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

  “But that takes cash.” His simple statement of fact had me immediately fuming.

  “Yeah.”

  “And I can help with that, but I want some time with you. We have fences to mend, Harper.”

  I didn’t want to mend fences. I wanted to move forward, not backward. Life, so far, had not gone the way I would have written it, and the chance to start something on my own, to be on the ground floor of something—it felt like the break I needed. And I didn’t need to have a rebuilt relationship with my absentee father to get it. Except that I did need cash, and Mom had basically shrugged her shoulders and cozied up to her newest boyfriend when I’d asked.

  Mom’s strategy for covering her finances wasn’t one I wanted to mimic. And her boyfriends might have been generous with her, but that generosity did not extend to her outspoken daughter who was old enough that she shouldn’t have been coming to either of her parents for money.

  Shame sent heat up my neck as I thought of it all again, and no amount of yogic breathing seemed able to tamp it down.

  Six months, I told myself. That was what I’d promised. Six months and I could go back to building the life I wanted. On my own. Independent. I rolled down the window, took a few deep gulps of fresh air and closed my eyes as a sense of familiarity washed through me. Even the air up here brought back memories.

  I sat for five full minutes, doing my best to breath, to accept. And then I pulled back onto the road and followed the directions I’d been given to a startlingly large house in the back of the residential village—one that had definitely not been there when I was a kid. I pulled up in front of the log and glass structure, wondering if maybe I had gotten it wrong somehow. This place wasn’t a cabin. And based on the size and look of it, it ought to have been renting for a lot more than what Dad said he was paying.

  I stood in the open door of the car, pulled out my phone and double-checked my information, which almost kept me from noticing the tall dark-featured guy who appeared at my side like a ghost.

  “Harper?” He asked, the deep gravel of his voice surprising me. I suppressed a shiver.

  “Yeah. You’re Cameron?” I reached out a hand to shake, my mind spinning at the same time. Tall, check. Dark short hair, check. Bright blue intense eyes, check. Add the tattoos snaking up his neck and down his forearms and the significant scruff around his face and throat, and yep, you pretty much had my kryptonite.

  A hot landlord was the last thing I needed, but if I was lucky, he’d hand me the keys and I’d never see him again. I was a friendly person, but distractions of the hot landlord variety were not something I needed at the moment.

  “I’ve got your deposit and first month, so unless you need me to show you around…” he held out the keys, clearly as eager to be done with me as I was to conclude my business with him.

  “Yeah, no. I’m good.” I took the keys, careful not to meet those soul-sucking eyes again.

  He stood there for a second after I’d accepted the keys, and I could feel his eyes on my face. I cleared my throat.

  “You have my number. I’m just back here.” He pointed behind the main house to a smaller structure, equally well-built but less imposing than the main house.

  “Right there, huh?” Closer than I needed him, that was sure. He hadn’t mentioned that when I’d emailed him at Dad’s direction to set up the rental.

  “Yeah.” He stepped back, and I looked up to find his eyes still on me. “I’ll stay out of your way, though.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, my entire body feeling foreign suddenly, like an instrument I hadn’t yet learned how to play. “It’s good maybe, having someone nearby, you know. Up here in the woods and all. Though you think I’d be at home. I grew up here, after all.”

  Shut up. Why could I not shut up?

  “You’re from here? Originally?” His voice was like rocks; like thunder; like a massive wave rolling in. It was full of some kind of dark foreboding, the promise of something deep and immense. I’d never heard anything like it.

  “Yeah. I lived here till I was seven. My parents split up and I went with my mom.”

  “And your dad…?”

  “Still here.”

  Cameron just looked at me, and when I met those eyes again, the discomfort I felt grew. There was something compelling in them—but it was attractive in the same way as fire. It drew me in, but I could already tell that whatever lay behind those roiling depths might pull me down and burn me, maybe scar me for life.

  He nodded then, just a quick lowering of his chin before he took another step back. “Don’t hike alone early in the morning or at dusk. Reports of a big cat over in the hills there.” Cameron indicated the hillside that climbed upward on the other side of the ravine that carved a boundary between the village and the forest.

  Big cat? He was going to just walk away after dropping that little tidbit on me? He looked at me a moment longer and then spun on his heel, tossing his final words over his shoulder. “You need anything, you know where I am.”

  I watched him walk away, his tall lean form sliding through the growing shadows, moving like the predator he’d just warned me about. A chill raced up my spine and I wasn’t sure if it was thanks to thoughts of mountain lions, or because of him.

  My huge suitcase left a rutted trail through the dust leading up to the front of the massive house, and it was no easy task hauling it up the five wide steps to the door. That’s what you get when you pack your entire life into a single Sampsonite, I guessed.

  The massive wooden door swung in to reveal an expansive front room that opened into a shining kitchen in the back, with a set of stairs off to one side next to a little mudroom with coat hooks and cubbies for boots. I took off my shoes, slipped them into a cubby, and stepped into the space. In no way did this place say “cabin.” More like “luxury home” or “too rich for my blood.”

  “This is not the Kings Grove I remember,” I said aloud as I wandered between plush couches, past a wall-mounted television and into the gleaming kitchen. The window looked down the slope beyond, where I knew a little creek trickled in the summer time—or it had when I’d been a little kid, when California hadn’t been in the middle of a drought. My dad had told me about the fire up here a couple years ago, and I guessed there was a chance that creek had been dry for a couple years, though it sounded like there’d been some snow this past winter.

  “Why do I even care?” I asked myself. It wasn’t like I’d lived here long enough to want to revisit all my old haunts. I’d been too little when I left to even keep in touch with the few friends I’d had as a kid. I yawned, leaning over the sink until I could see another structure just off to the right. Cameron’s little house. From this window I could see it sitting there quietly in the gathering darkness, little windows gleaming, and I thought about the mysterious dark man inside.

  Nope. Not going to do that.

  I turned from the window and circled through the bathroom and rooms on this level, then made my way upstairs, leaving the heavy suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. The master bedroom was huge, with a beamed ceiling that formed an A over the bed and a bathroom as big as my New York City apartment. Standing in its center, I closed my eyes, letting the space move around me, doing my best to be curious but not to judge—my yoga teacher would have been so proud.

  “Nope,” I said aloud. “Too damned big.”

  I padded into one of the smaller bedrooms, comforted by the nearness of the walls beside the bed, the coziness of the space. If I was here alone, I didn’t need an ensuite bathroom, and I was much more at home in a smaller space. This would be my room. I opened dresser drawers and then spent the next fifteen minutes going up and down the stairs, taking my clothes one load at a time instead of trying to manhandle the huge suitcase up the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs again, I picked up the now-empty luggage and toted it up to the master bedroom, dropping it into an empty spot next to the door before sliding a couple old books from the front pocket. I to
ok these to my bedroom and put them on the nightstand. Most adults probably didn’t lug around copies of The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are, but I’d never been like most people.

  Downstairs, the darkness coalescing outside had begun to press itself against the big windows, and I shivered in my solitude. It had been years—maybe my whole life—since I’d been quite this alone. No city noise, no other people shuffling around inside the house. I’d done a good job for a long time of filling the spaces around me, keeping the silence at bay. But after everything that had happened, I was back as I’d begun. Just me, alone in a huge house on the top of a mountain. Just me, starting over once again.

  I dug though the cabinets in the kitchen, but didn’t find any tea bags, so my idea to settle in with a nice cup of tea dissolved almost as soon as I’d had it. Tomorrow would have to be grocery day. I settled for water for now, and curled up on the couch with my phone, my legs tucked beneath me.

  A quick check of my email revealed that the illustrious event management firm of Pierce and Han had been busy in my absence. I had official severance paperwork, which was hilarious, considering they’d fired me in a spectacularly public fashion and then tried to sue me. But my lawyers had been good. They’d kept me out of the Titanic-level sinking of my firm—something I’d actually caused, depending on how you wanted to look at it—and managed to get me a severance package, which I already knew wouldn’t come anywhere near paying for the lawyers in the first place. Every penny I’d made in New York, every dollar I’d scraped and saved, had been spent in a desperate attempt to save myself and my professional reputation as the firm sank.

  That’s what you get for trying to do the right thing. Or maybe that’s what you get for sleeping with your boss.

  Chapter 3

  CAMERON

  The coffee I’d made in the little French press was too damned strong, but I wasn’t in the mood to do it again. Why I couldn’t remember the right number of scoops was beyond me, or maybe it was just that I’d bought the wrong coffee again. Either you were supposed to use a super dark espresso roast or you definitely weren’t. I had a mental block about it. Coffee wasn’t my area. Coffee was Jess. She made the coffee. You’d think after almost two years of living without her I’d have figured some things out. Like how to make coffee.

  But I hadn’t figured out much of anything.

  There was a sheen of condensation on the Adirondack chair I slid into on the deck, and as soon as I laid my arm along the wide planks I was sorry, since my flannel shirt was now soaked from elbow to wrist, not to mention the back of my jeans. I didn’t get up to change though, it seemed like a lot of effort considering my clothes would dry once I got to work.

  The big house that lay in front of mine and set off to the right was dark this morning, and though it was a decent hour—8:00 a.m., I didn’t hear any sounds from within, didn’t see any windows light up with evidence of the occupant moving around.

  The occupant… Harper Lyles. I wasn’t sure what to make of her. I’d wracked my brain after meeting her, hearing she’d grown up here, trying to remember a Lyles family. But I knew these mountains and the people who lived here like I knew my own sorrows—deeply and intimately. And there was no Lyles in Kings Grove, though I guess she might have gotten married somewhere along the way. She’d said her dad was still here, and even though I didn’t make a habit of spending my time playing Nancy Drew and trying to unravel the mysteries of those around me, I’d been curious enough to do a mental sorting of the older men I knew who might have a daughter Harper’s age. Hell, my age. Harper looked like she might be a year or two younger than me.

  I’d have to ask Maddie if she remembered her from when we were kids. Although Maddie’s memory wasn’t great for that sort of thing—she hadn’t remembered that we’d once played with Connor when we’d all been little. The guy had saved her life, pulling her out of a pond in the creek down below, and she’d barely remembered that. Maybe my sister wasn’t my best source for information.

  Not that I needed to know anything about Harper Lyles anyway.

  I sipped my coffee sludge and decided resolutely to not think about her.

  The interesting thing about that, though, was an annoying little truth. For the first time in a long time, my mind seemed to have found something to do besides dwell and churn and mope. When I allowed myself to ponder the woman who’d taken the keys from my hand yesterday and then dragged the biggest suitcase I’d ever seen into my house, I didn’t feel as generally horrible as I had for the last couple years. She was an interesting new character, and I guessed maybe considering her wasn’t the worst thing I could do. Especially if it pulled me out of my abyss a little bit.

  The girl who’d stepped out of her car yesterday hadn’t looked like a mountain girl at all, but I guessed when you’d left Kings Grove at seven, it didn’t leave that particular stain on you quite as deeply. Some of the folks up here couldn’t rub the mountains off with steel wool if they wanted to. It was something about the fine dust that crept into every wrinkle of skin, the clear air that made the eyes shine just a little more brightly than was normal. No, she looked city to me—all messy bun and purposely casual clothes that were undoubtedly expensive. She’d looked me right in the eye at first, and then it had felt like she’d purposely avoided looking at me again. Strange. Stranger still that I found myself wishing she would see me.

  She wasn’t a tall woman—kind of a little thing, actually. Not thin and petite like Jess had been, but curvy and compact, and… something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. That was the mystery. That was what had her on my mind first thing in the morning after two years of thinking of almost nothing but my dead wife. Part of me resented the sudden mental shift, and a part of me that was hard to acknowledge, because it felt like a traitor to my aching soul, was so relieved at the change that it almost hurt.

  I shook my head to clear it, and went back inside. All I really needed to know about Harper Lyles was that her money was good and that she didn’t throw wild parties and trash the house.

  Just as I reached the sink, ready to dump the rest of the coffee and admit I’d be better off going to the diner yet again, a light rap came at my front door.

  With the French press still in hand, I walked over and pulled it open.

  And there she stood. Messy bun back in place, tendrils of long dark hair escaping down her neck and around her face, dressed in flannel pajama pants with martini glasses on them and a T-shirt that was tight enough to give me a pretty good view of her top-level assets. Which were… nice.

  “There’s no coffee up there,” she said, her voice halfway between a moan and a whine. Her face was a comical misery, her round cheeks rosy and her mouth pushed into a soft pout below those gleaming dark eyes.

  “Ah,” I wasn’t sure what I was meant to say.

  Her eyes fell to the French press still in my hand. “Please?” she said, her voice high and reedy. “I promise I’ll go to the store today and you’ll never hear from me again. But I cannot function without…ohhh, is that espresso?” Her eyelids had slid halfway shut, and it was clear the right answer to the espresso question was yes.

  “Yeah, uh… come on in.” I pulled the door open all the way and watched as Harper walked into my house and settled herself in a chair at the kitchen table, just past the living room.

  She dropped her head onto her arms on the tabletop, exposing the back of her long white neck, and a muffled, “Thank you,” came out from beneath all the hair.

  I poured another mug of sludge and set it on the table. “Milk or sugar or anything?”

  She made a noise that sounded negative, so I stepped back, unable to contain my fascination. It wouldn’t have seemed like much to most people, but having an attractive woman wander into my house in pajamas demanding coffee first thing in the morning was a seismic shift from my usual routine.

  Harper lifted her head and eyed the cup, her expression turning from misery to pleasure as she dipped her nose towar
d the rim. “Ohh, this is amazing.” She lifted the cup and I watched her sip, hating myself for my own intrigue, but unable to look away or resume the nonchalant attitude I’d been using for just about everything in life for years now.

  For five solid minutes, neither of us said anything. Harper drank and moaned over the coffee, and I stood nearby like a statue, confused and enthralled, and generally moronic.

  “How’d you do it?” she asked finally, setting the cup down. She had transformed before my eyes. Her face was clearer, her spine was straighter, and her voice was steady. I’d never met anyone who needed coffee like other people need oxygen.

  “Do… what?”

  “The coffee. I saw the French press, but this was super dark and rich and… did you use an espresso roast?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention.”

  She stood and went to the counter next to the sink where the coffee bag still sat. She picked it up and eyed it, then opened it and stuck her nose inside, inhaling. “Oh yeah, this is good. Can you buy this in town? At the grocery?”

  “Yeah.” Where else?

  “Huh.” She shrugged and put the coffee bag back down on the counter and turned to face me. “Well, thanks, Cameron. You’ve saved my life.” She lifted a small hand and punched me lightly in the shoulder as she passed, heading for the door again.

  “Sure,” I said, unable to access the bulk of my vocabulary.

  She lifted a hand in a wave of goodbye and then let herself out the door, making her way barefooted through the soft brown dirt between my house and hers.

  When Harper had left, I shoved my wallet into my pocket and headed out to the diner for coffee I could actually drink before I went to work.