His First and Last (Ardent Springs #1)

by Terri Osburn

  “I agree with Spencer,” Buford said, speaking around the bite of cookie in his mouth. “We need to hear her out.”

  Though he was surprised to hear Buford speaking in support of Lorelei, Spencer didn’t say so. There was little love lost between the two older men, and if the chance to piss off Winkle was motivation enough for Buford to back Lorelei, all the better.

  At the sure sign that he was in the minority, Jebediah’s hackles went up. “Fine,” he said, “we’ll hear what she has to say. But if the committee does decide to pursue this option, I suggest we put someone with experience in charge.”

  “You mean like your daughter?” Spencer asked. Becky had been helping plan the Main Street Festival since Jebediah had taken office. From what Spencer’d heard, she did little more than sit at the front of the room during meetings, delegating duties until there was nothing left on her to-do list. She was a figurehead and nothing more.

  “Becky does have substantial experience planning this sort of event, yes.”

  Spencer let his anger seep through when he said, “This is Lorelei’s project. Should we choose to go forward, she’ll have the full support of the restoration committee.”

  Jebediah stood his ground, but his eyes lost their usual arrogance. “So you speak for the entire committee now?”

  “Don’t push this, Jebediah,” Buford warned. “You won’t win.”

  With a curt nod, the mayor said, “We’ll see about that.”

  Stepping aside to let the blowhard by, Spencer waited until the door swung closed before saying, “He’s going to be a pain in the ass, isn’t he?”

  “That’s what he does best,” Buford said, munching on another cookie. “These things are dang good.”

  The small bag on the counter sported a Lulu’s Home Bakery sticker. “Are those the ones for sale over at Snow’s place?” Spencer asked.

  “Yep.” The store owner took another bite, and a look of bliss crossed his face. “I don’t know who this Lulu person is, but she bakes like an angel.”

  Spencer rubbed a finger under his nose to hide the smile. “I’ve heard that. Your message said the oak is in?”

  “Wrapped and ready to go. Drive around back and we’ll load it up.” Wiping his hands on his shirt, Buford added, “You want one of these? I have to eat them here as the missus says I need to eat healthier. The woman cut me back to three beers a week, and she’s trying to make me eat salads.”

  The last word was said as if lettuce and tomatoes were equal to crickets and worms.

  “I’ll pass today,” Spencer said, thinking at least he had one piece of good news to share with Lorelei tonight. “Let’s get that wood.”

  Chapter 23

  Lorelei huddled in the corner of the couch staring at nothing while her mind churned through thirty years of memories. Halfway home she’d remembered that today was bridge day over at Pearl’s, and she was tempted to drive over there and make a scene. But for once in her life, Lorelei chose not to be impetuous. This wasn’t something she wanted to have out with an audience. Though she was contemplating calling Spencer. He’d been right that Mike knew who Lorelei’s father was, he just hadn’t guessed how well he knew him.

  After all these years, to learn that her father didn’t know about her either was a bit mind-blowing. Well, all of this was mind-blowing. Mike had claimed that if he’d known, he never would have gone, but was that true? He’d been a kid himself. Lorelei had essentially done the same thing her father had—run for the county line the first chance she got. Granted, she’d run a lot farther. And she’d given up Spencer to do it. Based on Mike’s story, Lorelei couldn’t tell if her mom had asked him to stay, or simply sent him on his way, knowing she was leaving herself to carry a burden alone.

  She hadn’t bothered to open the curtains that Granny kept closed during the day to keep the house cool, and the rage that had filled Lorelei’s being the moment she realized Granny must have known all along faded to a low simmer the longer she sat in the dimly lit room. A tiny voice of reason kept repeating that there was still a chance Granny might have been in the dark as much as Lorelei. But then why had the older woman been so against Lorelei working for Mike? She’d said it wasn’t a good idea, but wouldn’t give a reason. What other reason could there be than because he’s your father, Lorelei?

  A daytime soap opera had nothing on Lorelei’s life. At thirty years old, she was a failed actress who’d wasted twelve years of her life, become an unwitting mistress, destroyed a family, and returned home to a small town, where she wasn’t welcome, to end up working for the father she’d never known. Her only positive thought was that things could only go up from here. And then she heard Granny’s car pull into the drive and remembered there was still a chance that her farce of a story was about to get even worse.

  “Lorelei?” Granny said, pushing into the house and dropping her purse and keys on a table in the entryway. “Are you okay? Are you sick?”

  “I’m not sick,” she said, her voice flat. There were too many emotions warring in her mind for any specific one to win out. “I got some news today.”

  Granny sat down on the couch, her face etched with concern. “What is it, honey? What’s happened?”

  “Did you know that Mike Lowry was Mom’s boyfriend in high school?” she asked, opting to get right to the point.

  Blue eyes turned away. “I knew they spent time together.”

  “Did you know he was my father?”

  Her grandmother’s eyes closed and her shoulders fell, but she didn’t look shocked or surprised. “I suspected, but not until Mike came back last year.”

  Not the answer Lorelei expected.

  “You mean you didn’t know from the beginning?” she asked. “Mike says Mom wasn’t the type of girl to sleep around. How could you not have known the boy she’d been dating was my father?”

  “She told me they’d had a fight on that spring break trip,” Granny said, crossing her arms. “Said she’d been reckless, had a few drinks, and had sex with a stranger. I knew those sorts of things happened when young people went off on their own. That’s why I hadn’t wanted her to go. But she was eighteen and that boy had convinced her she was old enough to go without our permission.”

  “That boy?” Lorelei repeated, rising to her feet. “You mean my father?”

  “I didn’t know that!” Granny rubbed her forehead. “He was long gone by the time your mother told me she was pregnant. I believed her when she said it wasn’t him. And when I brought up finding the stranger from Gulf Shores, she didn’t want to talk about it.”

  So Granny hadn’t been lying all those years. But she’d said she suspected the truth for a year. And still she didn’t say anything.

  “What changed when Mike came back?” Lorelei asked. “Why didn’t you say something? To him or to me?”

  “I . . .” The older woman leaned back on the couch. “I don’t know. I thought if Mike was your father, that he had to have known before he left. And if he was the kind of man who’d walk away from you and your mother, then he wasn’t the kind of man you needed in your life anyway.”

  “That wasn’t your decision,” Lorelei snarled.

  “I did what I thought was right,” Granny defended. “I watched what your mother went through. The shunning and shameful looks for being one of those girls. Her friends turned on her, spurred on by that jealous Jebediah Winkle.”

  “What?” Lorelei sat down on the coffee table. “What does Jebediah have to do with Mom?”

  “Oh, he always had a thing for your mother,” Granny said, waving a finger in the air. “She wanted nothing to do with him, and when she chose Mike Lowry over him, he was livid. As soon as word got out that she was pregnant with you, Jebediah spewed poisonous lies about her to anyone who would listen. And those fools believed him!”

  This was a revelation Lorelei never saw coming. Jebediah had made Lorelei’s childhood a living nightmare, and now she knew why. He’d done his best to paint her mother with a mark of shame,
and once she was gone, he ensured Lorelei carried the mark as well. But why would anyone have listened to a jealous boy? He wasn’t a respected man of the community back then. This wasn’t the fifties they were talking about. But then, small Southern towns did have a way of getting stuck in time.

  “Did Mom ever defend herself?”

  Granny shook her head. “What was she going to say? Her story was that she didn’t even know your father’s name.”

  “But why would she do that when she could have told them it was Mike?”

  On a long sigh, Granny said, “I’ve tried to figure that out for the last year. I guess she loved him and didn’t want people to think poorly of him for leaving her pregnant.”

  Lorelei considered that, then remembered what Mike had said. “But he didn’t know.”

  “What?” Granny said.

  “Mike says he had no idea Mom was pregnant when he moved to Nashville. He found out later that she had a little girl, but thought I was born a couple years after he left. He didn’t even know how old I was until today.”

  With eyes wide, Granny’s mouth opened and closed several times, but nothing came out.

  “She didn’t want to give him a reason not to go,” Lorelei said, the truth dawning. “She knew he wanted to chase his dream, and telling him she was pregnant would have taken that away from him. He’d never have gone to Nashville if she’d told him about me.”

  “Are you saying your mother ruined her own reputation and bore the brunt of this town’s self-righteous judgment so a young man could chase a singing career?”

  Scooting over to join Granny on the couch, Lorelei ignored the question. “You said Mom was bitter because of her own choices. Choices she didn’t have the courage to change. What did you mean?”

  “I thought she regretted taking that trip to Gulf Shores. That she never forgave herself for giving in to a boy who didn’t love her, whether it was Mike or some stranger.”

  “Did you know Mike asked her to go to Nashville with him?”

  Granny’s brows shot up. “He asked her to go?”

  Lorelei nodded. “That’s what he says. She turned him down on graduation night. Mom had to know she was pregnant by then.”

  “Two kids trying to make it in Nashville with a baby would have been terribly hard.”

  “Yeah,” Lorelei said. “She did all of this for him.”

  Her grandmother squeezed her hand. “That’s a big sacrifice for a boy who didn’t love her enough to stay.”

  With a shrug, Lorelei said, “I didn’t love Spencer enough to stay either.”

  “But Spencer wasn’t pregnant.”

  “That definitely would have been a reason to stay,” Lorelei said with a chuckle. “She must have loved him a lot.”

  With two fingers on her chin, Granny turned Lorelei to face her. “She loved you, too. And she was never ashamed of having you. I meant that this morning.”

  Knowing she’d been created from love and not some seedy one-night stand changed how Lorelei saw herself and her mom. Donna Pratchett hadn’t been a lonely, bitter woman who fell into a bottle now and then and lived in the dark.

  She’d been a woman who knew love and gave life to a daughter despite what it would mean for her future. She wasn’t weak, as Lorelei had always thought. She’d been incredibly strong. And brave.

  “I wish her life could have been different,” Lorelei said as she leaned her head on Granny’s shoulder.

  “Me, too,” Granny said with a sigh.

  Spencer pulled the trays and boxes off his passenger seat and headed up to the house with Champ bouncing around beside him. Lorelei’s car was in the drive along with Granny’s. One of them must have let the dog out for him. Before he reached the porch, the front door opened and Lorelei stepped out.

  “Hi,” she said. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying, but she offered him a half smile.

  He set the trays on the porch and went to her. “What happened?”

  Lorelei sniffed. “Let’s sit on the swing,” she said, pulling him along by the hand. “I got some news today, and Granny and I figured a few things out.”

  Spencer’s gut tightened. “Was I right about Mike?” he asked, swallowing hard as he sat down beside her on the swing.

  “Sort of,” she said, pulling her feet up and leaning into him. “Mike didn’t just know who my father is. He is my father.”

  It was a good thing Spencer was sitting down or he’d have landed on the floorboards. “What?”

  “According to Mike, Mom was the love of his life. He asked her to go with him to Nashville, but she turned him down. She never told him she was pregnant, and Granny and I think she let him go and then lied about who my father was so he could chase his dream.”

  A whistle escaped his lips. “I did not see that coming. But how did Mike not know?”

  “He was so mad when Mom refused to go with him, he left and never looked back. A while later he heard she had a kid, but didn’t think to ask how old I was.”

  “And now you work for him.” Spencer wondered what the odds on that were. “Is that why Granny didn’t want you to work for him? Did she know all this time?”

  Lorelei shook her head. “I thought that, too, but no. She did start to suspect it when Mike came back last year. I don’t look a whole lot like him, but something he did during a brief encounter at Brubaker’s, some mannerism, she said, reminded her of me. She assumed if he was my father, that he must have known and left anyway. Which didn’t make him a good guy in her eyes, so why bring him into my life?”

  This meant that in the last forty-eight hours, both he and Lorelei had found their fathers. Except Lorelei’s was still alive and well, and living in Ardent Springs. Spencer hid the unexpected pang of jealousy that hit him in the chest. That his father was gone while hers was still breathing wasn’t Lorelei’s fault.

  “So you have a dad,” he said, wanting to be supportive, but not yet sure how Lorelei felt about this new revelation. “Is that a good thing?”

  She grinned. “I think so. I like Mike, so that’s something.”

  “Are you going to let people know?” Since Lorelei’s parentage had been a big issue with the townsfolk, letting them in on the truth could change the way some of them saw her.

  “I don’t know. I guess Mike and I have to talk about that.”

  Spencer wanted to find Mike Lowry and ask him, how could he have not known. Why didn’t he check on the girl he left behind? If he really loved her, how did he ever walk away in the first place?

  But then he remembered that Lorelei had walked away from him once upon a time. And he hadn’t loved her enough to go with her. Stupidity really did run rampant at that age.

  “I’m sorry,” Lorelei said, her voice so low he barely heard her.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For leaving you twelve years ago,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder. “For having a father I can go talk to when you don’t. For being a bitch in the past, and for the times I’m sure to be one in the future.”

  Spencer focused on the last word she said. “Does that mean you’re going to stick around for the future?”

  She dropped her feet to the floor, rose off the swing, and turned to face him. “How about we enjoy the present and not worry about the future for a while?” she said, taking him by the hands and pulling him close. “Twelve years ago, I spent too much time thinking about the future to appreciate what I had. I need to learn how to focus on the now, and this seems like a good place to start.”

  Tightening his arms around her, Spencer nodded. “I have to admit,” he said, “right now is feeling pretty good.”

  “And it’s about to get even better,” she whispered, dropping a kiss along his jawline. “Granny made a pecan pie.”

  Lifting Lorelei’s feet off the ground, he bellowed, “Why didn’t you mention that sooner, woman?”

  The delicious smell of fresh pie filled Spencer’s senses as he entered the old farmhouse with Lorelei in his arms
.

  Chapter 24

  Lorelei sat at an empty picnic table on the north side of the town square—which ironically enough was round—ignoring her basket of fries while toying with the stuffed brown dog Spencer had won for her. He’d proven he still had solid pitching skills by knocking down the six stacked bottles on his first try. As any smitten girl would do, Lorelei applauded and rewarded her beau with a kiss on the cheek.

  At which point Spencer had dragged her to the back of the game tent and coaxed her into the longer, wetter, and hotter kiss he felt he deserved. Lorelei obliged willingly, as she’d been doing a lot of in the last four days.

  It had been an odd week. So different from the many, many weeks before. Lorelei was getting to know Mike as her father, which would have been weird on its own, but she was also spending her nights in Spencer’s bed, enjoying a rather satisfying form of getting reacquainted. In some ways, they were once again teenage lovers, in a rush to rip each other’s clothes off and get to the good stuff. But as adults, they were also enjoying the quiet moments, lying together after the lovemaking, content to cuddle and talk with no need to break apart and race home to make curfew.

  The freedom lent a leisureliness to their moments together. Lorelei had set out to live in the now, and the now was definitely holding her attention. There were moments when she thought about the future. About spending her life in Ardent Springs, building a home and a family with Spencer. But then her chest would grow tight, as if the air were being squeezed out of her, and she’d distract her mind with memories of the night before. Or even the morning hours, when they dressed and readied for their day in perfect harmony.

  It hadn’t taken long for Lorelei to move her necessities into Spencer’s bathroom. There was no reason to scurry back to the house in the wee hours of the morning when the garage apartment offered a perfectly good shower. Especially when the apartment also held a rather sexy man willing to help wash her back.

  And her front.

  “That’s an awfully big smile on your face,” Mike said, stepping up to the table and taking a seat across from Lorelei. “Almost as big as the one you walked into the office with this morning.”