Love Reclaimed: (Clean Small-Town Romance) (Kings Grove Book 4)

by Delancey Stewart

  I stopped moving and turned to face her, steeling myself. “What?”

  “Will you help me put the Winter Festival together?”

  “I’m probably a bad choice,” I explained. “I’ve only just gotten up here, and I’ve never spent a winter in Kings Grove. I have no idea what your festival entails. Maybe I’d be better as an onlooker this first year.”

  Her face fell, and I swear on every wave I’ve ever surfed that the expression nearly broke my ridiculous heart. My mouth launched into action before my brain caught up. “I mean, I’m totally willing, of course, if you need help.”

  The smile returned, and I felt the sun get a little brighter in that endless mountain sky. “Oh, that’s great,” she said. “Well, why don’t you bring Zippy and Yoga Pants by here tomorrow morning around ten? We’ll knock out your first obedience lesson, and I can fill you in on plans for the festival.”

  I nodded, certain I’d done everything in my power to avoid this exact scenario. “Yeah,” I said, as my rational mind screamed, “No, no, no!”

  Annie put a hand on my arm then, and every nerve cell in my body relocated to those three square inches on my forearm, screaming for more. “Great,” she said, squeezing my arm and then dropping her hand and taking a step back.

  “Great,” I parroted, since my brain had stopped working completely. I tried for a smile, but have no idea what expression crossed my face after that. I turned and did my best not to trip over my silly dogs as I urged them home to the little house at the end of Cameron Turner’s driveway.

  Cam and Harper sat out on the sweeping deck of the big house in front of mine, watching me as I came up the drive with my two crazy dogs.

  “Hey Tuck!” Harper called, lifting a hand in the air.

  “Dogs getting the hang of the leash yet?” Cameron asked, his grin telling me he already knew the answer.

  “They’re free spirits,” I told him, bringing the dogs up onto the deck where they immediately began climbing over their mother and brother. Cam had rescued Matilda, the pups’ mom, a few months ago after she’d gotten into a tangle with a mountain lion while pregnant, and my dogs—and Harper’s pup, Sequoia—had all been the result of that. The others were scattered around the village and you could barely round the meadow any given night without having an impromptu Australian Shepherd reunion.

  I let the leashes go after closing the gate on the deck and settled into one of the armchairs that had appeared out on the big deck after Harper and Cam had officially taken over the big house. When I’d first moved up here, I’d shared this house with Harper—we split the rent while Cam lived in the little house behind us. But now that Harper and Cam were engaged, they had moved into the bigger house, in preparation for kids, I guessed. I’d relocated to the little house once I’d decided to stay in Kings Grove.

  “Vet says they need obedience training,” I sighed.

  “Ohh, you saw Annie,” Harper cooed, grinning at me.

  “Pipe down. Nothing going on there.” I looked away from them. Cam was studying me and I didn’t like the way his look said he was about to ask questions I didn’t want to answer.

  “What’ve you got to lose, Tuck? Annie’s cute. And she’s single.” Harper’s eyebrow was raised and that sprite-like smile was playing at her lips.

  “I’m not in the market,” I said. “These are my free and single years. I don’t need complications.”

  “So have an uncomplicated fling,” Cam suggested. “It’s obvious you’re attracted to her, and I’m pretty sure it’s mutual.” He reached for Harper’s hand as he said that, and I watched as love radiated between them. I’d pushed him to be open to Harper, but this was different. This was me.

  “Easier said than done in a small town like this,” I told them. “Look, Annie’s cute, and yeah—if we were in LA and I had the chance to never see her again? Yeah, I’d probably pursue it. But here?” I shook my head. “I’d like to stay here a while. And when things fall apart, it’ll just make it all weird and uncomfortable. Not just for us, but for everyone.”

  “Who says things will fall apart?” Harper asked.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Statistically speaking, relationships do not work out.” It was true. I’d watched my mom go through at least fifteen relationships in the seventeen years I’d lived with her. “They end, and then they make people awkward and weird.” I’d experienced that part myself, though Mom had been a cautionary tale there too.

  “Statistically speaking,” Harper said. “Nothing ever works if you don’t try.”

  One of my dogs broke into an excited high-pitched bark just then, as if agreeing with Harper’s words.

  “Shut it Yoga,” I told her.

  Harper just smiled at me.

  “Move along,” I told her. “Nothing to see here.”

  “If you say so, man,” Cam said.

  Sneak Peek - Christmas in Kings Grove (Chapter 2)

  Annie

  Having a mad crush on the tall Aussie who lived up behind Harper and Cam was not a good plan. Acting on that crush was an even worse idea. But I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from suggesting he might help plan the festival.

  For one thing, I could use his camera skills—I saw how well the trailer for the Inn he’d filmed had come out, and the footage of Maddie and Connor’s wedding was unbelievable. But the other part of it was just that I couldn’t help wanting to be near the guy. He was big and strong and he just seemed to glow with some kind of sunny feel-good vibe. And I needed a little bit of that.

  The phone was ringing as I stepped into the house, and I laid down my keys and went in search of my always-missing cell. I found it in a cushion at the back of the couch and picked it up just in time. “Hello? Dad?” I plopped onto the couch and tried to steel myself.

  “Hey.” Dad’s voice was tired. Like always.

  “How is everything?” I already knew the answer.

  “Your brother’s gone missing again.” He sighed.

  “How long this time?”

  “Just last night. Maybe he just went to visit a friend…”

  “I think the time for making excuses for him is past, Dad.” Johnny had been using drugs for the last four or five years off and on. Dad had left Kings Grove to go live with him down in Escondido, thinking if he was there maybe he could be a positive influence in his life. It hadn’t worked. John was as bad as ever, and we both knew one of these days he would disappear and just not come home.

  “I know it is. It’s just…it’s hard, baby.”

  I swallowed hard, not wanting to cry. My loud sniffle gave me away anyway.

  “I shouldn’t burden you with this, you can’t help from there,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Dad. I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing this all alone.”

  “Johnny won’t see that doctor now.”

  The rehab doctor. He’d been in and out of three different programs now. In-patient, out-patient, it didn’t seem to matter. “Why not?”

  “I think because the guy suggested he quit doing drugs.” Dad’s sense of humor wasn’t completely gone, but caring for Johnny had aged him, had stolen a lot of his joy. I wished I had an answer for this, wished I didn’t feel like I was hiding from our family’s problems, staying in Kings Grove.

  “Do you want me to come?” I asked the question for the fiftieth time. “Or do you think maybe bringing him home would help?”

  Dad sighed. “I’d love to come home, Annie. But bringing your brother to Kings Grove might just be bringing a lot of trouble to all those nice folks.”

  “Maybe it’s what Johnny needs.” I said the words feeling no confidence at all about what might help my brother.

  “The place is not equipped to handle him.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I just needed to hear your voice,” Dad said. “To know I didn’t screw up both my kids.”

  “This isn’t your fault, Dad.”

  “Maybe not.” I hated hearing the resignation in his voice, t
he unspoken belief that he’d done something wrong and it was going to cost Johnny his life.

  “Will you let me know if you hear from him?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Hey Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to come up for Christmas this year?” Dad had missed the last three because of Johnny. And I hadn’t seen my brother at the holidays in years.

  “We’ll see, okay?”

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  I hung up and forced my thoughts from the darkness that swirled around my family and our problems, and found that my mind naturally went to its happy place—images of a tall blond Australian man who I couldn’t seem to get out of my head, and who I’d basically steamrolled into both dog training and helping with the winter festival.

  As ten o’clock neared the following day, I wondered if I’d set myself up to be stood up. Tuck had tried to tell me no, and I’d refused to hear it. What had I been thinking?

  Forceful and demanding was definitely not my normal attitude around men. To be honest, I had no normal attitude around men. I was just me, and a place like Kings Grove didn’t offer a lot of opportunity to practice seduction skills.

  There were some single men, and I’d dated here and there. But no one had really caught my eye in years, and my job kept me busy and satisfied the part of me that needed to pour affection and love on others—I saw plenty of puppies, foals, kittens and rabbits in my line of work, and no one seemed to mind if you went in for an extra snuggle or two while you were giving shots or checking on something else. Fuzzy snuggles had been enough for me most of the time.

  Until Tuck showed up.

  I ran my fingers over my own dog’s smooth brown coat, smiling back at her as she turned adoring dark eyes on me. “You’re enough, aren’t you, Hattie?” I crooned. “I don’t need any tall hot Aussies around. We’re good on our own, isn’t that right?”

  “If that’s the case, maybe I’ll just take these girls and head back up to my place then.” Tuck’s voice was full of mirth and it wrapped itself around me, warming me even in my complete humiliation.

  I bolted to my feet and spun around, realizing I knew better than to sit with my back to the road when I was expecting someone. I dropped my hands on the railing I’d had my back against, and tried to look casual, but Tuck stood no more than two feet away, and his grin told me he heard what I’d said about ‘hot Aussies.’ Perfect. “Hey there, Tuck,” I said, my voice sounding like an operatic squirrel was stuck in my throat. My cheeks were flaming.

  “Annie,” he said, still grinning.

  “I was just, ah… I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

  “Ten a.m.,” he said.

  For once his dogs sat obediently and quietly at his feet and I wondered how they’d managed to sneak up on me like that. These dogs were not exactly stealthy most of the time. “Okay then,” I said, finally pulling myself back together. “Let’s tire the girls out a bit and then I’ll tell you about the festival, okay?”

  The grin was finally fading and I was thankful that Tuck seemed to be planning to let me off the hook. “Sure.”

  “Let’s start with a few basic commands that will be useful at home, then we’ll move to some loose leash training. Why don’t you bring the girls up on the deck?”

  The ‘girls’ were exuberant little butt-wagging balls of fur, just beginning to develop the lanky athletic limbs of the typical Australian Shepherd. They were both tricolor varieties, so they had brown, white and black faces with expressive “eyebrows’ and a blaze down their noses of white. Their paws were mostly white, along with their chests, and their backs were mostly black, with a little brown here and there.

  “Have you worked on ‘sit’?” I asked Tuck, trying hard to avoid direct eye contact.

  “Annie, I’ve let them do whatever they do naturally. We better start at the very beginning here.”

  I nodded and we got to work, teaching the dogs to sit and stay while Hattie looked on with interest. Tuck’s dogs were full of personality, much like him, I guessed. Zappy liked to add a little something extra to each command she obeyed — sitting came with one paw off the ground, and staying was an approximate stay, but she liked to creep slowly forward. Yoga Pants was a little more by the book, reveling in the praise we lavished on her when she performed as expected.

  After thirty minutes of training, the dogs were starting to show signs of tiring, so I gave them each a treat and we let them laze on the porch for a few minutes while Tuck and I sat down.

  “Gorgeous morning,” Tuck said, tilting his chiseled chin up to the sky and stretching his arms wide. The muscles on his biceps bulged beneath the fabric of the cotton henley shirt he wore, and I couldn’t help longing to curl myself against that broad chest of his, even though I’d been telling myself all morning to drop the ridiculous fantasies.

  “It is,” I confirmed, forcing myself not to look right at him. “But warm still. I doubt we’ll get snow in time for Christmas.”

  “Do you usually end up with a white Christmas up here?”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I feel like when I was a kid it snowed a lot at Christmas, but the last few years the drought has persisted, and we’ve been lucky to get any snow.”

  Tuck kicked his long legs out and crossed them. “I bet it’ll snow this year.” His voice held a confidence there was no way he could actually feel. It wasn’t going to snow. It never did.

  “Well, maybe,” I told him. “But we’ll have the festival either way. Think you’re up for helping a bit?”

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and watching me in a way that made it very hard to keep averting my gaze from those penetrating blue eyes. “Tell me about it.”

  “Sure, uh.” Having Tuck’s undivided attention was making me nervous, and after him hearing me say he was hot this morning, I felt like I’d lost all my power in this situation. “Well, we generally do things over a three-day period, with the tree lighting a week earlier.” I risked a look up at him and saw he was watching me with interest. I took a breath and continued. “This year I’m going to have a cookie-decorating contest, some outdoor games at the clubhouse—pinecone toss, three-legged race, that kind of thing, with some crafts inside for kids to work on. And then a Secret Santa gift exchange. On Christmas Eve we’ll do an open house with carols and cider. The day after Christmas we used to do the dogsled race, but that was when we had snow.”

  “Is that why you end up planning all this?”

  “Because of the dog race?” I laughed. “No, I mean, I used to enter when I had five dogs of my own. But I ended up planning this festival a long time ago when my parents were both here. It was kind of our family tradition at the holidays, since we don’t have a lot of extended family. It felt right to celebrate with Kings Grove.”

  “And you’re stuck with it now?” Tuck asked.

  “Kind of,” I admitted. “But I enjoy it. It’s a good distraction, I guess.” I shrugged, darting my eyes to his face and then back down to my hands.

  “What do you need to be distracted from, Doc?”

  That did it. The warm understanding tone of his voice, the way he dipped his head to catch my eye. It was hard enough having a crush on Tuck when he was just a bright shiny blond Adonis strutting around the village, not noticing me. But this? Having him talk to me in that soft voice and look at me like I was an injured bird he might try to save? It was too much.

  I jumped out of my chair and walked the length of the deck, trying to get a grip on myself. “Nothing, really.” I forced a laugh. “I mean, I’m alone up here, you know? That’s all, I guess. It keeps me busy.”

  “I get it,” he said. “I’m alone up here too. So maybe you’re on to something. Maybe I’ll help you plan the festival, and I won’t even notice I’m on my own for the holiday.”

  I risked a look at him again, and nearly sank into the warmth bubbling in his blue eyes. “That would be…” Words were failing me because Tuck
was holding my gaze and smiling at me, like he knew something, something I hadn’t told him yet. I guessed he kind of did. “That would be good,” I managed. “And if you could film some of it during the first parts, I’d hoped maybe we could show the movie the day after Christmas when folks stop through the clubhouse for the race?”

  Tuck stood. “I can definitely do that. But first, it sounds like there’s a tree we need to get ready to light?”

  The tree lighting was a week out and I hadn’t done a thing. “There is… and I’m behind before I even start.”

  “Where’s this lucky tree?”

  “Next to the Inn. But it’s gotten a lot bigger this year, and I’m not sure how we’re going to get the lights on it. A ladder isn’t going to cut it anymore.”

  “Leave it to me. Where are the decorations?”

  “In the attic at the stables next to my office.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m working over that way today, putting that new deck on the diner with Sam and Chance. Will you be around after about three? I’ll swing by and grab the stuff for the tree?”

  “Um, sure?”

  “You sure you want help?”

  I realized I didn’t sound entirely certain. “Yeah, I mean. I just…are you helping or are you just going to do it?” I didn’t want someone to take over—even him. The winter festival, as silly as it might be to some people, was all I had left of my family’s holiday traditions. Even if I didn’t have the family part anymore, I had this.

  Tuck stepped closer and it took everything I had not to give in to the magnetism pulling me toward him. “I was just going to come get all the stuff. Maybe you could come with me after to make sure I throw it onto the right tree? I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing. I just want to help.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” No one had ever stepped in and taken charge of something in my life, and I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted this kind of help or if I resented the implication that I needed it. But all of that indecision was buried beneath the waves of attraction I was still battling due to the fact that Tuck’s strong broad chest was just inches from my nose. “I’ll see you at the stables.”