Love Reclaimed: (Clean Small-Town Romance) (Kings Grove Book 4) Read online

  Love Reclaimed

  Delancey Stewart

  Contents

  Love Reclaimed

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Sneak Peek - Christmas in Kings Grove (Chapter 1)

  Sneak Peek - Christmas in Kings Grove (Chapter 2)

  Sneak Peek - Christmas in Kings Grove (Chapter 3)

  Also by Delancey Stewart

  Love Reclaimed

  Kings Grove - Book Four

  by Delancey Stewart

  Copyright © 2018 Delancey Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  LOVE RECLAIMED by Delancey Stewart

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  LOVE RECLAIMED is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Chapter 1

  CAMERON

  “Okay, wedding planning. I’ve been to weddings. I can do this.” I searched my brain’s limited archive of common wedding items, which was built mostly from being dragged to romantic comedies by various women over the years and from the one wedding I’d been in when I was three, at which I lost the ring I was supposed to be carrying on a tufted pillow. I wasn’t invited to participate much in weddings after that. Until now. My sister’s wedding. This was important. But still, I was probably not the best guy to help. “Doves? Want to release doves? I think people do that.”

  Maddie’s eyes widened, but she’d just put a marshmallow between her lips and couldn’t respond. She stared at me across the fire pit we sat around in front of my small house.

  Connor, her fiance, answered for her. “No birds. No livestock of any kind.”

  “Birds don’t qualify as livestock.” I said it definitively, but then realized I had no idea what qualified as livestock. Birds might.

  “Why are you arguing for birds?” Maddie asked, finally able to speak though her mouth was still full.

  I shrugged. Why did I do half the things I did lately? I’d been living a while in a state of simplicity. Just being. It kept me from thinking too much, from worrying too much. “Okay. No birds. Well, you definitely need children. Flower girl, ring bearer.”

  “We all remember how that turned out,” Maddie said, laughing.

  “Not all of us,” Connor said. “You guys seem to forget not everyone is a part of your secret sibling knowledge bank. I don’t know all the stories.”

  “Just most of them,” I said. It felt like we’d known Connor a long time—maybe because we had known him as kids. At least for a summer.

  “Let’s just say, you shouldn’t trust Cam with the rings.”

  “Um. He’s the best man. He’s going to be holding the rings.” Connor said, looking concerned.

  “This is why you need a ring bearer,” I confirmed. “Any four-year old will be more trustworthy than me when it comes to wedding rings. I have a history, man.”

  Connor shook his head and took a long pull on his beer as I stuck another marshmallow over the fire to brown. The sparks from the low flames danced over the pit and the light cast a reassuring glow in a circle around us. The fire hissed and popped in the silent mountain evening.

  “I don’t know about decor and stuff, but what about this,” Connor leaned back in the Adirondack chair with a bottle held between his palms, and gazed up at the wide indigo sky beyond the illumination of the fire pit. “The room falls to a hush and maybe the lights go out. We get a mist machine going and this cool thick mist begins to rise from the ground. Maybe we get some lights to come up from the floor, along the aisle, kind of swinging around and illuminating things from below, shining up through the mist—like searchlights. And over the speakers, ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe starts to play.” He hummed the beginning of the song: “na na na naaaa, na na nuh-nuh-nuh, na na na nuhhhh…”

  “‘The Final Countdown’?” My sister practically leapt from her chair, getting to her feet and dropping her hands to her hips. “You think I should walk down the aisle to ‘The Final Countdown’?”

  “Sit down,” I suggested. They barely needed me present for this conversation, but I’d put my sister off so many times she’d basically insisted she was coming tonight no matter what I said.

  “Is that how you feel about getting married, Connor? We’ve only been engaged for a half century now. Is that why you’ve been dragging your feet about planning anything? Because you feel like it’s the end of the world or something?” Maddie was getting spun up and I wished I had the right words to make her feel better. It was pretty ridiculous—both Connor’s idea, which I knew he was just tossing out to mess with her, and the fact that she was getting worked up. The guy was head over heels in love with my sister, and she knew it. The long engagement spoke more about that than anything else. They’d been enjoying things as they were, felt no need to rush into anything else. In another life, I’d known that feeling.

  “Maddie,” Connor said in that low voice that always seemed to soothe her. “You know I want to get married.” He put his beer down and stood, pulling her into his arms. The firelight danced on their faces and I could see her melt the second he touched her, despite the fact she was trying to look angry. There was so much love and attraction radiating between them, I felt an odd pull of emotions. I was happy for my sister—really, truly happy. But it was hard to watch, so I let my eyes drop shut and tried to turn off my mind.

  Connor whispered soothing words and my sister said something back. I didn’t focus on their words; I thought about soft blond hair splayed across my pillow in the morning sun, about a laughter filled with high notes like chimes in a breeze, about a cool slim hand I’d once been lucky enough to hold in my own. It hadn’t been perfect. And maybe it had been something far less than that, but I still missed it. Mourned it.

  “What do you think, Cam?” My sister was back in her chair, the crisis averted.

  “It’s your wedding, Mad. You should have it the way you want.” I had no idea what she was asking me, but this seemed like a pretty solid blanket response.

  “Yeah, totally agree. Actually I think the whole world should work that way, but it doesn’t seem to.” She paused and inclined her head, catching my eye. Her voice softened. “I asked if you’d be willing to walk me down the aisle. You know, since Dad…”

  “Dad can do it,” I said, knowing there were probably a thousand reasons why that was a bad idea.

  “What if he’s not lucid that day, Cam? What if he wanders off or gets confused or scared?” Her eyes grew round, her face serious, and I had a glimpse of the wild-haired little girl my sister used to be. My resolve softened.

  “Yeah, okay. Of
course I will, Maddie.” I couldn’t let my sister down. She was all I had in the world. Her and my dad, and dad hadn’t been himself for a long time now.

  “Thanks, Cam. I know weddings are probably hard.” Maddie had always been better at talking about things than I was, and she’d been trying to get me to talk about Jess—my wife—for a long time. But Jess was the reason I’d let myself stall out for the last two years. Talking about her was more than hard. Hell, thinking about her was hard. And doing just about anything else felt damn near impossible sometimes.

  “Hey Cam,” Connor was staring past me, toward the big house set just down the driveway from the little house I lived in. “When are you going to move into the main house? It seems crazy, you living in the guest shack when that incredible house sits there empty.”

  “It’s not always empty,” I reminded them.

  “Yeah, you rented my dream house to strangers last year.” Maddie wasn’t done being bitter, it seemed.

  “You built your dream house and never moved into it. Some dream.” I could play this game, too. Maddie had been the one who was supposed to live in the big house, but she met Connor mid-build, and ended up moving straight into his house. I ended up in the guest house back then, and just hadn’t seen a reason to leave it. “I’ve got plans to rent it again, remember? That girl Mike hired from New York to work at the Inn.”

  “Why don’t you rent this girl the guest house and live in the big house yourself?” she asked. Her curls danced around her head, and I felt a fierce love for my sister when I glanced at her.

  “I don’t need the space,” I said. That was the truth. I had no idea what I’d do with myself in the big house on the property my sister had given me when I’d moved up here. The two bedroom guest house that sat off to one side of it was plenty of space for me. I was alone, and had no plans to change that. And one man didn’t need four bedrooms and a chef’s kitchen. It wasn’t like I was entertaining on a weekly basis. “Plus I get more money renting the big house than I would this little house.”

  “What do you know about this girl?” Connor asked. The fire danced off his red beard and I thought—not for the first time—that he looked fierce and pretty badass. Besides the fact that he seemed to know a lot about various ways to kidnap, torture, and kill people—thanks to the thrillers he was famous for writing—I wouldn’t want to meet him in a fight. I could hold my own, but there was something about Connor that told me he could too. It made me glad he was with my sister. He could take care of her.

  “Some woman from New York,” I answered. “Didn’t get a whole lot beyond the deposit and the credit check. Set it up by email.” Pretty much the way I liked it. I didn’t have to talk to her, and if I was lucky, I’d never even see her after handing off the key. I wasn’t anti-social exactly, but people were not my thing. I loved my sister, and I didn’t mind her friends and fiancé. But other people? Kind of unnecessary in my mind. I had bad luck with people.

  “Huh, okay.” Maddie shrugged. “Maybe when she gets here I’ll come over and say hi.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “She’s supposed to get in tomorrow.”

  “Good.” Maddie leaned forward and stared into the dying coals in the pit, then surprised me by chucking her fist into my shoulder. “So. Walking me down the aisle, right? To some song besides ‘The Final Countdown.’ And there will be no mist or eerie lighting, thankyouverymuch.” She glared at Connor with this last part and he shrugged and grinned.

  “It was just an idea.” He said and then finished his beer.

  As Connor put the empty bottle on the table, an eerie shrill squealing sound tore through the fabric of the cooling night, a high-pitched squall that sounded like a cross between grinding machinery gears and a maniacal whistle. Everyone around the dying fire lifted their heads, listening.

  “What was that?” Maddie asked, looking around, her voice wary.

  Connor glanced at me, and his gaze told me he had a pretty good idea. I shook my head. The squall was something I hadn’t heard in the years I’d been here. “Not sure,” Connor said slowly. “Ranger George did say something about a mountain lion last week. A couple deer killed locally that fit the profile.”

  Maddie’s mouth dropped open a bit and she glanced nervously out into the darkness. “Mountain lion?”

  There were few real predators in our mountains—part of the reason we’d been allowed to roam freely up here as kids, and certainly a big part of the reason village kids still wandered the hillsides together, blissfully exploring the semi-wild without much to fear. There were black bears and the occasional bobcat, and plenty of deer. But mountain lions were different. The Sierra Nevada was part of their range, definitely, but Connor explained that Ranger George said he suspected the cat that had been around lately might have been driven to a new area by the fire a couple summers ago.

  I spent a fair amount of time on my own hiking, and had never seen any evidence of a mountain lion. But the cry we’d just heard had me wondering.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Connor assured my sister. “You don’t hike alone, and if you did run into it, you know enough not to run away, right?”

  “I do now,” Maddie said, sounding very doubtful. “But I think I’ve got a long night of Googling ahead of me. It’s getting late. Better head home.” Maddie stepped near and hugged me, and I held my breath. Maybe I was superstitious—maybe I was just insane. There was a little part of me that believed people I loved tended to die. But my goal with Maddie was to keep her so close I could stop anything from happening to her. I hadn’t been able to do that with Jess. But maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. Or maybe I hadn’t loved her enough.

  Once they’d gone, I stared into the dying coals in the fire pit for a long time. At first I just sat and listened, wondering if there really was a big cat prowling the hills just on the other side of the little creek below, but soon I just watched the ways the coals glowed and dimmed. If I worked hard enough, I could see Jess’s face in the smoldering fire, the outline of her jaw, the gleam of fun that was always in her eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut. If I worked just a little bit harder, I could almost feel her beside me. We’d had issues, that was certain. And maybe, had Jess lived, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. But I missed the possibility…the feeling that life wasn’t always predictable, wasn’t always dark and sad.

  But I knew it was pointless. The work I should be doing was to forget. I needed to forget her completely, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to let go of her or of the guilt that plagued me whenever I thought of my dead wife.

  Chapter 2

  HARPER

  The pine trees got bigger the higher up the side of the mountain I drove, and memories came rushing back like embarrassing one-night stands showing up at your favorite bar. I hadn’t planned to come back here. Like, ever. But a lot of things in my life turned out to be completely different from what I’d planned.

  At the top of the winding, hours-long road, my head had started to pound to match my heart, and when the first sign for Kings Grove appeared at the side of the two-lane highway I pulled over just past it into a dusty half-moon turnout. My hands gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled and desperate, and I forced them to relax, forced my body to unclench. Deep breaths. Yoga breaths.

  I used to pay a lot of money to learn to relax—now was the time to figure out if it had all been a waste. In truth, the only yoga pose I ever really mastered was corpse pose at the end of class. The rest of it just felt like awkward scrabbling and uncoordinated half-balancing in hopes I looked a little bit like the lithe strong teacher at the front of my class. “Accept,” she always said. “Acknowledge and accept. Be curious, but don’t judge.”

  If only.

  My life wasn’t about acceptance. Maybe some of us just weren’t built that way.

  My parents hadn’t accepted each other, neither had really ever accepted me. It probably wasn’t a surprise that acceptance wasn’t really my thing.

  Now I was
having trouble accepting that I was back in Kings Grove, aka the middle of literally nowhere. The only reason I’d come back to the place I was born was absolute, pure desperation. And my dad essentially blackmailing me into it. Maybe “blackmail” was a strong word. But Dad was not a guy I was used to turning to for help, and the only reason I found myself driving toward the little town he’d never left was because he’d made it easy.

  When I’d called him, needing help and hoping for assistance of the financial variety, things had gone a slightly different direction than I’d wanted. I’d laid out my woes in an email, and he’d called not two hours later with a plan and a set of demands.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” was his opening gambit.

  “I don’t think waitressing in a diner is going to cover my debt.”

  “Probably not. So I set up an event management position at the new Inn. Mike is the manager there and she needs help from someone smart who knows how to manage details.”

  I was silent a moment, pondering whether my current situation indicated the clear lack of an ability to manage anything. “Oh. Okay…”

  “And I’ll cover your rent for the first six months.”

  I sucked in a breath at that. “Dad, I’m not staying six months. I need to get to Austin. Chelle’s cousin is building an event management firm, and I told him I’d take a minority stake. It’s a chance to build something of my own, to finally get out from under the management thumb.”