The Next Little Thing (Jackson Falls #4) (11 page)
He took a hard breath as some of the worry that had weighed him
down slithered off his shoulders. "I wrote a song," he said. "For
Emma. The night I came to the hospital. I'll play it for you later."
Her smile was radiant. "Come," she said, taking his
hand and leading him to the cradle where Emma slept. Together, they stood watching
their sleeping baby. "Look at what we did." She lay her head against
his arm. "We made this gorgeous creature. You and me, Flash. Isn't that
just the most amazing thing you've ever seen?"
He studied Emma, her soft, flawless skin, her tiny chest moving up
and down with each breath. Swallowed hard. “It is.”
"This is just the beginning. A new baby, a new house, a new
us. Are you ready? Are you going to be okay?"
He probed his feelings, much the way he would have probed an
aching tooth. And was surprised by what he discovered. "Yeah," he
said. "I think I am."
"That's the answer I was looking for." She wound her arm
around his and said, "I hear there's this big, honking Jacuzzi in the next
room, just waiting to be christened. Want to take a long, lovely soak with the
woman of your dreams?"
He lifted her chin and kissed her. Smiled into her beautiful
green eyes, those eyes that had stolen his heart the first time he looked into
them. And said, “Babydoll, there will never come a time when I won't want to
take a long, lovely soak with you."
THE END
SNEAK PREVIEW OF JACKSON FALLS BOOK 4
REDEMPTION ROAD
COMING IN LATE 2013!
January, 1993
Jackson Falls, Maine
She hadn't been sure the fourteen-year-old Vega would make it this
far. She'd bought it for a measly two hundred bucks the day that Irv's kids
ran her on a rail out of Palm Beach. They'd sat her down one afternoon,
announced that they were contesting the will, and given her fifteen minutes to
pack up what was hers before the locksmith waiting in his panel truck in the
circular drive outside the mansion changed the lock on the front door.
It wasn't what Irv would have wanted, but she was too weary, too
discouraged, to fight it. They'd eventually win, anyway. She and Irv had only
been married for a year. In the eyes of his kids, that was hardly long enough
to justify her stealing their inheritance, and she was certain that the right
attorney could easily sway the judge to their way of thinking. It didn't
matter to his kids that she'd actually cared for their father, despite the
twenty-five-year age difference. In their eyes, she was a gold-digger, and
that was all that mattered.
So she'd left with nothing more than two suitcases of designer
clothing, a few pieces of jewelry, and seventy-five bucks in her Chanel
handbag. She'd sold the bag and most of the jewelry to a small secondhand shop
for a price so low it was insulting, but it was enough to cover the cost of the
car and the trip to Maine.
She'd thought about stopping in Boston. Trav lived there, on a
dead-end street in Chestnut Hill, and he would have let her sleep on the couch
in his finished basement. But she and her older brother's wife had never seen
eye to eye, and what was the point of stirring up trouble between them? So
she'd given Boston a wide berth, circling around it on 495, praying she and her
little Vega, which pretty much topped out at 61 mph, would survive all those
crazy Boston drivers swerving around her doing ninety.
And here she was, back in this shithole town, the one place she'd
sworn she'd never return to. But she was out of money and excuses, and home
was the one place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. On
this fifty-degree January afternoon, driving through downtown in a
fourteen-year-old Chevy with a mud-splattered windshield because she'd run out
of washer fluid two hundred miles back, she could smell the faint sulphur odor
from the paper mill downriver. There was no denying the fact that she was one
hell of a long way from the moneyed fragrance of Palm Beach.
The Vega was running on fumes, and she was down to her last
twenty-dollar-bill. Colleen downshifted and wheeled into the Big Apple
convenience store, where she pumped five bucks worth of fuel into her gas tank
and cleaned her windshield with a fistful of snow. She'd gone to high school
with the guy working the cash register. Sonny Somebody-or-other. She kept her
sunglasses on and her eyes lowered as they completed their transaction, hoping
he wouldn't recognize her and want to chat. Small talk had never been her
strongest suit, and what was there to talk about anyway?
Him: What have you been up to since the last time I saw you?
Her: Oh, nothing much, except that I just buried my
sixty-year-old third husband.
Meadowbrook Road was a quagmire. It always was at this time of
year. The town maintained the unpaved road, or so they claimed, but between
January thaw and mid-April, it mostly consisted of deep, muddy ruts and frost
heaves. Easily navigable in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Not so much in a
Chevy Vega with summer tires that had spent its entire pathetic life in
southern Florida and was skittish as a newborn colt on these snowy Maine roads.
John Anderson was singing
Straight Tequila Night
on the
dashboard radio when she passed the old Abercrombie place, perched atop a small
hill. She'd heard, through the grapevine, that her sister had lived in the
Gothic Revival farmhouse for a time before selling it to their nephew Billy
when Casey and her second husband had built a new home on Ridge Road. Although
he'd been a huge part of Casey's life for nearly two decades, Colleen had never
met her sister's new husband, and she was mildly curious. The late, great
Danny Fiore would be a hard act to follow. The irony of it struck her: She'd
always been jealous of her older sister, had always coveted whatever Casey had
that she didn't. It was really true that you had to be careful what you wished
for. She and Casey had never had much in common. She'd certainly never
expected that when they finally did share something, it would be the mantle of
widowhood.
She took McKellar's Hill at a snail's pace, let out a sigh of
relief when she reached the bottom and saw the river ahead of her, its frozen
surface dark in spots, slushy from the thaw. Another quarter-mile, and then,
on her right, a broad expanse of snowy fields with broken, yellowed corn stalks
poking up here and there through the pitted snow. Beyond that, wooden fence posts
marked the pasture where Dad's Holsteins grazed. In the distance loomed the
weathered nineteenth-century barn where hay was stored, flanked by the
low-roofed addition, circa 1952, that housed the milking parlor and the cattle
stalls. Two blue Harvestore silos stood sentinel, and as she drew closer, the
old farmhouse hove into view, smoke rising from its chimney, its clapboards in
need of a fresh coat of paint.
She passed the mailbox, clicked her blinker, and turned in at the
sign that read MEADOWBROOK FARM ~ REGISTERED HOLSTEINS. A cluster of chickens
scattered as she came to a stop beside the ominously tilted utility pole at the
center of the yard, directly behind the red Farmall tractor her father had
owned since the beginning of time. For a moment, she just sat there gazing
across a muddy, slushy barnyard, the steering wheel vibrating beneath her hands
and dread filling every crevice of her heart. Dad didn't know she was coming.
She hadn't been able to muster the courage to call for fear that he'd hang up
on her. Or worse, tell her not to bother. She hadn't been the favored child
to begin with; she could only imagine how far she'd fallen from grace since the
day she walked out on Jesse and her nine-year-old son.
But if there was one thing she'd learned in the past decade, it
was that running only got you so far. Sooner or later, everybody had to face
the music. So she shut off her ignition. The Vega sputtered and died. She
opened her door, swung around, and planted her Ferragamos flat on the muddy
ground.
And for the first time in six years, Colleen Bradley Lindstrom
Davis Berkowitz stood on Maine soil. She took a hard, deep breath, one that
drew in the scent of mud season overlaid with the sharp tang of wood smoke and
the faint aroma of cow manure. And then she shut the door and marched
resolutely toward the house.
The black sheep of the Bradley clan had returned to the fold.
Author Bio
Laurie Breton started making up stories in her head when she was a
small child. At the age of eight, she picked up a pen and began writing them
down. Although she now uses a computer to write, she's still addicted to a new
pen and a fresh sheet of lined paper. At some point during her angsty teenage
years, her incoherent scribblings morphed into love stories, and that's what
she's been writing, in one form or another, ever since.
When she's not writing, she can usually be found driving the back
roads of Maine, looking for inspiration. Or perhaps standing on a beach at
dawn, shooting a sunrise with her Canon camera. If all else fails, a day trip
to Boston, where her heart resides, will usually get the juices flowing.
The mother of two grown children, Breton has two beautiful
grandkids and two precious granddogs. She and her husband live in a small Maine
town with a lovebird who won't stop laying eggs and a
Chihuahua/Papillon/Schipperke/Pug mix named River who pretty much runs the
household.
I love to
hear from readers! If you enjoyed this book, please drop me a line.
www.lauriebreton.com
www.facebook.com/LaurieBretonBooks