Confessions of a Small-Town Girl
Sam. KS + SM. Mr. and Mrs. Sam MacInnes. Kelsey MacInnes.
Sam turned the diary toward Kelsey. “What’s all this about?”
Heat moved up Kelsey’s neck. “It’s just something teenaged girls do. It doesn’t mean a thing,” she insisted, reaching for the diary again.
He immediately lifted it away as he flipped ahead a few pages. “‘I dreamed about Sam again,’” he began aloud, only to pause, glance up, then start reading more slowly. “‘I’d give anything if he’d kiss me. Really kiss me…’”
Kelsey heard him cut himself off as he read the rest. A moment later he looked at her with a grin that would have stopped her heart had she not been so busy being horrified.
“You thought I had a great butt?”
Her cheeks had turned a telling shade of pink. But this would be nothing compared to what color they would turn after his perusal of a few more pages would reveal him to be the subject of a few more rather specific fantasies.
Very specific, actually.
Dear Reader,
Well, as promised, the dog days of summer have set in, which means one last chance at the beach reading that’s an integral part of this season (even if you do most of it on the subway, like I do!). We begin with The Beauty Queen’s Makeover by Teresa Southwick, next up in our MOST LIKELY TO…miniseries. She was the girl “most likely to” way back when, and he was the awkward geek. Now they’ve all but switched places, and the fireworks are about to begin….
In From Here to Texas, Stella Bagwell’s next MEN OF THE WEST book, a Navajo man and the girl who walked out on him years ago have to decide if they believe in second chances. And speaking of second chances (or first ones, anyway), picture this: a teenaged girl obsessed with a gorgeous college boy writes down some of her impure thoughts in her diary, and buries said diary in the walls of an old house in town. Flash forward ten-ish years, and the boy, now a man, is back in town—and about to dismantle the old house, brick by brick. Can she find her diary before he does? Find out in Christine Flynn’s finale to her GOING HOME miniseries, Confessions of a Small-Town Girl. In Everything She’s Ever Wanted by Mary J. Forbes, a traumatized woman is finally convinced to come out of hiding, thanks to the one man she can trust. In Nicole Foster’s Sawyer’s Special Delivery, a man who’s played knight-in-shining armor gets to do it again—to a woman (cum newborn baby) desperate for his help, even if she hates to admit it. And in The Last Time I Saw Venice by Vivienne Wallington, a couple traumatized by the loss of their child hopes that the beautiful city that brought them together can work its magic—one more time.
So have your fun. And next month it’s time to get serious—about reading, that is….
Enjoy!
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Confessions of a Small-Town Girl
Christine Flynn
Books by Christine Flynn
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CHRISTINE FLYNN
admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.
This book is dedicated to every
woman who kept a diary in high school…
with the hope that she knows where it is.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
Having fantasies about a man wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fantasies were normal. Fantasies were healthy. Writing them down wasn’t terribly bright, Kelsey Schaeffer conceded to herself, trying not to panic at what she was overhearing. Especially in detail. But she’d never dreamed that the subject of those wild imaginings would ever be anywhere near where she’d hidden her old diary. She’d had no idea that Sam MacInnes had even returned to Maple Mountain. She’d barely been back twelve hours herself.
“You going to flip those cakes, honey?”
Kelsey’s mother bustled into the kitchen of her busy little diner, one eye on the spatula Kelsey held, the other on her order pad. With her silvering-blond hair in its usual braided bun, her pretty features softening with age and a white bib apron tied around her ample waist, Dora Schaeffer looked much as she always had to Kelsey. Friendly. Efficient. Enduring. Like a rock that could weather any storm or challenge and remain unchanged. The only difference about her since Kelsey’s visit home last year was the white cast that ran from elbow to palm on her left arm. She had fallen from a ladder while adjusting the bunting she’d hung out front for the Fourth of July parade next Sunday.
The red, white and blue bunting now lay bundled on the storage room floor. Dauntless and headstrong to her core, her mom had pulled down the sections she’d hung rather than have them hang crooked before she’d walked down the street to the doctor’s office to get her arm set. There were no half-measures with Dora Schaeffer. Something was either done perfectly, or it wasn’t done at all.
Jerked from her alarm by her mom’s reminder, Kelsey hurriedly flipped the two orders of buttermilk pancakes turning golden on the griddle. With most of her attention on the conversation taking place on the other side of the service window, she stacked a third order onto a plate, added a side of sausage and eggs and slid the plate onto the window’s long ledge.
Amos Calder and Charlie Moorehouse, two of the community’s inherently stubborn se
nior citizens, sat with their elbows on the lacquered pine counter, coffee mugs in hand, waiting for their breakfast. According to what she’d just overheard of their laconic conversation, Sam’s sister had bought the old Baker place and Sam was refurbishing it for her and her boys. What had her mentally hyperventilating was Amos’s comment about Sam tearing out the upstairs bedroom walls.
Her old diary was up there. The one she’d kept in high school. It was behind a wall in the back bedroom. Her name was in glitter on the cover. Sam’s name was all over the inside.
Until a minute ago, she had nearly forgotten the thing even existed. Now, her only thought was that she would die if Sam found it.
She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d written. At that moment, all she recalled was that he had been a college senior the summer she’d turned sixteen and that he’d worked on his uncle’s farm. Big, buff, and totally out of her league, he had awakened her heart, her dreams and inspired a host of wild fantasies, the bulk of which she’d duly recorded, then ultimately hidden in the wall of the very house he was now tearing apart because her mom would have killed her had she found something so explicit in her bedroom.
Her then-best friend, Michelle Baker, in whose room she had hurriedly hidden her rather risqué writings after she’d discovered that her original hiding place in the old grist mill wasn’t safe, hadn’t had a clue what was in that diary. Since she kept a diary herself, Michelle had understood, however, how important it was for a girl to protect her private thoughts and assured her that no one would ever know the little book was there. As it was, Kelsey had never intended to leave it there permanently. But when she’d put it behind the loose wall panel Michelle had pulled out partway, it hadn’t caught on the little ledge that held her friend’s own treasures. It had slid all the way to the floor and they hadn’t been able to get it back out.
“Kelsey?” Carrying a freshly poured glass of milk, her mom backed out the swinging kitchen door. “The cakes?”
Multitasking normally came as easily as a smile to Kelsey. At the moment, however, she could barely focus on anything other than what she was overhearing. Rattled, hating it, she grabbed a white ceramic plate from the stack near the griddle and slid the pancakes on it. The meal joined the others on the service ledge as her mom placed the milk in front of the UPS man sitting at the end of the counter.
“Wonder what’s keepin’ him,” she heard Amos mutter.
“Keepin’ who?” her mom asked. Turning around, Dora absently smiled through the window at Kelsey’s suddenly frozen features, then reached one at a time for the older men’s breakfasts.
“Sam.” Scratching his balding head, Amos added a few more furrows to his weathered brow. “He’s usually here by now.”
Barely breathing, Kelsey watched the silver-haired Charlie eye his plate as her mom set it in front of him. Fork in hand, he poked at an egg yolk to make sure it was done to his liking. “Might be he drove to St. Johnsbury. Told us yesterday he’d have to make another trip into the lumberyard,” he reminded the man on the stool next to him. “I keep tellin’ him things aren’t as handy here as he’s used to in the city. Got to make lists. Pick up everything in one trip.”
Amos pressed his white stubble-covered chin toward the collar of the T-shirt shirt tucked into his coveralls. As he did, he eyed his similarly attired friend through the top of his black-rimmed trifocals.
“Doing the work he does, you think he don’t know about makin’ lists?”
Charlie, his own glasses rimmed in silver, eyed him right back. “What’s being a policeman got to do with anything?”
“He’s not a policeman. He’s a detective. You can tell by those shows on the TV that there’s a difference,” he explained, sounding as if the man being discussed hadn’t pointed out the distinctions himself. “I’d think that a man who goes around lookin’ for clues and such about crimes would be prone to keepin’ lists of what he knows and what he don’t.”
Kelsey’s mom gave the elderly men a patient smile. “I doubt he’s gone anywhere just yet,” she assured them both. “You know he wouldn’t make that long drive before fillin’ himself up. He hasn’t missed breakfast here in the two weeks since he arrived.”
“That’s ’cause he loves your cookin’, Dora,” came a gravelly voice from a table behind the men. “By the way, Kelsey, you’re doing good this mornin’, too.” A white ceramic mug was raised in her direction. “Good to see you home.”
Exposed by the window her mom had made wide so she wouldn’t miss anything while working in her kitchen, Kelsey smiled into the half-filled room. Smiley Jefferson had been the postal carrier for as long as she could remember. His front tooth had been missing for about that long, too.
“It’s good to be home, Smiley.” It had been until a few minutes ago, anyway. “I hear Drew and Kathy had another baby. Congratulations.”
“He finally got himself a grandson.” The owner of the only gas station in town grinned as he looked up from his breakfast. “Just don’t ask him to show you pictures. You get him started and the mail will never get delivered.”
There was no such thing as a private conversation at Dora’s Diner. Not when nearly everyone there knew everyone else. The quaint little establishment with its maple tables and chairs and bulletin board papered with handwritten notes of locals seeking to barter everything from farm equipment and labor to hay and eggs was as much the center of the community as the community center down the street. It was also the root of the town grapevine.
Much of what Kelsey had always loved about remote and rural Maple Mountain, Vermont, was the sense of acceptance and community she’d always felt there. Many of the locals were set in their ways and independent to a fault, but they protected their own. Neighbors helped neighbors. If someone hadn’t been heard from in a while, someone else checked on them to make sure they weren’t just busy or being reclusive. They were like extended family to her. And, like family, she loved them in spite of their quirks as much as she did because of them.
The acceptance was reciprocal. No matter how long she remained away, for a year, sometimes two, she was always welcomed back.
Her attention wasn’t on that comfortable familiarity, however. All she felt as the front door opened and heads lifted to see who was joining them was a distinct sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.
Sam MacInnes hadn’t been anything more to her than a passing memory in the dozen years since she’d last seen him. Since she’d gone off the deep end for him as she had, she’d obviously thought him rather incredible back then. But she’d been a teenager at the time. Having been raised in conservative and totally unsophisticated Maple Mountain, she’d been a fairly sheltered one at that.
Years of living in cities had left her far more worldly and infinitely less impressionable than she’d once been. Still, she wasn’t quite prepared for the six feet of solid muscle and testosterone in a faded NYPD T-shirt and worn jeans that walked into the room.
He totally dominated the space.
He made no effort to draw attention to himself. If anything, it seemed to her that his manner as he returned the greetings of others with an easy, appealing familiarity seemed decidedly low-key. He was simply the sort of man other men sensed as a prime example of their own, and either envied or emulated. Women simply stopped to stare and reminded themselves to breathe.
She didn’t remember his hair being so dark. Its shade of sable looked so deep it nearly seemed black in the overhead lights. And his silver-gray eyes spoke more of a quiet, watchful intensity than whatever romantic notion she’d had about them all those summers ago. Yet what struck her most as he moved closer was the rugged maturity that carved lines of character in a face that had once merely been handsome—and gave him an aura of power and utter control that seemed downright dangerous.
He’d barely met her eyes when she jerked her glance away and slipped behind the wall to the grill.
The thought that he might have already found the diary sent her heart to her t
oes.
With her pulse pounding frantically in her ears, she heard coffee being poured into a mug and her mom’s cheerful, “’Mornin’, Sam. Good thing you showed up. These two were gettin’ worried about you.” The mug slid across shiny pine. “I just told ’em not a minute ago that you wouldn’t leave without havin’ breakfast first.”
The chuckle she heard sounded as deep and rich as the brew her mother had just poured. “I didn’t realize I was getting that predictable. But you’re right.” His tone grew grateful. “Thanks, Dora,” he said, apparently referring to the caffeine she’d just slid toward him.
With the clink of metal against glass, her mom slipped the carafe back onto the big double coffeemaker. “What are you pickin’ up from the lumberyard this time?”
“More two-by-fours. But I’m not going into St. Johnsbury until I get all the walls upstairs torn out and see what else I’ll need. I’ve run into more wood rot up there than I did downstairs.”
“That’s because the roof was so bad.” Amos punctuated his conclusion by stabbing a bite of pancake. “The Bakers replaced it so they could sell the place. That thing sagged like an ol’ mare. Leaked in buckets, I’d imagine.”
“They told Megan about the water damage,” Sam replied, speaking of his sister. “She didn’t care. She and the boys fell in love with the place.”
“I can see why they’d do that.” Silverware rattled as her mom put together a setting. “It’s a pretty piece of property, with that creek and all. Kelsey used to like going out there herself when the elder Mrs. Baker was still alive. She was friends with her granddaughter.
“Speaking of which…Kelsey, I mean,” she continued, her tone utterly conversational, “she got here last night. Her plane was late arrivin’ in Montpelier, so we’ve hardly had a chance to visit. Have we, Kelsey?
“Kelsey?” Puzzlement entered Dora’s voice as she turned to where her daughter had stood only moments ago. “Where did you go? I want someone to meet you.”