Saratoga Falls: The Complete Love Story Series

by Pogue, Lindsey

  “How are your classes at the college?” A subject change was clearly needed. “I keep telling myself I should enroll, but I don’t think it’s going to happen this year.”

  “Give yourself more time, Sam. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now.” She rolled onto her side and looked at me, a smile parting her lips. “I’m loving my photography class, actually.” It was the first real smile I’d seen all night.

  “Yeah? Is it the subject matter,” I asked, knowing she’d been taking shots of the college football team, the track meets, and some of the other athletic events her professor wanted her to cover for the school newspaper. “Or,” I added, “is it the art of photography itself that you’re enjoying?”

  “Can it be both?” she asked with a wry grin. “Because the community college has their fair share of hotties.”

  “Just not a Mr. Right, though,” I clarified.

  Mac shook her head. “No one will ever be good enough for me,” she said playfully. Mac liked to pretend that she was flippant and carefree when it came to the opposite sex, but I’d never seen her with a guy, not really. She’d always flirted and hung out with them, but dating never turned into anything more than a night out, and I always wondered why. Her dad was likely the reason—overprotective and downright intimidating—but then, I couldn’t help wondering if it was something else.

  “Sup, girls,” Nick drawled from the window, making us both jump.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” Mac demanded. “I thought you were working?”

  He crawled up onto the rooftop and sat at the apex above us. “I left early.”

  “Awww, you came to hang out with us,” Mac said, and I didn’t have to see Nick to know he rolled his eyes.

  “No, you were on my way home,” he lied. We weren’t on his way home at all. Mac lived in the older, cramped neighborhoods where the blue-collar folks dwelled. His apartment was in a newer part of town, happily situated an equal distance from downtown and his parents’ place in the Valley with the nicer homes, the bigger homes.

  With a sigh, he motioned for us to separate, and he carefully nestled in between us. “I had to make sure you guys weren’t getting into trouble, at least not without me,” he added.

  “Well, we are about to pour our second cup of hot cocoa. It’s pretty crazy, I know. You want?” Mac offered him her to-go mug.

  “Does it have extra marshmallows?”

  “Always.”

  “Then, I happily accept.”

  “You know, Nick,” I said, realizing something. “For as long as we’ve been friends, I’ve never seen you refuse the offer of food, candy, or any other free, edible thing someone’s offered you.”

  He chuckled and took a sip of the hot chocolate. “And, my dear friend, you never will.”

  After sating his sweet tooth with a few more savored gulps, Nick settled in between us and peered up at the stars. “This is kinda cool.”

  “It’s been awhile since we’ve come up here,” Mac mused. “It was time.”

  “You’ve never come up here with us before, huh?” I realized aloud.

  Nick took another swig of his cocoa. “I was never allowed. You have a girls only rule, remember? Reilly and I have always been banned.”

  My heart hurt at the mention of his name, but I couldn’t fault Nick for thinking about or mentioning his best friend. As much as I wished everything could be different and go back to the way it used to be between us, I knew that Nick had not only been ditched by his best friend, but that I’d been pretty MIA, too.

  “Things change,” I thought aloud. “Consider the ban temporarily lifted.”

  “Yeah, we could use your warmth.” Mac snuggled closer against him.

  “So, that’s all I’m good for, huh,” he said dryly. “My warmth and charm.” Even though he was being playful, his words struck a chord in me, tightening my throat and burning the backs of my eyes.

  I rested my head on his shoulder, peering up at the night sky. I didn’t say anything to him because I couldn’t make my vocal chords work, but I squeezed his arm, and he squeezed my hand in reply.

  “Too much has changed,” Mac whispered. “I don’t like it.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Tell me about it.” Like Mac and me, Nick had been grappling with something, though I wasn’t sure what it was. His parents, maybe, and the pressure of attending school so that he could work at his dad’s firm. All Nick really wanted to do was play baseball, Mac and I both knew that, even if he would never admit it.

  “Let’s never forget this,” Mac said, her voice strained for the first time. “Let’s always do this, no matter what else changes, okay?”

  Nick wrapped his arm around Mac and drew her in closer. Whether it was her words or his body heat, my heart melted a little, and I knew I was lucky to have them.

  “Okay,” I breathed. Best friends, forever.

  Also by By Lindsey Pogue

  Saratoga Falls Love Stories

  Whatever It Takes

  Nothing But Trouble

  Told You So

  Forgotten Lands

  Dust and Shadow

  Borne of Sand and Scorn - Prequel Novella

  Wilt and Ruin (TBR)

  Borne of Earth and Ember (TBR)

  The Ending Series

  After The Ending

  Into The Fire

  Out Of The Ashes

  Before The Dawn

  The Ending Beginnings Omnibus

  The Ending Series: World Before

  For more information visit: www.lindseypogue.com

  A Sneak Peek at Forgotten Lands

  Dust and Shadow - Prologue

  “NO MATTER WHAT YOU HEAR, no matter how curious you are, never ever go outside during a storm. Do you understand?” The wind howls and something thrashes against the house, waking me from a restless sleep. “Tell me you understand.” Beeswax, faint and sharp, fills my nostrils as a cool gust of wind whips by me, and I blink my eyes open. I’m not sure how long I’ve been sleeping, but the cracked white moulding high above me is visible in the dismal light of the sand-soaked morning.

  I stir from my cocoon of blankets, peering around the sitting room as my eyes adjust. The room is cast in a flaxen-colored haze, turning the rich pinks and purples in the floral wallpaper almost brown. Everything is covered in a thin layer of sand. The candlesticks on the table next to me are no exception, finished in dust and burned to almost nothing from the long hours of the night before.

  I stare down at my sister. Her chest rises and falls with each steady breath as she sleeps. Her bright red hair—the color of the red saguaro flowers that bloom in the dunes beyond the farm— spreads across my lap. She sleeps so peacefully, so quietly.

  The house creaks, a familiar, expected sound for an old ranch house, but when floorboards groan under slow, heavy footsteps behind me, I twist around to find Papa, staring through a crack in the shuttered window. The metal that darkens the windows is a shield and an ominous reminder.

  The fuzziness of sleep instantly fades away as I realize the storm is still howling outside and Mama hasn’t made it home yet. “Never ever go outside during a storm.” Her words are engrained in me, the hymn of survival in this place of increasing danger.

  “It’s letting up,” Papa whispers, as if he can feel my concern.

  Carefully, I extricate myself from my sister. I recall my first memory of Mama and I playing with baby Scarlet, cooing and fidgeting on the plush oriental rug beneath my feet. Tears prick my eyes, and the worried sentiments that had hounded me until I finally fell asleep hours before return.

  I watch Papa for a moment, wondering what it is he thinks he sees beyond the crack in the metal shutters, through the whirling sand as the storm assaults the exterior. Mama would never venture out in a sandstorm; she would never risk the blinding, painful sting of sand or the possibility of death.

  Stepping up to the other window, I move the damask curtains aside and peer between the slight seam in the shutters. It started hund
reds of years ago: the Shift. Mama’s great-great-grandma, Elizabeth West, wrote about it in her journal. Lethal fogs that suffocated the bigger cities after the Industrial Revolution, killing innocents and forcing those who were still able to flee out of their homes. That’s why she came to Sagebrush, all those years ago. To escape. But things didn’t work out the way they’d planned on account of the sandstorms and the drought. It wasn’t just the cities with their big machines and coal engines that changed, but the whole world. Mama always reminds me that it’s the sand that is our greatest enemy, but it’s also the sea of sand surrounding us that keeps us nestled away from scavengers in search of precious water we can’t afford to share—it’s the sand that keeps us safe.

  Sometimes, I get too curious about Grandma West and the big steamboats that traveled the world. I try to imagine an ocean, or even a beach, where the water meets the sand, and not coarse sand like we have here, but a soft, malleable thing beneath bare feet. “We are grateful to be in Sagebrush, Jo. Never forget that.” Black lung took nearly everyone, and Grandma herself was ailing all her short life because of it. It’s why Mama’s family is so good with healing, something her family had to learn many years ago and passed down to her. “Grandma would have died in Baltimore and we would not be alive, not when so many others died.”

  But Sagebrush is a harsh place, cut off from whatever else is out there, that makes me uneasy and restless in the far-reaching expanse of the desert. It’s the only place I’ve ever known, and I try to think of a world where sand can be beautiful and water stretches as far as the eye can see. My mouth dries imagining it.

  “I’ll kill him,” Papa says under his breath, and I glance over, confused. Even if I don’t understand the anger in his voice, I somehow know that even if Mama were to walk right through that door, unscathed and smiling, something terrible would follow. I can feel it, the impending something, alive and humming in the air. It turns my longing and anticipation into fear.

  “She’s somewhere safe.” I try to reassure him because Mama knows what to do during a storm, and I know Papa knows that, too.

  “If he’s done something—anything . . .”

  Even at nine years old, I know who Papa is cursing. The marshal is scary, even if I don’t really know why. I’ve felt the tension between him and Papa during dinner parties and when we see him and his family around town. Although I don’t really know him, the marshal doesn’t seem like a pleasant man, but then none of the Cunninghams are very nice. I don’t like Clayton, the marshal’s son, either. He laughed at me once when I fell leaving church. His sister laughed, too.

  I look at Papa again, watch the way he combs his mustache with his bottom teeth and leans against the windowsill, as if it’s the only thing holding him upright. He looks gray and exhausted, and I wish I could do something to make the worry around his eyes soften, but I don’t know how.

  I fidget with the butterfly pendant Mama gave me on my seventh birthday. The enchanting creatures were her “favorite” thing from the world before. I saw one when I was a little girl, when I was with my best friend down at the creek. She always had a sorrowful look when she told that part of the story. Perhaps someday I will see another butterfly.

  I’m not sure how much time passes between Papa’s cursing and my drifting thoughts, but he doesn’t move from his perch. I sit on the edge of the blue velvet sofa, fiddling with the ends of my dark hair that’s rumpled and grimy from sand and sleep. I pick at the hem of my nightgown and then bite on my nails, even though Mama always scolds me not to. It feels like an hour passes before the storm finally starts to die down. The muted sound of wagon wheels outside barely reaches my ears as Papa turns on his heel, startling me.

  He rushes out of the room, his quick, heavy footsteps echoing in the hall. I glance at Scarlet, still asleep, and rush after him. I skid to a stop behind him at the front door and he turns to me. “Stay in the house with your sister,” he orders, his fingers gripping the door handle. “I mean it, Jo. Stay. Here.” He pushes the front door open, steps outside, and flings the door shut behind him. I hear him growl something from the porch, but I can’t make it out.

  Unable to resist the earnest nudge inside me, I open the door and follow after him. I stare down at the sand grinding beneath my bare feet as I run down the steps of the farmhouse, colliding directly into Papa’s back.

  The muted sunshine is disarming and my eyes are not used to the brightness, no matter how faint in the settling sand. The thump of a horse’s hoof as it paws at the dirt reminds me we have visitors, and I peer around Papa.

  Standing at the end of a horse-drawn cart with a jailer’s cage is the marshal. He looks different than usual—he looks sad. His face is exposed and red, like he’s been out in the sand without his sand cape and head scarf. His chapped lips are pulled back in a sneer. He doesn’t have goggles slung around his neck like the other three men I see climbing down from the front of the cart: two older men, one very young and nervous looking.

  “What did you do!” Papa lunges toward the cart, all composure gone from his wild, brazen features. I clap my hands over my mouth as two deputies rush to him, their sand scarves falling from their faces and down around their necks as they struggle to hold Papa back. The older one with graying hair elbows him in the face.

  “Papa!” I shout, wanting to rush to his side, to beat the men off of him as he struggles and curses, but I’m too frightened to move, too small. Too uncertain.

  “Doyle!” the marshal barks, and it sounds like a warning as the deputies wrestle against my father.

  “Leave him alone!” I shriek and meet Marshal Cunningham’s cool stare. But it’s the vibrant red hair, flashing through the iron bars of the cage behind him, that catches my attention. When I spot a long, delicate hand sticking out from beneath a blanket, all else is forgotten. I gape at the woman, unmoving in the cart. I’m confused.

  I’m not sure how many seconds pass before I actually start to cry, or even register that it’s truly my mother, motionless in the cage. Her hair is tangled and mussed, a stark contrast to the faint bruising around her neck. The squeak of the swinging metal door and my father’s sobs are all that fill the pause. “Caroline!”

  “Mama!” I scream and run to her, air barely filling my lungs. Faintly, I register the marshal clearing his throat behind me. “Ashford, get a blanket from the barn,” he commands.

  “Let me go to her!” Papa shouts frantically as he struggles against the two men. The young one, Ashford, disappears around the side of the farmhouse, his footsteps almost as urgent as my racing heart. This isn’t real—I don’t understand . . .

  The cart sways as antsy horses fidget in place, and I can’t tear my eyes away from Mama’s fingers. They move with the cart, as if she’s beckoning me closer to her, but I’m too petrified to move. My body begins to tremble, the tears catching in my throat as I stare at her in stunned horror.

  “I told her to stay,” the marshal starts. He stares down at me. He clears his throat and rests his hand on the grip of his holstered pistol as my father’s pleas become more desperate. His mustache twitches. I glance from the marshal’s face to his pistol and his knuckles clenching white around it. “She tried to leave right as the storm set in.” His voice is more raspy than usual, perhaps sad even, and his unfocused gaze settles on Mama’s limp body. His eyes blur and shimmer, like mine.

  “Son of a bitch!” Papa shouts.

  The marshal seems unfazed, his attention lingering on Mama even as the deputies stand above Papa, taking turns hitting him in the side of the face.

  “—did this!” he sputters. “You did! She wouldn’t have you and you—” They hit him again and Papa coughs, his teeth red with blood.

  I find my voice and scream. I want to help Papa, but when the marshal reaches for Mama’s hair, I hit his hand away. “Don’t touch her!” I spit at him, wiping my nose on the back of my arm. I shield her from his touch with my body, clutching the blanket that covers her as tightly as I can. “Don’t touch her
,” I squeak.

  “I tried to make her understand!” the marshal shouts, leaning in over me. I feel his breath on the back of my neck, and the sour stench of his breath hits my nostrils before he clumsily takes a step back. His chest heaves and he clears his throat.

  The hot metal of the cage sears through the thin linen of my nightgown, the lip of the cage cutting into my stomach, but I take little notice and nestle my face into the blanket that’s Mama’s tomb, and I wish everything away.

  The marshal says something else behind me, but I can’t hear him over my sobs and the grunting and cursing of the men as they pin my father to the ground.

  “—did this! I know you did . . .” Papa coughs again, his face shoved in the dirt, his nose already swelling. His eyes are bloodshot and wide as he strains to see her, his lip curled, bloody and broken. Papa’s body is shaking. I hate what they’re doing to him, but all I can do is squeeze my eyes shut and inhale the scent of my mother. But there is nothing left of her; something foul clings to the blanket instead.

  When I open my eyes, Papa is staring at me. The anger is gone from his expression and his eyes are filled with tears. “You . . . killed her,” he chokes out.

  As the words, broken and filled with anguish, pass Papa’s lips, something angry and protective stirs inside me. I turn to the marshal—hit at him and scream—but he acts like my fit of fury is a brush of the breeze against his skin and he barely sways in place. He doesn’t even care . . . “That’s my mama!” I shout and sob between kicks at his shins and punches to his stomach. I pull at his vest, smack him. Push him. “You killed her!” I shriek, and Marshal Cunningham shakes out of his trance.

  He pushes me to the ground as anger, red and dangerous, narrows his features.

  “No,” he snarls and points to Mama’s dead body. “She did this. If she hadn’t left, this wouldn’t have happened. She chose to leave . . . and she was attacked by drifters in the storm.”