The School Mistress (Emerson Pass Book 1)

by Tess Thompson

  “Trapper, listen to me.” My chest hurt so much I could hardly breathe. “If I’d tagged along, you would’ve outgrown me.”

  “I disagree.”

  “What does it matter now?” I asked.

  His voice rose in pitch. Tears dripped from his eyes. “I thought we were in love. Like epic love. The kind that lasts forever. Did you ever love me? I thought you did, and then you didn’t. I’ve never understood what happened.”

  I looked at him too long. His expression changed from sad to expectant. The truth must have leaked out of my eyes along with the tears that suddenly blurred my vision. “I loved you enough to let you go.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “What I needed from you was more than you could give.” My careless mistake would have cost him everything. Two nights in a row I’d forgotten to take my birth control pills. Instead of telling him, I kept it to myself. The first of the secrets I’d kept from him.

  “What did you need?”

  “I needed you to want to stay here and have a simple life. In the end, we simply didn’t fit together. I couldn’t leave here. I never have, you know.”

  He watched me with those eyes that still drew me in like no one else’s ever had. “Well, I’m back now for good. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Too much time has passed, Trapper. We don’t even know each other anymore.”

  “Fair enough.” The corners of his mouth twitched into a smile that did nothing to hide his sadness. “But we could get to know each other again.”

  “I…I can’t,” I said.

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  My first instinct was to lie. However, this town was too small for yet more deceit. “I’m not. I don’t want a relationship. I’m too busy.”

  He picked up a napkin from the counter and wiped his eyes. “Right. Got it. I feel like an idiot coming in here and talking about this stuff. If it means anything, my intention was to come in and say hello to an old friend. I didn’t plan for us to get into the past to this extent.”

  “You know what they say about best intentions.” I smiled, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “I guess so,” he said. “I’m still trying to find a way to move on.”

  “I’m fine. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.” I couldn’t keep my voice from cracking like a burned, brittle cookie. “There’s no reason to hold on to the past.”

  “I guess I should go, then.” He turned toward the door.

  “Don’t forget your scone. I can bag it up for you.” Why had I put it on a plate in the first place?

  “Nah, I lost my appetite. See you around.”

  I watched him walk out the door. He looked left, then right, as if deciding which way to go. In the end, he crossed Barnes Avenue and hopped into a shiny black truck and drove away, just as he’d done ten years earlier.

  Find a way to move on. He’d never been able to move on or get over me? As hard as this was to believe, I knew it to be true. Trapper had never lied to me. I was the liar.

  If I’d gone to him back then and told him about the pregnancy, would the course of our lives have been altered but not ruined? Did my grief kill our baby? I’d never know now. Trapper could never be mine. Not after the secret I kept from him.

  I sank to the floor behind the counter and cried.

  Thirty minutes later, I drove out to the cemetery and parked in my usual spot. I walked down the winding cement path to the Strom family plot where my baby rested. I sat on the grass next to her. My mother had not allowed me to have her name or dates etched into the simple headstone. Only a simple outline of a bird carved into the granite marked her existence. Ava meant bird. My little bird.

  I traced my fingers over the etching. “He came back. And it turns out I still love him. I know, not surprising. I never stopped. All his dreams came true. At least I was able to give him that.”

  I’d had to lie to him, pretend I didn’t love him, and hide my pregnancy so that he might have the life he deserved. Hockey was his destiny. “When he was a little boy, all he ever cared about was hockey. You should’ve seen him on the ice. He was a sight. I couldn’t hold him back from his dreams.”

  I knew if it came down to it, he’d choose the game over me. He proved me right when I asked him. Which would you choose? Me or hockey? We’d been sitting in lawn chairs at his Grammie and Pa’s house on the first warm day of spring.

  “I don’t have to choose. I can have both,” he’d said, flashing me that confident grin.

  “In this game, you have to choose.” I’d turned away, afraid to show him my reaction.

  “Hockey. I mean, for now anyway. If I’m to give you a great life, it has to start with me playing hockey.”

  There it was. The answer. I knew what I had to do.

  Now I spoke to my daughter as if she were there. “When he moved away to college, I thought I might die without him.”

  I didn’t, obviously. It was just my heart that had died. The rest of me was intact. After he left, I told my parents I was pregnant. My mother hatched a plan. A secret pregnancy. Adoption. No one would know, including Trapper and his parents. “I’ll be damned if I let a baby wreck your life like it did mine.”

  It? “It” was me. I was her baby. And I was still here, ruining all her plans.

  She’d wanted everything for me that she’d had to give up when she became pregnant at seventeen. She’d wanted a college education. She’d wanted a life with intellectuals and professionals. Instead, she’d gotten pregnant and married my dad. What had been a summer camp counselor fling had created a baby. Dad had brought her home to his mountain town in Colorado. As far as I could tell, she’d hated every moment of her life here.

  Everyone seemed to understand that I lacked the brains to pursue academics except my mother. She couldn’t see me as I was, refusing to have me tested for learning disabilities, berating me that if I only tried harder my grades would be better.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what she wanted for me. I was a disappointment. Even my compassionate father, who loved me more than anything in the world, was crestfallen at my failure to get into college. Then I broke his heart further when I got pregnant.

  My mother had located a wonderful couple who desperately wanted a child. He was a doctor. She was a professor. The family my mother wished we’d been. Little did she know, I’d had no intention of giving my baby to anyone.

  I’d been confined to the house as the baby grew inside me. To keep occupied, I’d baked bread in my mother’s kitchen. Loaves and loaves. Sourdough, wheat, oat, pumpernickel. I’d kneaded and measured and watched the yeast rise day after day. After I conquered bread, I’d moved on to cakes and cookies and muffins from the recipes from my great-great-great-grandmother Lizzie.

  All the while I’d tried to work out how I was going to escape with my baby. I was a young woman with no skills and no family support unless I did exactly what they wanted. Still, I’d been determined that somehow, I would find a way to raise her on my own.

  Finally, in desperation, I’d called my friend Crystal Whalen. She’d lived in Seattle during the school year and visited her grandparents during the summers. Descendants of Harley and Merry Depaul, her grandparents had continued the family’s horse breeding farm in Emerson Pass. However, her mother, Jennifer, had had different ideas. She’d chosen pottery over horses and had moved to Seattle, where she’d opened her own studio. When I told Crystal about the baby and my parents’ wishes, Jennifer had offered the baby and me a room in her home. I could stay with them until l got on my feet. She, too, had been a single mother, raising Crystal by herself. By choice, she assured me. “Who needs a man?”

  Me, I’d thought. I wasn’t independent or progressive thinking like Jennifer. I had no talents or ambitions.

  Sweet little Brandi Vargas. Blonde and cute in my high school cheerleader uniform, but without an ounce of brains. I’d wanted Trapper and babies and to bake bread on Sunday afternoons in my kitchen. No woman in this day and age
was supposed to want such a simple life. Despite that, I had.

  When it came time for the baby’s arrival, my parents had driven me to Denver, not wanting the local doctors to know about my pregnancy. In triage, the doctor’s face had blanched. He hadn’t looked me in the eye. I’d known something was wrong.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not getting a heartbeat.”

  No words strung together in the English language had ever been as cruel.

  I’d given birth to a baby girl. A baby girl who’d died in my womb.

  I’d begged my parents to let me take her home and bury her in the plot with Lizzie and Jasper and the rest of our family. They’d agreed, as long as I kept her name and dates off the headstone. We’d asked the funeral director to please keep it quiet.

  For months afterward, I’d barely left the house except to go to the cemetery. I’d bring a blanket and stay for hours. Other than that, I kept to my room watching television or staring out the window. An entire season went by, then another. Finally, one day, my father perched on the side of my bed and proposed an idea.

  “There’s going to be a farmers’ market in town on Wednesdays,” he’d said. “How about you bake some bread and sweets to sell?”

  I’d agreed, mostly to quell the look of worry in his eyes. The very first Wednesday, I’d sold out of every loaf of bread, all the cookies, and most of the muffins. News of my delicious baked items spread, and people started stopping by the house, asking if I had anything to sell. People referred to me as the Sugar Queen.

  When my mother couldn’t stand the flour on her kitchen floor one more minute, Dad encouraged me to take out a loan and open my own shop. He owned the building that used to be the Johnsons’ dry goods store back in the day. The former tenants had used it for a frozen yogurt shop that went under. I’d blamed the cold winters. Who wanted frozen yogurt when icicles hung from the rafters?

  From the moment I’d walked in, even before Dad and I had installed the industrial ovens and painted the walls a cream color, the voices of the Johnson family seemed to speak to us. Offer a good product and service, and customers will come.

  Dad had suggested I use my nickname for the shop. He’d painted the doors red, then we hung a sign: The Sugar Queen.

  I’d practically heard the Johnson sisters cheering me on as Dad and I’d given a face-lift to the front of the building. Cherry siding and tall windows with hanging baskets of bright flowers brought the storefront into this century. I’d decorated the inside with bistro tables and a wide counter made of repurposed wood from the original floors.

  From that day forward, I started work every morning at 4:00 a.m. and opened the doors at 7:00 a.m. The inside always smelled of sugar, butter, and fresh coffee. Customers flocked to my little place. A hit, despite my deficiencies.

  Our guidance counselor had once advised me to use my pretty face and sweet disposition to my advantage, implying I didn’t have much else going for me. Didn’t I get the last laugh? I did have a talent. A talent for which I was admired and adored. Or my products were, anyway. Notwithstanding the tears that sometimes fell in the batter, I was the Sugar Queen.

  Most days, I worked so hard proving everyone wrong I didn’t have time or energy to think of all I’d lost. I made a good living doing what I loved. Crystal moved to Emerson Pass after her husband’s death and opened a kitchen shop next door to my bakery. Mom and I came to a distant truce. Dad was still my biggest fan.

  A happy ending, of sorts. Until the day Trapper came home and I had to face the past, my lies piling up like sticky, messy muffins on a platter.

  “What do I do, little bird?”

  But my little bird didn’t answer. She never did.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, I have to thank my assistant, MaryAnn Schaefer for her undying loyalty and friendship. She manages so much for me and I’d be lost without her.

  Also, I’d like to thank my author sisters in our Facebook reader group, My Book Tribe. They’re such an inspiration to me, not only as writers but as people. We do a lot of giveaways and author interviews. If you’d like to join our reader group on Facebook, click here.

  Thank you to my street team. My street team, Tessers, is the absolute best early reader group in the world. I love every one of them!

  Thank you to my fan group Patio Chat With Tess Thompson. We have such fun in there. We have contests and live chats. If you’d like to join us, click here. Every new member gets a free ebook from my catalog.

  Thanks to my four kids for being independent enough to help with dinners and errands so that I have more time to write. My beautiful daughters are my pride and joy. My bonus sons light up my heart.

  Finally, thank you to my husband. Cliff Strom is the love of my life, my biggest fan and best friend. When I was first starting out, he would always say, “Not if, honey, but when.” Those words have encouraged me every step of the way.

  And finally, to my readers. Thank you for the privilege of writing for you. Thank you for spending a few hours inside my stories. It’s truly an honor.

  Also by Tess Thompson

  CLIFFSIDE BAY

  Traded: Brody and Kara

  Deleted: Jackson and Maggie

  Jaded: Zane and Honor

  Marred: Kyle and Violet

  Tainted: Lance and Mary

  Cliffside Bay Christmas, The Season of Cats and Babies (Cliffside Bay Novella to be read after Tainted)

  Missed: Rafael and Lisa

  Cliffside Bay Christmas Wedding (Cliffside Bay Novella to be read after Missed)

  Healed: Stone and Pepper

  Chateau Wedding (Cliffside Bay Novella to be read after Healed)

  Scarred: Trey and Autumn

  Jilted: Nico and Sophie

  Kissed (Cliffside Bay Novella to be read after Jilted)

  Departed: David and Sara

  Cliffside Bay Bundle, Books 1,2,3

  BLUE MOUNTAIN SERIES

  Blue Midnight

  Blue Moon

  Blue Ink

  Blue String

  Blue Mountain Bundle, Books 1,2,3

  EMERSON PASS

  The School Mistress of Emerson Pass, Book 1 (First historical installment).

  The Sugar Queen of Emerson Pass, Book 2 (First contemporary installment).

  The Spinster of Emerson Pass, Book 3 (Second historical installment).

  RIVER VALLEY

  Riversong

  Riverbend

  Riverstar

  Riversnow

  Riverstorm

  Tommy's Wish

  River Valley Bundle, Books 1-4

  CASTAWAY CHRISTMAS

  Come Tomorrow, Castaway Christmas, Book 1

  LEGLEY BAY

  Caramel and Magnolias

  Tea and Primroses

  STANDALONES

  The Santa Trial

  Duet for Three Hands

  Miller's Secret

  About the Author

  USA Today Bestselling author Tess Thompson writes small-town romances and historical romance. She started her writing career in fourth grade when she wrote a story about an orphan who opened a pizza restaurant. Oddly enough, her first novel, "Riversong" is about an adult orphan who opens a restaurant. Clearly, she's been obsessed with food and words for a long time now.

  With a degree from the University of Southern California in theatre, she’s spent her adult life studying story, word craft, and character. Since 2011, she’s published over 20 novels and a five novellas. Most days she spends at her desk chasing her daily word count or rewriting a terrible first draft.

  She currently lives in a suburb of Seattle, Washington with her husband, the hero of her own love story, and their Brady Bunch clan of two sons, two daughters and five cats. Yes, that's four kids and five cats.

  Tess loves to hear from you. Drop her a line at tess@tthompsonwrites.com or visit her website at https://tesswrites.com/ or visit her on social media.

  mpson, The School Mistress (Emerson Pass Book 1)