by J. H. Croix
When Love Comes
A Diamond Creek, Alaska Novel
J.H. Croix
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 J.H. Croix
Revised Edition
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1500903140
ISBN 13: 9781500903145
Cover design by CT Cover Creations
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.
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Dedication
A shout out to my husband – a man who has the sense to enjoy horror and romance at the same time (only in real life romance), supports every dream great and small, adores our dogs, and loves me in spite of myself.
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Contents
Note to Readers
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Sneak Peek: Follow Love by J.H. Croix; all rights reserved
Sneak Peek: Christmas on the Last Frontier
Find my Books
About the Author
Note to Readers
Welcome to Diamond Creek, Alaska! Each book in this series can be read as a standalone novel. The Diamond Creek, Alaska Novels are steamy, tender, and poignant contemporary romances set in the beautiful, wild, and quirky community of Diamond Creek.
In When Love Comes, you will meet Hannah and Luke and share their journey. I hope you fall in love with them, just as I have. As for whose heart may be up for grabs next? Well…I hope you’ll keep reading as Diamond Creek has many stories, surprises, and sexy escapades to offer, all set in the breathtaking beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. From someone who called Alaska home for over a decade, Alaska might be cold, but its romance is hot!
Happy reading and thanks for joining us in the last frontier!
~J.H. Croix~
Prologue
Hannah stared at the groceries that had tumbled out of her basket. A smashed tomato rested against a jar of olives, red tomato juice pooling on the floor. A can of soup rolled until it bounced against a display sign for orange juice promising, of all things, to make every day great. Hannah wished a great day could be guaranteed with orange juice. She’d buy it in bulk. She knelt down to clean up the mess. A second ago, she’d collided with someone as she came around the corner of the aisle.
“What the hell?”
She started to apologize, only to be cut off.
“Oh, whatever. Look where you’re going, why don’t you?” a man said, the words more of a demand than a question.
Hannah stood up, leaving her spilled groceries on the floor, and found herself looking down into the face of an irate man decked out in gym clothes, a matching top and bottom of shiny red fabric. She opened her mouth to speak, only to have his words trample her thoughts.
“Jesus, you’re a freakin’ giant. Enjoy cleaning up your mess.” He waved a hand toward the groceries on the floor and stalked off, his shoes squeaking with each step.
Hannah watched him walk away. She looked around to catch a few sympathetic glances, but no one said anything or moved to help. She didn’t appreciate being called a giant, but she was tall by most standards at six feet. She went through the motions of shopping, feeling alone in the store. Back in her small apartment, she turned on the TV to fill the quiet. While she ate a solitary dinner, her mind rolled back to a place where she didn’t feel so alone.
Hannah’s memory of the night she first arrived in Alaska was vivid. She was six years old and wide-awake despite having traveled for more than twelve hours from North Carolina with two layovers and three flights. With her forehead pressed against the plane window, glittering lights came into view in the dark sky, their reflections shimmering on the ocean water as the plane descended. Their destination, Diamond Creek, lay along the shores of Kachemak Bay. The lights shaped a town in darkness for her, streets curving up hillsides and winding along the ocean. A few neon signs shone boldly in the darkness.
As they landed, the tiny plane bounced and rumbled. The whir of the motors grew louder. She would forever associate that particular sound with Alaskan nights. It heralded their arrival. Hannah remembered the distinct sound of tires rolling over snow-packed roads, later the feeling of a heavy quilt tucked around her as she was lulled in and out of sleep, and then awakening to bright sun. Twenty-two years later, her first look out the window was still sharp in her memory. Snow-covered peaks stood stark against a bright blue sky. Deep green spruce trees dusted with snow were scattered across the view. Sunlight glinted on the ocean bay with wind whipping waves across the water.
Hannah glanced around her small living room and sighed, thinking that she was sighing a bit much lately. The nightly news rattled on in the background. She was probably four thousand miles, give or take, away from Alaska. Her view here was of a coffee shop across the street in a small town in Massachusetts. The town’s main street was picturesque in its quaint charm, but it lacked the wild sense of Diamond Creek. Her parents remained in Diamond Creek, where she was raised until graduate school led her to Massachusetts.
Just as she was starting classes for her graduate degree in environmental science, the news came that her parents had died in a plane crash in rural Alaska. Their death had ricocheted through her heart. That was two years prior, and she had yet to return to Alaska since the surreal trip for the funeral throughout which she’d been emotionally numb. She thought back to the incident at the grocery store, a small matter really. She lay awake that night, her mind spinning on the wheel of the feeling that had clung to her in the grocery store. Alone. She tried to remember if she’d had anyone to share dinner or drinks with in recent memory, or if anyone had visited her apartment in the last year. The fact that she had to think about it offered the answer. Her encounter with the rude stranger at the store marked a high point in human interaction beyond when she was at work or in classes. Her life was solitary, a marked contrast to her life in Diamond Creek where a day didn’t go by without someone who mattered being woven into its fabric.
The following morning, Hannah looked across the street to the coffee shop, blinking her eyes at the prick of tears, the wish to be home rushing through her. Visceral memories of Alaska suffused her mind. Cool windy days in summer. Walks along the beach scattered with rocks, the occasional lava stones, seaweed, and starfish. The fuchsia of fireweed come fa
ll, and colors dancing along the ground. The curious quiet of winter, when the snow muffled all sounds. The bite of winter air and breath of wood smoke. Stars bright and bare against the sky. And the tight-knit community of friends—interwoven in such a way that feeling alone was rare.
She stared blindly at the coffee shop across the street and shuttered her memories, shying away from the feelings they elicited. She was one week away from finishing her degree. As she closed her apartment door and listened to the echo of the lock in the hallway of hardwood floors, the yearning to be in Diamond Creek, where they never locked the door, was so acute she swallowed a sob. With no one in the hall to see, she leaned her forehead against the door and let tears slip down her cheeks. Later that morning, she turned in her final papers. It would be one month and almost as many sleepless nights before she found herself on the lone highway that led to Diamond Creek.
Chapter 1
Hannah gripped the steering wheel of her parents’ Toyota truck and felt waves of grief alternating with exhilaration flow through her. Her father’s friend Frank had offered to drop off the truck for her when she landed in Anchorage. Nostalgia washed through her when she spied the bright red truck in the airport parking lot. When she opened the back of the cab, she found herself looking at odds and ends that had traveled with her parents in any of the trucks they’d had, her eyes landing on two pairs of brown XtraTufs. XtraTufs were the favored heavy-duty rubber boot in Alaska—her parents never went anywhere without them. Knowing that they had probably last been touched by her parents brought a flash of grief.
For God’s sake, they’re just boots. With her chest tight, Hannah tossed her bags into the back of the truck.
It was late spring in Alaska with lupine starting to bloom in small clusters in the tall grass along the highway. The landscape varied, fields of grass alternating with spruce forests and ocean views. Exhilaration rose through the grief and came from being back in a place where she belonged. She had missed the feeling so much that she hadn’t known how empty she felt away from here. At the same time, the loss of her parents was so sharp; she could barely tolerate it at times.
Hannah’s recollection of her mother, Janet, was one of steadiness and warmth. To those in the lower forty-eight (as the rest of the United States was known to Alaskans), her mother’s beauty would likely have been considered at odds with her willingness to get dirty. She could change the oil on a truck, fillet a fish, chase off moose, and head out for dinner looking beautiful. As for her father, John, he’d loved his wife, his daughter, and his work. His love of biology led them to Alaska and kept him intellectually immersed.
Hannah grinned as she caught sight of a moose along the side of the road, calmly nibbling at an alder tree. They were so common in Alaska that drivers had to be careful in the winter months to avoid them on roads. They were often seen ambling about town and in backyards. Diamond Creek was south of Anchorage toward the lower end of the Kenai Peninsula. There was only one route there, south along Seward Highway and then farther south on the Sterling Highway. This had been the last road she’d traveled in Alaska with her mother –almost two and a half years ago when her mother drove her to Anchorage for her flight out to Massachusetts when she moved away. Hannah blinked when she recalled that she and her mother had argued on that drive, the last time she’d seen her mother. Her mother had tried to bring up her concern about Hannah’s most recent impulsive choice—that she’d blown her meager savings on a trip to Costa Rica with a man she’d barely known. Hannah had reacted as usual—she’d dismissed her mother’s concern and changed the subject. She’d tried to hide what it felt like to let them down time and again and shoved her battered self-respect out of the way with bravado.
The recollection made her cringe. The argument between her and her mother could have been a record she played over and over, the only variations related to where she was running off to and with whom. She didn’t like to think much about it, but she used to drive her parents nuts. In some ways, she had it together in that she had high grades and usually had a job. Before college in Anchorage, she had been less wild, but then she had her heart broken in the worst way. Or that’s how it felt. She’d fallen hard for Damon, a charming, rugged, handsome guy from Juneau.
Damon was everything Hannah thought she wanted—funny, smart, and an avid outdoorsman. She fell hard and along the way ignored all the obvious red flags, such as that he was a tad too familiar with lots of women and tended to be vague if she asked too many questions. But he was so much of what she thought she wanted that she dove right in, convinced they would be together for good. Her fantasy was blown up about a year into their relationship when she and Susie, her best friend, had gone for coffee at a new place in Anchorage. Lo and behold, Damon was there, cozied up to another woman. Susie had walked right up to Damon and called him out. Hannah had slunk back to the car. She’d actually let him persuade her it was a fluke and a huge mistake. Take two was when she ran into him with yet another woman when she was out for dinner with Susie and a few friends.
She’d had enough sense to break it off for good then. But the damage was done, and she spent the next few years running away from how she felt. She kept her relationships shallow and let the taste of adventure tug her just about anywhere, her heart shielded all the while. She’d convinced herself she could play it just as cool as the men who kept things casual. Her parents worried about her and didn’t like seeing their only child running off on trips around the world with men she barely knew. The consequences of her superficial, flighty choices were the incremental loss of her self-respect and her parents’ disappointment. She also had no savings to speak of and was often scrounging for money to cover bills.
Hannah wished her parents knew she’d stopped being so impulsive after they died. It was as if a switch turned off. She’d become almost rigidly responsible. Actually, the last trip she’d chased after a man had been the trip to Costa Rica, which had been the source of conflict with her mother. The man in question had ended up leaving her stranded in a hotel with no money to pay the bill while he took off with a lovely young woman he met there. Hannah had been forced to sneak out of the hotel, using what little money she had left to pay for the cab to take her to the airport. She’d been wise enough to purchase a round-trip ticket. After her parents died and she’d built up a teensy amount of savings, she’d paid off that hotel bill.
As she approached Diamond Creek, she pulled over to a viewing spot. Parts of Diamond Creek along the shoreline sat high on a bluff that flanked the ocean below. She leaned against a railing along the edge of the bluff. In a few weeks, the area would be filled with campers and RVs, drivers stopping to snap photos of the view. For now, it was blessedly empty. Looking out over Kachemak Bay, Hannah breathed deep. It was early afternoon, and the wind was light. The mountains stood silently across the water, mostly green with patches of snow left in the shady areas. Tears slid down her cheeks, and her chest loosened for the first time in years. A raven flew past her and called to another in the distance. An eagle glided low along the shoreline.
Gathering herself, she went into the rest-stop bathroom. Wiping her face with a damp paper towel, she looked in the mirror. Her long brown hair hung in tangled waves around her shoulders. Sky-blue eyes looked back at her, eyes she’d inherited from her mother. Her mouth was wide with full lips. She was too tall for the mirror, which cut her reflection off at the forehead if she stood up straight. Tugging her hair back, she twisted it into a knot and returned to her truck.
The sign for Emerald Road sat crookedly at the base of a small hill. She remembered when the city had installed new street signs years ago. The Emerald Road sign had tilted drunkenly after the first spring of frost heaves and mud, remaining in that state since. Her childhood home was the last on the road, which ended in a gravel cul-de-sac. The house was a two-story barn-shaped home with cedar siding. Blue spruce trees stood sentry at the entrance of the short driveway. She came to a stop and turned the engine off. Silence seeped through he
r for a moment before being interrupted by magpies chattering in the trees. Her gaze traveled around the yard. The spruce trees opened up to a small grassy area with the house sitting to one side. A field of fireweed, not yet blooming, flanked the left of the house with trees filling the rest of the area. Her mother’s raised flower beds were overgrown with weeds.
Hannah imagined the family’s old dog, Grayson, running out to greet her. Grayson had died peacefully in his sleep shortly before she’d left for graduate school. She felt his absence sharply. He’d been a fixture of her life with her parents in Alaska, a quiet, steady presence.
Aside from the funeral, which Hannah barely recalled, the last time she’d been here, her parents had been vibrant and well. The house had usually buzzed with activity, holding a sense of motion and purpose. Now it lacked any sense of presence within. The house looked out over the road, which afforded an open view of the bay and mountains. Turning away from the view, Hannah stepped to the deep purple door that stood out against the wood-frame house, reflecting her mother’s whimsical touch. When she entered the house, a soft quiet enveloped her. Despite two years of absence, the house held echoes of her parents’ presence.