Bourbon Springs Box Set: Volume III, Books 7-9 (Bourbon Springs Box Sets Book 3)

by Jennifer Bramseth

  How many insults could he anticipate before Sims actually said them?

  He started running variations of several expected abuses through his mind as he swept, such as big city too much for the country boy? and couldn’t sing well enough to earn your supper?

  The last little saying reminded him that he’d had a similar self-deprecating thought when he’d struggled with whether he wanted to sing at Goose’s wedding. And thinking about that day made his mind drift back to Jorrie.

  Singing for his supper. But his spirit soaring.

  7

  “Hey!” Derrick yelled from a few yards away. “Snap out of it, man! You writin’ more songs inside that head of yours?”

  “So you know who I am?” Mack asked as Derrick walked up and took the push broom.

  “Sure we do,” Derrick said. “I was at the fair last night, as a matter of fact. Great job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Look, we won’t say anything about your singing or whatever if it bothers you. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. You got enough to worry about with Sims apparently hating your guts.”

  “I don’t mind if you talk about my singing,” Mack said absentmindedly as his thoughts again moved to Jorrie—and how to get back on her good side.

  Mack made quick friends with his coworkers and was pleased that some of them, like Derrick, had been to see him at the fair. They ask a few polite, interested questions about his career, but they didn’t bombard him with demands for information, which he appreciated.

  Sims came back several times during the workday to check on the bottling operations. Mack learned that his new boss also had some responsibilities in the rickhouses and moving barrels, so his supervisor’s presence was not too suffocating. Mack noted how his new coworkers all had the same reaction to Sims. They avoided conversation and eye contact as much as possible, but always did as he ordered.

  Mack could almost feel sorry for someone like Sims, except he could not recall any instance where Sims had shown the slightest bit of regard for him. Mack did feel some empathy, however. He knew that to be so angry and unhappy was something tiring and corrosively embittering. It was not an easy attitude to shake, as he could attest from personal experience.

  By the end of the day, Mack had formed a plan of sorts as to how he was going to approach Jorrie. It was a bit clichéd and over-the-top, but he also knew it would get Jorrie’s attention, which was his goal. If he could amuse and entertain her again, he knew he had a chance to make amends.

  He was finishing putting the last of a few bourbon bottles into a box when he heard Sims’s voice as he talked with another man.

  Mack turned his head to the right to see Sims walking in with a tall, dark-haired man who looked familiar. He wiped his hands on his jeans as the man strode toward him, a smile on his face and his hand extended. Sims hung a few steps behind, his face a blank.

  “Welcome back, Mack,” the man said. “I heard you were joining us once more.”

  “Mr. Davenport,” Mack said as he took Bo’s hand.

  “Please call me Bo. And I’m sorry I missed your concert last night. My wife was raving about it this morning. And we’re all really excited about the concert series too,” he added.

  Bo greeted the other bottling line workers and, after another smile for Mack, left the building.

  Mack focused his attention on finishing packing the box in front of him and waited for Sims to ask the inevitable question about the concert series Bo had just mentioned. But Laura came to his rescue.

  “We’re going out to eat after work at The Windmill. Want to come with us?” She neatened a stack of labels on a table in front of her and turned to the boss. “What about you, Sims?”

  “No, thanks.” Sims cast a scowl at the group and then left the bottling house.

  “We always ask just in case,” Derrick said as he rolled a dolly over to pick up the last of the packed cases of bourbon, “but he never accepts.”

  “So you wanna join us?” Laura asked.

  “Thanks, but I need to get home and check on my grandpa.” Mack explained how he lived with the old man and kept an eye on him.

  But the complete truth was that he did have other plans.

  Plans involving Jorrie Jones.

  Her Saturday was uneventful, boring, and mildly irritating. Not the happiest way to spend a nice summer’s day, but things had to get done.

  Except they hadn’t all gotten done, leading to said frustration.

  After routine chores and errands, she headed out to do some car shopping. That entailed a trip to Springfield, about twenty miles south of Bourbon Springs. Her dinky rental car, which had been provided by her insurance company, was noisy and hot. The vehicle’s air-conditioning worked, but the car was puny and the temps in the nineties, so the interior of the car felt like a sauna. Jorrie found a few models she liked but nothing really grabbed her, and she considered the trip unproductive.

  Once back in Bourbon Springs, Jorrie texted Rissa and confirmed they were on for next week. Although moderately excited about meeting the guy Rissa had built up into some kind of lawyer demigod, Jorrie was more interested in making contacts at Rissa’s firm. Because she was starting to feel isolated in Bourbon Springs.

  Only the work that she'd done for Pepper had kept her from a more determined job search in Louisville and Lexington. Yet she feared Pepper’s legal work could eventually lose its novelty. She had started feeling as though she was missing out on not living and practicing law in a big city.

  But there had been moments over the past week where she had considered putting those plans on hold. In fact, she had changed her plans ever-so-slightly by canceling the blind date.

  And all for the likes of Mack Blanton, a guy who had confirmed his ambitions were far beyond Craig County, Kentucky.

  A guy who’d made it clear in just a few words that she wasn’t much of anything—and certainly not sufficient enticement to keep him in little Bourbon Springs, Kentucky.

  She knew she shouldn’t feel so peevish about his comments. It wasn’t like they were in a relationship or that they’d known each other a long time. Nevertheless, the words had hurt, especially since he’d written a song for her.

  A song all about dreams and desires, about flying away.

  A song about figuring out where to find love and home—which she considered to be the same thing.

  At least that’s what she’d heard on Friday night at the fairgrounds.

  As the day bled into evening, Jorrie felt a little stir-crazy in her condo, even though she’d been out and about for a good chunk of the day. She thought about going to The Windmill, just to get out, but the thought of going there in her sweatbox of a rental car was not an attractive option.

  She checked the time, thinking that she could make it to Over a Barrel to pick up a sandwich and trot over to—no, not the courthouse grounds. That would only make her think about the last time she’d been there.

  So it would be a peanut butter sandwich on her puny patio. She decided to go for a walk later, when it wasn’t so miserably hot.

  Jorrie had just finished screwing the lid back on the peanut butter jar and was about to get the milk from her fridge when she heard a knock. Probably a nosy neighbor wondering who had parked that ugly rental car in her reserved space.

  She checked through the peephole to discern her caller’s identity.

  Through the tiny fish-eye lens she saw Mack Blanton standing on her front stoop.

  With his guitar and looking mighty nice.

  He knocked again.

  “Jorrie, I know you’re in there. Heard you at the door. Please open up.”

  Against her better judgment, Jorrie opened up.

  Mack removed his cowboy hat from his head and bowed to her. He was in jeans, boots, and a crisp white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up.

  “What are you doing here?” Her eyes drifted to his guitar.

  He gripped the neck of his instrument with one hand and positioned
his other hand over the strings.

  “I’m here to serenade you.” He took a step back.

  Then he began to strum the guitar, and she knew he was about to break into song.

  “What?”

  He stopped strumming. “I’m going to sing for you, Jorrie Jones,” he said slowly, apparently thinking she didn’t understand.

  “Wait—what—why?”

  “You don’t want me to sing for you? You’re the one who told me this was my great gift. And I’m here to share it with you. Now. Tonight.”

  “But why?”

  “Why would any man serenade a woman? To get her attention.”

  “My attention?”

  “Yes, because you never let me explain myself last night after you overheard me.”

  She exhaled an angry sigh. “I heard plenty. I heard you say that there wasn’t much of anything to keep you in Bourbon Springs. I got the message.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said and stopped playing. “What I had been about to say when you showed up was that there wasn’t much of anything to keep me here if I don’t have family or loved ones or people close to my heart in Bourbon Springs. So, for starters, that includes my grandpa.”

  “So is he the only thing that keeps you bottled up in Bourbon Springs?”

  “Didn’t you hear that part about loved ones? People close to my heart?”

  “And who might those people be?”

  “Maybe I’m trying to find them.”

  “Any luck with that?”

  “Yeah—some good and bad both.” Mack took a step closer to her on the small porch. “And I’m not going to lie to you—why should I?—I do have dreams beyond Bourbon Springs. I’d love to be able to go back to Nashville and make a living again, to work with world-class musicians, to finish my album. I’ve always dreamed about playing on that bigger stage and, for a little slice of my life, I had that chance. I had a taste of that.

  “And while a lot of it ended up tasting pretty damned bitter, there was enough of the sweet that I’d go back, given the right chance. So I’m working on that dream. But I also know that this is my home, and it always will be. And as long as we’re being perfectly honest here, I have to tell you that I know that you feel the same way, that you’d like to get out of this town someday too. So don’t act like it’s so bad to have a little ambition.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “I heard you on the phone at the distillery visitors’ center that day of the wedding,” he confessed.

  “But you weren’t anywhere near me.”

  “The visitors’ center is like a whispering gallery,” he said. “I was standing far away from you, but I could hear what you were saying into your phone.”

  “So you eavesdropped?”

  “I confess,” he said. “But at least I’m not a hypocrite.”

  “Hypocrite?” She put her hand back on the doorknob, ready to shut him out.

  “Sounded to me like you want to leave town too,” Mack said. “Like you wanted a job somewhere in the big city.”

  “You sure have some way of trying to charm a girl, Mack Blanton,” she said, moving to close the door. “You show up here, disturb my dinner, admit you’ve eavesdropped on me, and act all romantic by saying you’re gonna serenade me, and—”

  “You really think it was romantic?”

  “My point is that you’ve come here demanding things of me—my time, my attention, my understanding. But you haven’t given me one good reason why I should give you any of those things.”

  “You’re right,” he admitted. “But I’ll say to you the same thing you said to me the day I first met you: make those things a gift.”

  His statement startled her, rattled her, challenged her.

  Because she understood that he was considering her as the gift.

  Her time, attention, presence.

  “I’m going on that blind date next week,” she said, unwilling to give in.

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Sure. I’ve just given you a little lecture about ambitions, so it’s not like I have any place getting upset about that. I suppose that’s why you told me, right? You want me to get upset?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  The conversation had come, she thought, to an awkward end. Mack shifted his weight from foot to foot, and she could tell he was about to leave.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you, Jorrie,” he said in a defeated tone.

  Mack turned his back on her and began to leave.

  But she didn’t want to see him go.

  “What about my song?”

  He stopped but kept his back to her.

  “I thought you didn’t want me to sing.”

  “I do—but—”

  Across the parking lot, Jorrie spied one of her neighbors giving her a curious look.

  “But what?” he asked.

  “Not here.”

  “You want me to serenade you somewhere else?”

  She felt herself flush.

  “Yes. But where else could we go?”

  8

  What the hell was she doing?

  She’d demanded her song and that he sing it somewhere more private, away from the prying eyes and alert ears of her neighbors.

  So now she was heading west out of Bourbon Springs with him, rattling along in his truck on Brush Grove Pike, going who knew where. She was getting just what she’d asked for.

  About a mile past Grimsby’s, the road began to curve as it wound between higher and higher ground. She sensed they were going up Springfield Knob and began to wonder whether he was taking her to his place. This thought caused her a little bit of alarm—she wasn’t ready to go home alone with a guy she barely knew—but then she remembered that Mack lived with his grandfather. Highly unlikely the man would try any hijinks with a female in the same house as his grandfather, although she supposed it was possible.

  Sure enough, Mack turned left into a driveway and drove up the dirt-and-gravel-covered path until a small home came into view. Other than a porch light, the place was shrouded in darkness; there was no ambient light from town this far out in the country.

  Jorrie expected him to drive up to the house, but instead Mack drove slightly past it, driving to an old black barn to the far left and behind the house. He threw the truck into park and announced they’d arrived.

  “Guess you’ve figured out this is where I live,” he said as he retrieved his guitar from the truck.

  “I take it you mean the house and not the barn?”

  He laughed, held out his hand, and she took it.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked as they began to trudge up the hill behind the house and the barn.

  “I’m going to show you my little corner of the sky.”

  He pulled her up the hill, which was quite the steep slope and dotted with outcroppings of rock and the occasional clumps of stubby cedars. A quarter moon was suspended in a mostly clear sky to the southeast, and its weak light cast an eerie glow around them.

  But more lustrous and lovely than the moon that night were the stars above them, washed across the heavens in a glowing river of light and color.

  “Just a little farther,” he coaxed.

  She’d stopped for a few moments to catch her breath, completely in awe of the vision above her.

  “We’re going to the top?” she asked.

  “To the top.”

  A few minutes later, they stood at the top of Springfield Knob with an unobscured view.

  Below them to the left and slightly to the northeast was Bourbon Springs, the tiny town shimmering in the heat of a summer’s night in Kentucky.

  To the south was nothing but rolling fields and swathes of woods stretching as far as the eye could see.

  In the very far distance to the south, Jorrie thought she saw the faint glow of a town, perhaps Springfield.

  “Where’s the distillery?” she asked.

  “In that thick cluster of tree
s,” he said, pointing north. “Look, see that house?” he asked and pointed to a house on a hill in the far distance to the left. “I think that’s where Hannah Davenport lives. The distillery is just below there.”

  “And there’s Old Crow Creek,” she marveled. The path of the creek, marked by a distinct line of trees, snaked in a north-south line as it cut its way through Craig County.

  Knowing the spot of the distillery oriented Jorrie to the location of GarnetBrooke, just to the east. For the first time, she actually thought the farm with its immense acreage and gargantuan horse barns looked tiny.

  She finally turned to the west and in the far distance saw the last edge of light, a thin glowing thread spun by the sun as it sank beneath the horizon. The landscape to the west was dotted with hills and knobs, a very different terrain from what was around them in the other directions.

  Jorrie shivered as the wind whipped up, and she wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Let’s move a little farther down the hill if you’re cold,” Mack suggested. “It’s not so bad on the eastern side of the Knob.”

  They trekked a few yards back down the hill until the wind calmed.

  “Take a seat,” he encouraged her.

  Jorrie sat on the rocky ground, but Mack remained standing. He’d carried his guitar on his back the climb up the hill, and now he brought the instrument to the front of his body.

  “Time for my serenade?”

  He nodded.

  “Your own personal concert, my dear,” he said, and she got butterflies at his use of the simple endearment. “So name it. What do you want to hear? What I sung at the distillery? Or something from the concert last night?”

  “What’s the name of the song you wrote for me?”

  “It still doesn’t have a name,” he admitted. “That was the only part I struggled with. Maybe you can help me with that.”

  Jorrie sat transfixed under a canopy of stars—and with her own star right in front of her, serenading her. His stage was a high hill above the Bluegrass, his spotlight a low moon and the Milky Way.