Country Pride (Belle Ridge Book 1)

by Charlene Bright

  After they had each ordered, he put his hand over hers. “So, tell me, Kinsley Griffin, when did you know you were gonna be a writer?”

  She took a moment to really think about his question. Of course, she had a stock answer that she used in her interviews and at events, but she wanted to dig deeper for him, to really give him a glance into her mind.

  “I think it’s the same for most writers, but to have passion for writing, I think you start with an insatiable reading habit. At least, that’s how it was for me. I read while I ate meals, while I waited on the school bus, in class when I’d finished my work early. I just loved the words, the images they created in my head, the places they took me. After my mom died, others’ words helped me get through … books, letters from loved ones, poems my mother had written.”

  “You said the other day your dad wasn’t really around?” Jared’s brows were knit and his eyes serious.

  She took a drink of water and shook her head. “Nope, he just wasn’t really part of my life.. I’m sure there’s another book somewhere in there about Daddy issue.” They chuckled together before she continued, “Anyway, I moved in with my mom’s parents on their farm.”

  “Ah,” he said, a smile lifting his brow again. “Yes. Living on a farm seems to suit you.”

  Ignoring what she thought might be a hinted invitation, she continued. “It wasn’t anything like Adamson Pride, but we had a milk cow, a couple of horses, lots of chickens, and a big garden. My grandmother would take me to the library every Saturday and I’d check out all kinds of books: mysteries, westerns, history, anything that looked interesting. As I got older, classics, plays, poetry, and”—she gave him a significant look—“romance fell into the mix.

  “You might think,” she said, “that I wouldn’t have had any friends, with my nose stuck in a book all the time, but I was a fast reader and made friends fairly easily. I’m an introvert with social tendencies.”

  She was delighted when he sat back and laughed.

  “I wasn’t a cheerleader or anything like that, but my friends were important to me. We supported each other and helped each other through some of the more difficult challenges being a teenager brings. And I guess that’s where my desire to help others came into play. I was helped so much by family and friends after my mom died, I just felt it natural to want to give some of that back, so I studied psychology. And I swear I could almost feel sparks flying around me when I was writing. It’s like I created a place to hold part of my soul for me to keep all the feelings from being too big.”

  He nodded and squeezed her hand as the server brought her eggs Benedict and him a pork chop, fried eggs, and home fries.

  While they ate, she encouraged him to tell her more about himself, feeling slightly embarrassed at how much she had told him, how much of the conversation so far she had monopolized.

  “Well, it’s not nearly as interesting as your life—”

  She scoffed.

  “But it’s been a good life. I played baseball in high school and enjoyed having a girl on my arm all the time, preferably a different one every couple of weeks. But that all changed when Julia got my attention.”

  Kinsley stilled and gave Jared her full attention, wondering at the woman this man had loved so fiercely.

  “I mean, we had grown up together and I’d always been sweet on her, but sometimes I thought she was too good for me. She had a good heart. But once we started dating, thoughts of any other girl in the world were gone. Even though she got pregnant right before we graduated from high school, we never felt we had to get married, you know what I mean?”

  Kinsley nodded and smiled tenderly at his honesty and the love she could see that was still in his eyes for his wife. Oddly, it was comforting and made her feel closer to him, rather than feel threatened. “So, not a shotgun wedding,” she concluded.

  “Well, this is the country. I’m sure there was a shotgun or two nearby.” He grinned as she chuckled, before his face became more serious. “And then, you know, she died, and I thought, ‘That’s it for me. My one shot.’ And I believed that for a long time because I dated some, but nobody made me want to wake up with them. I thought that my one true love was gone and now I’d just have to settle.” He paused and stared at his food. “Until—”

  Just as he broke contact with his plate of morning carbs, a passing customer stumbled by their table pouring his iced tea across Jared’s arm and into his lap. In an instant he was out of his seat, trying to keep the cold beverage from pooling under him.

  “Oh dear, I’m so sorry, sir,” the stranger apologized awkwardly.

  Kinsley was busy grabbing napkins when she finally took notice of the clumsy patron who had fallen into Jared. He was staring at her, rather than at the man he’d just drenched in tea. Kinsley felt annoyed that the stranger didn’t seem to be concerned about Jared. Instead, his bushy eyebrows lifted in recognition as he kept his eyes on her, giving her the odd sensation they had met before.

  “Well, I’ll be. Aren’t you that writer, Kinsley Griffin?”

  She squinted, feeling a bit suspicious. “Umm, yeah, but—”

  He reached his hand out and she allowed him to shake hers, but quickly pulled away and attempted to turn her attention back to her date, but the man persisted.

  “I saw your picture in the paper and I heard that radio interview last week. I’ve read your books. I’m sure you don’t have very many male fans.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said flippantly and kept returning her eyes to Jared who was still wiping the seat with the napkins she had hastily grabbed.

  The man started to speak again, but she cut him off. “Excuse me. It’s really nice to meet you and I’m glad you said hello, but I need to help my friend here.”

  His face turned crimson. “Of course. Again, I’m really sorry. It sure was nice to meet you, Kinsley.”

  “You too,” she replied but was already focused on Jared again. A server arrived at that moment with towels and graciously helped the couple.

  Not wanting to sit in wet jeans, Jared took care of the check and they stepped outside, where the warm sun could help him dry. Kinsley’s scanned the streets looking for the clumsy stranger, but had no luck in finding him.

  “Well, that was … interesting,” Jared stated, shaking his wet-jeaned leg.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she agreed absently, still scanning the sidewalks. “Didn’t something seem kind of, I don’t know, odd about him?”

  “You mean besides everything?” He looked down at his watch. “I think that shop should be open now. Let’s go place that order and maybe it’ll be ready when the truck is fixed.”

  Kinsley agreed and they turned headed toward Diamond Studded, putting the strange encounter at the diner far away from their minds.

  Just as they left the jewelry shop, Jared’s phone rang. The window repairman was on his way.

  “He says it’ll take about fifteen minutes to get there. So, let’s try to walk off some of this healthy Southern breakfast.”

  At his urging, Kinsley chatted about the things she missed most about growing up on a farm and how she’d found a life so far from what she had been raised in.

  “When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get out of Grundy County. As much as I loved my grandparents, I felt like I would be a failure if I didn’t go somewhere … big.”

  He took her hand. “That’s where you and I are different. I don’t think I ever really even considered what else might be out there. Or maybe I just didn’t think I was cut out for anything bigger. Of course, with a wife and baby barely at the age of twenty-one, maybe I just didn’t believe it was in the cards for me. I don’t know. I’m not sure I ever really thought about it either way.”

  “Well the thing is,” Kinsley started, “I think I missed what was right in front of me. I’m not saying that I made a mistake. I love my life, but I do think I didn’t appreciate the importance of my upbringing or my community ties in a way that I should have. I didn’t look at the tight com
munities of small-town America as having anything to offer me. A good psychologist might tell me that I was seeking something bigger to contain my sadness and insecurities from the trauma of losing a mother and feeling unimportant to my father.” She paused and he put his hand on her back. “And I know that’s part of it. But there’s so much there, and now I find myself having to reach deep into my brain to be able to hold a memory longer than a minute.

  “I mean, when I was a kid, I kind of resented having to help my grandparents in the garden. It was always hot and I wanted to be doing something else, usually read. So, I didn’t pay attention and didn’t really learn what they were trying to teach me. And when I tasted that tomato you brought in the other day, I had a flash of my grandmother showing me why it was important to tie up branches of tomato plants. And suddenly it seemed that the most important thing in the world was to try to remember how to grow tomatoes. And I just couldn’t bring up a full memory. And now they’re gone, and if I do decide to start a garden, I won’t have that wisdom because I didn’t see how important it was.”

  Jared was thoroughly enjoying getting to know her on this level, beyond even the physical intimacy, though he was not ready to tell her that his feelings were growing deeper by the minute; he was reluctant to admit it even to himself. He checked his watch casually. “We should probably start heading to the truck now.”

  The repairmen had already arrived by the time Kinsley and Jared made it back to the truck. Two young men who appeared to be no older than thirty were walking around the vehicle surveying the damage. On the side of the van was painted a car with big eyes for headlights and the grill stretched into a smile. The happy car’s windshield glistened. “Windshield Pros” was painted above the car with “24-hour on-the-site windshield repair” under the car, followed by the 1-800 number beneath that.

  Introducing themselves as Rocky and Pete, the two young men greeted Jared with a handshake and a friendly wave for Kinsley. They needed Jared’s driver’s license, insurance card, and vehicle registration to verify that he was indeed the owner.

  “Sorry this happened to you, sir,” one of them said, while the other was writing up the order. “It’s a pretty straightforward replacement. We’ll have it done and you two on your way in about two hours, max.”

  As Jared begin reading the repair agreement Kinsley pulled out her cell and sat on a nearby bench and called Lynn.

  “It was a kinda windy night,” added Jared. “I reckon some tree limbs blew over and smashed it.”

  Rocky looked at Pete and then back at Jared. “Unless your vehicle was directly under a tree and a large, heavy limb fell on it, I don’t think ordinary blowing limbs could have done this.”

  Jared furrowed his brow, and Pete stepped forward. “No, this looks like someone took something hard and smashed this. I don’t see an object in the seat that they may have thrown through it, so my guess is they took something like a baseball bat or a pipe or a big rock or something and hit it.”

  Jared thought back to Ethel’s gas tank and remembered J.J.’s words: Only one way. Someone put it in there. “Well, it doesn’t look like they got into the cab or took anything, so must have been some kids out running around looking for something to get into,” he said, less than convinced at his explanation. He wondered at the possibility of another random act of vandalism.

  “Can’t say it’s the first time that happened,” said Pete, “unfortunately.”

  Jared glanced back at Kinsley who was sitting on the bench, still talking on her phone. Is this about her? He was suddenly worried for her safety. He thanked the repairmen and joined her, glancing up and down the street. She had been pretty paranoid about causing them bad luck but perhaps the ‘bad luck’ was directed at her.

  As she closed her cell, Jared explained “Pete says this should take no more than a couple of hours or so.”

  “Wow. That’s actually a bit quicker than I would have guessed.”

  “Nah, it’s not a terribly complicated thing and there’s quite a business sprung up around fixing windshields.”

  “Well, good, then maybe this won’t hurt any dinner plans.”

  “I don’t think so. We have plenty of time now to go get some ice cream and be able to pick up Nikki’s present while they’re working.” He reached for her hand as they strolled down the sidewalk, his mind on overdrive.

  14

  Jared was mostly quiet during the hour and a half it took to get back to the farm. He used few words when responding to Kinsley until she grew quiet as well, watching the trees pass by them on the same road she had traveled only a week before. So much had happened, had changed in that short amount of time. Was Jared suddenly worried it was too much? She felt her stomach rolling as the thought hit her.

  She bit her lip and went back over every word since that morning, every gesture, looking for anything that should have given her a hint that he was having second thoughts. Finally, after replaying every conversation, she gave up, unable to find a catalyst for the change. It all seemed to happen right after he talked to the repairmen before they began work on his windshield. Had he learned something from them that would make him think she was responsible for this?

  The incidents that had bothered her before slammed into her again, this time adding the windshield. Maybe he was thinking she was bad luck now, as she had been suggesting all along.

  Or maybe those few moments away from her had given him time to rethink his feelings for her.

  She fought back tears and decided she could not let herself imagine dragons where there may not be any. She would wait and talk to him about this, when she had a tighter fist on her feelings. Right now, she was worried that if she tried to ask him what was wrong, she would start crying and that certainly wouldn’t help anything.

  She tried to focus on how tender he had been with her the night before, how excited he’d been by her touch and how he had made her feel wanted in a way no one had ever made her feel before. She touched her finger to her lips, remembering his mouth lingering over them.

  But every time she thought about how wonderful their time together had been, the cold wind of doubt swept over her. How could things have changed so quickly? Or had he been faking his feelings for her? She glanced at him. His eyes focused on the road ahead, concentrating. She was sure he had not been pretending. Something must have changed his mind.

  As if reading her fears, he put his hand on her leg, warming the spot, and left it there until they pulled into the driveway, making her wonder again what this man was thinking and hoping she was worried for nothing.

  15

  Jared was standing over the grill, turning the meat with the grill fork, his mind finally off the worry that had been eating him the entire drive back. He hadn’t been able to fully shake the fear that Kinsley might be in some kind of danger, even though no matter how hard he had tried, he couldn’t connect the dots into any kind of picture that made sense.

  It had to be a coincidence. If someone had indeed poured water in her gas tank on purpose, how would that person know she was back in Chattanooga in an entirely different vehicle? Something didn’t add up. Maybe Kinsley was right about the bad luck, only he thought it more likely that he had been the one to bring bad luck onto her, rather than the other way around. Hadn’t her car been running fine until he and Marshall had seen her pass?

  He finally settled his mind on what he’d told her at the diner the night before, right after they’d discovered the broken window. Sometimes bad things just happen for no reason. He chided himself for becoming a conspiracy theorist and decided to turn his attention toward the things that gave him pleasure. And on the top of that list was this gorgeous writer who had stumbled into their lives, shaking things up in such a way that he didn’t think he could ever go back to his life before her.

  She had been rather quiet on the way back. He guessed they were both thinking about things that had occurred. Suddenly it hit him that maybe she had not been quiet because of the car, but because she was
having second thoughts about what had happened between them. Or maybe he had made her think he was having second thoughts. A burning sensation ran down his chest at the idea.

  He turned his head and watched her, mesmerized by her simple beauty. She was drinking a beer and chatting with Nikki and Chance at the picnic table. She didn’t appear to be as happy as she had been before; rather, she seemed a little on edge.

  If he’d made her think … no sense in following that rabbit hole just yet, he told himself. When they were alone tonight, he’d ensure she was okay and that he hadn’t done anything to jeopardize what had been growing between them. When they were in bed, he thought—he’d just assumed she would be sleeping in his bed now, but they had not yet discussed anything about how moving to the next level had affected things.

  She gazed at him, as if sensing he was watching her, and he smiled, hoping it was a reassuring smile. She smiled in return, but it fell just short of her eyes as though she were contemplating something.

  “Please don’t let that burn, Daddy.”

  He turned his eyes back to the grill and flipped the meat again. “You got it, ma’am. You did say you liked yours super well done, right?” he said, looking back at his daughter. Nikki squinted, mocking a little anger, causing him to laugh. “Relax. You got a professional up here. This brisket is gonna be perfect.”

  “It better be.”

  A few minutes later, he carried over the medium-cooked meat on a platter and sliced it with a sharp knife. He served a few pieces to each of the three people sitting around the picnic table, while Nikki picked up the bowl of mashed potatoes and began passing it around. They had already finished their fresh salads.