Heath's Hope (The Brothers of Beauford Bend Book 5)

Avon, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2015 by Jean Hovey and Stephanie Jones.
All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Crimson Romance

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

www.crimsonromance.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-8563-6

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8563-0

eISBN 10: 1-4405-8564-4

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8564-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Cover art © iStockphoto.com/Jasmin Awad.

For our fantastic editorial team at Crimson Romance: Tara Gelsomino, Jess Verdi, and Julie Sturgeon.

In the much beloved children’s book,
The Velveteen Rabbit
,
a boy made a toy real by loving him. While the characters on the printed page cannot become real without the love of the writer and the reader, it takes much more—a compelling story, depth of emotion, and perfectly placed dialogue just for a start. A smart, committed team is required to help make that happen. We always try to remember to say thank you, but, ladies, this one’s for you, for all our velveteen rabbits who have hopped off the page.

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• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Epilogue
  
• About the Author
  
• MUST-HAVE MITTS KNITTING PATTERN
  
• FAMILY FRIENDLY KNITS AD FROM MDS
  
• More from This Author
  
• Also Available
  

“How’s your daddy? I hear he fell out of his tree stand and broke his leg.”

“Yes, ma’am. He did.” That’s why Hope MacKenzie had made the sudden, emergency trip back to her hometown. She stood on the sidewalk in the middle of Beauford, Tennessee’s Harvest Festival, talking to Miss Stella “Sticky” Stinson. Seated at a table set up outside her knitting shop, String, Miss Sticky was dressed as a ham. Hope wasn’t surprised.
To Kill a Mockingbird
was Miss Sticky’s favorite book, and she’d been emulating Scout’s costume on Halloween for as long as Hope could remember. Hope carried on, “It was a bad break, but the surgery went well.”

Miss Sticky and her sister, Miss Julia, had taught English and biology, respectively, at Beauford High School until they retired and opened their shop. Hope could remember sitting in class listening to them lecture, their knitting needles clicking in the background. Between the two of them, they must have knitted around the world fifteen times.

Miss Sticky stroked a hank of yarn on the table like it was a beloved pet. “What was Mac doing in a tree stand anyway? It’s not deer season yet, and I know he’s not the kind to hunt out of season.”

That was true. Vincent Ambrose MacKenzie III, owner, president, and head honcho in every way of Beauford Savings and Loan, didn’t do anything out of season.

“I’m not sure. I would guess he was checking to make certain it was in good shape before the season starts.” Or maybe he’d just gone out to the farm to get away from Hope’s mother. If that were the case, it had backfired because he wasn’t going to be able to get away from her for quite a while—starting with an almost unheard of weeklong hospital stay and a stint in rehab.

“So I guess the stand wasn’t in very good shape,” Miss Sticky said. “Not that it matters much now. I don’t suppose Mac will be doing any deer hunting this year.”

“No. Turns out, a femur break is the grand champion of them all.”

“Still. Sounds like he’s better off than Marla Ledow. Did you hear what happened to her? No? Well. She was driving down the road, and there was a pickup truck in front of her with a tanning bed in the back. They came to an incline, and that tanning bed slid out of the truck bed and flew through Marla’s windshield. If she hadn’t ducked, it would have decapitated her for sure. As it was, it crushed her shoulder.”

So many questions … so many. Why was someone moving a tanning bed? Was it not tied down? How did one go about ducking while driving a car? Hope could have come up with dozens and dozens of questions, but there would be no real answers, only long-winded debate and speculation.

She was for sure back in Beauford—though not for long.

“I know your mother was glad to see you coming,” Miss Sticky went on. “Now, where is it you’re living? Charlotte? Didn’t I hear you’re an investment banker at the Bank of America?”

None of this required verbal answers. Miss Sticky had it right; Hope just had to nod.

“Sticky!” Miss Julia came out of the shop door dressed as a giant black cat, and encircled Hope in her furry arms. “You’re grilling the best student we ever had like a rib eye steak in the backyard. How are you, Hope? I’m still bitter you didn’t use that brilliant science mind of yours to go to medical school. But I guess after three generations, banking is in your blood.”

“She wasn’t the best student I ever had,” Miss Sticky said.

Hope laughed. “It’s true. I wasn’t much for analyzing literature, and my writing was terrible.”

Miss Sticky nodded. “Perfect grammatically, but no soul.”

“Sticky, that was rude,” Miss Julia said. “Tell you what, Hope. To make up for my sister’s bad manners, come into String while you’re home, and we’ll give you some yarn and teach you to knit for free.”

“Thank you, Miss Julia, but I’m not going to be in town long enough for that.”

“Anyway, Julia,” Miss Sticky said. “You know what Heath said. We’ve got to stop giving things away. We’re a business. We are supposed to sell yarn and charge for lessons.”

Heath.
Hope stopped mid breath. “Heath?”

“Yes, Heath Beckett.” Miss Sticky beamed. “Do you know him? He’s the stained glass artist who owns Spectrum. He’s tremendously respected in the art world. A real master craftsman, and at such a young age, too. He’s forever going off to Europe to repair this window or that. He made a set of contemporary angel panels for the Milton building in Chicago a few years back. You should look them up on the Internet.”

But Hope didn’t have to. She knew those panels. They’d ripped her life apart and broken her heart. No. That wasn’t fair. She’d done that to herself. But there was no reason for Miss Sticky and Miss Julia to know the history between her and Heath. He hadn’t grown up here as Hope had, and Heath had never been one for telling his business. They’d met their junior year at Chapel Hill.

Even back then, Hope had liked a plan and hated the unpredictable. She’d thrived on rules and order and run from the nebulous. While it wasn’t in her plan to fall in love at Chapel Hill, Heath Beckett made sense. They were both in the school of business with similar goals. She thought it was charming that he drove to Ashville twice a week to take stained glass classes. Maybe he would use his hobby to make a window for their house one day. But when Heath told her shortly before graduation that he was quitting school to become a stained glass artist, it unnerved her so badly, she broke up with him.

They were supposed to go to graduate school, become investment bankers, get married, and live happily ever after. How could she be with someone who’d upset the plan? She couldn’t even hear him when he tried to explain that he’d been given the chance of a lifetime—to design and make stained glass panels for an important building by a renowned architect.

She didn’t understand all that. She dealt in clean, pure facts, figures, and plans.

Still, she’d been shattered, and there’d been no diagram, no equation, no business plan that could ease her broken heart. So six weeks later, right after graduation, she’d steeled herself and driven to Ashville, determined to see if she could make sense of a dream made of molten colored glass and lead.

Hope had just thought she’d been shattered before. The only saving grace was that Heath never knew she came looking for him. When she stopped to comb her hair and collect herself at the coffee shop near the studio where Heath worked, the barista told her that Heath had married his mentor’s daughter.

Hope’s hair never got combed that day.

When her grief had reached the anger stage, she’d vowed to fight her way to success while Heath tried to spin dreams into gold as his ethereal, little, violet-eyed, gauzy-skirt-wearing wife looked on.

The irony was the Milton building won award after award and was featured in every architectural periodical in the country—with pictures of Heath’s creations in every one. Within certain circles, Heath became a household name at twenty-three years old. Heath had his passion and success while Hope was still slugging it out in graduate school.

Outwardly, it might have seemed too fantastic to be true that Heath had landed in Hope’s hometown, but given Beauford’s status as an artisan boutique community with some of the most renowned craftsmen in the country, it was entirely believable. Hope’s trips home since had been so infrequent and brief that avoiding Heath had not been hard. She had certainly never been in his shop.

Miss Julia brought Hope back to the present. “Yes, Heath is a sweetheart. He’d been working out of Foster Garrett’s shop in Ashville where he made the angel panels, but we were all thrilled when the Beauford Arts Council persuaded him to open a shop here.” Hope was very well aware of when that had happened—seven years ago, three years after their breakup and a year after his big success. During that time, Hope had dated some here and there, but nothing had stuck. But who had time for it anyway? Well, except for Heath. He hadn’t wasted any time moving on.

“Heath’s got a real head for business, too,” Miss Sticky went on. “We’re lucky that he’s been willing to give us some tips now and then.”

Hope forced herself to smile. “Like to not give away goods and services?”

“He’s hard on us,” Miss Sticky said, “but he’s so cute I can’t stand it.”

Me, either, Miss Sticky. Me either.
His big, brandy-colored eyes would be the same. She wondered if he still wore his tawny hair in that tangled mess that so suited him.

“He never talks about it, but we heard his wife died,” Miss Julia whispered the way people do when they talk about the dead.

Hope had heard that, too—had verified it, in fact. Leukemia, just six months after the wedding. Hope didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.