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

  HEATH’S HOPE

  Alicia Hunter Pace

  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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  Contents

  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

  Chapter One

  “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 we
ek 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.

  “Let me bring you a chair from inside,” Miss Sticky said. “Sit with us and enjoy the festival. We’ve got candy for the children. You can help us give it out. We might even sell some yarn.”

  Hope shook her head. Under other circumstances, she’d be tempted. But she was in Beauford for a purpose. “I can’t. I need to get back to the hospital pretty soon to relieve Mama. My cousin Neyland is kidnapping me to grab some dinner and see the festival, since Halloween is my favorite holiday. But I should go.”

  After saying her goodbyes, Hope walked toward Piece by Piece, the quilt shop where Neyland sold her handcrafted jewelry. She had to pass by Heath’s shop, Spectrum, on her way to meet Neyland, but the streets were so thick with people, there was little chance he’d see her.

  Her parents had never given up hope that she’d return home and go to work in the family bank. She sometimes wished for that, too, but as long as Heath was in residence, that would never happen. But no matter. She was happy in Charlotte with her impressive client list and ever-growing salary.

  But if Beauford were capable of calling her home, it would be on a night like this. The air was just crisp enough, and the streets were resplendent with pumpkins, gourds, and mums. Costumed children played games in the closed-off street and music drifted from a portable stage a block away. Beauford’s most famous citizen, country music star Jackson Beauford—soon to be Neyland’s brother-in-law—would perform later.

  Hope was getting near Spectrum. Just to be safe, she’d cross the street and double back to Piece by Piece.

  But just as she started to do that, something round and orange in Spectrum’s window caught her eye. Could it be? Her stomach rolled over as she walked toward the window. She knew she ought to run, ought to do it now. But she couldn’t. The memories came hard and fast.

  Fall, senior year. They’d been together eight months. Heath had been sweetly amused when he’d discovered her almost giddy love of Halloween, had said he’d given up hope that there was anything beyond a spreadsheet that would excite her—though that wasn’t true. He’d excited her plenty. But he’d made her the jack-o’-lantern sun catcher that now hung in his shop window. Having no place for it in her room at the sorority house, she’d left it at Heath’s off-campus apartment. It had hung in his apartment window even after Halloween passed, and it had still been there that raw, March day when she’d left him for good.

  But was it the same one? Or had he smashed it or sold it and made another that was no more than a decoration for his shop? It looked the same. The jack-o’-lantern was wearing a top hat with a bat on top and, with its star-shaped eyes and crooked sweet grin, it looked like it was in love. When she’d told Heath that, he’d given her one of his smiles that was so quick it was almost gone before it appeared, and said he’d tried to put how he felt in the jack-o’-lantern’s expression. It was the most romantic thing he’d ever said to her.

  Now she was inches from the window. Yes. Even after all this time, she knew the nuances of the glass—the bubbles, the swirls, the little bead of lead in the corner of the mouth that Heath had said ruined the whole thing.

  But she’d laughed and kissed Heath’s mouth in the precise spot that worried him so on the sun catcher. And then she’d settled her mouth on the sweet spot on his neck above his collarbone, and he hadn’t worried about that little imperfection anymore.

  She put her hand against the shop window. “My jack-o’-lantern,” she whispered as she caressed the spot that would have been its cheek if the glass of the window had not been there.

  “Hello, Hope.” The voice was familiar, beloved, and far from gentle.

  She spun around to look into brandy-colored eyes.

  Chapter Two

  There was no surprise on Heath Beckett’s face for two reasons. First, he lived so inside himself that his expressions never betrayed his feelings, never had. Second, even if his face had been an open book, he wasn’t surprised. He’d been preparing for this moment for seven years, ever since he’d moved to Beauford. Though she didn’t live here anymore, Beauford was Hope’s hometown, and he knew that sooner or later he’d see her—though that wasn’t the reason he’d moved here. Far from it. He’d opened his shop here because of the town’s size, location, and reputation. The Arts Council probably thought they’d had some influence over his decision, but he’d needed to get out of Ashville, and he’d chosen Beauford in spite of the hard-pressure courting they’d given him. Heath didn’t like to be noticed, let alone courted.

 
“Heath.” Hope removed her hand from the window and turned her back on the jack-o’-lantern just like she’d turned her back on it and him ten years ago. She nodded a greeting like she was granting a boon to a peasant, which about summed up her outlook on life. If she’d carried herself like a princess at twenty-one, now she looked like she owned a crown but was too blasé to bother with it. She’d abandoned the headband she’d always worn in college, and her dark blond hair barely brushed the top of her shoulders, providing a frame for her wide-set, green eyes and high cheekbones. It suited her. She lifted her chin. “It’s good to see you.”

  I’ll just bet it is. Maybe he’d call her on it.

  “Yeah? Why don’t you come inside? I’ve got cupcakes.”

  “Oh, no. I—”

  “You sure?” He didn’t really intend for her to come in. He just wanted to make her uncomfortable. “I would have thought you’d want your favorite food on your favorite holiday.” There. That would show her he remembered that she liked Halloween and cake.

  She set her mouth and narrowed her eyes. “All right.”

  Hellhound on a roller coaster. He’d brought that on himself.

  It was not Heath’s nature to touch people, but he put his hand on her elbow to guide her inside. Must have been a muscle memory. That was something she had taught him to do. “A gentleman takes a lady’s arm to guide her through crowds and doors, and from curbs. It’s just polite.” Heath had faced a long time ago that it wasn’t part of his basic nature to notice the things that everyone else seemed to. He would have never in a million years figured out on his own that a perfectly able-bodied woman wanted to have her arm touched, like that would do any good even if she needed help. It still didn’t make sense to him, but he’d been willing to do it—do it for Hope. One of the things he’d loved best about her had been her willingness to tell him what she expected instead of glaring at him and slamming doors when he hadn’t responded appropriately. Even with her help, he hadn’t always done the right things, but he had tried hard. He’d not quite been able to believe his luck, and he’d thought if he was very, very good, he might get to keep her.