as if a strong wind blew past.
A man in scrubs and a lab coat stormed in carrying two plastic bags. He glanced at Sam, then disappeared into the last stall.
Sam watched as the lab jacket was tossed over the door. The guy was cussing as he bumped against the walls of the stall. Scrubs, bloody in places, were thrown over the d
oor next. Then plastic shoes slid out from under the door as if trying to escape.
More banging against the walls.
Just as Sam was shoving his old clothes into the suitcase, the man burst out of the stall. The stranger now wore jeans and a western shirt. Worn boots had replaced the hospital shoes. He turned and collected the clothes and shoes he’d discarded, dropping them into the trash bin. Then he pulled a Stetson from a bag, crammed it down over his ginger-colored curly hair, and turned toward Sam.
For a moment they looked at each other. Sam could see now that he was a few years younger than he was, a few inches shorter, but still over six feet.
Just as the man seemed about to speak, a dozen Boy Scouts suddenly invaded the restroom. Talking, laughing, pushing one another, they formed a line in front of the five stalls.
The cowboy nodded his head once at Sam. “Guess we’d better head ’em up. . . .”
Sam grinned, realizing he’d just met a chameleon like himself. “And move ’em out.”
The man headed out the door and Sam turned back to the mirror and his own journey. The mirror reflected a stranger’s face now. No longer his father’s and not quite his. He’d been trying to save the world in one way or the other for half his life, but no more. He’d take this trip back in time; then he’d bury all the past. His childhood, his parents’ deaths, memories of April.
He was mad at God.
Not because He took April, but because God had left him behind.
Chapter 2
Friday morning
Colby
