Waiting for Sparks
Waiting for Sparks
Kathy Damp
Sometimes love is right in front of youEmma Chambers wasn't supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug "Sparks" Turner has an important job to do, yet it's Emma who's feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she's been waiting for, right?Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn't staying, especially given the life-changing secret she's discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma's trust. Unless he can make her see that he's a man worth taking a chance on.
Sometimes love is right in front of you
Emma Chambers wasn’t supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug “Sparks” Turner has an important job to do, yet it’s Emma who’s feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she’s been waiting for, right?
Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn’t staying, especially given the life-changing secret she’s discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma’s trust. Unless he can make her see that he’s a man worth taking a chance on.
Sparks laughed and chucked her under the chin.
His touch set off so many alarm bells that Emma forgot to watch for the inevitable with Trouble and the lake. The dog shook the water from himself, gathering velocity as the shake intensified. Sparks and Emma ducked behind the cottonwood tree that had been there ever since Emma could remember.
That tree would be gone, as well. No need for a shade tree under bazillions of gallons of water.
She turned to Sparks. “It really is true. It’s not just that the town is out of money. It could also be flooded?” Surprise tears stung her eyes. Why did she care? She was leaving as soon as her plans were finalized.
Sparks’s shoulder, so close to hers, invited her to snuggle into him, hoping he’d tell her everything would be all right.
Dear Reader (#ulink_df5d2947-cfde-54d5-8c63-0047849a51a3),
As a teen, I handwrote pages and pages of romance novels after discovering Mills & Boon books in my Adirondack Mountains village library. Years later, welcome to my first novel for Mills & Boon Heartwarming, titled Waiting for Sparks.
While staying by a lake with the same too-blue-to-believe water as is in my book with my husband and border collie—the model for Trouble—I thought: What if this place was Heaven for one person and another couldn’t wait to leave? Then, the hero, Sparks, introduced himself. And I met Emma and her grandmother Nomi. Soon afterward, I knew secrets and running after what you think you want would make a great story.
I hope you get caught up in this special place and its people just as I did. I’d love to hear from you.
Kathy
Waiting for Sparks
Kathy Damp
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
KATHY DAMP loves to write about characters who discover they are more than they know and who realize that saving the world can take many forms. Walking on fire this past summer caused her to wonder what else she could do that she didn’t think was possible. When not writing, she rides bikes and kayaks with her husband throughout the West.
To my Adventure Guy and husband, Fred. Without your unflagging support, Emma and Sparks would never have gotten together. Thanks for always being willing to stop the car one more time to explore a novel idea. Here’s to ever so many more adventures.
Contents
Cover (#u5096fbb3-c3ca-52f3-a454-bcdef3007ff5)
Back Cover Text (#ueaee0b98-e3a2-5aa9-bd33-1a95891602ee)
Introduction (#u370e2a99-a17b-5d55-8246-ed73c0bdcbb7)
Dear Reader (#ulink_b0f0a0d0-4286-5403-83b9-24a2d479c7ba)
Title Page (#u1a2e2ef0-c7d8-5e52-8fc4-1dab2f2f727d)
About the Author (#uff83405c-9341-5584-9487-61b155a8ad1a)
Dedication (#u7dc3dffb-c653-58d5-a019-3b606a71228e)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_800b8334-c111-5bb0-a639-12236a0e2c74)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_24d4060d-36d2-5e58-bb6e-4459ff4f624a)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_2b5391d4-2e6b-5906-85cd-58999695a7e3)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_3fa64673-63df-5a69-82e6-958586c85bb2)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_fa893814-3637-5d51-844a-1ddf233701e8)
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_0130ac3b-c495-5170-81e8-6bfb6aad69b1)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_5dd5646e-6940-525a-854f-9a5e7af6a2a1)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_3377f67c-28bf-5a34-b506-2c5cb2585ccb)
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_e997428d-3aa7-5f01-b128-e7d74d2bd27b)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a07e14a3-5dea-5fa9-9a00-678028d9bb7f)
SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING.
Naomi Chambers clutched at her son’s hand, her salt-and-pepper hair plastered wet against her skull. Where terror ought to have been, her son’s face revealed only a cocky boredom. Her grip on him was saving him from the abyss, but her hand was cramping with fatigue. Why didn’t he fight? Try to help himself? His hand slipped from hers.
Jerked half-awake, Naomi Chambers opened her eyes.
Plants... She’d been watering the plants in the front room and thinking about the upcoming Memorial Day weekend.
Now, she was... She turned her head to the right, toward the beep-beep of a machine. She was at the regional hospital, most likely. Where her husband, Raymond, had died. The results on the screen looked a little puny.
Next to the machine, a plastic bag hung on a pole with a long tube dripping into the back of her hand. The two prongs blowing oxygen into her nose rubbed her nostrils; her left hand traveled to them.
Her darling granddaughter, Emma. I need to tell you... Naomi had waited too long.
The same night Emma had arrived as a tiny infant, a shrieking duet of anger and anguish between two women had exploded outside the house, a sound unheard in their town of Heaven.
Then the doorbell.
Every detail remained scoured into her being: Raymond checking his Timex, her insisting he take the gun from the bedside table in case a rancher had gotten tanked at The Wayside Inn and decided to persuade the bank president to reconsider a declined loan with the business end of a shotgun...
Some time later, she lifted heavy eyelids toward the beeping monitors. She dashed away wetness from her cheeks, but not before a few tears dropped into an ear. “Tears don’t solve problems,” her mother had always said. Looking toward the door, Naomi saw only graininess. She blinked. No change. She blinked again, becoming aware that she couldn’t feel her left arm. A singeing terror flared from her chest and out to the tips of the opposite arm.
Trying to breathe deeply, blinking again at the hospital ceiling, she fought the shadow of sleep. Two years had been too long for this stalemate between grandmother and granddaughter. If only Emma would be sensible and return to Heaven. Naomi hoped the young man she’d hired for the Jamboree fireworks would ignite a hometown spark in her granddaughter.
She’d met him at a Western Alliance conference of mayors, where he’d spoken on the advantage of pyrotechnics for civic events. From the longing in his eyes as she’d regaled him with the wonders of her Rocky Mountain village, he’d stay. Fall in love with Emma. Then she’d stay, too.
“Naomi? You decent?” A gravelly voice interrupted her plotting. Chet Jensen’s weathered face peered into the room. He approached, a frown creasing his expression as he took in the machines. “I told the nurse I was your fiancé so she’d let me in.” Gently taking her hand in his, he wriggled his eyebrows. “’Course, that means you’ll have to marry me now.”
Naomi tried to smile, riding the wobbly waves of semiconsciousness. As the crackle of terror began to subside thanks to Chet’s presence, she struggled to think. Had he called Emma? Surely, he had called Emma...
“To save you the bother of trying to spit out all the questions, I’ll fill you in,” Chet said, settling himself in the chair next to her bed. “It’s Thursday night. The EMTs got a call that you’d fallen.” He seemed to read her mind. “I don’t know who called. Good thing someone did. You’ve had a stroke. Do you remember the ride here?”
On the heels of the horror of the word stroke applied to her for the second time in as many years, Naomi tried to recall how much Raymond’s ambulance ride had cost and if that irresponsible Juggy Burnett had driven her in the silly thing.
“N-no.” But how could she not remember? Memory like an elephant, everybody said. Then her insides were seared with a remembrance. She had not yet told Emma what the girl needed to know, what Emma must hear only from Naomi. Her eyelids fluttered. “Wh-where’s Emma?” Bags of flour pressed her lids down. “I almost missed my chance to tell her that...” Sleep closed in.
* * *
EMMA TOOK A deep breath and blew it out. Suitcases by the door.
Check.
Mail set to be held at the post office.
Check.
Passport—her first. Big smile.
Check.
Ticket to England.
Oh, check, check, check.
She was doing it. Actually keeping the promise she’d made to her grandfather to get a new life while he’d been ending his. Emma Chambers’s lips trembled as she swallowed the thickness in her throat. A crooked smile formed as she glanced at the rest of the checklist in her hand. Her with a checklist. Normally, she was as scattered as leaves in the wind, but not with this trip. It was too important. The smile faded. For almost all of her thirty years, Emma had vacillated between wishing she was more like her grandmother to avoiding any habits that hinted at her grandmother’s top three: order, control and action. Naomi Chambers, Nomi to Emma, lived by checklists. And controlled everyone. Especially Emma. She loved her grandmother. She just wanted an ocean between them for a while.
Emma bit her lip and shifted her purse to her other shoulder, peering out the basement apartment window. Hurry.
A horn sounded outside as the blue and yellow van pulled up. The shuttle to the airport, then on to Denver to meet Brad. Then—England. I’m doing it, Grumpa.
Picking up her suitcases, she shook her head. “Boyfriend. Brad is your boyfriend.” She said it out loud to make the point. So why did her heart skitter away from thinking of him as that? Brad was always telling her, “Baby, I’m here for you.” The peripatetic day trader was fun. She needed fun. Yet sometimes—she refused to let her thoughts go here often—Brad seemed, well, about half an inch deep.
Her cell rang in the new traveler’s purse. Setting down one suitcase, she dug in the bag slung across her chest and checked the caller ID. She wouldn’t put it past her grandmother Naomi to try one last ditch effort to get her to her lair, the tiny Rocky Mountain village of Heaven.
Seeing Chet’s name, she grinned and punched the green button. Good old Chet, retired pharmacist and family friend. “Hey, Chet!”
Moving to the window, she waved at the driver and took in the dust-covered flowers that were at eye level at the edge of the sidewalk. She’d felt like those flowers until the details for the trip had been cemented. No more coated with other people’s ideas. England, here I come. We come, she amended.
“Emma?” Chet Jensen’s deep voice floated over the line. He sounded old and tired, unusual for this vigorous bachelor, who was in love with her widowed grandmother. “Listen, E, honey, your grandma’s had a stroke. Will you come, even with the—the way things are between you?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4e0488f5-7dda-5e8e-bba7-242d38fa97aa)
DOUG “SPARKS” TURNER GRUNTED, curling his lip. A gutless sedan. It wasn’t what he had envisioned for his hair-blowing, stereo-blasting drive up Bigelow Canyon to Heaven, his home for the summer. An hour and a half from the airport, Sparks had had enough of the crappy car and intermittent country music on a tinny-sounding radio.
As he reached over to silence the noise, the right wheels caught the dirt of the curving road’s shoulder. Only a narrow strip separated him from a long drop. He yelped and overcorrected, shooting the little blue car into the opposite lane—thankfully temporarily empty of cars, RVs and trucks towing boats.
Another thump on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop on the wrong side of the road. The woman at the car-rental desk had asked if he’d wanted insurance. Maybe he should have considered it. He shifted to Park, lifted his quivering foot off the brake and sat very still, breathing in pine and dust.
“Pull yourself together, Turner,” his pyrotechnics scheduler had said. “Running in every direction gets you nowhere.”
“Steady,” Sparks spoke aloud. “They can’t pay a dead man.” He needed this job more than he needed the vacation. His last two firework-design gigs had finished with fingers pointed at him, murmurs that he’d lost his touch.
On his most recent job all of the fireworks went off at once. A show that was supposed to last twenty minutes had lasted ninety seconds. One big grand finale with no build-up.
He put the car in gear, placed one hand at ten and the other at two on the steering wheel. Carefully returning to the correct lane, he forced his thoughts to remain on the twists and turns of the granite and evergreens, instead of his problems.
“Watch out for the last curve before heading down into Heaven,” the female clerk had said, brushing his hand with hers and giving him a smile. “I’ve heard it’s a killer.” Worse than the ones he’d already navigated? Ah, a sign heralding the summit. Downhill run. Good.
After meeting with Naomi Chambers in town to discuss business, he’d be able to officially start his vacation. Playing hard and long would retire the doubts he’d begun to have. It would push that yearning for something just out of reach back into the place where he wouldn’t think about it. Home.
Compared to his previous occupation—fighting isolated forest fires—and given his vast experience with pyrotechnic displays all over the world, this particular design for such a small town would be a piece of cake. Small towns were hometowns. He’d borrow this one for the summer. Maybe that would help him out.
He had to be getting close to that turn. He flexed one hand, then the other on the steering wheel. Good. He was tired of green trees, tired of the canyon, tired of thinking... He turned the blind corner in third gear, where, instead of the road continuing straight or even at a reasonable curve, a wall of rock appeared along with a ninety-degree angle.
He barely had time to stomp the brake, wrench the wheel all the way to the right and hope he would skirt the outcropping of granite.
* * *
SHE SHOULD HAVE seen it coming.
Kissing the edge of the speed limit on her way to Heaven, the phone call with Brad—made as soon as she’d ended the call from Chet—bounced around in her brain. Brad’s voice, breezy as always, had stunned Emma.
She smacked the old Omni’s steering wheel with a fist, remembering his words. “No problem, you have to go back home,” he’d said.
“It’s not home,” she’d snapped, apologized and, after his next words, wished she hadn’t.
“Given all those phone calls you ignored from Granny, I had a feeling family ties would come home to roost. I snagged Carmen a few nights ago. She can fly standby. You remember her.”
Carmen was hard to forget with bleached hair, bleached-white teeth...and a husband.
“Carmen? The married Carmen?” Despite wanting to keep her tone neutral, Emma couldn’t stop the sarcasm from catching the word married.
Emma heard the woman in the background call to Brad and ask him where he’d put the massage oil. Brad muffled the phone to answer. When he returned, he said, “We had some good times, Emma. Let’s leave it at that.”
Don’t hang up on me. Emma’s stomach started to grip like it did when she was going to be sick. Then he was gone.
In a swirl of hurt, she’d decided to confront her grandmother. Emma would firmly tell her only relative she was not falling for this ruse, that it was a shame she’d roped Chet into it and that Emma was turning around right now and heading for the airport.
She’d board that plane for England whether Brad and Carmen were on it or not. She could do this. She had to do this. She’d go with, with...a man moratorium in place. Yes, that was it.
Her brain cleared, and her foot pressed the accelerator firmly. No man for her until—well, until a very different type of guy showed up. One that made her see fireworks—or at least a spark. And who was trustworthy. Dependable. One who, when he said, “I’ll be there for you,” really was. Yet, from her perspective, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Ninety minutes later, pulling off the interstate at Evanston, Wyoming, the venerable Omni rumbled along the two-lane highway toward Bigelow Canyon. Emma kept an eye out for deer, skunks and raccoons with their nonexistent road-safety habits. The speedometer climbed; every mile brought Emma closer to the place she had vowed never to return to.
Grumpa had referred to Heaven as the intersection between Are We There Yet and Nowhere. Tucked in a valley with steep canyon sides, it boasted maybe a thousand people, which swelled into many thousands as tourists flocked there for the summer, and especially for the town’s main moneymaker—the Fourth of July Jamboree.
The event lasted from Thursday till Monday. A celebration of a small Western town and America.
It was almost nine o’clock now. And as surely as she took her next breath, by the time she crossed the town limits, her grandmother would be fine, Emma reassured herself. Nomi would be formulating some powerful reason for making Chet her minion on a new project.
Emma remembered she would need both hands on the wheel for the final turn. Only idiots blew down this canyon.
No way would her grandmother actually allow herself to fall ill. Not with her riding herd over the upcoming Jamboree in July. When God created Naomi Chambers, He had given her a double shot of stamina, and on the way out, she had snatched another.
Recognizing a familiar landmark, Emma shifted down for the descent. No one else on the road at this hour. Though Memorial Day weekend, travelers would be up and at it quick tomorrow; the early birds were already in their RVs for the night, parked at the local campgrounds, ready for the kick-off of the town’s summer season.
The Omni’s headlights swept left and right, with Emma letting the engine hold the car back. Biting her lip, she tapped the brake around another curve, readying for the last one.
She recalled smelling tourists’ and semitrailer brakes burning clear through to the center of town, coming from this canyon. Others, who thought they knew better than to slow down, rode with the tow truck or in an ambulance. The slow signs meant slow.
After she downshifted to first for the final blind corner and hairpin turn, she lowered the window; cool canyon air poured in. Here came the turn. She tapped her brakes. What was that ahead? When her headlights illuminated a blue sedan, she squinted. Off into the dark, up against an outcropping of rock spray-painted every year by graduating high school students, was a car lying on its side, steam pouring out from the hood, which was bent at many angles. Emma hit the brakes.
Pulling carefully to a stop at the side of the road along faint double tracks, she eyed the car, heart rate ramping. Yanking up her parking brake, she prayed it would hold on the steep downgrade, shut off the car and regretted that she couldn’t use her cell phone. Everyone in Heaven knew precisely where the lack of signal coverage ended for cell phones, and she wasn’t anywhere near it.
Please don’t be dead. Chastising her short height once again, she ran toward the car, looking around for something to stand on to see into it. Stepping onto a large flat rock that was close—yet not close enough to be really useful—she flung herself toward the car door, hanging on by her fingertips. Now what, genius? She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t let go, so she stretched up and peered into the sedan. She could see him now, see the blue collar of a shirt, a man’s head against the seat. He was blond, he was bloody and he wasn’t moving.
Do something. What?
The figure stirred as her fingers cramped from clutching the car’s side. Any minute now she was going to have to fling herself backward to avoid falling under the car.
His eyes opened, and despite the blood seeping down from a cut on his forehead, she couldn’t help noticing the dark blue eyes. Eyes staring right at her. Eyes with—deep questions? Don’t be dumb, Emma. He has a question as to what happened, not some complicated existential need.
“You’re beautiful—an angel? Am I dead?” he asked, then groaned and put a hand to his head. “My head.”
That struck her as funny—both the beautiful comment and that he actually did have questions—and she giggled, albeit a trifle hysterically. “No, you’re in Bigelow Canyon. The last turn. We call it The Last Nasty.”
“Nasty. Sure. About...how...my luck has been going.” He squeezed out the words.
Her aching fingers reminded her that she needed to change positions. Bending her knees slightly, she edged to the rim of the rock on which she teetered, and then shoved off the car. Back she fell, rear end hitting the ground first. She rolled to the side quickly and stood up, legs shaking. Dramatic rescues had not been part of the itinerary for the England trip, nor were they a common occurrence in her life.
The car door squeaked and then swung open with a metallic groan. The bloody, blue-eyed guy gazed at her and took in the surrounding area with a fuzzy frown.
She stared up at him. Even bloodied he was a jaw dropper. Blond hair sticking out all over, strong cheekbones that rose above a carved chin. Those eyes. Those questions.
“I think we’re both in trouble,” he mumbled, and dragged himself toward the open car door.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b86db9cc-61d6-534f-a7c0-a92e650f164e)
WHAT HAD THE angel girl just asked him? Thunderbolts banged around in Sparks’s head. The dampness and sting on his chin told him he’d have a souvenir of the Compact Car Crunch.
“I said, do you think you have a concussion?”
Minutes before, he’d started a slow pitch out of the car. Somehow—perhaps he’d recall later—she’d grabbed his long legs at the same moment he’d pushed off from the frame. It took him a few moments to realize he’d landed on his rescuer. She uttered gasping, grunting sounds from underneath him.
After he’d rolled off her, they’d both regained their breath, and she’d lugged his two suitcases out of the trunk and into her car. He focused on standing upright and making his legs move toward it, only to collapse onto the passenger seat. Oh, was his head throbbing.
She’d steered out onto the road, and they were on their way. Angel girl, Sparks thought. Short, dark haired and curvy in beige capris and a light-colored knit shirt, she was the prettiest part of the trip so far. And the prettiest thing to ever save him. Now, what was her name? It wasn’t like him to miss getting a name.
In the light of the dashboard, the skin over her knuckles was stretched taut, he noticed. Although in the midst of the rescue she’d kept saying, “What do I do? What do I do?” She’d been great.
He winced at the virtual bombs exploding in his head. “I’ve had concussions. This isn’t one.”
No response, yet her eyes widened at his comment.
“I’m kind of used to emergencies.” It would take more than a car crash to prevent Sparks Turner from getting a pretty girl to relax. She had a smudge of dirt on the cheek facing him. He raised his hand to wipe it off. She shrunk back. The car swerved.
“Man moratorium!” Her voice squeaked on the last part of moratorium.
He must have landed on her harder than he’d thought. “Did you hit your head?”
She ignored his question. “Are you sure you’re okay? Maybe I should take you to Regional for that cut on your chin. I’m...I’m headed in that direction.” Her voice sounded decidedly nervous.
He blamed himself for scaring her. Of course, taking a strange, bloody guy into your car was a risk. “No, ma’am. I’m a former smoke jumper and I’ve taken some pretty good bangs to the head before. I appreciate it, but a ride to the Safari Motel is good enough for me.”
Silence.
The knock on his head had opened a memory he’d slammed the door on five years ago. The tragedy that had driven him from a once-loved occupation and a part of his life that he was trying to forget.
A few more miles passed by, and the road flattened a bit before another plunge. She gestured to the left. “You can’t see much at night, but that’s the lake down there. Route 12 is Main Street.” So this was Heaven, his borrowed hometown for the summer.
This spurt of conversation seemed to empty her, and she once again fell silent.
Keeping his eyes on the darkness that was the lake, he leaned against the headrest and gave himself over to the pain. “Never expected such a big lake in the Rocky Mountains,” he muttered to himself. Talking to himself was a habit he’d had since he was a kid. Some counselor had told him he did it so he wouldn’t feel alone. He hadn’t wanted to think about that then, and he didn’t want to think about it tonight.
She didn’t respond.
“Heaven’s a different name for a town,” he said, this time louder.
The silence spread so long he thought she wasn’t going to answer, and then she shook herself slightly as though to rouse herself from troubling thoughts. “The original settlers had such a hard time coming down that canyon—” she flashed him a look “—as you can imagine, that when they came to this point and saw the bizarre blue of the lake, they figured they’d died and gone to heaven. Hence the name.”
Everyone had told Sparks he was crazy to take a cut-rate job designing fireworks in the middle of nowhere. When he’d been sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the wrecked car door, he would have had to agree. Now, seeing the size of the lake and with a summer to play in it, he began to doubt his doubts. He could entertain himself watching the spin cycle in a Laundromat and make five new friends before he’d even folded his polo shirts. He would amuse himself in Heaven and get back into sync with his career. A win-win for him and the town.
In fact...he eyed the petite woman next to him. He’d get a summer girl. Summer girls didn’t need to know why he couldn’t stick around.
The uncomfortable niggling at the back of his mind, the keening loss that often surged within him, kicked in again. He’d been feeling it off and on for months now. A place to call home. A place to be from. Come back to. Sparks touched the cut on his forehead. It had stopped bleeding.
Shooting a sideways look at his angel girl, he wondered where she was from, where she was going. She’d said a hospital. Local girl with a sick husband? He sighed. He hoped not.
Minutes later, she braked at a four-way stop sign with a Qwik Stop in need of a paint job on one corner. The other three corners were the edges of fields that gave way to Main Street.
“It looks like...home,” he blurted as yet another crash sounded in his head.
“Don’t bet on it.” Her muttering landed so softly he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard her. After she stopped on Main Street in front of the Safari Motel and put the car in Park, she turned to look at him—or rather, the cut on his forehead. Then she smiled.
Her smile curved up wide, showing white teeth with a tiny overlap of the right incisor. The move pressed her eyes into a delightful squint. He was glad she’d been coming down the canyon when she had. In the reflected light from the motel’s office, he saw coppery highlights glinting in her dark hair. A pretty woman preoccupied with something. After her rescuing him, he wanted to make everything right for her. Keep that smile on her face.
Finally, she spoke. “Looks as if Lynette kept the light on for you. She’ll want to know why you look as though you got beat up. She’s not much on troublemakers staying at her motel.” The smile faded and the tone sharpened. “Or unreliable, undependable charmers.” She closed her lips in a thin line.
“You’re from here?” His spirits lifted; he’d choose to ignore the edge to her last words. Summer girl. For the summer, he could be anything she wanted. For the summer.
A look swept over her face. Revulsion? Regret? He couldn’t place it.
“Not really.”
He slid slowly out of the car, emitting a few spontaneous grunts as he pulled his suitcases out of the backseat. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
Her smile returned, lightening her expression. “You rescued me from rescuing you. We’re square.”
As he came around the front of the car, he spoke in the direction of her open window. “See you around, then?”
She leaned out the window. “I’ll call on my cell about your car. The garage will contact the rental company.”
“Hey, no problem. I’ll call from my room.”
Another transforming smile. “I’ll call.” She put the Omni in Drive.
“Thank you for saving my life!” he shouted belatedly as she left the parking lot. She didn’t look back. He knew because he watched her. She knew where he was, so maybe...
Digging a piece of paper out of his jeans’ pocket, Sparks gingerly felt around the scrape on his chin. He leaned over, stretching right and left to unravel the increasing kinks, while checking out his home for forty-six glorious days of vacation. To the right was a line of single-level motel units of cinder block with a metal, aqua-painted eaves running their length as they sloped down away to the lake. Probably built in the 1950s.
He pushed open the glass door of the office and the bell at the top of the door tinkled; the theme song for a late-night talk show sounded in a room behind the desk. He was hours past his guaranteed reservation time. As his hand hovered over the bell on the counter for a second time, a bouffant-haired older woman pushed through the bead curtain.
“Don’t be pounding that bell. At my age, it takes more time to get everything moving.” Of average height, a loose black pullover tunic and legs encased in black knit pants, she didn’t look as though she had an ounce of fat on her. Taking in his damaged face, her eyes narrowed. “You got a reservation? We don’t allow riffraff here.”
Sparks glanced at the confirmation number on his piece of paper and passed it over to her. She snatched it from his hand.
“You’re Lynette?” he said.
Looking up from the paper, she seemed satisfied with his right to be there. “I’m the owner, Lynette.” She peered at him over half glasses. “You’re that hotshot fireworks designer who’s going to put Heaven on the map this year.” She swung her head back and forth. Her hair never moved. “Why do you look as though you lost a fight at the Wayside Inn?”
“I had an accident coming down Bigelow Canyon.”
“The Last Nasty, no doubt. Going too fast, I imagine. Happens all the time.”
His head ached in cadence to the throbbing in his jaw. He hadn’t eaten anything for hours, and he was feeling that Heaven fell short of Naomi’s rhapsodizing about warm, friendly people. Forcing his split lips into a smile, he said, “Yes, ma’am. Fortunately, a woman from town stopped to help me. I didn’t get her name.”
She shrugged. “Payment’s in full. Up front. Cash preferred.”
Naomi had warned him of Lynette’s affection for cash. No plastic card was accepted, but as he pulled out his wallet, he noted the rest of the office asserted a predilection for plastic. On the counter, plastic—not silk—daffodils leaned out of a hot pink plastic vase with seashells glued on it. The bead curtain was plastic. Plastic covered the lampshade by the cash register. He shifted his feet, heard a crackle. Plastic runner.
After opening his wallet and removing the cash, he glanced down at the registration card she slid in front of him.
“Fill it out completely—including home address. I’ll need your license plate number, too, in case you go sneaking off with my towels.” She looked out the side window. “Where’s your car?” Her eyes narrowed again.
“It’ll be towed in.” He focused on the card. Home address. There it was again. Home. By habit, he put down the address of the pyrotechnic corporation with whom he contracted. He was rarely at the condo he rented with a pilot.
She took the completed card Sparks offered her. “Doug?”
“I go by Sparks.”
A twinkle at last thawed the frosty, faded eyes.
“Bet there’s a story there.” Her tone returned to business. “The town’s got us a drought going on, so we change the towels and sheets twice a week ’stead of every day.”
He nodded. A quick survey out the window showed no on-site restaurant. “No restaurant?”
Turning away from him with the card in her hand, Lynette slid it into a pocket of a numbered canvas wall hanging. “No need for me to monopolize making money. Dew Drop Inn Café’s over there. Place for those of us over thirty and tourists who want local color.” She gestured behind him; Sparks followed. Across the street sat a cinder block building with wide glass windows and a prominent sign announcing a “Squat and Gobble Special” of eggs, biscuits, cream sausage gravy and hash browns. No lights on and a closed sign on the front door. His stomach rumbled.
Lynette peered at him. “Nothing’s open this late... Tomorrow, start of Memorial Day weekend, you can also go to the Dairy Delite at the other edge of town or Angel Wings BBQ here on Main.” She leaned her forearms on the counter. With money in hand, her tone of voice became positively chatty. “So you’re here to bail out Naomi?”
“You must be thinking of somebody else.” He dredged up a smile, wincing at the sting. Everything he owned ached. Longing for bed, he added quickly, “I’m only here to design the Fourth of July Jamboree fireworks. Technicians come from Evanston to set up the actual display. Pretty much, I’m on vacation.” Before he opened the door to leave, he remembered. “I’ll need directions to her office, though.”
“Won’t do you any good. Naomi’s had another stroke.” Lynette’s watery gray eyes scanned him. “We’re waiting for poor little Emma to save us.”
He nodded, and moments later, as he stood in the doorway of room number twenty-seven, Lynette’s departing statement lingered. Poor little Emma must be Naomi’s hapless assistant. Did this mean working for Naomi would be...difficult?
Holding the handles of his two suitcases, he surveyed the room with no relief found from a gathering sense of gloom or his aching muscles. The two full-size beds in front of him, one with a distinct hollow in the middle and both draped with red and saffron zigzag bedspreads, shouted 1970s, as did the crimson velvet paisleys raised on the gold wallpaper. He spied a rotary desk phone on the nightstand. At least there was a phone.
Walking over faded yellow shag carpet, he picked up the receiver to call the rental company. No dial tone. So that hazel-eyed angel girl had already known the secret. Hence her smile, the smile he wanted to remember and see again.
Reminiscing about the four-star hotels he’d enjoyed in Chicago, DC, Paris and Tokyo, he rotated his shoulders. Hadn’t he wanted a break from the globetrotting for a touch of hometown America?
He chose the least concave bed and plopped his suitcases on the other. The bed dropped a couple inches lower. He shrugged. “Best to look on the bright side.” Mother Egan, a fond memory from growing up at the orphanage, had had a million such sayings; every now and then one popped out of his mouth.
Sleep was his next order of business. Once he’d slept, his head would stop banging and his bones would settle back into place. After he met this unfortunate Emma, he’d explore his summer hometown.
Forty-six glorious days of vacation.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_74df6dc0-c052-52b5-9164-46a9a296a785)
EMMA PEERED INTO her grandmother’s hospital room where monitors glowed and beeped. Chet sat next to the narrow bed, his arms folded on the railing, head pillowed on them. Sweet Chet. The only person in Heaven who wasn’t afraid of her grandmother, other than Emma’s childhood friend Zoo. Emma stepped forward.
Nomi looked old. Her face, usually bright with vigor or pique, hung sallow. So many machines connected, like when Grumpa was here. So still. Had she—? Nomi moved her right leg slightly under the sheet and blanket.
Letting out the breath Emma didn’t know she’d been holding, she moved over to Chet and touched him on the arm. He jerked, then straightened.
“E?” Worry creased his wrinkles into gullies while his remaining white hair stuck up at every angle. She managed to lift her lips into a semblance of a smile as he gripped her hand. “Thank the good Lord you’re finally here.” No judgment sharpened his words, merely relief. If Nomi had said the same thing, it would have been clear that Emma had taken too long and someone else had had to shoulder her share of the burden.
Nodding toward her grandmother, Emma returned Chet’s squeeze. “How is she?”
“I’m scared, E.” He related the few details he knew: she fell, someone—nobody knew who—called the paramedics, and they brought her to Regional. She was stable. “I’ll leave you alone with her and wait outside.”
Her grandmother stirred. Picking up Nomi’s hand, Emma held it as Nomi lay unresponsive. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispered.
Nomi’s lids rose slowly. “Trr-ouble,” she whispered through dry lips. Emma reached for a plastic glass with a flexible straw. Her grandmother sipped with shallow swallows.
“Yes,” Emma whispered back, a tear sneaking out of her eye. “It’s trouble, but you’ll be fine. You always are.”
“Sparks. Sparks.” Naomi’s head jerked against the pillow.
Had there been a fire the night of the stroke? Emma’s eyebrows slammed together.
“Take care of...trouble...” Her grandmother’s attempt at speaking alarmed the monitors. Emma stroked Nomi’s arm. Her grandmother would survive trouble. A plan of action for every crisis.
At Emma’s touch, she quieted and appeared to fall asleep.
After watching her grandmother to make sure her sleep was peaceful, Emma joined Chet in the hall. They walked silently through the hospital out toward the parking lot.
As long as there were memories, Nomi and Grumpa were in them. When a fireman came to school in second grade, some kid had asked her if her smoke jumper daddy had been a hero. She wasn’t sure, so she asked her grandmother. Nomi had hesitated, her hands stilling on the fridge door. She’d just returned from her office where she served as mayor and was pulling leftovers out for dinner.
“He did what he felt he had to do,” she’d answered, then she’d told Emma to go set the table. Heroes did what they had to do. Emma had decided if you couldn’t have a father, at least you could have a hero father in heaven. The other heaven.
Emma rubbed the vertical line between her brows that matched her grandmother’s. She knew little of her father, other than he’d left to go smoke jumping and had died.
As a child, she’d been told her mother—whoever she was—had had to go away, asking Nomi and Grumpa to take care of her. Grumpa had said that, so it must be true.
Emma had learned a little more as an early teen. Evidently, her mother had been too much of a teenager herself to handle a baby. Despite the fierce love of her grandmother and the gentle care of her Grumpa, a certain emptiness in Emma had never filled, the being left part. Being left had rendered her unable to call the town home. It set a pattern in motion. Temporary relationships only.
After hugging Chet in the hospital’s parking lot, she slid into the Omni and drove to the house where she’d grown up. She pulled the car onto the double-cemented lines of the driveway. Tomorrow she’d find out her grandmother’s details—or rather, checking her watch, later today—and head back to Salt Lake.
Straightening up, with her stomach continuing to grumble as it had in the hospital, Emma resolved to explore her grandmother’s fridge.
Movement next door at Feral Beryl’s drew her glance. Naomi’s archenemy had peeked out the kitchen window above the Berlin Wall, a tall wooden fence between the two properties. More than a property divider, it divided the have-not Beryl Winsome from the have-it-all Chambers. Beryl was a singularly unpleasant woman.
Emma pulled out her suitcases and approached the bungalow. Fatigue dripped down her neck like perspiration, and her suitcases, rolling behind her, weighed a ton. Lilac bushes that were as high as her waist as a child now towered over her five foot something. They glowed in the dark, lighting both sides of the flagstones to the house. Although chokecherry bushes almost past blooming partially blocked her view, the porch swing peeked through.
Back in the day, when Grumpa could get Nomi to “stop doing and come out and just be,” the three of them would sit in silence on the porch. Grumpa and Emma would be on the swing, Nomi sitting on the floor with her head against Grumpa’s knees. Nomi would jump up for something; Grumpa would say in the voice Nomi called his “bank president” tone, “Leave it, Naomi. The child’s more important.” And Nomi would sit down again.
Her grandmother, never quiet for long, would commence talking about how important it was that Emma make good choices. Clearing his throat, Grumpa would interrupt with another story about the fierce Lady Emma, a young girl extraordinaire who fought dragons and won. When his deep voice finished the story, silence would surround them like an old afghan. Until Nomi would make a surprised sound and exclaim, “Raymond, Emma is beyond bedtime!”
“Come along, Miss Beyond Bedtime,” he would say, and carry her off to bed. They would pray, her last sight Grumpa’s silhouette in the doorway. “Remember, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, Lady Emma.”
Smiling now, Emma walked through the open side gate, around the corner of the house and up the back steps. Sure enough, the door was unlocked, as were most houses in Heaven. She was in before she heard a new sound: a low growl and light panting.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_431c7b6e-50d5-59c8-acec-56df5f4a6c3d)
THE HEADACHE HAD disappeared by the time Sparks awoke later that morning. While orienting himself to yet another new ceiling, he rubbed his neck reflexively. Traveling often left him muddled about which state, which city, even which country he’d landed in. Then, as he stretched his arms over his head, his muscles rushed to remind him, prompting him to recall as well the woman who’d rescued him.
First, there was the immediate intimacy of the little car and how careful she was to keep to her side. Second, her genuine concern for his head, those watchful side glances from the hazel eyes. Where had she been going with such intensity? He groaned again and rolled out of bed.
After a quick shower and shave, he dressed and left his room for the Dew Drop. He needed to get the scoop on Naomi, Emma and the Jamboree deal, and a local diner always had folks in the know. As he stepped off the curb, he winced. Better keep moving today or those muscles would stiffen up.
The pungent mixture of strong coffee and grease filled his nose not unpleasantly as he opened the diner’s glass door and stepped inside. Although Sparks had eaten some great food in great places across the planet, he still preferred American cardiac-zone cooking.
Most of the booths were full, and the counter didn’t have an empty swivel stool. The clatter of plates, silverware and voices rang against the red-wallpapered walls and aluminum wainscoting. A Coca-Cola clock from years past hung over the half circle of counter space.
“Coffee?” A middle-aged woman waved a coffeepot at him as she caught his glance. He shook his head no, Coke being his caffeine of choice, and continued to look around. When he spotted three men in work clothes crammed in a red Naugahyde booth, he turned toward them. They broke off their conversation, which seemed to center around farm equipment. “I’m here for the summer—fireworks guy for the Jamboree.” He gestured to the space next to the one man sitting alone. “Mind if I join you?”
After staring at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language, the three men nodded, and the one slid over. The server approached. Sparks opened the menu and ordered a Coke and chicken fried steak with mashed and vegetable medley. At eleven o’clock, it was only a bit early for lunch. He’d really slept in.
“You the guy who crashed that rental in the canyon?” A man with a John Deere cap enquired, thick fingers wrapped around a white stoneware mug.
Sparks nodded sheepishly.
“I’m Willard,” said a big bald man who looked as if he was meeting a celebrity. Having a license to blow things up had that effect on some people.
The man extended his hand. Sparks nodded, shaking the proffered paw, then swallowed some of the Coke that had quickly appeared.
“We’ve never had bigger fireworks than what the fire department put on. The rest are illegal...until you cross into Wyoming,” Willard explained, rubbing his head.
“Special license for entertainment purposes. I get them all the time,” Sparks said.
“That’s Mayor Naomi looking out for us—bringing in something that makes more money, knowing what trouble we’re in.” This was the guy with the John Deere cap. Even with his muttered voice, Sparks had caught that his name was Duff and he owned the Feed-N-Seed in town.
“Lynette mentioned an Emma,” Sparks said, leaving out the part about Emma saving the town. “Who’s she?”
Ray, rail thin and appearing older than the other two, leaned back against the booth, lifted his IFA cap and scratched his scalp. Replacing the cap, he pierced Sparks with a look.
“Closest shot we have to pulling our butts out of the fire. She’s Raymond and Naomi’s granddaughter.”
“I don’t know ’bout whether she’d come back,” Willard said. “You know how she and Naomi left things...” he trailed off, looking like a basset that had had his ears stepped on.
“Oh? So why are your butts in the fire?” Sparks asked.
“Money,” the three men chorused.
“She’ll come back.” That was Ray. He spoke with finality, but Sparks noted the look he tossed Duff.
Sparks jiggled the ice in his empty glass, watching for the server, both for a refill and his breakfast. “Town doesn’t look as if there’s a money problem...everything here looks freshly painted, well maintained.” Sparks tapped his fingers—as was his habit—on the table. He wanted to hear the Jamboree was right on track, meaning his money was right on track, meaning his vacation was right on track.
Duff piped up around the hot beef sandwich he was shoveling in his mouth. “We work hard to make the town look good. Too many dried up little Western towns.” He swallowed his mouthful. “Trouble is, we’ve had some winters that ate up funds with snow removal. All that snow still didn’t kill the drought.” A deep drink of coffee followed.
“My money’s on Emma not coming back,” Willard stated flatly. “She’s not been back since—”
“She’ll be back. Emma’s local,” Ray interrupted.
Listening, but not really, Sparks smiled at the server who set down a full plate, plunking another Coke in front of him, as well. Sparks breathed in the aroma of creamy sausage gravy over crispy fried cube steak, lumpy mashed potatoes and a watery pile of vegetables. He picked up his knife and fork. Ignoring the conversation flowing around him, he sliced a piece of meat, ran it through the gravy and slid it into the pile of mashed potatoes. He sighed, the focus on his aches and pains shifted to this gastronomical delight.
Moments later, as he tuned back into the conversation, the three men were now discussing the Jamboree and the cancelled one-and-only volunteer organizational meeting. Naomi’s skills must be better than his to run a Jamboree off one meeting. Then again, most people’s skills in that area were better than his, and now even his dependability had been called into question by his boss. This job had to go well.
“Can’t Naomi’s husband plan the Jamboree?” Sparks asked.
The three men looked at him as though he’d thrown a pitchfork of manure into the conversation instead of a question. Then they chuckled.
“Be hard for him,” Ray said. “He’s been dead for almost two years.”
Duff jumped in. “By the way—” he gestured to Sparks’s plate “—you don’t want to eat that medley.”
“Right.” Sparks restrained the overcooked vegetables from contaminating the rest of the meal. He didn’t see the problem with who ran the event—it was a small-town Jamboree after all. The problem he saw was his summer slipping down the drain if someone didn’t step up. He put another bite of meat and potato into his mouth. He hoped this Emma would show up, and soon.
Willard seemed determined to drive home his morose observations. “I’m telling you, Emma is gone. I was at the funeral that day.” All eyes were on him. “Emma and Naomi might have been in the kitchen but most of the US of A heard them, even if everyone pretends they didn’t to Naomi’s face.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, likely to raise Raymond from the dead.”
“Emma’s usually so quiet.” Ray didn’t sound convinced. “I wasn’t able to pay my respects till later. Naomi seemed fine then, like always.”
“Quiet around her grandmother, maybe,” Duff interjected. “She didn’t used to be that way. Older she got, less you heard from her.” He swirled his coffee.
Sparks squirmed. Add a hair dryer or two and this could be the Hattie’s Dyed and Gone hair place he’d noticed down the street. Emma, trained by Naomi, would be a clone of the fire-breathing Naomi. He tried to imagine a younger Naomi. No nonsense. Barking orders and expecting obedience every step of the way.
“Why don’t one of you plan it if Emma doesn’t show?” he asked.
Ray choked on his last forkful of pie. Willard looked as though Sparks had suggested he strip naked and run down Main Street, and Duff started laughing until tears ran down his face.
“Nobody but Naomi has done the Jamboree since Moses was in preschool,” Willard replied.
Looking down at his plate, Sparks leaned back. “Well, bigger fireworks will bring in more people who will then spend money.” Although the budget she had faxed fell miles below his usual, he knew the results would still knock the socks off anyone attending this small-town celebration.
Willard opened his mouth, but after catching the expressions on his friends’ faces, he reddened, snapped his lips shut and stared at the table. Sparks frowned. What didn’t Willard’s friends want him to say? Sparks watched the faces close up, wondering if everyone in town knew everyone’s business or if they saved energy and focused on The First Family, the Chamberses.
Not having a family, and with traveling so much, people only knew what Sparks told them; nothing more, nothing less. Some things people didn’t need to know. Some secrets needed to stay buried.
Looking at his watch, Duff sighed and slid out of the booth, turning a weary face to the remaining men. “Gotta get back to the store. Missus was holding down the fort for me while I went for coffee break.” He checked the watch again and headed to the cash register, bill in hand.
Ray inclined his head toward Sparks. “Room okay?”
With a contented expulsion of breath after finishing his meal, Sparks sipped his third Coke. “Yeah, other than the phone doesn’t work and it’s decorated like a time warp, everything’s good with me.”
Willard snorted as he held his stomach while Ray slapped his hand on the table and hee-hawed.
“Phones over at the Safari don’t ever work.” Ray wiped his eyes, then brought the mug to his lips.
Sparks raised his eyebrows. “The sign out front says phones in every room.”
Ray explained that there were phones in every room; they just didn’t work. When Lynette had bought the place back in the early seventies, they didn’t work. She’d just left them there so she wouldn’t have to redo the neon sign.
Ray punched Willard on the shoulder. “Move. I gotta get.”
The two men hitched out of the booth.
“Gotta love vacation,” Sparks said, no longer annoyed at the lack of phone service at the Safari. It was a great summer story.
Halfway to the cash register with his tab, Ray turned back toward Sparks, an enigmatic expression on his face. “You think you’re here for vacation?” He snorted.
A tall, thin man with a big smile and short white hair sprouting up on the top of his head pushed open the door and strode into the Dew Drop, scanning the diners.
He approached the booth. “Son, you Sparks?” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Chet. Naomi wants a meetin’ with you.”
Despite the older man’s warm voice and kind gaze, Sparks shivered. It was like a summons to visit the queen.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_6a33745c-8e21-59ce-b301-00441ba102c0)
AFTER A SHOWER, and pulling on shorts and a T-shirt, Emma headed for the ancient Bunn coffeemaker on the turquoise kitchen counter.
The “trouble” her grandmother had talked about last night as well as the heavy breathing when Emma had opened the door turned out to be a black-and-white border collie. Trouble was printed on the side of his dish. His favorite place seemed to be under the kitchen table.
One more problem to solve before she left town—who would take care of the dog? And why did her grandmother even have a dog? She’d easily ignored all of Emma’s pleas for a pet. Trouble seemed keenly interested in her every move, which was probably why her grandmother liked the mutt.
Out of habit, she glanced over at Beryl’s window, the way she had while growing up. When a curtain twitched, as it had last night, she wondered if Beryl had witnessed the ambulance picking up her grandmother and what evil thoughts of glee the bellicose woman had had. No one, including Emma, knew why the two were such enemies.
Not for the first time Emma thought of the blond guy she’d picked up in the canyon and hoped that he was feeling okay. From what he’d chattered about, he’d sounded wistful, looking for a hometown for the summer. The neighborly-grudges aspect of small-town life would not be on his bucket list. If he was lucky, he might go all summer and not meet Beryl.
Emma opened the back door. Trouble dashed to attend to his duties and seemed to be checking for any sign of intruders since he’d last patrolled the yard. She watched him, tail flagging over his back, joy in every movement. Had she ever felt that free? No need to analyze that. No, she hadn’t. She’d always been “poor Emma” to the townsfolk, although she could never figure out why. The Chamberses had money, position.
Holding the door for the dog as he raced back in, Emma shut it and headed to the kitchen. She sat at the round table and stared into space. What would the doctor say about her grandmother? Trouble hitched closer until his nose lay on her lap. An almost snort escaped Emma’s lips. Her grandmother must have needed something to replace Emma’s presence, although sometimes Emma could still feel the leash.
The dog’s nose bumped her knee, and his amber eyes bore into hers. A walk. They both needed fresh air. At the front door, she snapped on the leash and it unloaded the equivalent of a four-shot espresso into an already caffeinated canine. “Okay, okay, a walk along the beach. You sniff, I’ll think. But only a short one. I need to get to the hospital.”
The doctor would say something that Emma would have to deal with and rapidly. The quick-thinking gene, so lavished upon her grandparents, had skipped her. If she took as long to solve Naomi’s health issues as she did her other problems, England would have given up the monarchy by the time she arrived.
Maybe she needed to check out home health aides? Would her grandmother allow a professional caregiver in the house? Would she even need one?
Trouble strained at the leash in the opposite direction from the beach, ears up and engaged.
Emma caught the sound of applause the same moment the dog began to drag her down Seraphim. They were almost at the intersection of Cherubim and Seraphim.
In a normal small town, a street like this one might carry the same name as the school that was located at the southern end. Or it might even be named the quintessential Maple or Pine Street. But no, that wasn’t the case here. Decades ago, the town fathers—before Nomi’d gained a stranglehold on the mayor’s job—had decided it would boost tourism to rename the streets to match the celestial nature of the town’s name. Tourists found it charming. It had just made spelling in fourth grade more difficult.
On the football field, a bunch of students were facing someone tall and blond and beautiful, who was waving his hands and pointing to various pieces of—artillery? Mr. Blue Eyes! The guy who had rescued her from rescuing him. A rush of gladness swelled her chest. He was okay—at least he seemed okay—flashing a megawatt smile and gesturing as he explained something.
She was happy he had recovered. His nonchalance about a possible head injury had made her nervous, but she couldn’t have done much to make him go to Regional. He now was moving as though all his joints worked. The blue eyes above the cut on his chin came to mind. So very blue and with deep questions inside.
Trouble made his way along the outskirts of the group, startling a rear end here and there. She found it a pleasure watching Mr. Blue Eyes. Maybe she’d just stand there for a bit. She’d sidled to the back of the group when the idea of a man moratorium jogged her memory.
Oh. Right.
Better to head home and then to the hospital.
“Hi, Miss Chambers! When did you get back in town? How’s your grandmother? Who’s going to plan the Jamboree?” A cute brunette with a belly shirt and low-riding jeans grinned up at her as she petted Trouble.
When had she arrived? It seemed like both forever and a breath ago. Emma answered the girl vaguely and greeted others as a ripple of laughter ran through the crowd.
“What’s going on?” she asked one of the kids.
“Fireworks stuff. The dude doin’ them on the Fourth is giving us a demo ’cause it’s Friday and the start of Memorial Day weekend.” The kid bobbed his head.
Each time she thought she had mastered a shift in Heaven’s universe, another shudder hit it. What was going on here? Her grandmother had never deviated from the Black Binder of Jamboree Procedures in Emma’s lifetime or anyone else’s.
Historically, Nomi had the Jamboree organized the day before the Memorial Day weekend started. The parade would be Monday. She wondered who’d taken over the helm, and pitied them.
A murmur went through the crowd that it was almost “time,” however, Emma, righteously holding to her no-man policy, had lost interest. She was more concerned with seeing her grandmother and moving on with her new life. Tugging on Trouble’s leash, she towed the dog away from the crowd. She would cut across the football field, reach the house in record time and climb in the Omni for the trip to the hospital, and then the ninety-minute drive to Salt Lake. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long to get things sorted at Regional. She’d have to arrange for care for her grandmother, the house and, oh, yeah, the dog and...
Should she collect a few personal items for Nomi before she left the house? Good thing her grandmother’s place was only a couple of blocks away. Although everything was only a couple of blocks away in Heaven—good for the feet and the Omni, which had been making death rattle noises coming up the canyon. She had planned to run the thing into the ground and worry about a vehicle when she and Brad—when she—returned. Dramamine. She’d have to get some Dramamine for the flight. Thinking of the trip helped her keep her goal in mind. A new life.
It wasn’t as if she was abandoning her grandmother, she thought, picking up speed as she crossed the expanse of the football field. Her cavalier compartmentalizing washed up some guilt. Was she selfish for running off? She halted those thoughts. Why scold herself for selfish—why not see it as the travesty it would be to put herself on hold while Nomi took priority again? The fireworks guy with his amazing eyes and the bump on the head could have this hometown. She wanted Europe.
Naomi had always purposely gotten in the way whenever something wasn’t her idea. Like when Grumpa and Emma had planned this European trip to celebrate her high school graduation. That was the year town volunteers had put in the boardwalk by the lake, and Nomi had insisted Grumpa would have to assist. Or the time after college graduation... Well, that had been due to Emma’s distracted involvement with Professor Sleazeball, but, she amended hastily, there had still been a myriad of other times when Emma’s life was restructured to suit her grandmother.
If that way-beyond-beautiful fireworks designer was to know Naomi, he’d change his view of this small town.
She had a stroke, Emma. That was hardly in the same category as Nomi conscripting her to plant flowers on Main Street in junior high. Emma set her jaw.
A stone had worked its way into her arch, kicked in by her quick pace. Limping, she continued to trudge along. She was infinitely tired of dealing with how she felt about her grandmother. From behind her, she heard a yell and a thunk from the first firework shell being launched.
Her curiosity piqued, she turned and collided with a broad expanse of white shirt. Her head snapped back and her feet left the ground. Trouble yipped. The chalk of the end zone rushed to fill her nose. Emma lay still, mentally counting the screams in each appendage. Good. Nothing broken. Then, while she was trying to decide how best to eject the dirt and such from her nose, large hands cupped her waist and, with a whoosh that tickled her insides, she landed gently on her feet. Still dazed, she thought it awfully convenient that Heaven’s volunteer firemen had such great timing. She shifted onto her back to smile and say thanks when she saw that fireworks designer looking at her like she had looked at him in the canyon. Questions.
“You!” With the single word, the scrapes on her forehead and chin widened and began to sting.
“I did yell. I knew it was you.” His grin looked satisfied. “I remember your backside—er, the back of you from last night.” He gestured at the field. “You were just about to walk right through my rocket landing zone.”
Snorts and giggles greeted that comment and looking further, Emma saw the crowd of teens watching the show.
“Your landing zone? Of all the irresponsible—” Now she noticed the orange cones with the yellow caution tape fluttering in the warm breeze, the ends tugged free from their moorings. Great. It wasn’t even his fault.
Thinking about her grandmother, she’d wandered into no man’s land.
Trouble pulled on the leash. He wanted attention from the crowd. She wanted to say much more, but the dirt in her nose was making it hard to breathe. She wanted it out. With this audience, how was she going to do that?
Sparks faced the crowd and yelled for a tissue and after a pause, a young man parted the crowd and handed her a wrinkled packet of tissues. “Allergies,” he whispered.
She grabbed a tissue, muttered her thanks and blew her nose hard. A quick check of her watch told her she’d now have to speed those ninety minutes to reach her grandmother.
She sensed him before he touched her shoulders. His large hands were warm and reassuring. He was such a...such a...problem.
“Let me make it up to you,” he said. He tugged her toward him so that she could see him, a crooked smile in a sun-reddened face, and a shock of too-perfect hair falling over his wide, tanned forehead. “I’m really sorry. Uh...how ’bout going for food?” Blue eyes stared into hers. More questions lingered in their depths. What?
Emma straightened. She needed distance from this man whose gaze gathered her close. Too close. “Man moratorium! Irresponsible— Undependable— I—I have an urgent appointment!” Her voice, intended to be strong and off-putting, wobbled and squeaked.
His eyes widened. “Appointment? Oh, I...uh...” He instantly released her and fled across the field, scattering students in his wake, who looked disappointed that the show was over.
Never in her wildest expectations had she anticipated how good a defense this man moratorium would be. It was a little sad, actually.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_ec6dd65c-abf4-53fd-888b-f7088c546f6d)
NAOMI STARED AGHAST at her granddaughter as she blew into the hospital room—late, mind you—to join her, Chet and the neurologist. The child had bits of yellowed grass in her hair along with streaks of dirt on her face, hands and T-shirt. A couple of the facial and knee scrapes were oozing blood. What on earth had Emma been doing?
Soon, Chet, Emma and the doctor, who looked young enough to be one of Emma’s students, were watching her eat as if she was some freak exhibit at the state fair. What she would give for a Dew Drop kitchen-sink omelet, hash browns with cheese and a strong cup of coffee, heavy on the cream.
Since the tubes in her nose didn’t help the eating process any with what passed for food here, she pushed at the tray. Emma pulled the rolling table away from the bed.
“Are you in pain, Nomi?” Emma’s brows furrowed, perplexed most likely at Naomi’s swift change of expression.
No, dear, she wanted to say, that had been a smile on my face at seeing you here in town, where you belong. Drat it. Would the girl never pick up on one of her cues? She sighed.
The girl probably didn’t understand she was talking about either the dog or Sparks last night.
Though seeing Emma here now set some of Naomi’s world to rights. Getting on with the Jamboree would stabilize everything. Now, what she needed most was for that charming young man to arrive, so Naomi could let them know how it was going to be for the summer. Then she could work on getting out of this terrible place and supervise the rest of the event details from home. Home.
Chet put an arm around her shoulders. “Relax, Naomi. You have to depend on others this year.”
How did he read her mind, and more important, had he also lost his? Who did he think could pull off the town’s biggest moneymaking opportunity, especially this year when the event was do or die? She turned her head so she could see her granddaughter full-on. Only Emma could be trusted with organizing the Jamboree, and then, only with Naomi’s assistance.
Emma understood tradition, or at least had, until the two of them had had a misunderstanding at Raymond’s funeral. Emma had made too much of it.
“I’ve seen worse strokes,” the neurologist was saying to Emma, as though discussing cuts of meat. He lounged against the bathroom doorway, one hand resting on the monitor, the other loosely in his pants’ pocket. Naomi thought his bedside manner needed work. After several more minutes of being treated as though she was invisible, Naomi struggled to get words out, ignoring Chet’s pressure on her shoulders. “You can t-t-talk to me, d-doctor. I—I’m not dead.”
The doctor’s face reddened and he shifted over to face Naomi. “The stroke has affected you a great deal, Mrs. Chambers. Due to the trauma to your left side, you’ll need six to eight weeks in a rehabilitation center to regain the use of your hand and increase stability. Therapy’s essential.” He slipped the stethoscope from around his neck and checked his watch.
Naomi wanted to snort, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. She’d never neglected a thing in her life. Except—the sting of the secret burned—neglecting that one thing Emma needed to know.
“She’ll recover completely, though, won’t she?” Chet asked.
She wanted to cheer; someone was finally asking a decent question. The next one should be, “When can she be discharged?”
Emma was chewing on her little finger like she always did when thinking deeply. Naomi had never broken her of the habit.
The doctor glanced at the time again.
Straightening, Emma tugged at the hems of her scruffy shorts. She looked at Naomi, and then at the physician. “She’ll get there,” she answered, determination clear in her voice.
Naomi cocked her head. She’d been racking her brain to think of a way to get Emma to come home and give up the silly trip Raymond was always encouraging her to take. Had something good come out of this horrendous event?
The doctor nodded. “She’ll be ready to go, most likely, in a day or two.” He typed in notes on his tablet. “I’m writing orders for eight weeks’ on-site physical and occupational therapy at an extended-care facility. Garden Terrace is good.”
An old folks’ home? Naomi about lifted straight off the sheets. If any of them thought she was going to an old folks’ home, they had beets for brains.
Where was Sparks?
What had happened to Emma’s face?
Someone had better start doing some talking, and fast.
* * *
WITH HIS STOMACH reminding him how close lunch was, Sparks dashed up the wide steps of the hospital two at a time, sweating in heat more typical of Las Vegas than Colorado. He wanted Naomi to confirm one thing: yes, his contract was a go.
He’d been having too good a time so far, he chastised himself. He would have to stay focused. His job was everything to him.
Still, it’d been easy to get caught up in the charming flavor of the town. Besides knowing he would enjoy Monday’s parade, there were the barbecue invites from Duff, Willard and Ray and their families, and fun at the lake with new friend Ben, owner of Washed Ashore Marina.
On the heels of that enjoyable thought came the image of Emma. Yes, from the kids at the football field he knew that he’d flattened “poor little Emma,” who was Naomi’s sidekick and had been a favorite teacher at Heaven High. That bit of a woman who’d saved his life and looked as though she had too many heavy concerns weighing on her mind... She was the miracle the town was waiting for? His gallant tackle had delighted the crowd. Her, not so much.
He winced, remembering the laser stare and the knifelike words—irresponsible, undependable—as they’d left her rosy lips. They were taking turns saving each other, he thought, and wished he’d said that when she was telling him, among other things, that she wasn’t a tackling dummy.
Forcing himself to slow to a trot, he strode through the hospital room door that he’d been directed to. There lay Naomi Chambers, mayor of the town, glaring at him; Chet; the doctor and— His breath caught. Dirty, bloody and gaping at him wide eyed was his summer girl. Hopefully.
The doctor nodded to Sparks on his way out. Chet stepped over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming, son.”
Son. Something deep inside stirred, melted a bit.
“L-late,” said Naomi, closing her eyes as though his tardiness was too much for her to bear. “Emma, go f-find out when someone is coming to t-take this tray.”
“I’ll take it, Nomi.” Emma moved to pick up the tray, but Naomi waved her off.
“You d-don’t g-get paid to do that. They d-do.”
Emma’s face froze and she abruptly left the room.
Wow. Growing up under Naomi’s thumb suddenly made him traveling the world alone not seem so bad.
Naomi waved again; this time a royal sweep of her hand drew him to the chair beside her bed.
“Mrs. Chambers...” No matter how far he’d travelled or who he met, the manners he’d been taught by Mother Egan would always remain with him. He leaned in. “I don’t want to bother you. I just want to make sure everything is still a go for the fireworks.”
Now, up close and personal, he drew in a breath.
Light from the window showed every line, all the gray folds in her face and neck. Word at the Rexall soda fountain was that Naomi Chambers was “too stubborn to die.” Judging from her pasty complexion, death had nearly succeeded.
Naomi drew the covers up to her shoulders with her right hand, while Sparks waited for her to continue.
But the silence grew.
Chet stood by the window, peering outside.
Am I in trouble? Sparks rubbed his neck. I can’t be in trouble. He sneaked a peek at Naomi. Why do I feel as if I’m in trouble? The silence persisted.
“How are you feeling?” Sparks ventured.
She twitched slightly. “As w-well as...c-can be expected with—” she swallowed and closed her eyes, then reopened them “—s-somebody w-waking me up every fifteen m-minutes to see if I’m still alive.” If she hadn’t spoken, he might have done the same.
At breakfast, the guys had mentioned that folks were taking bets on whether Naomi would go to rehab if ordered. Had Emma been speeding to see her grandmother when she’d stopped to help him? His respect for her flourished. She’d taken the time to help him, a stranger, while needing to be with family.
“T-to be honest, young man, finances are tight, but you’ll be paid.”
A whoosh of relief left him. “My fireworks always draw a good crowd, so that’ll raise quite a lot of money for the town.”
Summer was on. He only needed one good pyrotechnic event to get back in the game.
As he heard Emma greeting some nurses in the hallway, Naomi wiggled closer, gesturing with a beckoning finger. Sparks hunched forward.
“You’ll be p-paid, but I want you to h-help Emma—coplan with her. But don’t b-breathe a word...until I say so.”
Sparks’s face flushed with heat and embarrassment; his mouth dried so fast he could feel its hinges creak. Help plan the Jamboree?
There were two immediate problems with that edict. First, he didn’t know a thing about planning a Jamboree. Fireworks, yes. But that was it. Second, if he worked closely with the townsfolk and they really got to know him, they would eventually find out he was the type to let them down.
He frowned. Hadn’t the guys at the Dew Drop said Emma was leaving?
* * *
EMMA SWUNG OPEN the door, her back teeth grinding in the old familiar way, ready to tell her grandmother that the nurses said someone would be right in to take the silly tray, when Sparks leaped up and barreled out of the room. She watched him go.
What had caused his face to blush so deeply?
Even though there were more pressing issues, such as Nomi’s rehab and Emma’s own escape, she showed her grandmother the Organic District cinnamon-bomb bread from the tote bag she’d left by the bed. “I forgot. I brought this for you.” Then she looked at the empty chair. “What did you say to him?”
Nomi’s eyes gleamed. “We...were talking about the Jamboree...telling h-h-him...fun.”
This wasn’t the way to stay on track with her goal. This was her grandmother trying to control the situation just like always. “Not for me.”
Emma summoned her courage. Here goes. She took in a big breath. Think new green suitcases, think British Airways.
“Emma...” Nomi’s lips, lopsided now, twisted as she spoke. “You...liked it. Miss F-f-fire...crac...ker...you r-remember?”
Emma did remember and was glad Sparks wasn’t around to hear the tale. What had made him tear off like that?
What had she just been thinking about? Oh, yeah, the Miss Firecracker pageant. Indeed, she did remember. Short the required number of contestants for the kiddie pageant, Naomi had coerced Emma and her best friend Zoo to participate.
As they did every year, a group of townspeople protested this exploitation of women. Required to wear a red, white or blue T-shirt and blue shorts, each five-to seven-year-old contestant sang a patriotic song or twirled a baton to the same sort of tune. No bathing suits, no interviews about world peace.
Emma and Zoo, unfortunately, did not sing on key and were not particularly coordinated. Zoo agonized through “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and Emma gave herself a black eye from her baton. Neither of them won, and Emma had thrown the baton in the lake. She now changed the subject. “Think how fast you will progress with twice-a-day therapy.”
A vehement shake of Naomi’s head.
“Nomi—”
Naomi stretched her lips with effort. “Me...” She stopped and drew in a deep breath. “P-planning would be a little much...”
A little? Denial is a warm bedfellow on a cold night of reality.
Naomi nodded. “Someone else...plan it.”
Emma’s spirits soared. Here was a breakthrough. If Nomi was going to be reasonable about this, why not the rehab?
“Someone will turn up,” Emma enthused. A girl had to move on. Right on to England, Lady Emma. “The Jamboree has always been and always will be around, so there’s no need to worry. Now, let’s get you ready for transport to the facility, Nomi. I’ll have the nurse bring the transfer forms.”
Her grandmother rose up on her good elbow like Napoleon on his deathbed. “Emma,” her imperial tone commanded. With eyes boring into Emma’s, the left one slightly unfocused, she said, “You must p-plan the J-jamboree.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_00f52ba5-8552-5099-b6b2-d8da0f361d36)
SHE KNEW SHE sounded juvenile, but it wasn’t fair. Dashing away the wetness on her cheeks, Emma half ran, half walked out of the hospital.
Every time she reached for something, her grandmother would snatch it out of her hand: sleepovers rejected for civic service, particular friends deemed unsuitable. The list ran on and on.
Emma crossed the parking lot, the asphalt so heated it felt squishy under her sneakered feet. A tall woman dodged out of Emma’s way and then grabbed her by the arms.
“Zoo!” Emma exclaimed.
“Hey, Emms.” Zoo hugged her. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the bulls at Jem Silver’s ranch. Sorry I didn’t text as soon as I heard you were in town. I’ve been swamped.”
Zoo would be a voice of reason in this mess. They’d been friends forever, as different as two people could be. Zoo, thin, with black hair and pale blue eyes, attracted boys like flies on manure, as Emma was fond of saying. Zoo spoke her mind and got away with it. Zoo had sweated away on ranches and farms since she was old enough to ride her bike from town.
This work ethic of Zoo’s had earned her Nomi’s seal of approval. Zoo was everything her grandmother wanted, and Emma never heard the end of it. Fortunately, Zoo was also fun and kind.
Emma steered her friend toward the Omni. “Do you know what she did to me this time?”
Zoo grinned. “Haven’t heard that in a while. What’s the tyrant up to now?” She had, on more than one occasion, stood up to Naomi, inspiring awe in Emma.
Emma rationalized that it was easier to butt heads with Naomi when you weren’t related. Chet did it all the time, and he lived. Then again, it could be Zoo and Chet were vertebrates, unlike herself.
“She told—no, ordered—me to plan the Jamboree. Never mentioned my trip to Europe once.” New situation, old anger, she acknowledged, but it seemed fresh each time it happened.
A flood of words gushed forth as Emma unlocked the door to her car. Heat poured out. “My only family member, and she pulls rank like when she got me a teaching job at the high school without asking me—and I went along with it. Like when Nomi overrode Grumpa on...on just about everything.” She moved around the outside of the car, opening doors and windows. “Darn it, I hate feeling like I have no backbone.”
“Lighten up, Emma. Tell your grandmother you won’t do it. But don’t hate her for asking—um, assuming.”
Emma hid a grudging smile. “How can I love someone so much and still want to put massive distance between us?”
“You don’t want Nomi out of your life, just out of the way of your life.”
“You ruined a perfectly good temper tantrum, you know?”
Her friend smiled. “My day, I guess.” She laughed as she said, “Just told Jem Silver his sperm count’s too low to breed. That ruined his day, too.” She laughed some more at Emma’s open mouth. “For his bull to breed.”
Emma imagined the scene with the handsome rancher and a giggle slipped out. She slid into the sizzling seat. “Yow. Hot. Okay. I’ll go back to town, drum up a replacement—before I hit Nomi with my decision.” She turned the key and squinted up at her friend, standing next to the car. “Thanks, Zoo.”
“Any time, you reactionary, you. Hey, what’s this I hear about the summer stud tackling you in front of the entire student body? That where your face got messed up?”
* * *
AS EMMA ENTERED TOWN, loneliness wormed its way around her heart. Sparks’s offer of food to make up for driving her into the dirt came to mind. If she hadn’t imposed a man moratorium, she’d go out with him.
He’d be fun. She wanted fun. She wanted—oh, blast—she wanted to stuff her face at the Dairy Delite. Emma punched the brakes and careened into the hamburger stand’s parking lot. The squeal drew the looks of those lined up by the order window, including a blond man towering above the others.
With his head thrown back, Sparks was laughing at something someone in the group had said. By the time she cooled her face enough to get out of the car and walk to the window, the others had drifted away, leaving Sparks to watch her approach.
“Hi,” he said.
Zoo’s teasing zipped through her head, and she blushed. Their complexions matched, red for red. On the heels of that was Zoo’s suggestion she find a replacement to plan the Jamboree.
Emma needed someone who got along well with everyone, although why that would be a requirement since her grandmother didn’t, Emma wasn’t sure, but it seemed a good thing. And the best person would be one who didn’t know how...how her grandmother could be. That left no one who lived in Heaven and the surrounding area. “Hi, yourself,” she replied.
Those fabulous blues scanned her face, and then his gaze flickered away.
“You ran away from my grandmother.” Really, she didn’t blame him.
The redness of his face deepened as he glanced down at his foot and scraped some gravel.
She continued in a brisk tone, “Can you believe my grandmother ordered me to plan the Jamboree? I’m about to go to England.” She’d leave out the part about being dumped by Brad. About how “baby, I’ll always be there for you” was merely a fairy tale.
Today she was especially looking for someone to lift her spirits.
“Imagine that,” he muttered, and stared at the ground, watching an ant struggle with a crumb of bun. “She say anything else?”
“No.” Somebody ought to tell Mr. Gorgeous about SPF 45. If he kept burning his face like that, he’d be getting bumps frozen off with liquid nitrogen by age forty.
“Nothing else?” He seemed somewhat disappointed; no, bitterly disappointed.
Obviously, she didn’t know him well—but still, she expected excitement, interest. Instead, he seemed as stimulated by her pronouncement as an eighth grader assigned to plot a time line for the Revolutionary War.
Starla Fleming slid the window open with a bang. Sparks startled.
“Are you gonna order something, Emma? If you’re not, I’m gonna sit in the back and watch my soaps,” Starla rasped, then peered at Emma’s scraped face.
Emma ordered an orange cream shake after a wary look at the scab Starla was scratching on her arm. The woman disappeared from the window, the roar of the shake machine following.
Emma turned back to Sparks. “My grandmother thinks she can con me into organizing the Jamboree. I have my own life.” Who could she find to take her place? Someone ignorant of her grandmother’s schemes, that was who. She scrolled through a mental list... Empty.
Her red-faced companion chewed his bottom lip and swept the toe of his sneaker back and forth. Finally, he looked up at her. “She trusts you, Emma. It’s a big year.”
Emma’s disgust came blurting out in an ugly noise. That was feminine, she thought, duly embarrassed. She cleared her throat. “Big year, my foot. The Jamboree hasn’t changed in my lifetime. She’s charmed you like I hear you’re charming the rest of the town. You don’t know what it’s like. All you have to do is design the fireworks, pass your instructions over to your techs and skip on to the next adventure.” Stop it, Emma. Transferring her anger at her grandmother to this innocent visitor was not cool.
“Hey, Spaaarks!” kids yelled from a passing car. “Dude!”
The man was a magnet. Everyone liked him. The hair on her arms prickled, then she gave him a broad, welcoming smile, like a hungry spider that had spotted a fly.
And he’s new in town.
The window being flung open startled them both this time. Starla’s arm emerged. After a quick look for the scab, Emma slid her money through the window and grabbed the shake. The window slid shut. A moment later, the blast of a TV sounded.
“I’ve had things not turn out. I know what it feels like,” Sparks said, his brilliant blues on her boring hazels.
She jutted out her chin, momentarily forgetting her mission in the rush of resentment. “Sure you have.” But her tone was not friendly. She’d be the first to admit she was acting the drama queen. Pull yourself together, girl.
Should she ask him straight out to run the Jamboree or make more small talk? Hadn’t he wanted to make it up to her for slamming her into the end zone in front of the under-eighteen population of Heaven?
“My dream was to have parents. It never happened.” He said the words matter-of-factly, as if he’d commented on the heat, which was substantial and was pitting her underarms out in a most unbecoming way.
The ant in the crack by her feet suddenly seemed immense compared to how small she felt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” she managed to choke out.
Sparks must have sat on the front steps like she had on birthdays. She used to imagine her mother was a lost princess held by a wicked king.
“Maybe you ought to go see your grandmother and get it straightened out,” he said.
This reminded Emma of her brilliant idea. She sucked up another mouthful of shake while she scrutinized his burned face. “You might want to wear a heftier sunscreen.”
“My face isn’t always this red.” He mopped his brow.
But Emma was barely listening. “Didn’t you say you wanted to make it up to me, you know, for tackling me?”
The color of his faced plunged to a deeper shade. “With food. I said, food.”
Perhaps, Emma thought, looking more closely—easy to do with Sparks—he was blushing. What had she said that would make him blush? Oh, never mind the man’s skin tone, she chided. Get to the point.
She leaned toward him, eyes wide in entreaty. She hoped it looked like entreaty and not that her contacts had dried out. “What if you planned the Jamboree? You’re getting to know a lot of people here. They like you.”
“Me?” His voice shot up. Somewhat cute, really. “I...already have a job. You really should talk to your grandmother.”
Emma released an exasperated sound. “You only have to design your fireworks. You don’t even have to blow them up. So you’ll have all sorts of free time. Nomi’s created this gigantic black binder with all the procedures already mapped out.” She snapped her fingers. “Piece of cake.”
Sparks’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Emma, talk to your grandmother.”
She stepped back. Sparks looked as if he wanted to crawl under the ant.
A familiar emotion crept up Emma’s neck. “What is it you don’t want to tell me?” she asked. “I can see it in your face.” She hadn’t taught junior high for nothing. Very good liars aside, she’d learned to spot omissions.
He gulped. “I’m no good at keeping secrets, but she made me, Emma, I swear.”
So that was the reason for his flushed face and repeated urges for her to talk to her grandmother. For “she” could only mean one person. One person who didn’t need a first or a last name. One person who thought she was the master puppeteer. Emma’s back teeth fused. She gritted out, “What did my grandmother make you promise not to tell me?”
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_5608957f-d333-55ea-89ee-688aa57bc50f)
EMMA LEANED INTO the heavy glass door of the IGA, still minus a replacement after a night of thinking. One day left to clear up everything and still make her flight.
Her grandmother was an adult, as Brad had said repeatedly. Nobody could blame Emma. She’d done everything.
Everyone was afraid of her grandmother. And it didn’t matter that it would probably be a kick to work with resident summer-fun guy Sparks Turner. Chet had been no help. Zoo had run through the same options Emma had conjured up.
Then Emma had felt guilty about wanting others to solve her problem, then gotten mad about feeling guilty, then guilty about being mad about it. Then she’d eaten way too many slices of butter-soaked cinnamon toast to forget the whole matter.
The pungent odor of extrasharp cheddar cheese twitched her nose. Mr. Telford and his wife had sold the grocery store to their son Vince. He’d graduated a few years behind Emma. Vince broke off his whistling to greet her from behind the meat counter. Resting his big forearms in front of him, he grinned. “Emma, what can I get you? Got some nice chops. How’s your grandmother?”
“My grandmother is going to be fine. She’s a Chambers.” Her eyes roamed the deli case. Mmm. Twice-baked potatoes. A little comfort food might help tonight while she changed a lifetime pattern and came up with a good idea fast.
One crummy day to get it right.
Vince’s gaze shifted up and beyond her shoulder. “Sparks! Looking for lunch?”
Emma whirled to find Sparks looking at her, his expression changing the second she locked eyes with him. Those questions when she caught him watching her... Was he thinking, “What is her problem? What is the big deal here?”
As she hurriedly began to inspect every single item in the deli case as though it was the most fascinating deli case on the planet, a new idea struck.
“Hey, Vince, I’m looking for someone to run the Jamboree. Wanna apply?”
Vince laughed as if she’d told the funniest joke he’d ever heard. “Em, this weekend has been a great start to the summer so far. My barbecue went out the door in slabs.” He tied the string around the potato wrapped in white butcher paper and pushed it toward her. “Hope the Jamboree will be enough.”
Emma grasped the package and tucked it in her basket. “Enough for what?”
As he bent across the deli case to respond, a bullhorn voice, elevated to carry into the next county, vibrated through the store. “Vincent, how do you expect to stay in business if you don’t have what people need?”
Vince patted Emma’s hand and stepped aside to wait on Sparks, whose eyes had widened at the stentorian bellow.
“It’s only Beryl,” Vince reassured him.
Feral Beryl wore a chip on her shoulder the size of Heaven Lake, daring anyone to breathe on it, much less knock it off.
While Emma was growing up next door to the woman, balls that went over The Berlin Wall never came back, at first. Grumpa would have to go and get them. Then one day Beryl started returning the balls over the fence and that was that. To be fair, Emma thought, Beryl had had her share of hard times.
After leaving the deli counter, Emma dropped a loaf of sourdough from a local organic bakery into her basket alongside the tomatoes, lettuce and bacon.
Beryl and her alcoholic husband had screamed at each other for years until the night he’d gone for beer and didn’t come home. Old Mae Cunningham swore that evening’s events had sealed the deep line between Beryl’s eyebrows and gradually added more than a hundred pounds to the woman. Now Feral Beryl lumbered around in a caftan and sandals. Once she retired, she spent most of her time working in her backyard and criticizing town events.
A warm hand landed on Emma’s shoulder and caught her attention. Sparks. In the produce aisle. Standing very near to her.
“Look,” he said, his hand remaining on her shoulder until Emma shot a pointed glance toward it. “You don’t want to plan this Jamboree.”
“I don’t.” Finally they agreed on something.
He spotted the items in her basket. “BLTs! How ’bout I buy some more bacon and we make ’em together?” At Emma’s silence, he shrugged. “Sorry.”
Although...maybe the sandwich making would give her an opportunity to convince Sparks to take on the five-day Fourth of July event.
“I don’t want to plan it, either, to be honest. I’m on vacation. A man of the world, committed to no one. So let’s find someone else.” His grin indicated his pleasure at solving both of their problems.
Emma sighed and moved toward the checkout. Great. Only she’d already solved both of their problems.
As she opened her mouth to reply that she was busy—man moratorium, you know—the phone in her pocket buzzed and played the opening chords of “I Will Survive.” She moved a couple of steps away and answered the call. “Hello?”
It was the nurse she’d spoken to at Garden Terrace, the temporary facility for the next step of her grandmother’s recovery. The doctor had cleared her grandmother for rehab, but Naomi was having none of it. “There’s no medical reason to keep her at the hospital...and I think they need the bed...” The nurse’s voice trailed off. She thanked the woman, said she’d be in touch and ended the call.
Emma decided on and then added shortbread cookies and chunky chocolate fudge ice cream to her basket as she tried to think of something helpful. A breath later, she felt, rather than saw Sparks beside her, his warmth reaching out to her.
What was she going to do? Her mind flashed to a picture of her grandmother grinning and holding up a map of England, taunting her.
She changed directions and headed toward the checkout, and heard Beryl again, informing Vince of more of her opinions. “If I was running the Jamboree, there’d be changes, I can tell you.”
Evidently, Beryl’s changes would start with changing the organizer’s title from Jamboree coordinator to supreme empress of the universe. Her grandmother would hitchhike from Garden Terrace as soon as she heard crazy news like that. Not that it would ever happen. Nomi would never allow it.
Emma stepped up to the checkout, Sparks at her side. He had the sense, she was relieved to find, to not say a word. Something. She had to come up with something to get her grandmother to rehab. If she didn’t get better— Tears smarted in Emma’s eyes.
“I’d get rid of that Cadillac Naomi rides in during the parade. It smacks of elitism. And if you ask me...”
Nobody had asked Beryl. Nobody ever did. Naomi had first rode in a Cadillac in the early 70s as mayor when an Evanston car dealership offered it; Grumpa had ridden with her as fire chief. Eliminating that tradition from the Jamboree had as much chance of happening as Beryl did of running the show this year or any year.
Emma’s feet stopped moving. If Nomi knew Beryl was thinking of changing the Jamboree... Of running the event? This...this might work. Her grandmother would never agree to go to Garden Terrace unless—unless her grandmother got something she wanted in return. This time the tears were for Emma herself.
She hit Redial and was connected to the nurse. “I’ll get her there,” Emma promised. It took only minutes to make the arrangements. A pang in her heart struck deep. But the longer her grandmother was not in rehab, the less she’d recover. Could Emma depend on the lengths Nomi might go to keep Beryl out of the Jamboree?
Emma closed her eyes, feeling faint. Had it come down to this? The shores of England began to cloud with fog. An image from the movie My Fair Lady, which she and Grumpa loved, faded quickly.
With the basket slung over her arm, Emma forced her legs to engage and continue walking to the register.
“Are you—” Sparks began.
Emma flung up a hand as if to ward off his kindness. “Please.”
“Can I help?”
“No.” To get lost in those eyes would ruin everything for her. The man moratorium had to get her through.
Another intense gaze, and then he nodded as though confirming something to himself. Sparks turned and strode out of the store.
* * *
AFTER LETTING TROUBLE OUT, filling the Omni with gas and grabbing a yogurt at the house, Emma headed for the Organic District before driving to the hospital.
Emma had no doubt that her grandmother would take the bait, once she dangled Beryl’s potential involvement in the Jamboree in front of her. The chasm between Nomi and her neighbor had erupted long before Emma had had memories, and nothing could induce her grandmother to let Beryl replace her.
A special loaf of bread would, however, hopefully reward the hospital staff for taking care of her difficult relative. They would need a treat, for her grandmother was, so far, still refusing to go to Garden Terrace.
A few miles out of town, a large carved sign heralded what was referred to as the OD. Organic farmers, ranchers, artisans and crafters rented small wooden stalls and sold their wares to residents and tourists passing on the county road. Organic gardens stretched behind the buildings.
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Kathy Damp
Sometimes love is right in front of youEmma Chambers wasn't supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug "Sparks" Turner has an important job to do, yet it's Emma who's feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she's been waiting for, right?Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn't staying, especially given the life-changing secret she's discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma's trust. Unless he can make her see that he's a man worth taking a chance on.
Sometimes love is right in front of you
Emma Chambers wasn’t supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug “Sparks” Turner has an important job to do, yet it’s Emma who’s feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she’s been waiting for, right?
Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn’t staying, especially given the life-changing secret she’s discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma’s trust. Unless he can make her see that he’s a man worth taking a chance on.
Sparks laughed and chucked her under the chin.
His touch set off so many alarm bells that Emma forgot to watch for the inevitable with Trouble and the lake. The dog shook the water from himself, gathering velocity as the shake intensified. Sparks and Emma ducked behind the cottonwood tree that had been there ever since Emma could remember.
That tree would be gone, as well. No need for a shade tree under bazillions of gallons of water.
She turned to Sparks. “It really is true. It’s not just that the town is out of money. It could also be flooded?” Surprise tears stung her eyes. Why did she care? She was leaving as soon as her plans were finalized.
Sparks’s shoulder, so close to hers, invited her to snuggle into him, hoping he’d tell her everything would be all right.
Dear Reader (#ulink_df5d2947-cfde-54d5-8c63-0047849a51a3),
As a teen, I handwrote pages and pages of romance novels after discovering Mills & Boon books in my Adirondack Mountains village library. Years later, welcome to my first novel for Mills & Boon Heartwarming, titled Waiting for Sparks.
While staying by a lake with the same too-blue-to-believe water as is in my book with my husband and border collie—the model for Trouble—I thought: What if this place was Heaven for one person and another couldn’t wait to leave? Then, the hero, Sparks, introduced himself. And I met Emma and her grandmother Nomi. Soon afterward, I knew secrets and running after what you think you want would make a great story.
I hope you get caught up in this special place and its people just as I did. I’d love to hear from you.
Kathy
Waiting for Sparks
Kathy Damp
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
KATHY DAMP loves to write about characters who discover they are more than they know and who realize that saving the world can take many forms. Walking on fire this past summer caused her to wonder what else she could do that she didn’t think was possible. When not writing, she rides bikes and kayaks with her husband throughout the West.
To my Adventure Guy and husband, Fred. Without your unflagging support, Emma and Sparks would never have gotten together. Thanks for always being willing to stop the car one more time to explore a novel idea. Here’s to ever so many more adventures.
Contents
Cover (#u5096fbb3-c3ca-52f3-a454-bcdef3007ff5)
Back Cover Text (#ueaee0b98-e3a2-5aa9-bd33-1a95891602ee)
Introduction (#u370e2a99-a17b-5d55-8246-ed73c0bdcbb7)
Dear Reader (#ulink_b0f0a0d0-4286-5403-83b9-24a2d479c7ba)
Title Page (#u1a2e2ef0-c7d8-5e52-8fc4-1dab2f2f727d)
About the Author (#uff83405c-9341-5584-9487-61b155a8ad1a)
Dedication (#u7dc3dffb-c653-58d5-a019-3b606a71228e)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_800b8334-c111-5bb0-a639-12236a0e2c74)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_24d4060d-36d2-5e58-bb6e-4459ff4f624a)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_2b5391d4-2e6b-5906-85cd-58999695a7e3)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_3fa64673-63df-5a69-82e6-958586c85bb2)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_fa893814-3637-5d51-844a-1ddf233701e8)
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_0130ac3b-c495-5170-81e8-6bfb6aad69b1)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_5dd5646e-6940-525a-854f-9a5e7af6a2a1)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_3377f67c-28bf-5a34-b506-2c5cb2585ccb)
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_e997428d-3aa7-5f01-b128-e7d74d2bd27b)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a07e14a3-5dea-5fa9-9a00-678028d9bb7f)
SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING.
Naomi Chambers clutched at her son’s hand, her salt-and-pepper hair plastered wet against her skull. Where terror ought to have been, her son’s face revealed only a cocky boredom. Her grip on him was saving him from the abyss, but her hand was cramping with fatigue. Why didn’t he fight? Try to help himself? His hand slipped from hers.
Jerked half-awake, Naomi Chambers opened her eyes.
Plants... She’d been watering the plants in the front room and thinking about the upcoming Memorial Day weekend.
Now, she was... She turned her head to the right, toward the beep-beep of a machine. She was at the regional hospital, most likely. Where her husband, Raymond, had died. The results on the screen looked a little puny.
Next to the machine, a plastic bag hung on a pole with a long tube dripping into the back of her hand. The two prongs blowing oxygen into her nose rubbed her nostrils; her left hand traveled to them.
Her darling granddaughter, Emma. I need to tell you... Naomi had waited too long.
The same night Emma had arrived as a tiny infant, a shrieking duet of anger and anguish between two women had exploded outside the house, a sound unheard in their town of Heaven.
Then the doorbell.
Every detail remained scoured into her being: Raymond checking his Timex, her insisting he take the gun from the bedside table in case a rancher had gotten tanked at The Wayside Inn and decided to persuade the bank president to reconsider a declined loan with the business end of a shotgun...
Some time later, she lifted heavy eyelids toward the beeping monitors. She dashed away wetness from her cheeks, but not before a few tears dropped into an ear. “Tears don’t solve problems,” her mother had always said. Looking toward the door, Naomi saw only graininess. She blinked. No change. She blinked again, becoming aware that she couldn’t feel her left arm. A singeing terror flared from her chest and out to the tips of the opposite arm.
Trying to breathe deeply, blinking again at the hospital ceiling, she fought the shadow of sleep. Two years had been too long for this stalemate between grandmother and granddaughter. If only Emma would be sensible and return to Heaven. Naomi hoped the young man she’d hired for the Jamboree fireworks would ignite a hometown spark in her granddaughter.
She’d met him at a Western Alliance conference of mayors, where he’d spoken on the advantage of pyrotechnics for civic events. From the longing in his eyes as she’d regaled him with the wonders of her Rocky Mountain village, he’d stay. Fall in love with Emma. Then she’d stay, too.
“Naomi? You decent?” A gravelly voice interrupted her plotting. Chet Jensen’s weathered face peered into the room. He approached, a frown creasing his expression as he took in the machines. “I told the nurse I was your fiancé so she’d let me in.” Gently taking her hand in his, he wriggled his eyebrows. “’Course, that means you’ll have to marry me now.”
Naomi tried to smile, riding the wobbly waves of semiconsciousness. As the crackle of terror began to subside thanks to Chet’s presence, she struggled to think. Had he called Emma? Surely, he had called Emma...
“To save you the bother of trying to spit out all the questions, I’ll fill you in,” Chet said, settling himself in the chair next to her bed. “It’s Thursday night. The EMTs got a call that you’d fallen.” He seemed to read her mind. “I don’t know who called. Good thing someone did. You’ve had a stroke. Do you remember the ride here?”
On the heels of the horror of the word stroke applied to her for the second time in as many years, Naomi tried to recall how much Raymond’s ambulance ride had cost and if that irresponsible Juggy Burnett had driven her in the silly thing.
“N-no.” But how could she not remember? Memory like an elephant, everybody said. Then her insides were seared with a remembrance. She had not yet told Emma what the girl needed to know, what Emma must hear only from Naomi. Her eyelids fluttered. “Wh-where’s Emma?” Bags of flour pressed her lids down. “I almost missed my chance to tell her that...” Sleep closed in.
* * *
EMMA TOOK A deep breath and blew it out. Suitcases by the door.
Check.
Mail set to be held at the post office.
Check.
Passport—her first. Big smile.
Check.
Ticket to England.
Oh, check, check, check.
She was doing it. Actually keeping the promise she’d made to her grandfather to get a new life while he’d been ending his. Emma Chambers’s lips trembled as she swallowed the thickness in her throat. A crooked smile formed as she glanced at the rest of the checklist in her hand. Her with a checklist. Normally, she was as scattered as leaves in the wind, but not with this trip. It was too important. The smile faded. For almost all of her thirty years, Emma had vacillated between wishing she was more like her grandmother to avoiding any habits that hinted at her grandmother’s top three: order, control and action. Naomi Chambers, Nomi to Emma, lived by checklists. And controlled everyone. Especially Emma. She loved her grandmother. She just wanted an ocean between them for a while.
Emma bit her lip and shifted her purse to her other shoulder, peering out the basement apartment window. Hurry.
A horn sounded outside as the blue and yellow van pulled up. The shuttle to the airport, then on to Denver to meet Brad. Then—England. I’m doing it, Grumpa.
Picking up her suitcases, she shook her head. “Boyfriend. Brad is your boyfriend.” She said it out loud to make the point. So why did her heart skitter away from thinking of him as that? Brad was always telling her, “Baby, I’m here for you.” The peripatetic day trader was fun. She needed fun. Yet sometimes—she refused to let her thoughts go here often—Brad seemed, well, about half an inch deep.
Her cell rang in the new traveler’s purse. Setting down one suitcase, she dug in the bag slung across her chest and checked the caller ID. She wouldn’t put it past her grandmother Naomi to try one last ditch effort to get her to her lair, the tiny Rocky Mountain village of Heaven.
Seeing Chet’s name, she grinned and punched the green button. Good old Chet, retired pharmacist and family friend. “Hey, Chet!”
Moving to the window, she waved at the driver and took in the dust-covered flowers that were at eye level at the edge of the sidewalk. She’d felt like those flowers until the details for the trip had been cemented. No more coated with other people’s ideas. England, here I come. We come, she amended.
“Emma?” Chet Jensen’s deep voice floated over the line. He sounded old and tired, unusual for this vigorous bachelor, who was in love with her widowed grandmother. “Listen, E, honey, your grandma’s had a stroke. Will you come, even with the—the way things are between you?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4e0488f5-7dda-5e8e-bba7-242d38fa97aa)
DOUG “SPARKS” TURNER GRUNTED, curling his lip. A gutless sedan. It wasn’t what he had envisioned for his hair-blowing, stereo-blasting drive up Bigelow Canyon to Heaven, his home for the summer. An hour and a half from the airport, Sparks had had enough of the crappy car and intermittent country music on a tinny-sounding radio.
As he reached over to silence the noise, the right wheels caught the dirt of the curving road’s shoulder. Only a narrow strip separated him from a long drop. He yelped and overcorrected, shooting the little blue car into the opposite lane—thankfully temporarily empty of cars, RVs and trucks towing boats.
Another thump on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop on the wrong side of the road. The woman at the car-rental desk had asked if he’d wanted insurance. Maybe he should have considered it. He shifted to Park, lifted his quivering foot off the brake and sat very still, breathing in pine and dust.
“Pull yourself together, Turner,” his pyrotechnics scheduler had said. “Running in every direction gets you nowhere.”
“Steady,” Sparks spoke aloud. “They can’t pay a dead man.” He needed this job more than he needed the vacation. His last two firework-design gigs had finished with fingers pointed at him, murmurs that he’d lost his touch.
On his most recent job all of the fireworks went off at once. A show that was supposed to last twenty minutes had lasted ninety seconds. One big grand finale with no build-up.
He put the car in gear, placed one hand at ten and the other at two on the steering wheel. Carefully returning to the correct lane, he forced his thoughts to remain on the twists and turns of the granite and evergreens, instead of his problems.
“Watch out for the last curve before heading down into Heaven,” the female clerk had said, brushing his hand with hers and giving him a smile. “I’ve heard it’s a killer.” Worse than the ones he’d already navigated? Ah, a sign heralding the summit. Downhill run. Good.
After meeting with Naomi Chambers in town to discuss business, he’d be able to officially start his vacation. Playing hard and long would retire the doubts he’d begun to have. It would push that yearning for something just out of reach back into the place where he wouldn’t think about it. Home.
Compared to his previous occupation—fighting isolated forest fires—and given his vast experience with pyrotechnic displays all over the world, this particular design for such a small town would be a piece of cake. Small towns were hometowns. He’d borrow this one for the summer. Maybe that would help him out.
He had to be getting close to that turn. He flexed one hand, then the other on the steering wheel. Good. He was tired of green trees, tired of the canyon, tired of thinking... He turned the blind corner in third gear, where, instead of the road continuing straight or even at a reasonable curve, a wall of rock appeared along with a ninety-degree angle.
He barely had time to stomp the brake, wrench the wheel all the way to the right and hope he would skirt the outcropping of granite.
* * *
SHE SHOULD HAVE seen it coming.
Kissing the edge of the speed limit on her way to Heaven, the phone call with Brad—made as soon as she’d ended the call from Chet—bounced around in her brain. Brad’s voice, breezy as always, had stunned Emma.
She smacked the old Omni’s steering wheel with a fist, remembering his words. “No problem, you have to go back home,” he’d said.
“It’s not home,” she’d snapped, apologized and, after his next words, wished she hadn’t.
“Given all those phone calls you ignored from Granny, I had a feeling family ties would come home to roost. I snagged Carmen a few nights ago. She can fly standby. You remember her.”
Carmen was hard to forget with bleached hair, bleached-white teeth...and a husband.
“Carmen? The married Carmen?” Despite wanting to keep her tone neutral, Emma couldn’t stop the sarcasm from catching the word married.
Emma heard the woman in the background call to Brad and ask him where he’d put the massage oil. Brad muffled the phone to answer. When he returned, he said, “We had some good times, Emma. Let’s leave it at that.”
Don’t hang up on me. Emma’s stomach started to grip like it did when she was going to be sick. Then he was gone.
In a swirl of hurt, she’d decided to confront her grandmother. Emma would firmly tell her only relative she was not falling for this ruse, that it was a shame she’d roped Chet into it and that Emma was turning around right now and heading for the airport.
She’d board that plane for England whether Brad and Carmen were on it or not. She could do this. She had to do this. She’d go with, with...a man moratorium in place. Yes, that was it.
Her brain cleared, and her foot pressed the accelerator firmly. No man for her until—well, until a very different type of guy showed up. One that made her see fireworks—or at least a spark. And who was trustworthy. Dependable. One who, when he said, “I’ll be there for you,” really was. Yet, from her perspective, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Ninety minutes later, pulling off the interstate at Evanston, Wyoming, the venerable Omni rumbled along the two-lane highway toward Bigelow Canyon. Emma kept an eye out for deer, skunks and raccoons with their nonexistent road-safety habits. The speedometer climbed; every mile brought Emma closer to the place she had vowed never to return to.
Grumpa had referred to Heaven as the intersection between Are We There Yet and Nowhere. Tucked in a valley with steep canyon sides, it boasted maybe a thousand people, which swelled into many thousands as tourists flocked there for the summer, and especially for the town’s main moneymaker—the Fourth of July Jamboree.
The event lasted from Thursday till Monday. A celebration of a small Western town and America.
It was almost nine o’clock now. And as surely as she took her next breath, by the time she crossed the town limits, her grandmother would be fine, Emma reassured herself. Nomi would be formulating some powerful reason for making Chet her minion on a new project.
Emma remembered she would need both hands on the wheel for the final turn. Only idiots blew down this canyon.
No way would her grandmother actually allow herself to fall ill. Not with her riding herd over the upcoming Jamboree in July. When God created Naomi Chambers, He had given her a double shot of stamina, and on the way out, she had snatched another.
Recognizing a familiar landmark, Emma shifted down for the descent. No one else on the road at this hour. Though Memorial Day weekend, travelers would be up and at it quick tomorrow; the early birds were already in their RVs for the night, parked at the local campgrounds, ready for the kick-off of the town’s summer season.
The Omni’s headlights swept left and right, with Emma letting the engine hold the car back. Biting her lip, she tapped the brake around another curve, readying for the last one.
She recalled smelling tourists’ and semitrailer brakes burning clear through to the center of town, coming from this canyon. Others, who thought they knew better than to slow down, rode with the tow truck or in an ambulance. The slow signs meant slow.
After she downshifted to first for the final blind corner and hairpin turn, she lowered the window; cool canyon air poured in. Here came the turn. She tapped her brakes. What was that ahead? When her headlights illuminated a blue sedan, she squinted. Off into the dark, up against an outcropping of rock spray-painted every year by graduating high school students, was a car lying on its side, steam pouring out from the hood, which was bent at many angles. Emma hit the brakes.
Pulling carefully to a stop at the side of the road along faint double tracks, she eyed the car, heart rate ramping. Yanking up her parking brake, she prayed it would hold on the steep downgrade, shut off the car and regretted that she couldn’t use her cell phone. Everyone in Heaven knew precisely where the lack of signal coverage ended for cell phones, and she wasn’t anywhere near it.
Please don’t be dead. Chastising her short height once again, she ran toward the car, looking around for something to stand on to see into it. Stepping onto a large flat rock that was close—yet not close enough to be really useful—she flung herself toward the car door, hanging on by her fingertips. Now what, genius? She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t let go, so she stretched up and peered into the sedan. She could see him now, see the blue collar of a shirt, a man’s head against the seat. He was blond, he was bloody and he wasn’t moving.
Do something. What?
The figure stirred as her fingers cramped from clutching the car’s side. Any minute now she was going to have to fling herself backward to avoid falling under the car.
His eyes opened, and despite the blood seeping down from a cut on his forehead, she couldn’t help noticing the dark blue eyes. Eyes staring right at her. Eyes with—deep questions? Don’t be dumb, Emma. He has a question as to what happened, not some complicated existential need.
“You’re beautiful—an angel? Am I dead?” he asked, then groaned and put a hand to his head. “My head.”
That struck her as funny—both the beautiful comment and that he actually did have questions—and she giggled, albeit a trifle hysterically. “No, you’re in Bigelow Canyon. The last turn. We call it The Last Nasty.”
“Nasty. Sure. About...how...my luck has been going.” He squeezed out the words.
Her aching fingers reminded her that she needed to change positions. Bending her knees slightly, she edged to the rim of the rock on which she teetered, and then shoved off the car. Back she fell, rear end hitting the ground first. She rolled to the side quickly and stood up, legs shaking. Dramatic rescues had not been part of the itinerary for the England trip, nor were they a common occurrence in her life.
The car door squeaked and then swung open with a metallic groan. The bloody, blue-eyed guy gazed at her and took in the surrounding area with a fuzzy frown.
She stared up at him. Even bloodied he was a jaw dropper. Blond hair sticking out all over, strong cheekbones that rose above a carved chin. Those eyes. Those questions.
“I think we’re both in trouble,” he mumbled, and dragged himself toward the open car door.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b86db9cc-61d6-534f-a7c0-a92e650f164e)
WHAT HAD THE angel girl just asked him? Thunderbolts banged around in Sparks’s head. The dampness and sting on his chin told him he’d have a souvenir of the Compact Car Crunch.
“I said, do you think you have a concussion?”
Minutes before, he’d started a slow pitch out of the car. Somehow—perhaps he’d recall later—she’d grabbed his long legs at the same moment he’d pushed off from the frame. It took him a few moments to realize he’d landed on his rescuer. She uttered gasping, grunting sounds from underneath him.
After he’d rolled off her, they’d both regained their breath, and she’d lugged his two suitcases out of the trunk and into her car. He focused on standing upright and making his legs move toward it, only to collapse onto the passenger seat. Oh, was his head throbbing.
She’d steered out onto the road, and they were on their way. Angel girl, Sparks thought. Short, dark haired and curvy in beige capris and a light-colored knit shirt, she was the prettiest part of the trip so far. And the prettiest thing to ever save him. Now, what was her name? It wasn’t like him to miss getting a name.
In the light of the dashboard, the skin over her knuckles was stretched taut, he noticed. Although in the midst of the rescue she’d kept saying, “What do I do? What do I do?” She’d been great.
He winced at the virtual bombs exploding in his head. “I’ve had concussions. This isn’t one.”
No response, yet her eyes widened at his comment.
“I’m kind of used to emergencies.” It would take more than a car crash to prevent Sparks Turner from getting a pretty girl to relax. She had a smudge of dirt on the cheek facing him. He raised his hand to wipe it off. She shrunk back. The car swerved.
“Man moratorium!” Her voice squeaked on the last part of moratorium.
He must have landed on her harder than he’d thought. “Did you hit your head?”
She ignored his question. “Are you sure you’re okay? Maybe I should take you to Regional for that cut on your chin. I’m...I’m headed in that direction.” Her voice sounded decidedly nervous.
He blamed himself for scaring her. Of course, taking a strange, bloody guy into your car was a risk. “No, ma’am. I’m a former smoke jumper and I’ve taken some pretty good bangs to the head before. I appreciate it, but a ride to the Safari Motel is good enough for me.”
Silence.
The knock on his head had opened a memory he’d slammed the door on five years ago. The tragedy that had driven him from a once-loved occupation and a part of his life that he was trying to forget.
A few more miles passed by, and the road flattened a bit before another plunge. She gestured to the left. “You can’t see much at night, but that’s the lake down there. Route 12 is Main Street.” So this was Heaven, his borrowed hometown for the summer.
This spurt of conversation seemed to empty her, and she once again fell silent.
Keeping his eyes on the darkness that was the lake, he leaned against the headrest and gave himself over to the pain. “Never expected such a big lake in the Rocky Mountains,” he muttered to himself. Talking to himself was a habit he’d had since he was a kid. Some counselor had told him he did it so he wouldn’t feel alone. He hadn’t wanted to think about that then, and he didn’t want to think about it tonight.
She didn’t respond.
“Heaven’s a different name for a town,” he said, this time louder.
The silence spread so long he thought she wasn’t going to answer, and then she shook herself slightly as though to rouse herself from troubling thoughts. “The original settlers had such a hard time coming down that canyon—” she flashed him a look “—as you can imagine, that when they came to this point and saw the bizarre blue of the lake, they figured they’d died and gone to heaven. Hence the name.”
Everyone had told Sparks he was crazy to take a cut-rate job designing fireworks in the middle of nowhere. When he’d been sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the wrecked car door, he would have had to agree. Now, seeing the size of the lake and with a summer to play in it, he began to doubt his doubts. He could entertain himself watching the spin cycle in a Laundromat and make five new friends before he’d even folded his polo shirts. He would amuse himself in Heaven and get back into sync with his career. A win-win for him and the town.
In fact...he eyed the petite woman next to him. He’d get a summer girl. Summer girls didn’t need to know why he couldn’t stick around.
The uncomfortable niggling at the back of his mind, the keening loss that often surged within him, kicked in again. He’d been feeling it off and on for months now. A place to call home. A place to be from. Come back to. Sparks touched the cut on his forehead. It had stopped bleeding.
Shooting a sideways look at his angel girl, he wondered where she was from, where she was going. She’d said a hospital. Local girl with a sick husband? He sighed. He hoped not.
Minutes later, she braked at a four-way stop sign with a Qwik Stop in need of a paint job on one corner. The other three corners were the edges of fields that gave way to Main Street.
“It looks like...home,” he blurted as yet another crash sounded in his head.
“Don’t bet on it.” Her muttering landed so softly he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard her. After she stopped on Main Street in front of the Safari Motel and put the car in Park, she turned to look at him—or rather, the cut on his forehead. Then she smiled.
Her smile curved up wide, showing white teeth with a tiny overlap of the right incisor. The move pressed her eyes into a delightful squint. He was glad she’d been coming down the canyon when she had. In the reflected light from the motel’s office, he saw coppery highlights glinting in her dark hair. A pretty woman preoccupied with something. After her rescuing him, he wanted to make everything right for her. Keep that smile on her face.
Finally, she spoke. “Looks as if Lynette kept the light on for you. She’ll want to know why you look as though you got beat up. She’s not much on troublemakers staying at her motel.” The smile faded and the tone sharpened. “Or unreliable, undependable charmers.” She closed her lips in a thin line.
“You’re from here?” His spirits lifted; he’d choose to ignore the edge to her last words. Summer girl. For the summer, he could be anything she wanted. For the summer.
A look swept over her face. Revulsion? Regret? He couldn’t place it.
“Not really.”
He slid slowly out of the car, emitting a few spontaneous grunts as he pulled his suitcases out of the backseat. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
Her smile returned, lightening her expression. “You rescued me from rescuing you. We’re square.”
As he came around the front of the car, he spoke in the direction of her open window. “See you around, then?”
She leaned out the window. “I’ll call on my cell about your car. The garage will contact the rental company.”
“Hey, no problem. I’ll call from my room.”
Another transforming smile. “I’ll call.” She put the Omni in Drive.
“Thank you for saving my life!” he shouted belatedly as she left the parking lot. She didn’t look back. He knew because he watched her. She knew where he was, so maybe...
Digging a piece of paper out of his jeans’ pocket, Sparks gingerly felt around the scrape on his chin. He leaned over, stretching right and left to unravel the increasing kinks, while checking out his home for forty-six glorious days of vacation. To the right was a line of single-level motel units of cinder block with a metal, aqua-painted eaves running their length as they sloped down away to the lake. Probably built in the 1950s.
He pushed open the glass door of the office and the bell at the top of the door tinkled; the theme song for a late-night talk show sounded in a room behind the desk. He was hours past his guaranteed reservation time. As his hand hovered over the bell on the counter for a second time, a bouffant-haired older woman pushed through the bead curtain.
“Don’t be pounding that bell. At my age, it takes more time to get everything moving.” Of average height, a loose black pullover tunic and legs encased in black knit pants, she didn’t look as though she had an ounce of fat on her. Taking in his damaged face, her eyes narrowed. “You got a reservation? We don’t allow riffraff here.”
Sparks glanced at the confirmation number on his piece of paper and passed it over to her. She snatched it from his hand.
“You’re Lynette?” he said.
Looking up from the paper, she seemed satisfied with his right to be there. “I’m the owner, Lynette.” She peered at him over half glasses. “You’re that hotshot fireworks designer who’s going to put Heaven on the map this year.” She swung her head back and forth. Her hair never moved. “Why do you look as though you lost a fight at the Wayside Inn?”
“I had an accident coming down Bigelow Canyon.”
“The Last Nasty, no doubt. Going too fast, I imagine. Happens all the time.”
His head ached in cadence to the throbbing in his jaw. He hadn’t eaten anything for hours, and he was feeling that Heaven fell short of Naomi’s rhapsodizing about warm, friendly people. Forcing his split lips into a smile, he said, “Yes, ma’am. Fortunately, a woman from town stopped to help me. I didn’t get her name.”
She shrugged. “Payment’s in full. Up front. Cash preferred.”
Naomi had warned him of Lynette’s affection for cash. No plastic card was accepted, but as he pulled out his wallet, he noted the rest of the office asserted a predilection for plastic. On the counter, plastic—not silk—daffodils leaned out of a hot pink plastic vase with seashells glued on it. The bead curtain was plastic. Plastic covered the lampshade by the cash register. He shifted his feet, heard a crackle. Plastic runner.
After opening his wallet and removing the cash, he glanced down at the registration card she slid in front of him.
“Fill it out completely—including home address. I’ll need your license plate number, too, in case you go sneaking off with my towels.” She looked out the side window. “Where’s your car?” Her eyes narrowed again.
“It’ll be towed in.” He focused on the card. Home address. There it was again. Home. By habit, he put down the address of the pyrotechnic corporation with whom he contracted. He was rarely at the condo he rented with a pilot.
She took the completed card Sparks offered her. “Doug?”
“I go by Sparks.”
A twinkle at last thawed the frosty, faded eyes.
“Bet there’s a story there.” Her tone returned to business. “The town’s got us a drought going on, so we change the towels and sheets twice a week ’stead of every day.”
He nodded. A quick survey out the window showed no on-site restaurant. “No restaurant?”
Turning away from him with the card in her hand, Lynette slid it into a pocket of a numbered canvas wall hanging. “No need for me to monopolize making money. Dew Drop Inn Café’s over there. Place for those of us over thirty and tourists who want local color.” She gestured behind him; Sparks followed. Across the street sat a cinder block building with wide glass windows and a prominent sign announcing a “Squat and Gobble Special” of eggs, biscuits, cream sausage gravy and hash browns. No lights on and a closed sign on the front door. His stomach rumbled.
Lynette peered at him. “Nothing’s open this late... Tomorrow, start of Memorial Day weekend, you can also go to the Dairy Delite at the other edge of town or Angel Wings BBQ here on Main.” She leaned her forearms on the counter. With money in hand, her tone of voice became positively chatty. “So you’re here to bail out Naomi?”
“You must be thinking of somebody else.” He dredged up a smile, wincing at the sting. Everything he owned ached. Longing for bed, he added quickly, “I’m only here to design the Fourth of July Jamboree fireworks. Technicians come from Evanston to set up the actual display. Pretty much, I’m on vacation.” Before he opened the door to leave, he remembered. “I’ll need directions to her office, though.”
“Won’t do you any good. Naomi’s had another stroke.” Lynette’s watery gray eyes scanned him. “We’re waiting for poor little Emma to save us.”
He nodded, and moments later, as he stood in the doorway of room number twenty-seven, Lynette’s departing statement lingered. Poor little Emma must be Naomi’s hapless assistant. Did this mean working for Naomi would be...difficult?
Holding the handles of his two suitcases, he surveyed the room with no relief found from a gathering sense of gloom or his aching muscles. The two full-size beds in front of him, one with a distinct hollow in the middle and both draped with red and saffron zigzag bedspreads, shouted 1970s, as did the crimson velvet paisleys raised on the gold wallpaper. He spied a rotary desk phone on the nightstand. At least there was a phone.
Walking over faded yellow shag carpet, he picked up the receiver to call the rental company. No dial tone. So that hazel-eyed angel girl had already known the secret. Hence her smile, the smile he wanted to remember and see again.
Reminiscing about the four-star hotels he’d enjoyed in Chicago, DC, Paris and Tokyo, he rotated his shoulders. Hadn’t he wanted a break from the globetrotting for a touch of hometown America?
He chose the least concave bed and plopped his suitcases on the other. The bed dropped a couple inches lower. He shrugged. “Best to look on the bright side.” Mother Egan, a fond memory from growing up at the orphanage, had had a million such sayings; every now and then one popped out of his mouth.
Sleep was his next order of business. Once he’d slept, his head would stop banging and his bones would settle back into place. After he met this unfortunate Emma, he’d explore his summer hometown.
Forty-six glorious days of vacation.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_74df6dc0-c052-52b5-9164-46a9a296a785)
EMMA PEERED INTO her grandmother’s hospital room where monitors glowed and beeped. Chet sat next to the narrow bed, his arms folded on the railing, head pillowed on them. Sweet Chet. The only person in Heaven who wasn’t afraid of her grandmother, other than Emma’s childhood friend Zoo. Emma stepped forward.
Nomi looked old. Her face, usually bright with vigor or pique, hung sallow. So many machines connected, like when Grumpa was here. So still. Had she—? Nomi moved her right leg slightly under the sheet and blanket.
Letting out the breath Emma didn’t know she’d been holding, she moved over to Chet and touched him on the arm. He jerked, then straightened.
“E?” Worry creased his wrinkles into gullies while his remaining white hair stuck up at every angle. She managed to lift her lips into a semblance of a smile as he gripped her hand. “Thank the good Lord you’re finally here.” No judgment sharpened his words, merely relief. If Nomi had said the same thing, it would have been clear that Emma had taken too long and someone else had had to shoulder her share of the burden.
Nodding toward her grandmother, Emma returned Chet’s squeeze. “How is she?”
“I’m scared, E.” He related the few details he knew: she fell, someone—nobody knew who—called the paramedics, and they brought her to Regional. She was stable. “I’ll leave you alone with her and wait outside.”
Her grandmother stirred. Picking up Nomi’s hand, Emma held it as Nomi lay unresponsive. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispered.
Nomi’s lids rose slowly. “Trr-ouble,” she whispered through dry lips. Emma reached for a plastic glass with a flexible straw. Her grandmother sipped with shallow swallows.
“Yes,” Emma whispered back, a tear sneaking out of her eye. “It’s trouble, but you’ll be fine. You always are.”
“Sparks. Sparks.” Naomi’s head jerked against the pillow.
Had there been a fire the night of the stroke? Emma’s eyebrows slammed together.
“Take care of...trouble...” Her grandmother’s attempt at speaking alarmed the monitors. Emma stroked Nomi’s arm. Her grandmother would survive trouble. A plan of action for every crisis.
At Emma’s touch, she quieted and appeared to fall asleep.
After watching her grandmother to make sure her sleep was peaceful, Emma joined Chet in the hall. They walked silently through the hospital out toward the parking lot.
As long as there were memories, Nomi and Grumpa were in them. When a fireman came to school in second grade, some kid had asked her if her smoke jumper daddy had been a hero. She wasn’t sure, so she asked her grandmother. Nomi had hesitated, her hands stilling on the fridge door. She’d just returned from her office where she served as mayor and was pulling leftovers out for dinner.
“He did what he felt he had to do,” she’d answered, then she’d told Emma to go set the table. Heroes did what they had to do. Emma had decided if you couldn’t have a father, at least you could have a hero father in heaven. The other heaven.
Emma rubbed the vertical line between her brows that matched her grandmother’s. She knew little of her father, other than he’d left to go smoke jumping and had died.
As a child, she’d been told her mother—whoever she was—had had to go away, asking Nomi and Grumpa to take care of her. Grumpa had said that, so it must be true.
Emma had learned a little more as an early teen. Evidently, her mother had been too much of a teenager herself to handle a baby. Despite the fierce love of her grandmother and the gentle care of her Grumpa, a certain emptiness in Emma had never filled, the being left part. Being left had rendered her unable to call the town home. It set a pattern in motion. Temporary relationships only.
After hugging Chet in the hospital’s parking lot, she slid into the Omni and drove to the house where she’d grown up. She pulled the car onto the double-cemented lines of the driveway. Tomorrow she’d find out her grandmother’s details—or rather, checking her watch, later today—and head back to Salt Lake.
Straightening up, with her stomach continuing to grumble as it had in the hospital, Emma resolved to explore her grandmother’s fridge.
Movement next door at Feral Beryl’s drew her glance. Naomi’s archenemy had peeked out the kitchen window above the Berlin Wall, a tall wooden fence between the two properties. More than a property divider, it divided the have-not Beryl Winsome from the have-it-all Chambers. Beryl was a singularly unpleasant woman.
Emma pulled out her suitcases and approached the bungalow. Fatigue dripped down her neck like perspiration, and her suitcases, rolling behind her, weighed a ton. Lilac bushes that were as high as her waist as a child now towered over her five foot something. They glowed in the dark, lighting both sides of the flagstones to the house. Although chokecherry bushes almost past blooming partially blocked her view, the porch swing peeked through.
Back in the day, when Grumpa could get Nomi to “stop doing and come out and just be,” the three of them would sit in silence on the porch. Grumpa and Emma would be on the swing, Nomi sitting on the floor with her head against Grumpa’s knees. Nomi would jump up for something; Grumpa would say in the voice Nomi called his “bank president” tone, “Leave it, Naomi. The child’s more important.” And Nomi would sit down again.
Her grandmother, never quiet for long, would commence talking about how important it was that Emma make good choices. Clearing his throat, Grumpa would interrupt with another story about the fierce Lady Emma, a young girl extraordinaire who fought dragons and won. When his deep voice finished the story, silence would surround them like an old afghan. Until Nomi would make a surprised sound and exclaim, “Raymond, Emma is beyond bedtime!”
“Come along, Miss Beyond Bedtime,” he would say, and carry her off to bed. They would pray, her last sight Grumpa’s silhouette in the doorway. “Remember, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, Lady Emma.”
Smiling now, Emma walked through the open side gate, around the corner of the house and up the back steps. Sure enough, the door was unlocked, as were most houses in Heaven. She was in before she heard a new sound: a low growl and light panting.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_431c7b6e-50d5-59c8-acec-56df5f4a6c3d)
THE HEADACHE HAD disappeared by the time Sparks awoke later that morning. While orienting himself to yet another new ceiling, he rubbed his neck reflexively. Traveling often left him muddled about which state, which city, even which country he’d landed in. Then, as he stretched his arms over his head, his muscles rushed to remind him, prompting him to recall as well the woman who’d rescued him.
First, there was the immediate intimacy of the little car and how careful she was to keep to her side. Second, her genuine concern for his head, those watchful side glances from the hazel eyes. Where had she been going with such intensity? He groaned again and rolled out of bed.
After a quick shower and shave, he dressed and left his room for the Dew Drop. He needed to get the scoop on Naomi, Emma and the Jamboree deal, and a local diner always had folks in the know. As he stepped off the curb, he winced. Better keep moving today or those muscles would stiffen up.
The pungent mixture of strong coffee and grease filled his nose not unpleasantly as he opened the diner’s glass door and stepped inside. Although Sparks had eaten some great food in great places across the planet, he still preferred American cardiac-zone cooking.
Most of the booths were full, and the counter didn’t have an empty swivel stool. The clatter of plates, silverware and voices rang against the red-wallpapered walls and aluminum wainscoting. A Coca-Cola clock from years past hung over the half circle of counter space.
“Coffee?” A middle-aged woman waved a coffeepot at him as she caught his glance. He shook his head no, Coke being his caffeine of choice, and continued to look around. When he spotted three men in work clothes crammed in a red Naugahyde booth, he turned toward them. They broke off their conversation, which seemed to center around farm equipment. “I’m here for the summer—fireworks guy for the Jamboree.” He gestured to the space next to the one man sitting alone. “Mind if I join you?”
After staring at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language, the three men nodded, and the one slid over. The server approached. Sparks opened the menu and ordered a Coke and chicken fried steak with mashed and vegetable medley. At eleven o’clock, it was only a bit early for lunch. He’d really slept in.
“You the guy who crashed that rental in the canyon?” A man with a John Deere cap enquired, thick fingers wrapped around a white stoneware mug.
Sparks nodded sheepishly.
“I’m Willard,” said a big bald man who looked as if he was meeting a celebrity. Having a license to blow things up had that effect on some people.
The man extended his hand. Sparks nodded, shaking the proffered paw, then swallowed some of the Coke that had quickly appeared.
“We’ve never had bigger fireworks than what the fire department put on. The rest are illegal...until you cross into Wyoming,” Willard explained, rubbing his head.
“Special license for entertainment purposes. I get them all the time,” Sparks said.
“That’s Mayor Naomi looking out for us—bringing in something that makes more money, knowing what trouble we’re in.” This was the guy with the John Deere cap. Even with his muttered voice, Sparks had caught that his name was Duff and he owned the Feed-N-Seed in town.
“Lynette mentioned an Emma,” Sparks said, leaving out the part about Emma saving the town. “Who’s she?”
Ray, rail thin and appearing older than the other two, leaned back against the booth, lifted his IFA cap and scratched his scalp. Replacing the cap, he pierced Sparks with a look.
“Closest shot we have to pulling our butts out of the fire. She’s Raymond and Naomi’s granddaughter.”
“I don’t know ’bout whether she’d come back,” Willard said. “You know how she and Naomi left things...” he trailed off, looking like a basset that had had his ears stepped on.
“Oh? So why are your butts in the fire?” Sparks asked.
“Money,” the three men chorused.
“She’ll come back.” That was Ray. He spoke with finality, but Sparks noted the look he tossed Duff.
Sparks jiggled the ice in his empty glass, watching for the server, both for a refill and his breakfast. “Town doesn’t look as if there’s a money problem...everything here looks freshly painted, well maintained.” Sparks tapped his fingers—as was his habit—on the table. He wanted to hear the Jamboree was right on track, meaning his money was right on track, meaning his vacation was right on track.
Duff piped up around the hot beef sandwich he was shoveling in his mouth. “We work hard to make the town look good. Too many dried up little Western towns.” He swallowed his mouthful. “Trouble is, we’ve had some winters that ate up funds with snow removal. All that snow still didn’t kill the drought.” A deep drink of coffee followed.
“My money’s on Emma not coming back,” Willard stated flatly. “She’s not been back since—”
“She’ll be back. Emma’s local,” Ray interrupted.
Listening, but not really, Sparks smiled at the server who set down a full plate, plunking another Coke in front of him, as well. Sparks breathed in the aroma of creamy sausage gravy over crispy fried cube steak, lumpy mashed potatoes and a watery pile of vegetables. He picked up his knife and fork. Ignoring the conversation flowing around him, he sliced a piece of meat, ran it through the gravy and slid it into the pile of mashed potatoes. He sighed, the focus on his aches and pains shifted to this gastronomical delight.
Moments later, as he tuned back into the conversation, the three men were now discussing the Jamboree and the cancelled one-and-only volunteer organizational meeting. Naomi’s skills must be better than his to run a Jamboree off one meeting. Then again, most people’s skills in that area were better than his, and now even his dependability had been called into question by his boss. This job had to go well.
“Can’t Naomi’s husband plan the Jamboree?” Sparks asked.
The three men looked at him as though he’d thrown a pitchfork of manure into the conversation instead of a question. Then they chuckled.
“Be hard for him,” Ray said. “He’s been dead for almost two years.”
Duff jumped in. “By the way—” he gestured to Sparks’s plate “—you don’t want to eat that medley.”
“Right.” Sparks restrained the overcooked vegetables from contaminating the rest of the meal. He didn’t see the problem with who ran the event—it was a small-town Jamboree after all. The problem he saw was his summer slipping down the drain if someone didn’t step up. He put another bite of meat and potato into his mouth. He hoped this Emma would show up, and soon.
Willard seemed determined to drive home his morose observations. “I’m telling you, Emma is gone. I was at the funeral that day.” All eyes were on him. “Emma and Naomi might have been in the kitchen but most of the US of A heard them, even if everyone pretends they didn’t to Naomi’s face.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, likely to raise Raymond from the dead.”
“Emma’s usually so quiet.” Ray didn’t sound convinced. “I wasn’t able to pay my respects till later. Naomi seemed fine then, like always.”
“Quiet around her grandmother, maybe,” Duff interjected. “She didn’t used to be that way. Older she got, less you heard from her.” He swirled his coffee.
Sparks squirmed. Add a hair dryer or two and this could be the Hattie’s Dyed and Gone hair place he’d noticed down the street. Emma, trained by Naomi, would be a clone of the fire-breathing Naomi. He tried to imagine a younger Naomi. No nonsense. Barking orders and expecting obedience every step of the way.
“Why don’t one of you plan it if Emma doesn’t show?” he asked.
Ray choked on his last forkful of pie. Willard looked as though Sparks had suggested he strip naked and run down Main Street, and Duff started laughing until tears ran down his face.
“Nobody but Naomi has done the Jamboree since Moses was in preschool,” Willard replied.
Looking down at his plate, Sparks leaned back. “Well, bigger fireworks will bring in more people who will then spend money.” Although the budget she had faxed fell miles below his usual, he knew the results would still knock the socks off anyone attending this small-town celebration.
Willard opened his mouth, but after catching the expressions on his friends’ faces, he reddened, snapped his lips shut and stared at the table. Sparks frowned. What didn’t Willard’s friends want him to say? Sparks watched the faces close up, wondering if everyone in town knew everyone’s business or if they saved energy and focused on The First Family, the Chamberses.
Not having a family, and with traveling so much, people only knew what Sparks told them; nothing more, nothing less. Some things people didn’t need to know. Some secrets needed to stay buried.
Looking at his watch, Duff sighed and slid out of the booth, turning a weary face to the remaining men. “Gotta get back to the store. Missus was holding down the fort for me while I went for coffee break.” He checked the watch again and headed to the cash register, bill in hand.
Ray inclined his head toward Sparks. “Room okay?”
With a contented expulsion of breath after finishing his meal, Sparks sipped his third Coke. “Yeah, other than the phone doesn’t work and it’s decorated like a time warp, everything’s good with me.”
Willard snorted as he held his stomach while Ray slapped his hand on the table and hee-hawed.
“Phones over at the Safari don’t ever work.” Ray wiped his eyes, then brought the mug to his lips.
Sparks raised his eyebrows. “The sign out front says phones in every room.”
Ray explained that there were phones in every room; they just didn’t work. When Lynette had bought the place back in the early seventies, they didn’t work. She’d just left them there so she wouldn’t have to redo the neon sign.
Ray punched Willard on the shoulder. “Move. I gotta get.”
The two men hitched out of the booth.
“Gotta love vacation,” Sparks said, no longer annoyed at the lack of phone service at the Safari. It was a great summer story.
Halfway to the cash register with his tab, Ray turned back toward Sparks, an enigmatic expression on his face. “You think you’re here for vacation?” He snorted.
A tall, thin man with a big smile and short white hair sprouting up on the top of his head pushed open the door and strode into the Dew Drop, scanning the diners.
He approached the booth. “Son, you Sparks?” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Chet. Naomi wants a meetin’ with you.”
Despite the older man’s warm voice and kind gaze, Sparks shivered. It was like a summons to visit the queen.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_6a33745c-8e21-59ce-b301-00441ba102c0)
AFTER A SHOWER, and pulling on shorts and a T-shirt, Emma headed for the ancient Bunn coffeemaker on the turquoise kitchen counter.
The “trouble” her grandmother had talked about last night as well as the heavy breathing when Emma had opened the door turned out to be a black-and-white border collie. Trouble was printed on the side of his dish. His favorite place seemed to be under the kitchen table.
One more problem to solve before she left town—who would take care of the dog? And why did her grandmother even have a dog? She’d easily ignored all of Emma’s pleas for a pet. Trouble seemed keenly interested in her every move, which was probably why her grandmother liked the mutt.
Out of habit, she glanced over at Beryl’s window, the way she had while growing up. When a curtain twitched, as it had last night, she wondered if Beryl had witnessed the ambulance picking up her grandmother and what evil thoughts of glee the bellicose woman had had. No one, including Emma, knew why the two were such enemies.
Not for the first time Emma thought of the blond guy she’d picked up in the canyon and hoped that he was feeling okay. From what he’d chattered about, he’d sounded wistful, looking for a hometown for the summer. The neighborly-grudges aspect of small-town life would not be on his bucket list. If he was lucky, he might go all summer and not meet Beryl.
Emma opened the back door. Trouble dashed to attend to his duties and seemed to be checking for any sign of intruders since he’d last patrolled the yard. She watched him, tail flagging over his back, joy in every movement. Had she ever felt that free? No need to analyze that. No, she hadn’t. She’d always been “poor Emma” to the townsfolk, although she could never figure out why. The Chamberses had money, position.
Holding the door for the dog as he raced back in, Emma shut it and headed to the kitchen. She sat at the round table and stared into space. What would the doctor say about her grandmother? Trouble hitched closer until his nose lay on her lap. An almost snort escaped Emma’s lips. Her grandmother must have needed something to replace Emma’s presence, although sometimes Emma could still feel the leash.
The dog’s nose bumped her knee, and his amber eyes bore into hers. A walk. They both needed fresh air. At the front door, she snapped on the leash and it unloaded the equivalent of a four-shot espresso into an already caffeinated canine. “Okay, okay, a walk along the beach. You sniff, I’ll think. But only a short one. I need to get to the hospital.”
The doctor would say something that Emma would have to deal with and rapidly. The quick-thinking gene, so lavished upon her grandparents, had skipped her. If she took as long to solve Naomi’s health issues as she did her other problems, England would have given up the monarchy by the time she arrived.
Maybe she needed to check out home health aides? Would her grandmother allow a professional caregiver in the house? Would she even need one?
Trouble strained at the leash in the opposite direction from the beach, ears up and engaged.
Emma caught the sound of applause the same moment the dog began to drag her down Seraphim. They were almost at the intersection of Cherubim and Seraphim.
In a normal small town, a street like this one might carry the same name as the school that was located at the southern end. Or it might even be named the quintessential Maple or Pine Street. But no, that wasn’t the case here. Decades ago, the town fathers—before Nomi’d gained a stranglehold on the mayor’s job—had decided it would boost tourism to rename the streets to match the celestial nature of the town’s name. Tourists found it charming. It had just made spelling in fourth grade more difficult.
On the football field, a bunch of students were facing someone tall and blond and beautiful, who was waving his hands and pointing to various pieces of—artillery? Mr. Blue Eyes! The guy who had rescued her from rescuing him. A rush of gladness swelled her chest. He was okay—at least he seemed okay—flashing a megawatt smile and gesturing as he explained something.
She was happy he had recovered. His nonchalance about a possible head injury had made her nervous, but she couldn’t have done much to make him go to Regional. He now was moving as though all his joints worked. The blue eyes above the cut on his chin came to mind. So very blue and with deep questions inside.
Trouble made his way along the outskirts of the group, startling a rear end here and there. She found it a pleasure watching Mr. Blue Eyes. Maybe she’d just stand there for a bit. She’d sidled to the back of the group when the idea of a man moratorium jogged her memory.
Oh. Right.
Better to head home and then to the hospital.
“Hi, Miss Chambers! When did you get back in town? How’s your grandmother? Who’s going to plan the Jamboree?” A cute brunette with a belly shirt and low-riding jeans grinned up at her as she petted Trouble.
When had she arrived? It seemed like both forever and a breath ago. Emma answered the girl vaguely and greeted others as a ripple of laughter ran through the crowd.
“What’s going on?” she asked one of the kids.
“Fireworks stuff. The dude doin’ them on the Fourth is giving us a demo ’cause it’s Friday and the start of Memorial Day weekend.” The kid bobbed his head.
Each time she thought she had mastered a shift in Heaven’s universe, another shudder hit it. What was going on here? Her grandmother had never deviated from the Black Binder of Jamboree Procedures in Emma’s lifetime or anyone else’s.
Historically, Nomi had the Jamboree organized the day before the Memorial Day weekend started. The parade would be Monday. She wondered who’d taken over the helm, and pitied them.
A murmur went through the crowd that it was almost “time,” however, Emma, righteously holding to her no-man policy, had lost interest. She was more concerned with seeing her grandmother and moving on with her new life. Tugging on Trouble’s leash, she towed the dog away from the crowd. She would cut across the football field, reach the house in record time and climb in the Omni for the trip to the hospital, and then the ninety-minute drive to Salt Lake. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long to get things sorted at Regional. She’d have to arrange for care for her grandmother, the house and, oh, yeah, the dog and...
Should she collect a few personal items for Nomi before she left the house? Good thing her grandmother’s place was only a couple of blocks away. Although everything was only a couple of blocks away in Heaven—good for the feet and the Omni, which had been making death rattle noises coming up the canyon. She had planned to run the thing into the ground and worry about a vehicle when she and Brad—when she—returned. Dramamine. She’d have to get some Dramamine for the flight. Thinking of the trip helped her keep her goal in mind. A new life.
It wasn’t as if she was abandoning her grandmother, she thought, picking up speed as she crossed the expanse of the football field. Her cavalier compartmentalizing washed up some guilt. Was she selfish for running off? She halted those thoughts. Why scold herself for selfish—why not see it as the travesty it would be to put herself on hold while Nomi took priority again? The fireworks guy with his amazing eyes and the bump on the head could have this hometown. She wanted Europe.
Naomi had always purposely gotten in the way whenever something wasn’t her idea. Like when Grumpa and Emma had planned this European trip to celebrate her high school graduation. That was the year town volunteers had put in the boardwalk by the lake, and Nomi had insisted Grumpa would have to assist. Or the time after college graduation... Well, that had been due to Emma’s distracted involvement with Professor Sleazeball, but, she amended hastily, there had still been a myriad of other times when Emma’s life was restructured to suit her grandmother.
If that way-beyond-beautiful fireworks designer was to know Naomi, he’d change his view of this small town.
She had a stroke, Emma. That was hardly in the same category as Nomi conscripting her to plant flowers on Main Street in junior high. Emma set her jaw.
A stone had worked its way into her arch, kicked in by her quick pace. Limping, she continued to trudge along. She was infinitely tired of dealing with how she felt about her grandmother. From behind her, she heard a yell and a thunk from the first firework shell being launched.
Her curiosity piqued, she turned and collided with a broad expanse of white shirt. Her head snapped back and her feet left the ground. Trouble yipped. The chalk of the end zone rushed to fill her nose. Emma lay still, mentally counting the screams in each appendage. Good. Nothing broken. Then, while she was trying to decide how best to eject the dirt and such from her nose, large hands cupped her waist and, with a whoosh that tickled her insides, she landed gently on her feet. Still dazed, she thought it awfully convenient that Heaven’s volunteer firemen had such great timing. She shifted onto her back to smile and say thanks when she saw that fireworks designer looking at her like she had looked at him in the canyon. Questions.
“You!” With the single word, the scrapes on her forehead and chin widened and began to sting.
“I did yell. I knew it was you.” His grin looked satisfied. “I remember your backside—er, the back of you from last night.” He gestured at the field. “You were just about to walk right through my rocket landing zone.”
Snorts and giggles greeted that comment and looking further, Emma saw the crowd of teens watching the show.
“Your landing zone? Of all the irresponsible—” Now she noticed the orange cones with the yellow caution tape fluttering in the warm breeze, the ends tugged free from their moorings. Great. It wasn’t even his fault.
Thinking about her grandmother, she’d wandered into no man’s land.
Trouble pulled on the leash. He wanted attention from the crowd. She wanted to say much more, but the dirt in her nose was making it hard to breathe. She wanted it out. With this audience, how was she going to do that?
Sparks faced the crowd and yelled for a tissue and after a pause, a young man parted the crowd and handed her a wrinkled packet of tissues. “Allergies,” he whispered.
She grabbed a tissue, muttered her thanks and blew her nose hard. A quick check of her watch told her she’d now have to speed those ninety minutes to reach her grandmother.
She sensed him before he touched her shoulders. His large hands were warm and reassuring. He was such a...such a...problem.
“Let me make it up to you,” he said. He tugged her toward him so that she could see him, a crooked smile in a sun-reddened face, and a shock of too-perfect hair falling over his wide, tanned forehead. “I’m really sorry. Uh...how ’bout going for food?” Blue eyes stared into hers. More questions lingered in their depths. What?
Emma straightened. She needed distance from this man whose gaze gathered her close. Too close. “Man moratorium! Irresponsible— Undependable— I—I have an urgent appointment!” Her voice, intended to be strong and off-putting, wobbled and squeaked.
His eyes widened. “Appointment? Oh, I...uh...” He instantly released her and fled across the field, scattering students in his wake, who looked disappointed that the show was over.
Never in her wildest expectations had she anticipated how good a defense this man moratorium would be. It was a little sad, actually.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_ec6dd65c-abf4-53fd-888b-f7088c546f6d)
NAOMI STARED AGHAST at her granddaughter as she blew into the hospital room—late, mind you—to join her, Chet and the neurologist. The child had bits of yellowed grass in her hair along with streaks of dirt on her face, hands and T-shirt. A couple of the facial and knee scrapes were oozing blood. What on earth had Emma been doing?
Soon, Chet, Emma and the doctor, who looked young enough to be one of Emma’s students, were watching her eat as if she was some freak exhibit at the state fair. What she would give for a Dew Drop kitchen-sink omelet, hash browns with cheese and a strong cup of coffee, heavy on the cream.
Since the tubes in her nose didn’t help the eating process any with what passed for food here, she pushed at the tray. Emma pulled the rolling table away from the bed.
“Are you in pain, Nomi?” Emma’s brows furrowed, perplexed most likely at Naomi’s swift change of expression.
No, dear, she wanted to say, that had been a smile on my face at seeing you here in town, where you belong. Drat it. Would the girl never pick up on one of her cues? She sighed.
The girl probably didn’t understand she was talking about either the dog or Sparks last night.
Though seeing Emma here now set some of Naomi’s world to rights. Getting on with the Jamboree would stabilize everything. Now, what she needed most was for that charming young man to arrive, so Naomi could let them know how it was going to be for the summer. Then she could work on getting out of this terrible place and supervise the rest of the event details from home. Home.
Chet put an arm around her shoulders. “Relax, Naomi. You have to depend on others this year.”
How did he read her mind, and more important, had he also lost his? Who did he think could pull off the town’s biggest moneymaking opportunity, especially this year when the event was do or die? She turned her head so she could see her granddaughter full-on. Only Emma could be trusted with organizing the Jamboree, and then, only with Naomi’s assistance.
Emma understood tradition, or at least had, until the two of them had had a misunderstanding at Raymond’s funeral. Emma had made too much of it.
“I’ve seen worse strokes,” the neurologist was saying to Emma, as though discussing cuts of meat. He lounged against the bathroom doorway, one hand resting on the monitor, the other loosely in his pants’ pocket. Naomi thought his bedside manner needed work. After several more minutes of being treated as though she was invisible, Naomi struggled to get words out, ignoring Chet’s pressure on her shoulders. “You can t-t-talk to me, d-doctor. I—I’m not dead.”
The doctor’s face reddened and he shifted over to face Naomi. “The stroke has affected you a great deal, Mrs. Chambers. Due to the trauma to your left side, you’ll need six to eight weeks in a rehabilitation center to regain the use of your hand and increase stability. Therapy’s essential.” He slipped the stethoscope from around his neck and checked his watch.
Naomi wanted to snort, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. She’d never neglected a thing in her life. Except—the sting of the secret burned—neglecting that one thing Emma needed to know.
“She’ll recover completely, though, won’t she?” Chet asked.
She wanted to cheer; someone was finally asking a decent question. The next one should be, “When can she be discharged?”
Emma was chewing on her little finger like she always did when thinking deeply. Naomi had never broken her of the habit.
The doctor glanced at the time again.
Straightening, Emma tugged at the hems of her scruffy shorts. She looked at Naomi, and then at the physician. “She’ll get there,” she answered, determination clear in her voice.
Naomi cocked her head. She’d been racking her brain to think of a way to get Emma to come home and give up the silly trip Raymond was always encouraging her to take. Had something good come out of this horrendous event?
The doctor nodded. “She’ll be ready to go, most likely, in a day or two.” He typed in notes on his tablet. “I’m writing orders for eight weeks’ on-site physical and occupational therapy at an extended-care facility. Garden Terrace is good.”
An old folks’ home? Naomi about lifted straight off the sheets. If any of them thought she was going to an old folks’ home, they had beets for brains.
Where was Sparks?
What had happened to Emma’s face?
Someone had better start doing some talking, and fast.
* * *
WITH HIS STOMACH reminding him how close lunch was, Sparks dashed up the wide steps of the hospital two at a time, sweating in heat more typical of Las Vegas than Colorado. He wanted Naomi to confirm one thing: yes, his contract was a go.
He’d been having too good a time so far, he chastised himself. He would have to stay focused. His job was everything to him.
Still, it’d been easy to get caught up in the charming flavor of the town. Besides knowing he would enjoy Monday’s parade, there were the barbecue invites from Duff, Willard and Ray and their families, and fun at the lake with new friend Ben, owner of Washed Ashore Marina.
On the heels of that enjoyable thought came the image of Emma. Yes, from the kids at the football field he knew that he’d flattened “poor little Emma,” who was Naomi’s sidekick and had been a favorite teacher at Heaven High. That bit of a woman who’d saved his life and looked as though she had too many heavy concerns weighing on her mind... She was the miracle the town was waiting for? His gallant tackle had delighted the crowd. Her, not so much.
He winced, remembering the laser stare and the knifelike words—irresponsible, undependable—as they’d left her rosy lips. They were taking turns saving each other, he thought, and wished he’d said that when she was telling him, among other things, that she wasn’t a tackling dummy.
Forcing himself to slow to a trot, he strode through the hospital room door that he’d been directed to. There lay Naomi Chambers, mayor of the town, glaring at him; Chet; the doctor and— His breath caught. Dirty, bloody and gaping at him wide eyed was his summer girl. Hopefully.
The doctor nodded to Sparks on his way out. Chet stepped over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming, son.”
Son. Something deep inside stirred, melted a bit.
“L-late,” said Naomi, closing her eyes as though his tardiness was too much for her to bear. “Emma, go f-find out when someone is coming to t-take this tray.”
“I’ll take it, Nomi.” Emma moved to pick up the tray, but Naomi waved her off.
“You d-don’t g-get paid to do that. They d-do.”
Emma’s face froze and she abruptly left the room.
Wow. Growing up under Naomi’s thumb suddenly made him traveling the world alone not seem so bad.
Naomi waved again; this time a royal sweep of her hand drew him to the chair beside her bed.
“Mrs. Chambers...” No matter how far he’d travelled or who he met, the manners he’d been taught by Mother Egan would always remain with him. He leaned in. “I don’t want to bother you. I just want to make sure everything is still a go for the fireworks.”
Now, up close and personal, he drew in a breath.
Light from the window showed every line, all the gray folds in her face and neck. Word at the Rexall soda fountain was that Naomi Chambers was “too stubborn to die.” Judging from her pasty complexion, death had nearly succeeded.
Naomi drew the covers up to her shoulders with her right hand, while Sparks waited for her to continue.
But the silence grew.
Chet stood by the window, peering outside.
Am I in trouble? Sparks rubbed his neck. I can’t be in trouble. He sneaked a peek at Naomi. Why do I feel as if I’m in trouble? The silence persisted.
“How are you feeling?” Sparks ventured.
She twitched slightly. “As w-well as...c-can be expected with—” she swallowed and closed her eyes, then reopened them “—s-somebody w-waking me up every fifteen m-minutes to see if I’m still alive.” If she hadn’t spoken, he might have done the same.
At breakfast, the guys had mentioned that folks were taking bets on whether Naomi would go to rehab if ordered. Had Emma been speeding to see her grandmother when she’d stopped to help him? His respect for her flourished. She’d taken the time to help him, a stranger, while needing to be with family.
“T-to be honest, young man, finances are tight, but you’ll be paid.”
A whoosh of relief left him. “My fireworks always draw a good crowd, so that’ll raise quite a lot of money for the town.”
Summer was on. He only needed one good pyrotechnic event to get back in the game.
As he heard Emma greeting some nurses in the hallway, Naomi wiggled closer, gesturing with a beckoning finger. Sparks hunched forward.
“You’ll be p-paid, but I want you to h-help Emma—coplan with her. But don’t b-breathe a word...until I say so.”
Sparks’s face flushed with heat and embarrassment; his mouth dried so fast he could feel its hinges creak. Help plan the Jamboree?
There were two immediate problems with that edict. First, he didn’t know a thing about planning a Jamboree. Fireworks, yes. But that was it. Second, if he worked closely with the townsfolk and they really got to know him, they would eventually find out he was the type to let them down.
He frowned. Hadn’t the guys at the Dew Drop said Emma was leaving?
* * *
EMMA SWUNG OPEN the door, her back teeth grinding in the old familiar way, ready to tell her grandmother that the nurses said someone would be right in to take the silly tray, when Sparks leaped up and barreled out of the room. She watched him go.
What had caused his face to blush so deeply?
Even though there were more pressing issues, such as Nomi’s rehab and Emma’s own escape, she showed her grandmother the Organic District cinnamon-bomb bread from the tote bag she’d left by the bed. “I forgot. I brought this for you.” Then she looked at the empty chair. “What did you say to him?”
Nomi’s eyes gleamed. “We...were talking about the Jamboree...telling h-h-him...fun.”
This wasn’t the way to stay on track with her goal. This was her grandmother trying to control the situation just like always. “Not for me.”
Emma summoned her courage. Here goes. She took in a big breath. Think new green suitcases, think British Airways.
“Emma...” Nomi’s lips, lopsided now, twisted as she spoke. “You...liked it. Miss F-f-fire...crac...ker...you r-remember?”
Emma did remember and was glad Sparks wasn’t around to hear the tale. What had made him tear off like that?
What had she just been thinking about? Oh, yeah, the Miss Firecracker pageant. Indeed, she did remember. Short the required number of contestants for the kiddie pageant, Naomi had coerced Emma and her best friend Zoo to participate.
As they did every year, a group of townspeople protested this exploitation of women. Required to wear a red, white or blue T-shirt and blue shorts, each five-to seven-year-old contestant sang a patriotic song or twirled a baton to the same sort of tune. No bathing suits, no interviews about world peace.
Emma and Zoo, unfortunately, did not sing on key and were not particularly coordinated. Zoo agonized through “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and Emma gave herself a black eye from her baton. Neither of them won, and Emma had thrown the baton in the lake. She now changed the subject. “Think how fast you will progress with twice-a-day therapy.”
A vehement shake of Naomi’s head.
“Nomi—”
Naomi stretched her lips with effort. “Me...” She stopped and drew in a deep breath. “P-planning would be a little much...”
A little? Denial is a warm bedfellow on a cold night of reality.
Naomi nodded. “Someone else...plan it.”
Emma’s spirits soared. Here was a breakthrough. If Nomi was going to be reasonable about this, why not the rehab?
“Someone will turn up,” Emma enthused. A girl had to move on. Right on to England, Lady Emma. “The Jamboree has always been and always will be around, so there’s no need to worry. Now, let’s get you ready for transport to the facility, Nomi. I’ll have the nurse bring the transfer forms.”
Her grandmother rose up on her good elbow like Napoleon on his deathbed. “Emma,” her imperial tone commanded. With eyes boring into Emma’s, the left one slightly unfocused, she said, “You must p-plan the J-jamboree.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_00f52ba5-8552-5099-b6b2-d8da0f361d36)
SHE KNEW SHE sounded juvenile, but it wasn’t fair. Dashing away the wetness on her cheeks, Emma half ran, half walked out of the hospital.
Every time she reached for something, her grandmother would snatch it out of her hand: sleepovers rejected for civic service, particular friends deemed unsuitable. The list ran on and on.
Emma crossed the parking lot, the asphalt so heated it felt squishy under her sneakered feet. A tall woman dodged out of Emma’s way and then grabbed her by the arms.
“Zoo!” Emma exclaimed.
“Hey, Emms.” Zoo hugged her. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the bulls at Jem Silver’s ranch. Sorry I didn’t text as soon as I heard you were in town. I’ve been swamped.”
Zoo would be a voice of reason in this mess. They’d been friends forever, as different as two people could be. Zoo, thin, with black hair and pale blue eyes, attracted boys like flies on manure, as Emma was fond of saying. Zoo spoke her mind and got away with it. Zoo had sweated away on ranches and farms since she was old enough to ride her bike from town.
This work ethic of Zoo’s had earned her Nomi’s seal of approval. Zoo was everything her grandmother wanted, and Emma never heard the end of it. Fortunately, Zoo was also fun and kind.
Emma steered her friend toward the Omni. “Do you know what she did to me this time?”
Zoo grinned. “Haven’t heard that in a while. What’s the tyrant up to now?” She had, on more than one occasion, stood up to Naomi, inspiring awe in Emma.
Emma rationalized that it was easier to butt heads with Naomi when you weren’t related. Chet did it all the time, and he lived. Then again, it could be Zoo and Chet were vertebrates, unlike herself.
“She told—no, ordered—me to plan the Jamboree. Never mentioned my trip to Europe once.” New situation, old anger, she acknowledged, but it seemed fresh each time it happened.
A flood of words gushed forth as Emma unlocked the door to her car. Heat poured out. “My only family member, and she pulls rank like when she got me a teaching job at the high school without asking me—and I went along with it. Like when Nomi overrode Grumpa on...on just about everything.” She moved around the outside of the car, opening doors and windows. “Darn it, I hate feeling like I have no backbone.”
“Lighten up, Emma. Tell your grandmother you won’t do it. But don’t hate her for asking—um, assuming.”
Emma hid a grudging smile. “How can I love someone so much and still want to put massive distance between us?”
“You don’t want Nomi out of your life, just out of the way of your life.”
“You ruined a perfectly good temper tantrum, you know?”
Her friend smiled. “My day, I guess.” She laughed as she said, “Just told Jem Silver his sperm count’s too low to breed. That ruined his day, too.” She laughed some more at Emma’s open mouth. “For his bull to breed.”
Emma imagined the scene with the handsome rancher and a giggle slipped out. She slid into the sizzling seat. “Yow. Hot. Okay. I’ll go back to town, drum up a replacement—before I hit Nomi with my decision.” She turned the key and squinted up at her friend, standing next to the car. “Thanks, Zoo.”
“Any time, you reactionary, you. Hey, what’s this I hear about the summer stud tackling you in front of the entire student body? That where your face got messed up?”
* * *
AS EMMA ENTERED TOWN, loneliness wormed its way around her heart. Sparks’s offer of food to make up for driving her into the dirt came to mind. If she hadn’t imposed a man moratorium, she’d go out with him.
He’d be fun. She wanted fun. She wanted—oh, blast—she wanted to stuff her face at the Dairy Delite. Emma punched the brakes and careened into the hamburger stand’s parking lot. The squeal drew the looks of those lined up by the order window, including a blond man towering above the others.
With his head thrown back, Sparks was laughing at something someone in the group had said. By the time she cooled her face enough to get out of the car and walk to the window, the others had drifted away, leaving Sparks to watch her approach.
“Hi,” he said.
Zoo’s teasing zipped through her head, and she blushed. Their complexions matched, red for red. On the heels of that was Zoo’s suggestion she find a replacement to plan the Jamboree.
Emma needed someone who got along well with everyone, although why that would be a requirement since her grandmother didn’t, Emma wasn’t sure, but it seemed a good thing. And the best person would be one who didn’t know how...how her grandmother could be. That left no one who lived in Heaven and the surrounding area. “Hi, yourself,” she replied.
Those fabulous blues scanned her face, and then his gaze flickered away.
“You ran away from my grandmother.” Really, she didn’t blame him.
The redness of his face deepened as he glanced down at his foot and scraped some gravel.
She continued in a brisk tone, “Can you believe my grandmother ordered me to plan the Jamboree? I’m about to go to England.” She’d leave out the part about being dumped by Brad. About how “baby, I’ll always be there for you” was merely a fairy tale.
Today she was especially looking for someone to lift her spirits.
“Imagine that,” he muttered, and stared at the ground, watching an ant struggle with a crumb of bun. “She say anything else?”
“No.” Somebody ought to tell Mr. Gorgeous about SPF 45. If he kept burning his face like that, he’d be getting bumps frozen off with liquid nitrogen by age forty.
“Nothing else?” He seemed somewhat disappointed; no, bitterly disappointed.
Obviously, she didn’t know him well—but still, she expected excitement, interest. Instead, he seemed as stimulated by her pronouncement as an eighth grader assigned to plot a time line for the Revolutionary War.
Starla Fleming slid the window open with a bang. Sparks startled.
“Are you gonna order something, Emma? If you’re not, I’m gonna sit in the back and watch my soaps,” Starla rasped, then peered at Emma’s scraped face.
Emma ordered an orange cream shake after a wary look at the scab Starla was scratching on her arm. The woman disappeared from the window, the roar of the shake machine following.
Emma turned back to Sparks. “My grandmother thinks she can con me into organizing the Jamboree. I have my own life.” Who could she find to take her place? Someone ignorant of her grandmother’s schemes, that was who. She scrolled through a mental list... Empty.
Her red-faced companion chewed his bottom lip and swept the toe of his sneaker back and forth. Finally, he looked up at her. “She trusts you, Emma. It’s a big year.”
Emma’s disgust came blurting out in an ugly noise. That was feminine, she thought, duly embarrassed. She cleared her throat. “Big year, my foot. The Jamboree hasn’t changed in my lifetime. She’s charmed you like I hear you’re charming the rest of the town. You don’t know what it’s like. All you have to do is design the fireworks, pass your instructions over to your techs and skip on to the next adventure.” Stop it, Emma. Transferring her anger at her grandmother to this innocent visitor was not cool.
“Hey, Spaaarks!” kids yelled from a passing car. “Dude!”
The man was a magnet. Everyone liked him. The hair on her arms prickled, then she gave him a broad, welcoming smile, like a hungry spider that had spotted a fly.
And he’s new in town.
The window being flung open startled them both this time. Starla’s arm emerged. After a quick look for the scab, Emma slid her money through the window and grabbed the shake. The window slid shut. A moment later, the blast of a TV sounded.
“I’ve had things not turn out. I know what it feels like,” Sparks said, his brilliant blues on her boring hazels.
She jutted out her chin, momentarily forgetting her mission in the rush of resentment. “Sure you have.” But her tone was not friendly. She’d be the first to admit she was acting the drama queen. Pull yourself together, girl.
Should she ask him straight out to run the Jamboree or make more small talk? Hadn’t he wanted to make it up to her for slamming her into the end zone in front of the under-eighteen population of Heaven?
“My dream was to have parents. It never happened.” He said the words matter-of-factly, as if he’d commented on the heat, which was substantial and was pitting her underarms out in a most unbecoming way.
The ant in the crack by her feet suddenly seemed immense compared to how small she felt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” she managed to choke out.
Sparks must have sat on the front steps like she had on birthdays. She used to imagine her mother was a lost princess held by a wicked king.
“Maybe you ought to go see your grandmother and get it straightened out,” he said.
This reminded Emma of her brilliant idea. She sucked up another mouthful of shake while she scrutinized his burned face. “You might want to wear a heftier sunscreen.”
“My face isn’t always this red.” He mopped his brow.
But Emma was barely listening. “Didn’t you say you wanted to make it up to me, you know, for tackling me?”
The color of his faced plunged to a deeper shade. “With food. I said, food.”
Perhaps, Emma thought, looking more closely—easy to do with Sparks—he was blushing. What had she said that would make him blush? Oh, never mind the man’s skin tone, she chided. Get to the point.
She leaned toward him, eyes wide in entreaty. She hoped it looked like entreaty and not that her contacts had dried out. “What if you planned the Jamboree? You’re getting to know a lot of people here. They like you.”
“Me?” His voice shot up. Somewhat cute, really. “I...already have a job. You really should talk to your grandmother.”
Emma released an exasperated sound. “You only have to design your fireworks. You don’t even have to blow them up. So you’ll have all sorts of free time. Nomi’s created this gigantic black binder with all the procedures already mapped out.” She snapped her fingers. “Piece of cake.”
Sparks’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Emma, talk to your grandmother.”
She stepped back. Sparks looked as if he wanted to crawl under the ant.
A familiar emotion crept up Emma’s neck. “What is it you don’t want to tell me?” she asked. “I can see it in your face.” She hadn’t taught junior high for nothing. Very good liars aside, she’d learned to spot omissions.
He gulped. “I’m no good at keeping secrets, but she made me, Emma, I swear.”
So that was the reason for his flushed face and repeated urges for her to talk to her grandmother. For “she” could only mean one person. One person who didn’t need a first or a last name. One person who thought she was the master puppeteer. Emma’s back teeth fused. She gritted out, “What did my grandmother make you promise not to tell me?”
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_5608957f-d333-55ea-89ee-688aa57bc50f)
EMMA LEANED INTO the heavy glass door of the IGA, still minus a replacement after a night of thinking. One day left to clear up everything and still make her flight.
Her grandmother was an adult, as Brad had said repeatedly. Nobody could blame Emma. She’d done everything.
Everyone was afraid of her grandmother. And it didn’t matter that it would probably be a kick to work with resident summer-fun guy Sparks Turner. Chet had been no help. Zoo had run through the same options Emma had conjured up.
Then Emma had felt guilty about wanting others to solve her problem, then gotten mad about feeling guilty, then guilty about being mad about it. Then she’d eaten way too many slices of butter-soaked cinnamon toast to forget the whole matter.
The pungent odor of extrasharp cheddar cheese twitched her nose. Mr. Telford and his wife had sold the grocery store to their son Vince. He’d graduated a few years behind Emma. Vince broke off his whistling to greet her from behind the meat counter. Resting his big forearms in front of him, he grinned. “Emma, what can I get you? Got some nice chops. How’s your grandmother?”
“My grandmother is going to be fine. She’s a Chambers.” Her eyes roamed the deli case. Mmm. Twice-baked potatoes. A little comfort food might help tonight while she changed a lifetime pattern and came up with a good idea fast.
One crummy day to get it right.
Vince’s gaze shifted up and beyond her shoulder. “Sparks! Looking for lunch?”
Emma whirled to find Sparks looking at her, his expression changing the second she locked eyes with him. Those questions when she caught him watching her... Was he thinking, “What is her problem? What is the big deal here?”
As she hurriedly began to inspect every single item in the deli case as though it was the most fascinating deli case on the planet, a new idea struck.
“Hey, Vince, I’m looking for someone to run the Jamboree. Wanna apply?”
Vince laughed as if she’d told the funniest joke he’d ever heard. “Em, this weekend has been a great start to the summer so far. My barbecue went out the door in slabs.” He tied the string around the potato wrapped in white butcher paper and pushed it toward her. “Hope the Jamboree will be enough.”
Emma grasped the package and tucked it in her basket. “Enough for what?”
As he bent across the deli case to respond, a bullhorn voice, elevated to carry into the next county, vibrated through the store. “Vincent, how do you expect to stay in business if you don’t have what people need?”
Vince patted Emma’s hand and stepped aside to wait on Sparks, whose eyes had widened at the stentorian bellow.
“It’s only Beryl,” Vince reassured him.
Feral Beryl wore a chip on her shoulder the size of Heaven Lake, daring anyone to breathe on it, much less knock it off.
While Emma was growing up next door to the woman, balls that went over The Berlin Wall never came back, at first. Grumpa would have to go and get them. Then one day Beryl started returning the balls over the fence and that was that. To be fair, Emma thought, Beryl had had her share of hard times.
After leaving the deli counter, Emma dropped a loaf of sourdough from a local organic bakery into her basket alongside the tomatoes, lettuce and bacon.
Beryl and her alcoholic husband had screamed at each other for years until the night he’d gone for beer and didn’t come home. Old Mae Cunningham swore that evening’s events had sealed the deep line between Beryl’s eyebrows and gradually added more than a hundred pounds to the woman. Now Feral Beryl lumbered around in a caftan and sandals. Once she retired, she spent most of her time working in her backyard and criticizing town events.
A warm hand landed on Emma’s shoulder and caught her attention. Sparks. In the produce aisle. Standing very near to her.
“Look,” he said, his hand remaining on her shoulder until Emma shot a pointed glance toward it. “You don’t want to plan this Jamboree.”
“I don’t.” Finally they agreed on something.
He spotted the items in her basket. “BLTs! How ’bout I buy some more bacon and we make ’em together?” At Emma’s silence, he shrugged. “Sorry.”
Although...maybe the sandwich making would give her an opportunity to convince Sparks to take on the five-day Fourth of July event.
“I don’t want to plan it, either, to be honest. I’m on vacation. A man of the world, committed to no one. So let’s find someone else.” His grin indicated his pleasure at solving both of their problems.
Emma sighed and moved toward the checkout. Great. Only she’d already solved both of their problems.
As she opened her mouth to reply that she was busy—man moratorium, you know—the phone in her pocket buzzed and played the opening chords of “I Will Survive.” She moved a couple of steps away and answered the call. “Hello?”
It was the nurse she’d spoken to at Garden Terrace, the temporary facility for the next step of her grandmother’s recovery. The doctor had cleared her grandmother for rehab, but Naomi was having none of it. “There’s no medical reason to keep her at the hospital...and I think they need the bed...” The nurse’s voice trailed off. She thanked the woman, said she’d be in touch and ended the call.
Emma decided on and then added shortbread cookies and chunky chocolate fudge ice cream to her basket as she tried to think of something helpful. A breath later, she felt, rather than saw Sparks beside her, his warmth reaching out to her.
What was she going to do? Her mind flashed to a picture of her grandmother grinning and holding up a map of England, taunting her.
She changed directions and headed toward the checkout, and heard Beryl again, informing Vince of more of her opinions. “If I was running the Jamboree, there’d be changes, I can tell you.”
Evidently, Beryl’s changes would start with changing the organizer’s title from Jamboree coordinator to supreme empress of the universe. Her grandmother would hitchhike from Garden Terrace as soon as she heard crazy news like that. Not that it would ever happen. Nomi would never allow it.
Emma stepped up to the checkout, Sparks at her side. He had the sense, she was relieved to find, to not say a word. Something. She had to come up with something to get her grandmother to rehab. If she didn’t get better— Tears smarted in Emma’s eyes.
“I’d get rid of that Cadillac Naomi rides in during the parade. It smacks of elitism. And if you ask me...”
Nobody had asked Beryl. Nobody ever did. Naomi had first rode in a Cadillac in the early 70s as mayor when an Evanston car dealership offered it; Grumpa had ridden with her as fire chief. Eliminating that tradition from the Jamboree had as much chance of happening as Beryl did of running the show this year or any year.
Emma’s feet stopped moving. If Nomi knew Beryl was thinking of changing the Jamboree... Of running the event? This...this might work. Her grandmother would never agree to go to Garden Terrace unless—unless her grandmother got something she wanted in return. This time the tears were for Emma herself.
She hit Redial and was connected to the nurse. “I’ll get her there,” Emma promised. It took only minutes to make the arrangements. A pang in her heart struck deep. But the longer her grandmother was not in rehab, the less she’d recover. Could Emma depend on the lengths Nomi might go to keep Beryl out of the Jamboree?
Emma closed her eyes, feeling faint. Had it come down to this? The shores of England began to cloud with fog. An image from the movie My Fair Lady, which she and Grumpa loved, faded quickly.
With the basket slung over her arm, Emma forced her legs to engage and continue walking to the register.
“Are you—” Sparks began.
Emma flung up a hand as if to ward off his kindness. “Please.”
“Can I help?”
“No.” To get lost in those eyes would ruin everything for her. The man moratorium had to get her through.
Another intense gaze, and then he nodded as though confirming something to himself. Sparks turned and strode out of the store.
* * *
AFTER LETTING TROUBLE OUT, filling the Omni with gas and grabbing a yogurt at the house, Emma headed for the Organic District before driving to the hospital.
Emma had no doubt that her grandmother would take the bait, once she dangled Beryl’s potential involvement in the Jamboree in front of her. The chasm between Nomi and her neighbor had erupted long before Emma had had memories, and nothing could induce her grandmother to let Beryl replace her.
A special loaf of bread would, however, hopefully reward the hospital staff for taking care of her difficult relative. They would need a treat, for her grandmother was, so far, still refusing to go to Garden Terrace.
A few miles out of town, a large carved sign heralded what was referred to as the OD. Organic farmers, ranchers, artisans and crafters rented small wooden stalls and sold their wares to residents and tourists passing on the county road. Organic gardens stretched behind the buildings.
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Kathy Damp
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Sometimes love is right in front of youEmma Chambers wasn′t supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug «Sparks» Turner has an important job to do, yet it′s Emma who′s feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she′s been waiting for, right?Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn′t staying, especially given the life-changing secret she′s discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma′s trust. Unless he can make her see that he′s a man worth taking a chance on.