by Jennie Marts
Mack reached out his hand to lift her chin so she had to look at him. He stared at her, his eyes hard as they narrowed in intensity. “I didn’t forget, Jocelyn. I wrote you every week for the first four months you were gone, sometimes twice a week. But you were the one who never wrote me back. Not even a Christmas card.”
Chapter Eleven
Jocelyn gripped the side of the counter as her knees threatened to buckle. “You wrote me letters?”
“Tons of them. And sent you cards.”
A hard knot formed in her stomach. “That can’t be true. I never got a single letter from you. And I did write to you. I found this stationery in a card shop that looked like old parchment, and I wrote you a letter on it at least once a week.”
“I never got them. In fact, I never heard anything from you that whole school year. So, I figured you must have met someone new or forgot about me and moved on.”
“No, I never forgot about you. About us.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And I’ve tried, but I still haven’t figured out how to move on.”
His hand moved to cup her cheek. “I haven’t either.”
Spellbound, her body frozen, her eyes rapt in his gaze, she tried to make sense of what he’d just said. “But you did move on. You didn’t even wait for me to come home that next summer.”
“I didn’t know you were coming back. I told you, I figured you found someone else and forgot all about me.”
“How could you think that?”
“Why would I think any differently? I hadn’t heard from you all year. And why would I think you’d come back to some stupid skinny hick kid when you’d probably met tons of cool kids in New York?”
Pain ripped through her chest. “How can you say that? I loved you.”
His hand dropped from her cheek. “I don’t have a real great track record when it comes to people coming back for me. My mom said she loved me and that she’d be back too. And look how that went.”
“It wasn’t like that. I was trying to come back. I told my mom I didn’t care what she said, I was buying a ticket and taking a bus to Harmony Creek. She tried to tell me you’d already forgotten about me, that you’d moved on to some other girl, but I didn’t believe her. Not until I called my grandma, and she told me it was true.”
Mack shook his head. “I hadn’t moved on. You broke my heart. And I didn’t know how to handle it. I went from depressed to angry and back again. When Ashley started coming around, I tried to tell her I wasn’t interested, but she kept at me. I was a teenager, and she was a distraction.”
“A distraction?” she sputtered. “You married her. That doesn’t sound like just a distraction to me.”
He sighed and scrubbed a hand across his jaw. “Come on, Jocelyn. You were already gone.”
“And Ashley loved you,” she said.
Mack shrugged. “I don’t know if she loved me as much as she loved the idea of being married. And I think she saw me as her ticket out of here. She wanted to move to California. But then my grandpa got sick, and I told her I was staying. I wanted to start a family here. Eventually, she told me she’d decided to go to California without me and that she wanted a divorce. You know, we just did a simple Justice of the Peace wedding, but it was easier to get divorced than it had been to get married. Signed some papers, filed them at the courthouse, she packed up her stuff, and I moved back in with my grandparents. Thank goodness Grandma Lo hadn’t already turned my bedroom into a sewing room.”
“I had no idea.”
He pulled his arm out from under hers. “Why would you? You weren’t around. And you never asked.”
“I thought you’d moved on. I swear I never got your letters.”
“I never got yours either.”
She gave a frustrated shake of her head, trying to make sense of all he’d told her. “I know time feels different here, but it’s not like you were actually living in the 1900s. Why didn’t you try to call me?”
He flinched at her words, a pained expression in his eyes as he swallowed. “Because I’d written you umpteen letters professing my teenage love. And I never heard back from you. I was angry and embarrassed and felt like an idiot. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this fact, but teenage boys don’t always make the greatest decisions.”
“Apparently neither do teenage girls.” She slumped against the counter. “How could none of our letters have made it to each other?”
“I don’t know. Unless someone was purposely intercepting them. But why would anyone do that? My grandparents love you, and they knew how much I was hurting.”
A lump filled her throat. “It was my mom. It had to be her. She was the only one with a key to the mailbox.” She thought back to that first time she’d written him. “I remember holding that first letter—it was in a pink envelope—and asking her for a stamp. I can recall her telling me how stupid it was to write you, but then her expression changed and she said it was kind of sweet and to give it to her and she’d drop it in the mail room at her work. From then on, I just left the letters on the kitchen counter, and she took them to mail them.” She shook her head. “Or, I guess now it seems like she just took them. I never imagined she wasn’t mailing them.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. Who knows why she does anything? She’s been in an argument with her own mother for over a decade now. But Gram was just telling me tonight that the main reason my mom moved us to New York was because she didn’t want me to get stuck in this town like she’d been. She wanted me to go to college and have a chance at the kind of career that was only obtainable in a big city.”
“And you have that. There aren’t a lot of social media marketing-managing-whatever-your-title-is in a town the size of Harmony Creek. Our local paper only goes out once a week, and our main method of communication is still the bulletin board inside the door of the Price Rite.”
“But I didn’t want that at the expense of losing you.” She fought back the tears that filled her eyes. They had wasted all that time. All that anger. And hurt. “I’ve missed you.”
“Me too.”
“So what do we do now?”
As if in answer to her question, Savage stood up and bumped his short squat dog head into the back of her legs, driving her forward so that she stumbled into Mack’s cupcake-aproned chest. His hands instinctively raised to steady her and fell around her waist.
She looked up at him, sure that the question in her heart was conveyed in her eyes. She couldn’t speak, didn’t want to break the moment with words. Instead, she hoped their connection, that way they had communicated all those years ago, with nods and smiles and knowing looks, still held.
They had known each other so well. Even though they had only spent a few months together each year, those first summers were everything. Months would pass without seeing each other, but as soon as they were together again, they would fall into the same easy rhythm of talking and laughing—the true bond of friendship when one is so comfortable in knowing that the other person already loves them and accepts them, with all their ugliness, and beautifulness, and weirdness, that they can just relax immediately into their true selves without having to play that game of getting someone new to like them.
Jocelyn peered up at Mack, her question changing to a message as she tried to express that emotion of caring, of acceptance, of love. They’d broken each other’s hearts—not intentionally, but it had hurt all the same. This one moment felt like a chance to heal some of that pain…to start anew.
Mack must have felt her message, because he slid his arms around her back and pulled her into a hug. His touch was tender, and he smelled like cinnamon and sugar and apple pie, and everything she’d been missing the last ten years they’d been apart.
His arms wrapped tighter around her, and she melted into him, sighing as her body recognized his and settled into the familiar, yet still new
and exciting, feel of being held in his arms again.
Despite their late night of pie-making, Mack was still up the next morning with the sunrise. He had hours of work ahead of him before the festival started—setting up, guiding volunteers, plus doing the numerous daily chores he normally did of feeding and caring for the animals and the grounds.
Which meant he needed to get his mind off a certain blonde pie-baking city girl and back onto the tasks at hand. Except the image of her in the kitchen the night before with flour dusting her flushed cheeks kept sneaking into his overworked brain. It was so good to be laughing and joking around with her again. Too good.
It was something he could get used to. If he let himself. But he couldn’t let himself.
Because Jocelyn might be back for now, but she wasn’t back for good. This time they were spending together was going to come to a screeching halt when the festival ended and Molly got back on her feet. Then he was going to be back in the same place he was all those years ago, still here, on the ranch, missing her and trying to pretend his heart hadn’t been broken. Again.
Focus on today.
He’d told her to quit worrying about the past or the future and focus on the time they had together today. Which is what he needed to do as well.
He could laugh and have fun with her today, maybe even indulge in another hug, as long as he kept his heart in check and kept things between them light. They’d both said they wanted to be friends again. Being friends seemed safe. He could do that. At least for now.
Savage lumbered along behind him as he tossed hay into the corral for the horses and into the pen holding the sheep and Punkin, the Jersey cow whom Jocelyn had tried to ride when they were kids. Even though she hadn’t been here for years, Jocelyn was still everywhere on this ranch. Everywhere he turned, a memory of her edged its way into his mind—the general store where they’d purchased handfuls of candy sticks, the trails around the property they’d spent hours exploring, the spot behind the barn where they’d stolen hugs and kisses.
He’d worked so hard to push all those memories out of his brain, but with her here, catching glimpses of her coming out of the general store or searching the pond for the muskrat, they all came rushing back. But it wasn’t just the memories, it was also the tightness in his chest, the reminder of the pain of losing her, of hoping she’d come back and waking up every morning to another day without her.
Savage let out a whine and his tail started thumping. Mack looked up to see Jocelyn walking toward him, her arm upstretched in a wave. Her cornflower blue dress matched her eyes. Her hair was curled and tied at her neck with a ribbon, and she wore a hat with a wide blue fabric sash and a spray of flowers affixed to its side.
His heart dropped all the way to his feet. He could tell himself to keep his heart in check until the cows came home, but it was too late. He was already gone.
Jocelyn smiled at him, then crouched down to pet Savage, whose tail was wagging hard enough to power a wind farm. “Good morning. You ready for this crazy day?”
“Ready as I’m ever gonna be.”
She stood and peered out over the ranch. “It looks good. The tents and the booths are ready, and I’ve already been letting a few of the vendors and crafters in to get set up.”
“We’ve got about half an hour before the volunteers arrive. Most of them have done this event for years and they know what to do. And I think we’ve done a great job of preparing the others.”
Jocelyn rubbed her hands together. “Now we just have to wait for the visitors and the money to start rolling in.”
“From your lips to God’s ears.” He followed her line of sight. “The ranch does look great.” The white tents gleamed against the backdrop of perfect blue sky, and bits of green could be seen everywhere, from the new growth of grass underfoot to the fresh leaves and tiny buds sprouting from the trees. The majesty of the mountain range rose up behind Molly’s house, a dusting of snow capping its peaks.
“I miss the mountains.” Jocelyn inhaled a deep breath. “The air just smells different here.”
“Like the absence of smog and fuel emissions.”
She nudged his arm. “Yes. But also like ponderosa pines and the algae from the pond and the smell of the horses and the dust in the corrals and the sweet scent of the chokecherry trees blossoming behind Whitaker House.”
“That’s a lot of smells.” He was teasing her, but he knew what she meant. It smelled like spring.
She shrugged. “It smells like home.”
A funny knot twisted in his gut. Because this wasn’t her home. Her home smelled like asphalt and the scent of too many cars and too many people and the warm aroma of grilled meat emanating from carts lining the sidewalk. “Hopefully it smells like cash soon. And lots of it. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to work.” He reached into the tool pouch he’d been carrying around that morning and handed her the item he’d spent an hour revamping before he’d gone to bed the night before. “Here. I made this for you.”
Her eyes widened as she took what appeared to be an antique camera in a case. “Thank you. Does it work?”
“No. It’s been busted for years. But I knew you were going to want to take a million pictures today so I hollowed out the guts of the camera and built a little shelf inside the case. You should be able to set your iPhone in there, and it should align so you can hold it up and take pictures. To everyone else, it will look like you’re using an antique camera, but you’ll actually be able to take pictures with your phone.”
She stared down at the camera as she turned it over in her hands then gazed back up at him. “Wow. Thank you. I can’t believe you did this. It’s amazing.” Her voice had that hushed tone of awe, and tears pooled in her eyes.
Oh crud. “Come on now. Don’t cry. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Yes. It is.” She blinked back the tears as she pulled the camera strap over her hat and let it hang around her neck. Then she threw her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his chest. “This is just so sweet. I love it.”
I love you.
He swallowed back the words, thankful he hadn’t spoken them out loud as he returned the hug. He had loved her. At one time and with all he had. But that was a long time ago.
How could he even think he loved her now? They barely knew each other. They were different people now. They’d been kids, teenagers, when they’d known each other before. Now they were adults who led very different lives. In very different states and halfway across the nation from each other, he reminded himself.
She felt so good against him. He wanted to bury his face in the soft length of her neck and inhale the scent of her skin. She smelled like vanilla and cookies and something floral, and the heady mixture of it was making him dizzy with need and want. Which were feelings he couldn’t afford.
The price of that desire was too high. He’d paid it before and promised himself he’d never owe it again.
He pulled away, clearing his throat as he tried to return to business mode. “I need to get going. But I’m glad you like it. I hope you get some good pictures today.”
“I can’t wait to try it out. Thanks again, Mack.”
“Like I said, it’s no big deal. And it was really more for the ranch, so we can keep promoting the event today and try to draw a bigger crowd.”
The shining smile on her face faltered. “Oh yeah, sure, of course. I’ll be sure to get some good action shots early on and get them posted on Facebook and Insta with some great copy about the festival going all day, and there still being time to make it down to the event.”
“Sounds good.” He tapped his pocket. “I’ve got my phone on me today, so call or text me if you need me. Otherwise, man your battle stations and pray we have a huge crowd.”
Jocelyn peered down at her picnic setup. She had about five minutes before the gates officially opened, and she was the only one left in
the roped-off Boxed Lunch Social arena.
She’d thought she was being cute and clever with the rusty pail, the cute fabric, and the old blanket that she and Mack had used to haul out to the meadow to eat lunch on. But looking at the other setups surrounding her blanket, her picnic site looked dismal in comparison. There was one blanket set up with teddy bears having a tea party, one with a black and white cow theme, and another with a French countryside-inspired premise. Some were funny, but most were gorgeously decorated with flowers or fancy tableware.
She was much better at putting ideas and thoughts together on a screen. She should have stayed in her lane—she knew what she was doing in the world of marketing. Why had she thought participating in the Boxed Lunch Social thing would be a good idea?
And what kind of crazy twist of fate had put Sophie’s picnic setup in the site directly next to hers? She recognized the picnic basket and the silver vase holding a spray of tulips from the spread the other woman had set out for Mack a few days before. Sophie’s tablecloth blanket was bright blue-and-white-checked and had even been ironed. Two glossy white porcelain plates were perfectly placed across from each other with complete silver place settings and napkins formed into the shape of roses.
Seriously? How could she compete with that? She’d added flowers to her picnic too, but they were just a handful of lilacs she’d cut this morning and stuck in a mason jar—another sign for her intended bidder. She’d left several, including the blanket and the lilacs.