by Cat Johnson
KISSING BOOKS
New York Times & USA Today Bestseller
CAT JOHNSON
Piss off the hot farmer ✔
Find out I'll be living in a funeral home ✔
Meet my new pet pig Petunia ✔
Day one in town proved one thing . . . I'm screwed.
Welcome to Mudville, home of KISSING BOOKS, a 63,000 word standalone small town, opposites attract, fish out of water, laugh-out-loud, action-packed romantic comedy with lots of kissing (and other things), a cocky farmer, a sassy misplaced heroine with too many animals, some crazy locals, a decades' old mystery, and a very happy ending for them all!
From the Journal of Rose Van de Berg
MUDVILLE INQUISITOR
1916
Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Mudville Inquisitor, the first newspaper published in the village of Mudville, New York. We will be located in Dr. Huntington’s old store and will remain neutral in politics.
~William Daily, Publisher
ONE
Harper
The black cursor blinked against the white screen. Steady. Relentless. Winking on and off. On and off.
It might as well have been chanting, loser, loser.
That’s what I felt like.
I huffed out a sigh.
This was ridiculous. This wasn’t my first book. Far from it.
I had nine novels published. I’d earned those New York Times and USA Today bestseller letters after my name. Or at least author Harper Lowry had.
Harper Lowinsky—thanks, Dad, for that winner of a last name—was available as a website domain if I’d wanted it. No surprise there. But I decided it was too long and too hard to spell correctly. Hence I made my choice to go with a simpler pen name and Harper Lowry was born.
But the point was, though this book wasn’t my first, it might be my last if I didn’t get something—anything—down on paper and get it to the editor by the deadline.
Yes, the procrastination was my fault. I didn’t have to listen to that audiobook by that productivity coach instead of writing, but it might have helped me. It was productivity I was having trouble with. Obviously.
And cleaning my apartment before I sat down to write couldn’t really be considered procrastinating. Right? It needed to be done eventually. Maybe not right then but . . .
I was willing to take a certain amount of the blame for not putting my butt in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard, but the writer’s block I was experiencing—that was not my fault.
It might have taken me awhile to get here but now, I had my butt in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard. Ready.
Yet still there were no words. Not in my brain. Certainly not on the blank screen.
So whom could I blame this on?
My editor seemed like a good choice. She wanted a brand new three-book series and the thought of that, starting at zero, was daunting. Paralyzing.
Happy with that excuse, I waited for an idea to strike, like it always had during my writing career.
And I waited.
Blink-blink. Blink-blink.
Lo-ser. Lo-ser.
Ugh!
“Shit.” I said the word aloud even though there was no one to hear me. Not a cat. Not a goldfish. Not even a houseplant. But saying it made me feel better.
The four walls of my apartment didn’t care if I talked to myself. It still didn’t help the current word count situation though.
Oh, there were lots more words running through my brain at the moment. Unfortunately, none of them were appropriate for the page.
I let a few of those choice words out, in a long colorful string of obscenities worthy of a celebrity caught by the paparazzi on TMZ.
Was it crazy if no one actually heard me talking to myself? I could probably find the answer to that online . . .
Maybe there was a plot line in there somewhere. I opened a new browser window and was about to dive head first into the rabbit hole that was the internet when the cell phone on the desk next to my laptop lit with an incoming call.
I watched the name that appeared on screen with mixed emotions—anticipation and annoyance. At this point any distraction—any excuse to not face that blank page—felt welcome.
On the other hand, there’d be no written words forthcoming once I answered that call. Maybe not for the rest of the morning. Because I’d be stuck on the phone chatting for at least a solid half an hour if I answered.
Then, even after I hung up, I’d be too distracted and out of sorts to settle in to write. The mushroom cloud of emotional fallout from my mother’s calls tended to hang around.
Resigned, I hit the icon to answer and put the call on speaker. “Hello, Mother.”
“Are you home?” she asked.
“Yes. Of course, I’m home,” I said, annoyed. Honestly, where else would I be this early in the morning?
“I don’t know. You could be anywhere as far as I know since you never tell me anything. Aren’t you going on a trip soon?”
“No. I’m not.”
She acted like I routinely snuck away without telling her. My damn travel schedule was public. It had its own webpage on my site.
I consciously pressed my lips together in an effort not to grind my teeth. I couldn’t afford it. I’m self-employed. I don’t have dental insurance.
“Oh. Well anyway, since you’re home and not busy, you can come with me. I have to drive upstate for the reading of Aunt Agnes’s will today and your father is working.”
There were so many parts of that one sentence that disturbed me I didn’t know where to start.
First and foremost, my mother still didn’t get that if I was awake and I was home, it meant I was working. Just because I didn’t put on a business suit and drive to an office to sit at a desk in a cubicle for my job, didn’t mean I wasn’t busy.
But I’d tilted at that windmill too many times with no results. I knew how it would end so I moved on to my next concern.
“Great Aunt Agnes died?” I asked.
“Apparently. Her lawyer called me and asked if I could meet her at her office today. What else could it be about?”
“Wow. Shouldn’t one of our relatives have told you she died?”
“Who? She’s got no one. She’s never been married. She has no kids. You should let that serve as a lesson to you, Harper. This is what happens when you die unmarried with no children. The lawyer calls your grieving relatives.”
Relatives, yes. I’d give my mother that one. But grieving? Yeah, no. I called bullshit on that.
I ignored the routine slam against my current relationship status. I’d heard that broken record too many times since I’d had the audacity to turn thirty while single. Instead, I moved on to yet another concern.
“Where is this lawyer’s office located?” I asked.
“It’s about three hours away. Maybe a little less if we don’t stop.”
“Three hours? Each way?” My eyes widened.
“Yes, of course. Aunt Agnes lived way upstate. Remember?”
Six hours. In the car. With my mother. A trip to Hell held less trepidation for me than this road trip.
“What’s the name of her town again?” I asked.
“Mudville.”
Mudville. I sighed. Lovely. “That’s a long drive, Mom.”
“It’ll be worth it. She’s got a four thousand square foot, turn of the century Queen Anne Victorian on Main Street. Stained glass windows. Original wood-paneled walls. Fireplaces in almost every room. A gorgeous grand staircase. It’s on a nice big lot too, right in the center of the village.”
I listened as my mother spewed out the amenities like a real estate agent citing her listing.
“I can’t even imagine how much it’s worth,” she continued. �
�I only hope it isn’t a falling down wreck. I mean she was ancient. She wouldn’t be able to maintain it herself. That’s one reason I’m anxious to get right up there, right away. To see what state the house is in. We might have to make repairs before we sell it. And houses move faster in nice weather than they do in winter.”
So this was what happened when a woman died alone in this family. The one time poor old Great Aunt Agnes’s only living relatives made the effort to visit her home was after she was dead. And then only to see for themselves how much her possessions they were inheriting were worth.
It was a sad and frankly frightening future. Little did Mom know she was playing the role of the Ghost of Christmas Future to my Ebenezer, showing me what could be my fate if I continued to focus on work and actively shun having a dating life.
I’d become comfortable with my skewed work-life balance. I whole-heartedly embraced JOMO—the joy of missing out on anything social and not work related.
But this whole Agnes situation was proving Mom’s case against my remaining single. The fear of dying alone was real.
I would never tell her that, of course. She didn’t deserve to hear she might be right, for multiple reasons. The least of which was that Mom should be ashamed of how she was acting in the face of a beloved aunt’s death.
She was one of Agnes’s few living relatives and after ignoring the woman for years, except for an annual Christmas card, she was rushing upstate now—post mortem—for the reading of the will.
Of course I couldn’t ignore my own guilt and shame in this. I had to include myself in the blame.
Not the inheritance part—I made a decent living without having to count on my dead relatives leaving me something—but the rest? Yeah, I was guilty.
I hadn’t bothered to reach out to Great Aunt Agnes while she’d been alive. I could have made the effort to visit while she was still living. I was as culpable as my parents in that respect.
Living from one deadline to the next, it became easy to put things off. And working from home made it very easy to let work become my whole life.
I needed to change that . . . as soon as I finished this new three-book series in eighteen months.
Which brought me full circle to today’s word count. Zero so far. And today’s writing forecast wasn’t looking bright and sunny for that to change.
“So I figure if you come here, I’ll drive us upstate,” Mom went on. “If we leave by nine-thirty, we can stop for lunch and still be there in plenty of time for the one o’clock meeting with the lawyer.”
I glanced at the time displayed at the corner of my laptop screen, and then down at myself. I was working—if I could call it that considering I’d produced no actual written work—in the pajama bottoms and T-shirt I’d slept in.
There was definitely no leeway for me to shower. I’d have just enough time to throw my hair into a ponytail and change into real clothes. “Okay. I’ll be at your house by nine-thirty.”
“If you get here earlier I can make you breakfast.”
I rolled my eyes. It was a nice offer. If nothing else, she did like to feed me whenever possible, but the woman had no concept of time and space. “I’ll try, but don’t count on that.”
If I hit traffic between my apartment and my parents’ house, or got stuck behind a damn garbage truck on their street, there was a chance I wasn’t even going to make nine-thirty.
“Okay. See you soon,” she said in a sing-song voice, obviously happy with her plan for the day.
Me, not so much.
I disconnected the call and sighed as I shut the lid of the laptop. That put an end to the never-ending blinking of the cursor. And an end to today’s writing.
Hope sprung eternal in the heart of a writer. I’d do better tomorrow.
I had to.
Of course, who knew what tomorrow’s call from Mom would bring. I still had a few relatives left to get sick or die.
And there would be some sort of service for Aunt Agnes, I suppose . . .
I glanced at the calendar on the wall—a gift from Mom who still believed in paper calendars. I used it to mark off the parade of days marching toward my looming deadline.
Yeah. I was screwed and today’s little jaunt wouldn’t help.
A few hours later, the look on my mother’s face as we sat in the lawyer’s office was so priceless I would have sacrificed a half a dozen days of writing just to be able to see it.
“What are you talking about? Agnes isn’t dead?” Mom’s eyes went comically wide.
Dee Flanders, Mudville’s resident attorney at law, pressed one hand to her chest. “Oh, goodness no. Why would you think that?”
“When you asked if we could meet you regarding Agnes, I thought we were here for the reading of the will. We drove three hours to be here.” My mother scowled.
The older woman’s graying brows drew low. She glanced down at the paper on the desk. “I wasn’t familiar with that area code for the contact number Agnes gave me for you.” She raised her gaze. “I apologize. When you didn’t say anything, I never imagined you weren’t local.”
My mother pressed her lips together, her displeasure at not inheriting that big Main Street Victorian we’d driven by on the way to the meeting showing clearly.
She let out a humph. “Well, we’re not local.”
I decided to get to what I considered more important. The fact Agnes wasn’t dead.
“So where is Agnes? And why did she ask you to contact us? Is she all right?”
“Oh, yes. She’s fine. Well, kind of. She’s certainly better than dead, so that’s good news. She’s in Europe,” Dee revealed.
Mom drew back. “In Europe? What in God’s name is she doing in Europe?”
“Traveling. Seeing the world. The trip was only scheduled to last a month. But then she broke her leg summer skiing in the Alps, I believe. That’s when she emailed me and asked me to contact you.”
“What does she need us to do?” I asked.
“Now that she might not be home for another month, at least, she was hoping you could house sit while she’s stuck there.”
“Why can't she just fly back with a broken leg?” my mother asked.
“I’m not really sure.” Dee lifted one shoulder. “I supposed the doctor she’s staying with while she’s recuperating advised against it. His villa looks lovely from the pictures she sent.”
Summer skiing in the Alps. A mysterious European doctor . . . with a villa. Aunt Agnes lived a life worthy of a romance novel.
She sounded amazing, and not just for a woman of her advanced age. She was living a better life than I was.
I turned to my mother. “Mom, why have I never met this woman?
“Because your great aunt is a lunatic, as you can see. Who disappears to Europe, breaks a leg, and then shacks up with some foreign doctor?”
Someone who was a hell of a lot of fun, that’s who.
“Besides,” Mom continued. “You have met her.”
“When?” I asked.
“You were three. We spent the weekend. Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t remember. I was three. Why haven’t we visited since?”
“Because she insists on living in the middle of nowhere. That’s why. A three-hour drive is far for a visit, Harper.”
It hadn’t been too far for my mother to drop everything and high tail it here to see what she would inherit. I kept that thought to myself as my mother turned in her seat to face the lawyer again.
“Who's been taking care of Agnes’s house until now?” she asked.
“A local college student is staying there, but she has to be back at school next week. That’s the reason for the rush.”
“I don’t understand why the house needs taking care of at all. Can't it just be closed up? Drain the water if she's worried about pipes freezing or whatever.” Mom flicked one wrist dismissively.
“It’s a bit more complicated than—” Dee began.
“I’ll do it,�
� I said, loud and clear.
“What?” my mother exclaimed at the same time the lawyer beamed me a smile.
“Wonderful. When can you move in?” Dee asked.
“Give me two days?” I asked.
“Perfect.” Dee smiled more broadly as my mother scowled.
“You’re crazy. What you’re going to do up here all by yourself in that big house is beyond me. But it’s your decision, I guess.”
I might well be crazy, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in that big rambling Victorian all by myself, but Mom was right about one thing. It was my decision and I was more determined than ever to make it work.
From the Journal of Rose Van de Berg
MUDVILLE INQUISITOR
1917
As the war in Europe rages on, Company G left Mudville on the fourth of February for duty to guard the New York City aqueduct.
TWO
Stone
From my vantage point in the back of the Mudville Community House I had a good view of the whole room and everyone in it. But more importantly, standing and leaning against the wall by the exit meant I could make a quick escape once the town meeting was over.
I had my reasons. Not having to stop and chat with every person in here could get me home a good hour faster. That was especially crucial tonight since I was hungry as fuck. And not giving the town gossip a chance to catch me might just save my sanity.
Up in the front row, where he would both be able to hear better and be in the mayor’s face, Buck raised one hand.
“Yes, Buck,” the mayor said with such forced patience in his tone no one in that room actually believed he wanted to hear what Buck had to say.
The old man made the effort to stand. It took him awhile—and both of his hands—to finally hoist his bony body out of the chair.
Once that was accomplished, he rasped out, “I object.”
Mayor Fox Pickett visibly sighed. “You can’t object, Buck. It’s already been approved. Besides, this isn’t a courtroom.”