Homecoming (Speakeasy)

by Rebecca Norinne

  Homecoming

  The World of True North

  Rebecca Norinne

  Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Norinne

  All rights reserved.

  This book was inspired by the True North Series written by Sarina Bowen. It is an original work that is published by Heart Eyes Press LLC.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. Preston

  2. Rosalie

  3. Preston

  4. Rosalie

  5. Preston

  6. Preston

  7. Rosalie

  8. Preston

  9. Preston

  10. Rosalie

  11. Preston

  12. Rosalie

  13. Preston

  14. Rosalie

  15. Preston

  16. Rosalie

  17. Rosalie

  18. Rosalie

  19. Preston

  20. Preston

  21. Rosalie

  22. Rosalie

  23. Preston

  24. Rosalie

  25. Rosalie

  26. Preston

  27. Rosalie

  28. Preston

  29. Preston

  30. Rosalie

  31. Preston

  32. Rosalie

  33. Preston

  You Will Also Enjoy…

  Bonus Recipe

  To the man I call home, no matter where in the world we live.

  1

  Preston

  Popping up from a crouch along the north wall of what was going to be the formal dining room once my crew finished rehabbing this centuries-old estate into a luxury bed and breakfast, I wiped the sweat from my brow with the back of my forearm. A small shaving of wood that had been stuck to my sleeve fell into my eye and melted against my cornea.

  “Fuck.” I flung my hand out toward where my best friend was standing back to admire his handiwork.

  “Hand me that water, would you?”

  “Ah, shit.” Mikey passed me the half-filled bottle I’d been drinking from a few minutes before, the plastic crinkling loudly as I tipped it back to pour water into my eye.

  Once I managed to flush the shaving out, I dropped my face forward and let the water trickle down my cheeks to fall in a small puddle at my feet. I almost lifted my arm to wipe my face with my sleeve again, but stopped when I realized that was how I’d wound up with an eyeball full of sawdust in the first place.

  “Here,” he said, handing me several napkins leftover from lunch.

  “Thanks.” I finished toweling off my face and blinked my eyes a few times to test my vision. Satisfied I’d gotten the debris out, I aimed the wadded up paper ball at a trashcan about fifteen feet away. I let it fly, but instead of going in as intended, it bounced off the rim and fell to the floor.

  “Your aim still sucks,” he chuckled.

  “It’s a good thing I’m a builder instead of a basketball player, then.”

  “Yeah,” he snorted, as he began gathering up his tools for the day. “Good thing that basketball career didn’t pan out.”

  I smirked as we locked up and headed toward my truck. Mikey and I had known each other since we were kids; he’d been there when I’d been cut from the freshman basketball team for not being able to shoot. We both knew I was never destined for athletic greatness.

  We climbed up into my truck and he turned the radio on, futzing with the dial until he found a song he liked. When Foo Fighters’ “Best of You” filled the cab, he fastened his seatbelt and settled in for the drive back to Colebury.

  “Want to grab a drink?” he asked. “Speakeasy just updated its beer list.”

  It was barely six o’clock on a Friday night, but I was already wrecked, having put in seven twelve-hour days in a row. I should be jumping at the chance for a night out with my best friend, but right now all I wanted was a hot shower, a cold beer, and then to fall face first into bed.

  “Nah, man. I’m gonna pass.”

  He lifted his shoulder in an indifferent shrug. “No worries. Drop me off though, would you?”

  “Sure thing,” I said, pointing my truck toward the old mill where Speakeasy was located. “You’ll find a ride home?”

  He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Oh, I’ll find a ride all right.”

  “You’re such a pig,” I said, pulling into the parking lot.

  “I’m a man with needs.” He unfastened his seatbelt and hopped out of the cab. “See you Monday.” He closed the door and strolled toward the entrance with a cocky swagger.

  I let my foot off the brake, checking for traffic as I eased back onto the road and pointed my Chevy home.

  Ten minutes later, I turned off the highway and drove carefully down a bumpy lane lined with birch, poplar, and maple trees. It was too late to appreciate the view, but earlier they’d have been shimmering in the setting sun. Say what you would about the tropics, in my mind there was nothing prettier than autumn in New England, and Vermont was as good as it got.

  The carriage house I was renting came into view, my landlady’s large, rambling farmhouse a couple hundred feet beyond. When I’d first moved from Boston to Vermont, there hadn’t been a whole lot of decent housing options available, so I’d counted myself lucky to have found this place so quickly.

  There’d been two other couples interested in it, but when Gloria Mitchell learned that I renovated historic properties for a living, she offered it to me on the spot if I would be willing to help her out around the place. Typically, that meant replacing a burned-out lightbulb that was too high for her to reach, or hauling inside a piece of furniture she’d found laying on the side of the road, but more and more frequently, it also meant joining her for dinner while she talked my ear off about the daughter who’d moved to California years ago and rarely came to visit.

  The sound of gravel crunching under my tires quieted as I shifted into park. Climbing down out of the cab, I set my chin in the palm of my hand and twisted my head to the side, hearing the satisfying pop, pop, pop of my neck cracking away some of the week’s tension. When I turned my head back in the other direction, I spied Gloria waving me over.

  As I crossed the yard, I noticed that one of the window’s decorative shutters was askew. I made a mental note to re-hang it before it broke away completely, necessitating a bigger, costlier repair. For the first time, I also noticed an old Volvo station wagon parked next to Gloria’s bright turquoise Mini Cooper.

  Gloria gestured me closer, her body practically vibrating with excitement. I wasn’t entirely sure how old she was; I guessed anywhere between sixty and eighty. The woman had more energy than anyone I’d ever known. “Rosalie’s here,” she whispered, clasping her weathered hands together in front of her chest. “She showed up today out of the blue.”

  “What?”

  Technically speaking, I had no reason to dislike her daughter, but listening to Gloria talk about how she had stayed away so long had definitely colored my impression of the woman. And the photos Gloria frequently shoved under my nose depicting a well-dressed ice princess who seemed incapable of a genuine smile hadn’t helped to improve my outlook much, either.

  But this wasn’t about me, I reminded myself. I genuinely liked Gloria, and seeing her so happy was really fucking nice. “That’s fantastic,” I said, putting as much enthusiasm as I could muster behind my words.

  But despite my best efforts, Gloria saw right through me. “I know you don’t think much of Rosalie, what with all the complaining I’ve done these past few mont
hs, but that’s just been the ramblings of an old, lonely woman who misses her only child. If you’d have met her before she married that man, you’d understand.”

  I doubted that was true, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good for me to say so. There was just something about her that rubbed me the wrong way. Like the fact that she reminds you of your cheating ex-fiancée? my subconscious chimed in.

  Okay, so there was that. It wasn’t Rosalie’s fault that her golden hair was the exact same shade as someone I never wanted to see again, but my subconscious didn’t particularly care, apparently.

  “How long is she staying?” I asked, my question not entirely altruistic.

  I had a lifetime’s worth of experience with women like her to know an old, drafty farmhouse wouldn’t be her first choice for where to live. Women like her typically didn’t like to get their hands dirty. Their manicures were too important. During her visit, I expected nonstop complaints about the house not being up to her standards, and endless phone calls to come fix things that were perfectly fine given this place was a hundred and fifty years old.

  Like a bad movie, my mind flashed back to a scene from my past: my ex, Margaux, standing in the middle of the dining room of the antique colonial I used to own. The house had been built in the early seventeen hundreds, and the space had once been the original keeping room. The ceiling was low, the floors were sloped, and the walls were dark. She’d hated it, and had no problem telling me so. In hindsight, her reaction to the house I loved should have sent me running in the opposite direction, but I’d been too blinded by her beauty and charm to pay it any mind.

  “Oh! Nothing like that.” The sound of Gloria’s voice pulled me back to the here and now. “What I meant is Rosalie’s moved back. For good. You remember me telling you about the fire at her gallery? Well, it was all the impetus she needed to finally leave that arrogant, no-good, piece of shit man she married.” She bounced on her toes and lifted her fists in victory. “I’ll tell you what for nothing—”

  Her tirade was cut short when the screen door opened and a small-boned woman wrapped in an oversized flannel and looking nothing like the photos I’d seen stepped out onto the porch. “Mom,” she sighed, her voice weary. “We talked about this.”

  In that moment, my world turned on its axis. Up was down, dark was light, and I was in big fucking trouble.

  2

  Rosalie

  I’d driven from San Francisco in five days—existing on little more than bad coffee, stale Cheetos, and adrenaline—so all I’d wanted when I arrived back in Vermont was to climb the stairs up to my old bedroom and fall into bed. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life now that my gallery was gone and I’d finally left Blake, but the immediate plan had been to spend the next several days hiding out under the covers.

  Imagine my shock then when I found my childhood bedroom had been turned into an in-home yoga studio instead. Not that I had much cause to complain, what with not having been back to visit in longer than I cared to admit. Still, it was something I figured my mom would have mentioned during one of our many phone calls. It wasn’t as if we didn’t talk every Sunday. In fact, it had been last Sunday’s conversation that had finally given me the nudge I needed to leave my narcissistic, gaslighting husband.

  Which, in hindsight, was something I probably should have shared with her.

  Instead, I’d shown up unannounced, and now I was trying my best to figure out where I was going to sleep. Had I given her advance warning of my impending arrival, maybe that guy who lived in our old carriage house—Preston, I thought his name was—could have put my old bed frame back together. Assuming I could even find it in this mess.

  I scanned the cavernous attic, finally locating the headboard and rails propped up against the far wall. I picked my way slowly across the bare hardwood floor, maneuvering around boxes of Christmas ornaments, photo albums, and who knew what else. Still, I could see the space was overall in good shape, larger even than my first studio apartment. The roof was peaked high down the center, with walls pitching steeply toward the floor on each side. With its exposed beams and six-over-six paned windows with wavy glass, it was actually pretty cozy.

  A memory flitted at the edges of my consciousness. If I squinted, I could almost make out traces of the pied-à-terre in Paris Blake had rented for our honeymoon. Those had been happier times, back when he was still smitten with me and found my “small town naïveté” charming instead of grating. Before I’d learned the man I married had been playing a role, and that the real Blake Wentworth was a cold, calculating sociopath who was incapable of loving me back.

  But he wasn’t the only one who’d played a role during our marriage. Two or three years after that Parisian honeymoon, I’d transformed from the bright-eyed girl he’d swept off her feet at twenty-three into someone who’d locked all of her emotions behind a hard, unsmiling exterior. My mantra had been If he wants cold, I’ll give him cold, and I’d become an expert at it.

  I felt my chin wobble, and before the waterworks could start anew, I pushed the memories of my marriage—both the good and the bad—to the far recesses of my mind, vowing not to give him any more of my precious time.

  Painful though this short mental detour had been, it wasn’t entirely without benefit, thankfully. It had given me a fresh dose of inspiration.

  “Mom!” I called, galloping down the stairs to find her and ask if I could move into the attic. Only, she wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table where I’d left her. “Mom?” I repeated, popping my head into the sewing room, only to find it empty as well.

  The farmhouse was large and rambling, having been added onto every fifty years or so, which meant I had to check a couple of different nooks and crannies before I finally found her standing on the edge of the porch, speaking in hushed tones to a man with a deep, gravelly rumble of a voice. I started to move toward the front door only to stop in my tracks. I loathed eavesdropping, but I quieted my footsteps and slowed my approach when I heard my name.

  “... left that arrogant, no-good, piece of shit she married.”

  My shoulders curled in on themselves, and I let out a heavy sigh. My mom’s disdain for Blake was not news to anyone. For years, she’d been trying to get me to leave him, and more than once I’d almost done it, too. While I could understand her feelings—and in most cases, agreed with them wholeheartedly—my situation was just that: mine. Colebury was a small town where gossip traveled fast. The fact that I was suddenly back after more than a decade away would be news enough; I didn’t need strangers knowing the details of why I’d returned, too. That was private.

  I straightened my spine and pulled in a deep breath, preparing myself for the pitying looks I was sure to encounter. Letting out my breath, I pushed the screen door open and stepped outside to join her. “Mom,” I sighed, hearing the weariness in my voice. “We talked about this.”

  She turned to me, surprise written on her face. My mom had always been a striking woman with bold features, but sometime in the last couple of years, age had started to creep in on her. It might not have been so jarring if I’d seen it slowly happening over time, but that would have required me being here. I’d been shaken by the differences I’d seen in her when I’d first arrived. She was still beautiful, but her coffee-colored hair was now liberally streaked with gray and her laugh lines had started to deepen into grooves near the outer edges of her eyes.

  “Oh!” she chirped, her head swinging between the man standing at the bottom of the stairs and me.

  In the dim glow of the porch light, I could see the cheeks above his closely-cropped beard were flushed with embarrassment. He shuffled the toe of his work boot through the fallen leaves scattered at his feet.

  When our gazes connected, my breath caught, and I felt a swooping sensation in the pit of my belly—not unlike that moment when you’ve reached the top of the hill on a roller coaster and the car careens forward, faster than you expected.

  For a brief, flashing moment, he looked
as startled as I felt. But then he blinked, and his face became a mask of polite indifference.

  That was … odd.

  I jerked my head to dislodge the strange feelings that had swept through me and directed my attention back to my mother, my hands planted firmly on my hips in annoyance. “What did I tell you?”

  She waved an unbothered hand in front of her face. “Psh. You’re too concerned about what other people think.”

  Not for the first time, I wondered if my being that way was in direct contrast to her never being concerned enough. But that was an argument we’d had more times than I could count, and I’d never come out on the winning end of it. The truth of the matter was that Gloria Mitchell marched to the beat of her own drum, and you could join her parade or get the hell out of the way. Sometimes, I wished I could be more like my mom, but right now—when I was broken and battered from that final, soul-sucking year of my marriage—all I wanted was to fade into the background. That had never been her way, though, and I was foolish to hope that might change now.

  “Besides, it’s just Preston.” She gestured at the man whose gaze had darted toward the woods, his features pinched with what looked like discomfort. “Who’s he going to gossip to about you being back?”

  Her words sank in. “That’s Preston?” My voice pitched up at the end, a mixture of confusion and disbelief. For the last six months, she’d alternatively referred to him as “that nice young man next door” or “that sweet boy Preston.”