Coming Home to Texas--A Clean Romance

  “Is this Buckleberry Finn?”

  Dalia felt a smile coming on but managed to hold it back. “Sure is.”

  “Whoa! What is he now, twenty? He looks amazing! What’s your secret, huh, buddy?”

  Tony’s voice sounded all high and sweet, like it had that day in the barn with the kittens. He’d always been almost goofily affectionate with animals.

  “Remember when I rode him?” Tony asked.

  Their eyes locked across Buck’s back. In an instant, the years fell away and they were eighteen again, Tony in yet another graphic T-shirt with the state of Texas on it, Dalia pulling him to his feet and brushing the dust off him, both of them stumbling and laughing and falling into each other’s arms.

  She couldn’t hold back the smile anymore...but she turned her head to hide it.

  Dear Reader,

  Memory is a funny thing. It can be vague and hazy, barely more than an impression, or as strong and vivid as the real thing. Either way, memory doesn’t always line up with the way things really happened. Maybe we didn’t know the whole story and filled in the blanks with whatever made sense to us. And if there’s no one around to set us straight, our faulty memories just get stronger over time.

  Which brings us back to Limestone Springs, and to Tony and Dalia. Long before they helped Dalia’s friend Lauren find her way out of heartbreak to the love she needed in Hill Country Secret, they had their own story—a shared history, carved into the very boards of the old ranch house at La Escarpa. Dalia hardly has a single memory of home that Tony isn’t mixed up in somehow. But something drove them apart, the way hurricane-force winds shattered Dalia’s home—and Dalia’s memory of what happened has taken on a life of its own.

  But in Limestone Springs, friends and neighbors help each other out. Storms may come, but broken things get rebuilt. And in the end, the truth shines bright.

  Enjoy your stay.

  Kit

  Coming Home to Texas

  Kit Hawthorne

  Kit Hawthorne makes her home in south-central Texas on her husband’s ancestral farm, where seven generations of his family have lived, worked and loved. When not writing, she can be found reading, drawing, sewing, quilting, reupholstering furniture, playing Irish pennywhistle, refinishing old wood, cooking huge amounts of food for the pressure canner, or wrangling various dogs, cats, goats and people.

  Books by Kit Hawthorne

  Harlequin Heartwarming

  Truly Texas

  Hill Country Secret

  To my husband, Greg, who has been patiently explaining football to me for close to thirty years now. You taught me that all that running around on the field actually means something, that every game has its complexities of character, backstory, motive, conflict, resolution—basically all the components of a good story. Like most things, football is a lot more interesting when I have you to talk it over with.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to all those who answered my technical questions for this story: Dr. Mark Berry, Isaac Dehoyos, Grace Midkiff, Greg Midkiff and Wes Short. I’m grateful for your generosity with your wisdom and time.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM CATCHING MR. RIGHT BY CAROL ROSS

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE RED-CHECKED KITCHEN curtains hung askew, waterlogged and specked with dirt. Indoors and outdoors were all mixed together, with glass shards and china fragments scattered over what was left of the porch, and tree leaves covering the kitchen counters. The rafters didn’t look quite ready to fall down, but daylight shone through where the metal roof had peeled back like the lid off a sardine can. The little kitchen table where Dalia and Marcos used to jostle each other for space while doing homework was smashed to kindling beneath the porch swing, which had been driven straight through the window by hurricane-force winds—and the porch swing itself wasn’t looking too good. A calico barn cat perched on its remains, licking herself.

  This was Dalia’s first good look by daylight. She’d arrived last night, three days after the storm, and she’d been hoping against hope that the damage would turn out to be not so bad after all, but no. Her mother’s kitchen, the emotional center of her childhood home, lay in ruins.

  So did Dalia’s routine, for that matter. She longed for her own controlled, streamlined environment, where everything was where it belonged and she knew just what to expect. The loss of that felt like a physical ache, or caffeine withdrawal.

  Her mom hobbled over on her crutches. “Can you believe this mess? I never in my life heard a wind like that one. It was like a freight train inside a tornado.”

  She didn’t have to sound so gleeful about it, Dalia thought resentfully. She liked having such an exciting story to tell, and a captive audience to tell it to. Dalia had heard it all before, over the phone and in person.

  “What are you even doing up, Mom? It’s not safe for you to be walking around here. This place is a disaster area.”

  “I know! Isn’t it awful? The cleanup alone is going to take days. There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to begin—and with the FFF just two weeks away.”

  Ah, yes—the firefighter fundraiser. Dalia had been getting an earful about that, as well.

  “Why not cancel the FFF this year?”

  Her mom looked at her as if she’d said, Why not stop breathing oxygen this year?

  “Or, you know, put it off,” Dalia added quickly.

  “We can’t. There’s a reason we do it on that exact weekend in September. August is the Persimmon Festival, and everyone needs a few weeks to recover from that, and anyway, the FFF has to be in the fall for the pumpkin patch and corn maze to make any sense. But October is the county fair and Oktoberfest, and then Halloween, and the next thing you know it’s November and you’re right in the thick of the holidays. No, we can’t change the date.”

  “Well, then let someone else host it for a change.”

  “But we’ve hosted the firefighter fundraiser at La Escarpa for five years in a row! It’s never even been held anyplace else.”

  “All the more reason for someone else to take a turn.”

  Her mom shook her head. “We’re the ones who’re set up for it. It’s not like we can move the corn maze or the football field. We have the big cleared space for the tent, and most of the tables and things are stored in our tool barn.”

  Dalia poked a lump of soggy insulation with the toe of her boot. “I understand that, Mom, but something’s got to give. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it—that’s all. It’s not your fault. It’s just how things are. You can’t help it that your house got wrecked by a storm.”

  “Lots of people suffered storm damage. And the firefighters helped us all through it. They went right out into the teeth of it to rescue people—and now it’s
our turn to support them. They need this fundraiser. They’re all volunteers, and their expenses aren’t covered by taxes. Most of their operating funds for the year come from what we raise at this one event.”

  Dalia sighed. Her mom was right, of course. If the roles were reversed, Dalia would be making the same arguments. But her stomach sank as she saw the weeks of her visit to Texas unfurling longer and longer in her mind.

  It wasn’t the work itself that was the problem. Dalia didn’t mind hard work. She’d gladly rebuild the kitchen herself if she had the carpentry skills... But she didn’t. All she could do in this case was facilitate things—run the household, take care of her mother, keep on top of the builders. The whole process was going to involve a lot of coffee and tea, a lot of poring over magazine pictures and catalog pages, debating the merits of various designs and materials and finishes in excruciating detail, then debating them all over again the next day. A lot of nodding, and shaking her head, and making sympathetic noises, and not tearing her hair out.

  Eliana should be here instead of me. She likes this stuff.

  But Eliana couldn’t exactly drop out of college for a semester to come hold their mom’s hand for the rebuild. Marcos was away serving his country, so he had an even better excuse. And as Marcos had been quick to point out, Dalia hadn’t been home in literally years—since her dad’s funeral, in fact. She was due.

  Well, one thing at a time. “When does the builder get here?”

  Dalia’s mom shot her a quick look. “Um, about that—”

  Then her mom’s phone rang, and she actually answered it—answered it instantly, without grumbling about how the person should have texted instead, or even checking if she knew the number. She just swiped to answer and said, “Hello!” in that same bright, cheerful voice.

  “Oh, hi, Carol!...Yes, she got in last night...Flew in to Austin and drove out in a rental car...She’s here for as long as I need her. She’s going to telecommute to her work in Philadelphia.”

  Her mom said this like telecommuting was some futuristic marvel and Dalia was a good daughter, caring for her mother with joy in her heart and a song on her lips and not being at all grumpy or impatient or longing for peace and quiet and her own space.

  The conversation rolled along. There didn’t seem to be any point to the call; they were just...talking. It was weird. Dalia had exactly one friend she cared enough about to keep up with. They texted off and on and had scheduled Skype sessions. But she’d witnessed half a dozen of these shooting-the-breeze phone conversations between her mom and her mom’s friends since last night alone.

  They were talking over the storm now. “I know it!” her mom was saying. “When that wind came through, it sounded just like a freight train inside a tornado!”

  Gah! Dalia couldn’t listen to it one more time; she just couldn’t. She had to get away now before she lost her last marble.

  She picked her way through the gap in the wall where the kitchen door had been, onto the porch and down the steps to the sandstone walkway.

  The Texas sky was perfectly clear, acting all innocent, like it had never hurled a late-summer hailstorm at Dalia’s ancestral home. She breathed in the cool morning air and kept walking, out the gate and onto the caliche drive. The sound of her mom’s voice faded to the point where Dalia couldn’t make out the words anymore.

  Then she heard the crunch of tires on gravel, and here came a truck around the bend. The driver’s door had a decal with some sort of graphic that looked like a house. The builder!

  Finally. Now we can get down to business. Make some plans. Set some deadlines.

  The truck was an old stepside with a tomatoey orange-red paint job that looked original. A good sign. Anyone who drove a truck like that had respect for the past. He wouldn’t try to push any tacky period-inappropriate stuff onto the house.

  The truck pulled smoothly into the spot by the stand of cedar trees where visitors always parked. The driver got out. There was something familiar about his shape.

  He shut the door, and Dalia saw the lettering on the decal: Reyes Boys Construction.

  She barely had time to think, Wait, what? before the passenger door opened and out stepped another figure, even more familiar.

  Her heart gave a painful throb before her mind fully understood what was happening.

  Oh, no. No. It can’t be.

  But it was.

  Anyone would have thought an old has-been washed-up jock like Tony would have lost his looks in the years since he flunked out of college and broke Dalia’s heart. That would only have been fair.

  But no. The clean V shape of his torso, his crisp jawline, his outrageously full head of glossy black hair—it was all the same. If anything, he looked better than ever, with the physical maturity of his midtwenties giving solidity and dignity to what had always been a spectacular shape. He’d been magnificent enough back in the day, but evidently he hadn’t peaked until now.

  From their late teens on, Dalia was always surprised by how big he was—six foot four, broad and powerful. It just didn’t seem right for a man’s shoulders to go out that far. She could still remember the physical shock she’d felt the first time she’d put her arms around him. There was so much of him.

  He stopped in his tracks and looked at her with his head to one side, like he kinda-sorta recognized her but couldn’t quite place her. Wow. Talk about adding insult to injury.

  While he stood there puzzling her out, Alex came over with arms wide open. He always had been a hugger.

  “Dalia! I didn’t know you were in town.”

  He looked enough like Tony for it to be unnerving—an inch or two shorter, and less massive, but with the same basic proportions, the same jawline, the same smile.

  “Hi, Alex! Yeah, I just flew in last night,” she heard herself saying.

  “Yeah? How long you here for?”

  “Um, I don’t know yet. I’ll be helping my mom while her ankle heals. Overseeing the work on the house and all.”

  “You’re here for the duration, then.”

  Tony joined them. Dalia’s heart pounded. Up close he looked better than ever. Had she actually thought Alex resembled him? Ha! Alex was a pale imitation—Tony Lite. Tony was the real thing.

  He seemed taller, somehow. Was it possible he’d grown? He towered over Dalia, and she was not a short woman.

  “Hey, Dalia. How you been? You look good.”

  He could have taken the words out of a manual of things to say to an ex, and he said them exactly right, all soft and smooth. His charm, like the rest of him, hadn’t suffered with the passage of time.

  “Hello,” she managed.

  A very different hello, high and trilling, rang out behind her. And here came her mom, booking it across the rubble-strewn porch on her crutches, headed for the steps.

  Dalia was too horrified to speak. The surgery was just two days ago. There were pins and things sticking out of the incisions.

  “Whoa, hold on there, Mrs. Ramirez!” Tony called out. “Don’t come to us. We’ll come to you.”

  But it was Alex who led the way, looking over his shoulder now and then to tell his brother, “Ground’s kinda rough,” and, “Watch out for these porch steps.” Alex always did have a fussy-old-woman streak.

  They made it to the porch. Tony found a wooden porch chair in decent shape and brushed off the seat.

  “Here you go, Mrs. Ramirez. Do you need to elevate your foot? How are you? Looks like you got busted up almost as bad as the house did! How did it happen?”

  Dalia suppressed a scream as her mom started the story from the beginning.

  “Well! I was unloading the dishwasher that morning, waiting for my coffee to brew, when all of a sudden the sky went black, and the wind rumbled over the roof, just like when a cold front comes in, you know. Then the alert went off on my phone. Severe storm! Thunder and lightning!
Golf-ball-sized hail! I’d already let my chickens out to forage, and they were scattered all over the orchard. So I grabbed a chunk of watermelon out of the fridge and ran out the door calling, ‘Here, chick chick chick!’ I’ve got them trained pretty well, and they all came running up the ramp and into the coop. I tossed the watermelon inside, shut the door and started back to the house, but somehow I missed the steps. I fell off the coop porch and came down hard on my foot.”

  Dalia shuddered, trying not to think how much worse the accident could have been. It was bad enough as it was.

  Tony winced. “Oh, no! That coop’s up pretty high. That’s not a minor fall.”

  “No, it’s not! The fracture I got is called a trimedial malleolus, and it’s a doozy. I had to have surgery all over my ankle. I’ve got screws and a metal plate in there, and a little cage to hold everything together.”

  She sounded proud, but Dalia knew the pain must have been horrible. She’d done her own research into trimedial malleolus fractures after the accident. The injury involved breaks to three different parts of the ankle, as well as ligament damage. Not a minor thing at any time, and worse at her mother’s age.

  “Wow!” Tony said. “How’d you ever make it back to the house?”

  “I didn’t! I couldn’t even get up. I tried to crawl, but I hadn’t made it three feet before the hail started coming down. Ended up scooching under the chicken coop and waiting it out there, watching the hailstones bounce off the grass. But I didn’t lose a single chicken!”

  “That’s the spirit! You’re one tough lady, Mrs. Ramirez.”

  “Oh, well, I didn’t have much choice. Anyway, as it turned out, I’d have been a lot worse off if I had made it back to the kitchen. You boys are the heroes, going out into it all to help people. Did you know the chief made it over here in twelve minutes? He took care of me until the ambulance arrived. Good thing I had my phone on me to call.”

  A lightbulb went off in Dalia’s head at the words you boys. Dang it. Tony was a volunteer firefighter. Of course he was. Which meant he would be here at La Escarpa for the FFF in two weeks. She was going to have a full day of Tony, from the early-morning exhibition football game to the bonfire at night.