Blue Wide Sky

by Inglath Cooper

  Blue Wide Sky

  Inglath Cooper

  Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  Blue Wide Sky Copyright © 2015

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by Inglath Cooper

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  Reviews

  Sam

  Gabby

  Kat

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Analise

  Sam

  Gabby

  Analise

  Sam

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Kat

  Gabby

  Kat

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Kat

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Sam

  Gabby

  Analise

  Gabby

  Analise

  Gabby

  Gabby

  Sam

  Coming Soon! Book Two in the Smith Mountain Lake Series: Pink Summer Sunset

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  About Inglath Cooper

  Get in Touch with Inglath Cooper

  FREE Chapter from Nashville - Part One - Ready to Reach

  First love. . . forever love.

  Sixteen-year old Gabby Hayden wasn’t the kind of girl who gave a hoot about boys. She had a few real loves. Water-skiing, going out on Smith Mountain Lake with her dad and her dog. Anything else ranked a distant second. Until the summer smart, caring, gorgeous Sam Tatum gave her his heart. It had been the most wonderful time of her life, lazy days hanging out at the dock, skinny-dipping at midnight, staring up at the stars from the back of Sam’s truck.

  They are planning their future together when Sam’s father is transferred to South Africa. Devastated, Gabby and Sam promise to wait for each other until he returns for college. But lonely and angry, Sam makes a mistake that will change the course of both their lives.

  Years later, an unexpected diagnosis brings Sam home to his parents’ house on Smith Mountain Lake where he believes he can find peace and acceptance. What he finds, however, is the girl he once loved, now a woman unwilling to lose him again, a woman who will make him realize that both love and life are worth fighting for.

  Published by Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  Copyright © Inglath Cooper, 2015

  Cover © Sarah Hansen

  Cooper, Inglath

  Blue Wide Sky / Inglath Cooper

  ISBN – 978-0-9862825-0-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the email address below.

  Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  Fence.free.entertainment.llc@gmail.com

  Books by Inglath Cooper

  Blue Wide Sky

  Rock Her

  Crossing Tinker’s Knob

  Jane Austen Girl

  Good Guys Love Dogs

  Truths and Roses

  A Gift of Grace

  RITA® Award Winner John Riley’s Girl

  A Woman With Secrets

  Unfinished Business

  A Woman Like Annie

  The Lost Daughter of Pigeon Hollow

  A Year and a Day

  Nashville: Part Eight – R U Serious

  Nashville: Part Seven – Commit

  Nashville: Part Six – Sweet Tea and Me

  Nashville: Part Five – Amazed

  Nashville: Part Four – Pleasure in the Rain

  Nashville: Part Three – What We Feel

  Nashville: Part Two – Hammer and a Song

  Nashville: Part One – Ready to Reach

  On Angel’s Wings

  Join Inglath Cooper's Mailing List and Get a FREE book!

  Get a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs by joining Inglath Cooper’s newsletter mailing list! Just click here.

  Reviews

  “Truths and Roses . . . so sweet and adorable, I didn’t want to stop reading it. I could have put it down and picked it up again in the morning, but I didn’t want to.” – Kirkusreviews.com

  On Truths and Roses: “I adored this book…what romance should be, entwined with real feelings, real life and roses blooming. Hats off to the author, best book I have read in a while.” – Rachel Dove, FrustratedYukkyMommyBlog

  “I am a sucker for sweet love stories! This is definitely one of those! It was a very easy, well written, book. It was easy to follow, detailed, and didn’t leave me hanging without answers.” – www.layfieldbaby.blogspot.com

  “I don’t give it often, but I am giving it here – the sacred 10. Why? Inglath Cooper’s A GIFT OF GRACE mesmerized me; I consumed it in one sitting. When I turned the last page, it was three in the morning.” – MaryGrace Meloche, Contemporary Romance Writers

  5 Blue Ribbon Rating! “. . .More a work of art than a story. . .Tragedies affect entire families as well as close loved ones, and this story portrays that beautifully as well as giving the reader hope that somewhere out there is A GIFT OF GRACE for all of us.” — Chrissy Dionne, Romance Junkies 5 Stars

  “A warm contemporary family drama, starring likable people coping with tragedy and triumph.” 4 1/2 Stars. — Harriet Klausner

  “A GIFT OF GRACE is a beautiful, intense, and superbly written novel about grief and letting go, second chances and coming alive again after devastating adversity. Warning!! A GIFT OF GRACE is a three-hanky read…better make that a BIG box of tissues read! Wowsers, I haven’t cried so much while reading a book in a long long time…Ms. Cooper’s skill makes A GIFT OF GRACE totally believable, totally absorbing…and makes Laney Tucker vibrantly alive. This book will get into your heart and it will NOT let go. A GIFT OF GRACE is simply stunning in every way—brava, Ms. Cooper! Highly, highly recommended!” – 4 1/2 Hearts — Romance Readers Connection

  “…A WOMAN WITH SECRETS…a powerful love story laced with treachery, deceit and old wounds that will not heal…enchanting tale…weaved with passion, humor, broken hearts and a commanding love that will have your heart soaring and cheering for a happily-ever-after love. Kate is strong-willed, passionate and suffers a bruised heart. Cole is sexy, stubborn and also suffers a bruised heart…gripping plot. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Cooper’s work!” – www.freshfiction.com

  Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

  ~ Marcus Aurelius

  Sam

  You know how there are some things in life that you eventually allow yourself to admit you’re never going to do again?

  Things that you clung to when you were young with the arrogance that underscored life through your twenties, anyway. Until you hit thirty and that little ping of awareness started up.

  Uh-oh. This really might not go exactly like I thought it was going to. No u-turns in sight. Just straight-ahead highway like the North Dakota stretch from Gackle to Beaver Creek where you can see so far in the distance, it looks like you’ll just fall off the edge of the Earth if you ever do get
there.

  At some point along the way, that’s what I eventually came to accept about Smith Mountain Lake and my memories of it. That this place and everything I had loved about it as a boy were part of my past, a time long gone, so far behind me that it wasn’t possible to ever travel back.

  Or at least that’s what I would have told myself just a few days ago.

  And yet here I am now, behind the wheel of a rented Ford Explorer, headed out of Roanoke down 581 south to 220 and the winding curves that will take me back to the heart of my childhood summers.

  The H&C coffee pot and the Dr Pepper 10-2-4 signs, both erected sometime in the 40’s, are still here among the downtown highrises. The factoid comes to my brain with my father’s voice still attached, and I remember how he’d point them out those first summers when we’d drive in from our DC home, headed for the lake house in our packed-to-the-gills station wagon.

  New on the city landscape, though, is the train-shaped museum that is a more recent part of Roanoke’s contemporary identity. I had read about it online in the New York Times and remember the pang just seeing the city name in print lifted up inside me.

  To the left of 581, Mill Mountain looms in the distance, its famous star now modestly dim in the daylight. At night, it glows red, white and blue on top of its post, earning Roanoke its nickname as the star city of the south.

  A Starbucks, a Lowes, and a BMW dealership have grown up alongside 220 heading out of Roanoke. It looks vastly different from the last time I was here, and I am suddenly anxious to leave the city limits where the countryside starts to appear in short, more familiar stretches.

  But it isn’t until I’ve hit route 40 headed east outside of Rocky Mount that I start to see green pastures, black-and-white Holstein cows grazing slope after slope. Barbed wire alternates with white board fencing; the houses ranging in style from brick ranches to two-story farmhouse structures.

  I’ve hit late afternoon traffic, and a big yellow school bus has cars lined up out of sight behind me. The transplanted Londoner in me itches to blow the horn and wave for the driver to pull over and let us all pass. I suppress the urge, realizing I don’t want to be that guy. Not here, where everyone seems content to wait. Where I used to be someone content to wait.

  The thought of London brings with it a ping of guilt.

  I should give Evan and Analise a call. Let them know where I am.

  But I don’t have the energy to get over that wall just now. It’s possible the kids haven’t even missed me yet. Evan’s on the fast track of a young career, and Analise is nearing the end of her junior year in boarding school. They are both busy and occupied with their own lives.

  For now, I’m grateful for this. At some point, I will have to talk with them, but I can use the time here to figure out how I’m going to do that.

  And as for Megan, I don’t really owe her an explanation of any kind. Sad, but true, after twenty-three years of marriage. The life we built together wasn’t initially mine by choice, but I did commit to it, and even though what we had never felt like the love of a lifetime kind of love, I grew to care for her. I was faithful to her. Odd as it sounds, in some strange way, I am glad that I wasn’t the one who caused our marriage to end, and that I don’t have that particular guilt to live with.

  We’re still stopping every quarter mile or so, tired-looking children straggling off the bus with weighted book bags slung across their shoulders. At one stop, an enormous yellow lab dances a happy-to-see-you jig alongside a boy and a girl as they trudge up their gravel driveway.

  Ten minutes later, the bus finally takes a right and lumbers on to a smaller state road, black smoke puffing from its exhaust.

  The cell phone on the passenger seat rings, and my brother’s face pops up.

  I swipe the screen and take the call. “Ben,” I say, hearing the smile in my own voice.

  “Brother!” Ben says. “You on terra firma?”

  “Yeah, man, and happy to say so.”

  “Nice to think there’s not an ocean between our phones.”

  “Agreed,” I say.

  “It’s been too damn long since you graced this country with your presence.”

  “Yeah, I know. Hey, thanks for arranging to get the house ready.”

  “Glad to do it. I just wish we didn’t have this trip planned. We’d be meeting you there.”

  “I didn’t exactly give you any notice. And hey, I’m proud of you. That’s some award you won.”

  “Good excuse for a free vacation to Hawaii,” he says.

  “It’s a lot more than that,” I say.

  “You know I would have ditched it to see you.”

  “I do, but I’ll be here when you get back in two weeks,” I say, feeling a sudden plummet in my stomach at the words as I realize I really have no way of knowing whether that will turn out to be true. “I’ll try to be,” I amend quickly.

  “Uh-uh. None of that. You will be there,” Ben says, adamant. “I want to see you.”

  “I want to see you too, brother.”

  “So what prompted the spur-of-the-moment visit?”

  I start to make light of the question with some fluff version of an answer, but find that I can’t. “Just felt the need,” I say, and it’s more true than I could ever express.

  “Glad to hear it. How’s the doc business across the pond?”

  “A little crazy these days.”

  “Copy that,” Ben says, and I wonder how it is that my neurosurgeon brother can as convincingly shoot the breeze in truck-stop vernacular as he can lay out the complexities of brain surgery to a room full of surgeons.

  “Marie and the kids excited about the trip?”

  “Just about over the moon. Marie says I have to learn how to surf.”

  “There’s a mental picture I didn’t need.”

  Ben chuckles. “Hey now, long as I don’t forget to sunscreen my bald pate, I should do fine.”

  “Just get video, okay?” I say, smiling. “Where are you calling from?”

  “L.A. flight leaves in a couple of hours.” Ben hesitates and then says, “Kids didn’t want to come with you?”

  I hesitate and do my best to avoid a blatant lie. “They kind of have their own lives now.”

  “Maybe we can get over there for Christmas this year. Sure would be nice to get everybody together.”

  The words fall on my ears like glass jars to a marble floor. I feel their crack inside me and offer back a hollow sounding, “Yeah, it would.”

  “Well, then, let’s don’t just say it. We’ll do it.”

  In the background, I hear an airport announcement, and then my brother says, “I’ve gotta run, Sam. I’ll give you a call in two weeks. I’ll drive out to the lake the weekend we get back.”

  Part of me wants to stop him from hanging up, to hold onto the first thread of normalcy I have felt in days. I feel an unexpected calm in just hearing my brother’s voice, its warmth and familiarity an anchor for the emotions I’ve been trying to keep my head above. Part of me wants to blurt everything out, let him help me make sense of it the way he used to do when we were kids, and he was the kind of older brother all my friends wished they had.

  I’ve never needed his level-headed common sense more.

  But now isn’t the time. I don’t want to ruin this trip he and Marie have looked forward to. It can wait.

  “That sounds great,” I answer in an even voice. “It’ll be good to see you, Ben.”

  “You too, Sam. Talk to you soon, okay?”

  We hang up on that, and I picture him jogging off through the airport, cracking one of his corny jokes to Marie, who considers it an act of love to always laugh, even when no one else does. I’ve always thought that was as good a definition for love as any I can think of.

  I try to remember in the last years of my marriage a time when Megan and I laughed with each other, or even at each other. And I honestly can’t bring one to mind. The stone wall of silence had been erected for so long that laughter seemed like a co
mpletely out-of-place notion.

  I spot the turn-off just ahead, the smaller paved road that leads to my family’s summerhouse. There are no cars in front of me now, and I press the accelerator, anxious to get there.

  The houses are fewer and farther between on this road, the pastures wider and dotted with Black Angus cows and calves. Ahead, I can see Smith Mountain, green and beckoning. I’m relieved that it is still free of houses, that its graceful slopes have not been pocked by development.