Hometown Hope

“What? Yes. Three of the panes have been cracked forever, but—” Anna broke off and bit her lip as she studied her window. “Oh.” The damaged glass had fallen completely out of the frame and splintered on the floor, leaving gaping spaces behind. “Well, no. Not like that.”

That was what he’d been afraid of. “When I kicked the door in, the impact must have jarred the cracked panes loose.” He’d broken the door, too, but he didn’t feel as bad about that. It was a cheap hollow core not original to the building. He could get dozens of those down at the building supply store.

That window was a different story. Hoyt’s contractor brain kicked in. The watery-looking glass in the intact panes meant he was looking at an antique fixture. Not a standard size, either. It was going to be ridiculously expensive to repair, if he could even get glass to match, which was doubtful. The whole window would probably have to be replaced.

As he silently summed up the damages, gusts of wind blew in through the empty holes, bringing heavy splats of rain with them.

“Excuse me.” Anna made a worried noise as she brushed past him. She grabbed the flaps of a rain-spattered cardboard box and began tugging it away from the window.

“I’ll do that.” He reluctantly set Jess on her feet. “Stay put for a minute, pumpkin, okay?” He waited until she nodded and then made short work of moving boxes out of the danger zone while Anna hovered on the sidelines.

“Thanks,” she murmured. Opening one of the dampest boxes, she checked the contents. She made unhappy clucking sounds as she unpacked the books. She gave each one a quick once-over before stacking them on a nearby table.

Hoyt watched the process with a sense of confusion. There was at least six or seven hundred dollars’ worth of structural damage in this room, but Anna was worrying over a box of wet books?

He’d never understand this woman.

Anna made it to the bottom of the box and sighed. “Most of these are okay. I might have to discount a couple for water spotting, but other than that, I don’t think you did any real damage.”

Hoyt waited, eyebrows lifted.

Nothing.

“Except for your busted window and door,” he finally pointed out.

“Oh, right.” Anna considered the broken glass. “There is that. Not that it really matters now,” she muttered under her breath.

What did she mean by that? No telling. Hoyt shook his head.

Nope, he’d never understand Anna Delaney. Not in a million years.

He grabbed a broom leaning against the wall. “Hand me that dustpan there. I can’t do much tonight because I need to get Jess on home to bed, but I can at least get this mess cleaned up a little.”

“I can manage,” Anna protested. He ignored her.

He swept up the broken glass and dumped it in the trash. Then he snagged some rags off a pile of cleaning products and wadded them into the empty panes. He was able to shut out the worst of the blowing rain, but just to be on the safe side, he shifted three more boxes of Anna’s precious books farther from the window.

Mainly because he figured that if he didn’t, Anna would do it the minute he left.

Then he picked Jess up and settled her back against his chest. “That’s the best I can do for now. I’ll be by first thing in the morning to take some measurements so I can get the materials I’ll need for the repair.”

“You’re fixing it?” Anna looked so jittery at the idea that it was almost funny.

Almost.

“I’m a building contractor, Anna. Fixing things is what I do.” That doubtful expression she was wearing was a little insulting. “Is that a problem? Because I can get somebody else to handle the repair, but I can’t promise you when it’ll happen. Summer’s a busy season, and every man worth his salt is up to his elbows in work right now. But if you’d rather have somebody else fix this—”

“No! You fix Miss Anna’s bookstore, Daddy. I don’t want Miss Trisha to make this place go away.”

A man’s life could change on a dime. Hoyt had lived long enough and hard enough to know that firsthand. And when it did, for a second or two, time just sort of...stopped.

As he looked down at Jess, Hoyt could hear the ticking of the old clock on the wall of the bookstore and the flapping of the flimsy awnings Principal Delaney had paid some jackleg out-of-town guy to install on the front of the building. But as far as Hoyt was concerned, the whole world had narrowed down to a tiny girl in a pink T-shirt.

After three long years of silence, Jess had finally spoken.

Dr. Mills had assured him this would happen one day, but he’d almost stopped hoping for it. Even the therapist had started to worry. He’d seen it in her eyes the last time he’d taken Jess to Atlanta for an appointment. Both of them knew the statistics for selective mutism, and they knew Jess’s silence had dragged on way too long.

Act normal when it happens. The counselor’s optimistic instructions replayed themselves in his head. It’s a delicate moment. Don’t make a big deal out of it.

Yeah, right. Turned out that was a lot easier to talk about than it was to do. He’d never been much of a crier, but right now his eyes were stinging like he’d been chopping onions.

“Wh—” His own voice came out so rusty that he had to clear his throat and try again. “What did you say, sweetheart?”

Jess put her small hands on each of his cheeks, tilting his head down until their foreheads bumped together. She looked deeply into his eyes. “Fix Miss Anna’s bookstore, Daddy. Pretty please promise?”

Pretty please promise. His gut twisted as he remembered the last time he’d heard that cutesy phrase. The memory was sharp. He could almost smell that weird hospital odor again and see a smaller Jess’s tear-streaked face.

The moment wasn’t something he was likely to forget. It was the last time he’d heard his daughter speak...when she’d asked him to keep the promise he never should have made in the first place.

Mommy will get better, honey. I promise.

He shook off the memory. This time was different. This time Jess was asking for something he could do.

“Sure thing, baby. Daddy’ll fix everything, don’t you worry. This bookstore’s not going anywhere. I promise.”

Anna cleared her throat, but Hoyt jerked his head sharply and cut her a pleading look.

Not now.

Anna must’ve read his face correctly. She bit her lip. “We should talk, Hoyt.” Her voice was carefully calm, but her expression wasn’t.

“We will. I have to get Jess home now, but I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk everything over then.” He didn’t wait for her to respond.

He had no idea why Principal Delaney’s run-down old bookstore had been the key to unlock Jess’s speech when nothing else had worked, but he wouldn’t waste time wondering about it. The game he’d been losing had finally changed, and Hoyt had possession of the ball for the first time in three years.

Tomorrow he’d find out exactly what that funny expression on Anna’s face meant, and he’d work his way around whatever problem was standing between him and the end zone.

Whatever it was, he already knew it didn’t stand a chance.

Chapter Two

At six thirty the next morning, Anna set her devotional book down on the counter and refilled her coffee mug. She was going to need all the caffeine she could get today.

She hadn’t slept well. Yesterday’s events had played on an endless loop in her mind. Trisha’s mean-spirited offer on the building, followed by Hoyt’s frantic visit and the horrifying discovery that Anna had locked an emotionally traumatized five-year-old in her storage room.

Then the astonishment of Jess speaking. That was the memory that got to her most of all. The incredulous joy on Hoyt’s face... She still got choked up, thinking about it.

The Bradley family had been through a lot. The whole of Pine Valley had sympathized with Hoyt in his grief and worried over Jess’s long silence.

Especially Anna’s father. He’d written Jess and Hoyt’s names on the very top of the prayer list he’d kept tucked in his Bible. Her father loved everybody in his small town, but Jess Bradley held an extra special place in his heart. He’d always considered the little girl’s love of books one of his biggest successes as an educator.

Before his memory had completely failed him, her father had told her proudly about how Hoyt’s wife had brought Jess in for story times and other special bookstore events.

“Neither I nor his teachers could ever get Hoyt interested in literature, but we did manage to reach Marylee Sherman. She was an avid reader, and she was doing her best to make sure that baby of theirs loved books, too. It’s a shame how things work out sometimes. It truly is.”

Her father would have been so pleased to see how Marylee’s efforts continued to pay off. Jess’s passion for books had grown until it rivaled Anna’s own. Come to think of it, because of Jess, Anna had sold more books to Hoyt Bradley over the past couple of years than to anybody else in Pine Valley.

Her father would’ve chuckled over that.

Anna might have appreciated the irony a lot more herself if it hadn’t meant seeing Hoyt on a regular basis. Even after all these years, Hoyt Bradley made her feel...uncomfortable.

She hadn’t always felt that way. Once upon a time she’d actually tried to run into Hoyt, hanging around hallways where she knew he had classes, making long detours by the athletes’ boisterous lunch table, hoping he’d look up and say hi.

That was the sort of thing that happened when you were shy and socially invisible, and your beloved English teacher asked you to tutor the local football star. Anna’s job had been to keep Hoyt eligible to play, but she hadn’t stopped there. She’d boosted Hoyt’s GPA enough that he’d qualified for a college football scholarship.

Then copies of senior exams had been discovered in the gym locker room, and all eyes had turned on Anna. After all, people had said, as the principal’s daughter, she had access to the school after hours, and Hoyt was...well, Hoyt Bradley. Any girl, especially a nerdy bookworm like Anna, would be willing to do whatever a guy like that asked her to do.

It all made perfect sense.

It just wasn’t true.

Anna had no idea how Hoyt had managed to get those test keys, but whatever he’d done, he’d done without her help. To be fair he’d tried to make that clear. He’d told everyone that Anna had nothing to do with the theft. But since he’d stopped short of making a public confession of his own guilt, most people had simply assumed he was covering for her.

There was some irony for you. Hoyt was the actual guilty party, but in the end, he’d come off looking like some chivalrous hero, while she looked like...well...

A lovestruck dork.

Which, if she were brutally honest with herself, was uncomfortably close to the truth.

A rapping on the door startled her out of her thoughts. She glanced up to see Hoyt peering at her from the sidewalk.

Anna shot an alarmed look at the antique clock on the wall. She’d known she’d have to deal with Hoyt at some point today, but what was he doing here at this hour? It wasn’t even 7:00 a.m. On a Saturday. And she was wearing her rattiest yoga pants and an oversize green T-shirt with I’d Rather Be Reading scrawled across the front in glittery pink script.

Plus, she had the kind of curly hair that had to be beaten into submission every morning, and she hadn’t even made her first attempt yet. She probably looked like some cartoon character who’d just been struck by lightning. Still, considering she’d locked the man’s daughter in her storage room yesterday, she couldn’t exactly shoo him away.

Besides, she’d been the accidental witness to an incredibly emotional moment last night. When Hoyt had heard his daughter’s voice for the first time in way too long, she’d seen the man’s heart hanging out. He was probably feeling vulnerable himself today, facing her after a moment like that.

Anna set down her mug, took a deep, calming breath and headed in his direction. She unlocked the door and opened her mouth to say something friendly and reassuring.

She didn’t get the chance.

“You trying out a new look, Delaney?” Hoyt gave her a quick once-over and grinned. “I like it. You should wear your hair like that all the time.”

As he shouldered past her into the store, Anna could feel her cheeks heating up. As usual, Hoyt Bradley was poking fun at her.

This man wasn’t vulnerable. He was impossible.

“My Saturday hours are posted right there on the window. I don’t open until ten today. I’m aware that reading goes against the whole caveman thing you’ve got going on, but you really should give it a try sometime.”

He raised an eyebrow at her tone and then shrugged. “Sorry about that.” He didn’t sound particularly sorry, but then Hoyt never did. “Some of us cavemen have to get to work early.”

He did look ready for work. He was wearing a rust-colored shirt paired with khaki work pants and boots. An embroidered sign on his shirt pocket read Bradley Builders in black script. His dark hair was damp from a shower, and he smelled like some kind of foresty aftershave.

He made her feel like a slacker.

Whistling cheerfully, he paused to pour himself a mug of coffee from the machine behind the counter. “If you want that window and door fixed anytime soon, I need to take some measurements before I hit the building supply store this morning.” He vanished into the storeroom, filched coffee in hand.

The instant he was out of sight, Anna went straight for the heavy-duty rubber bands she kept in a drawer at the checkout counter and attempted some emergency hair management.

Hoyt Bradley hadn’t changed a bit since high school. She could almost feel her blood pressure going up.

She’d barely finished corralling her uncooperative hair into a messy ponytail when Hoyt reemerged from the storeroom. He retracted the tape measure in his hand and stuffed a torn scrap of paper in the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m done. I can get the door fixed today, but I’m going to have to special-order the window, and that’ll take a while. I’ll board up the gap for you when I swing back by.”

More Hoyt was the last thing she needed. “Don’t worry about it. I can rig up something to keep the rain out.”

“Rain’s not all you want to keep out. You don’t want somebody breaking in.”

“In Pine Valley? I doubt that’ll be a problem. Besides, there’s nothing in here to steal except books.”

Hoyt paused. For the first time since she’d opened the door, he looked serious. “About that. How bad is it?”

Something about his tone put Anna on alert. “How bad is what?”

“Are you carrying a lot of debt or is it just a cash flow problem?” Confused, she frowned at him, and he made an impatient noise. “The bookstore, Anna. How deep in the hole are you?”

Typical Hoyt, standing there, asking nosy questions as if he had every right to know. Well, she wasn’t sharing. For one thing, her finances were none of his business.

And for another thing, she’d already been embarrassed enough for one morning, thank you very much.

“That’s a bit personal, don’t you think?”

Hoyt sighed and looked at his watch. “I think you never could give a guy a straight answer. I don’t have time to get into all this right now anyway. I’ve got a job site to get to. We’ll have to hash it out later. How about after work? That good for you? You could come over to my house for supper.”

The man was unbelievable. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? I’m serious, Anna. Me and you need to talk. You don’t have anything more exciting lined up for tonight. Do you?”

It was something about the offhand way he tacked on the question and the humorous twinkle in his eye as he asked it. Like he already knew she’d be sitting at home alone on a Saturday night reading a book, just like always.

That happened to be true. But the fact that Hoyt Bradley knew it irritated her, and the words came out before she could stop herself.

“It’s you and I.”

“What?”

“You and I need to talk. Not me and you. I must have told you that at least a million times back in high school.”

Hoyt stared for a second. Then he laughed and shook his head. “Still dishing out the Annatude. I guess some things never change.”

Annatude. She’d forgotten about the word he’d made up back in high school. It had been their little inside joke, and she’d actually thought it was cute. For a while.

Until she’d realized that the joke was on her.

She lifted her chin. “Your grammar certainly hasn’t changed.”

Hoyt glanced at his watch and made an impatient noise. “Look, I really don’t have time for all this right now, Anna, so let’s cut to the chase. I know you don’t like me much, okay? I get that, but this isn’t about me. This is about Jess.”

He was right. She didn’t like him much. She also didn’t like being steamrolled, so she’d been prepared to dig in her heels and stand her ground.

Right up until that last sentence.

She hesitated, torn between her irritation with Hoyt and her concern for his daughter. The concern won out. “What about Jess?”

“We’ll talk about it tonight over supper.” The corner of Hoyt’s mouth twitched. “Me and you. Say, around six thirty? Don’t expect a lot of bells and whistles, though. I’m not much of a cook, but I’ll come up with something. You could bring some dessert if you want. You used to make a pretty stellar brownie if I remember right.”

That was the wrong memory for him to bring up. Remembering the long afternoons she’d spent baking those sad little I-have-a-crush-on-you brownies still made her cringe.

That clinched it. No way was she was going to Hoyt Bradley’s house for dinner. She opened her mouth to tell him so.

He must have read her expression, because he spoke before she could. “Anna, Jess is all I have. She finally talked last night after all these years, and I want—” His voice roughened, and he waited a second before continuing. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure she keeps on talking. I know this isn’t your problem, and I’m really sorry to bug you. But somehow you and this store of yours have gotten tangled up in my situation, so I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d take the time to talk with me about it. At my house. Tonight.”

Jess is all I have. Anna chewed on her lower lip. She knew what it was like to have only one person in the whole world left to love. She also knew how it felt when that person slipped away from you into a place you couldn’t access, no matter how desperately you wanted to.

She was going to kick herself for this later, but—

“Okay.”

“Please, Anna, I—” Hoyt stopped short. For once in her life, she’d thrown him off-balance. “Okay?”

“Yes. I’ll come.”

Hoyt blinked a couple of times. “I really appreciate that. I guess I’ll see you tonight.”

“Right.” They considered each other for an awkward second or two, and then Hoyt nodded and headed out of the store toward his truck.

Anna relocked the door behind him, her heart skipping nervously. Glancing up, she caught Hoyt studying her from the cab of the truck.

Their eyes connected, and she realized something. For probably the first and only time in their lives, she and Hoyt Bradley were thinking the exact same thing.

What on earth did I just get myself into?

* * *

Hoyt Bradley didn’t spook easy, and he had his dad to thank for that. When you grew up in a house with a mean drunk, you learned early to cope with stuff that made most people turn tail and run.

So it made no sense for his palms to be sweaty when he reached for the doorknob at six thirty. On the dot.

Trust Anna Delaney to be right on time.

She was waiting in the shade of his deep front porch. Maybe she was trying to make up for that crazy outfit she’d been wearing earlier because now she looked like she was headed to a job interview at a funeral home. She had on a pink blouse buttoned up to the neck and gray slacks with a knife-blade crease down each leg. Somehow she’d even wrangled her unruly mop of hair into a prissy bun.

That must have taken some doing. And as far as Hoyt was concerned, it had been a big waste of time. He’d meant what he told her back in the bookstore. Her hair looked better the other way.

Still. Hoyt glanced down at his own rumpled blue cotton shirt and jeans. All things considered, he probably could have stood a little sprucing up himself. She poked a foil-covered dish in his direction. “I brought dessert.”

She’d taken his suggestion. Maybe this was going to be easier than he’d thought. “I hope it’s those caramel brownies you used to make.” She’d once bribed him to read an entire act of Julius Caesar by allowing him one bite per page.

“Sorry. Banana pudding.”

He’d never much cared for bananas, and from that sharp twinkle in Anna’s eye, she remembered. So much for easy. “Come on in.”

She edged past him into his living room and threw a startled glance upward.

“Oh, wow.” For a second or two she seemed to have forgotten he was standing there, which made the raw admiration in her voice mean even more. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well, not in somebody’s home, anyway. I feel like I just walked into a cathedral.”

He’d designed the front room of his home with a vaulted ceiling that soared into a high point. Large triangular windows brought in the blue sky and tops of the old pecan trees in his yard. The back wall of the room was mostly glass, too, showcasing the sparkling pond he’d dug out in the back field.

He always enjoyed seeing people react to it, but nobody had ever commented that it looked like a church before now.

Strange, since he’d actually patterned this space after a sanctuary he’d helped build down in Savannah several years ago. He’d liked the way that building had brought in the outdoors, spotlighting God’s creation rather than focusing on man-made curlicues. He thought he’d done a pretty fair job of copying that here.

Weird that Anna Delaney of all people would be the one who picked up on that.

“Thanks,” he said simply.

Anna flushed and nodded awkwardly. She reached up a hand to tuck a straying lock of hair back into place. It flopped right back down as soon as she quit fussing with it.

Hoyt tried not to grin. For such an uptight girl, Anna sure had some wild hair. It was a glossy brown, and when she wore it down, it fell in loose spirals past her shoulders. She’d been fighting with it—and losing—as long as he’d known her.

“Where’s Jess?” Anna dug in the bag she had looped over one elbow and produced a storybook. “I brought her something.”

“She’s not here.” The immediate alarm in Anna’s expression might have been funny if there hadn’t been so much at stake. “We need to talk about some stuff she doesn’t need to overhear, so I asked Bailey Quinn to take her out to Tino’s for a pizza.” Anna still looked uneasy, so he added, “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

She hesitated but then set her bag down on the table by the door and nodded. “I guess so.” She tilted her head and sniffed. “Hoyt? Is something burning?”

He made it to the kitchen about the time the smoke alarm started going off. He opened the oven and drew out four charred lumps of garlic bread. Even by his low standards, they weren’t salvageable.

Not a good start.

“If that’s our dinner maybe we should skip right to dessert.”

Anna had followed him and was leaning against the doorframe. Bombing the bread had served one purpose at least. She didn’t look suspicious anymore. She looked amused.

“Nah, the lasagna’s okay.” Mainly because it had started out in the supermarket’s frozen foods section. “I was trying to hurry this bread along. Me and the broil setting on this oven have a love-hate thing going on. I like it because it cooks stuff fast, but if you forget about it—” he gestured to the smoking lumps “—charcoal.” The smoke alarm was still shrilling. “Could you hand me that broom?”