Last First Kiss
Authors: Lia Riley
F
IRST
,
TO
MY
agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, for unfailing optimism and helping the Brightwater series find its home at Avon Impulse. To my editor, Amanda Bergeron, who performs editorial magic and is encouraging and insightful. To Gabrielle Keck, for being so helpful and responsive.
A huge thanks to my critique partners on this book: Jennifer Ryan (hugs for the lovely blurb too), Jennifer Blackwood, Jules Barnard, and Natalie Blitt, for your kicks in the pants and much needed love notes.
Special love to Megan Erickson and AJ Pine. On good days and bad, you two are always there. It means the world.
A huge thank you to my family who put up with so much while I disappear to work or zone out in space. To J & B, I love you beyond words, and don’t read Mama’s books until you are much, much older. To Nick, this year has been nuts and I couldn’t write half the words if it wasn’t for your support. I love you.
Contents
The Legend of Five Diamonds Farm
(excerpt from
Brightwater: Small Town, Big Dreams)
R
OWDY
CATTLE
MAN
J
ERICHO
K
ANE
and quiet sodbuster Boone Carson were among the Brightwater Valley’s first settlers. The story goes that in the late-nineteenth century, Carson sauntered into
The Dirty Shame Saloon
after a good harvest and bought into a poker game. Lady Luck must have perched on his shoulder because he quickly made three hundred dollars. His neighbor, Wild-J Kane, was also there, having lost everything but the shirt off his back.
“Carson,” Kane allegedly said, “I’ll stake half my ranch for your winnings on the next hand.”
“Deal,” came the reply. Carson’s five-diamond flush beat out the cattleman’s three of a kind. He doubled his landholding and established Five Diamonds Farm.
And so began the famed Kane and Carson feud. The lingering grudge has withstood the test of time, driving the two families asunder, and rumors suggest the Eastern Sierras can now even boast of its own version of Romeo and Juliet. No dying, not unless you count the innocence of first love.
[draft]
Musings of a Mighty Mama
older posts>>
Dear Readers,
There were so many sweet but worried comments following my divorce announcement. Everything is
Screwed City, Population: Me
okay. Gregor
actually asked, “Annabelle, why limit myself to a single book in the whole library?”
and I grew apart. No one’s to blame.
Only my high-waist underwear and lack of a sex drive.
Yes, I went missing in action
leading the charge on Operation Eat Your Feelings—good time to buy stock in Ben & Jerry’s
, but for a fantastic reason. Ready for a little front-page news? (Insert the
Imperial Death March
anticipatory drum roll here.)
Atticus and I are in Brightwater!
FML
We left Portland yesterday morning, drove to Reno, and then dipped back into California to arrive in the
fifth circle of Dante’s Inferno
Eastern Sierras. My
don’t-know-what-the-h-e-double hockey sticks I’m doing
evil genius plan is to spend the summer at my family’s farm, which includes a small orchard filled with
ghosts and lost dreams
heirloom apple varieties. My hometown is famous for
two things: a hundred-year-old family feud
and
being the set location of
Tumbleweeds,
last year’s
overrated
Academy Award winner for best picture.
We’ll be celebrating the start of our new adventure with a bang—at this week’s Fourth of July fireworks celebration at the rodeo grounds. I’m contributing my specialty to the community potluck—cinnamon swirl coffee cake
infused with bitter tears
.
Can’t wait to share the natural beauty of this place, the snow-capped peaks, panoramic vistas, wild forests, and meandering rivers. It’s high time to dust off my red cowgirl boots and wrangle you guys some shiny new blog posts. Brace yourself for a whole lot of goodness.
Kill me now. Use a hammer and make it quick
.
Love, Annie
PS: Leave a comment telling me your favorite summertime potluck dish for a chance to win a set of organic silk play scarves for your little one from our lovely sponsor, Waldorf Whimsy
Draft Saved by
Mighty Mama 12:45am
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,
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T
HE
KNOCK
CAME
as the last ice cube melted into her scotch.
What the . . . ?
Annie Carson slammed against the chair, adrenal system upgrading from zoned out to Defcon 1. The vintage pig cookie jar stared back from the Formica counter with a vaguely panicked expression. Nothing arrived after midnight except lovers and trouble.
Annie didn’t have a lover. And the biggest trouble she had tonight was trying to finish this blog post while forgetting all the reasons she fled from here in the first place. On the surface, Brightwater boasted a quaint Ye Olde West appeal. Nestled under the shadow of Mount Oh-Be-Joyful’s fourteen-thousand-foot peak, the historic main street boasted a working saddlery instead of Starbucks, the barbershop offered complimentary sideburn trims, and tractors caused the only traffic jams.
Then there were the cowboys. Some women—fine,
most
women—would consider the local ranchers to be six kinds of swoon-worthy, but she’d learned her lesson ten years ago.
If you meet a cute guy wearing a Stetson, run in the opposite direction.
The next knock rattled the front door’s hinges; whoever was out there meant business. Annie sneezed before drawing a shaky breath. Drinking wasn’t a personal forte, but chamomile tea didn’t do much to blunt the first-night-back-in-my-one-cow-hometown blues, even with extra honey.
Maybe if she took her time, whoever was out there would go away.
She closed her laptop’s lid, stood, and walked to the sink, setting the tumbler under the leaky tap. Water drip, drip, dripped into the brown dregs. Dad’s radio above the fridge, tuned to a Fresno classical station, piped in Mozart’s requiem on the scratchy speakers, hopefully due to coincidence rather than cosmic foreshadowing.
More knocking.
This could very well be an innocent mistake. Someone had confused directions, taken a wrong turn, driven up a quarter-mile driveway to an out-of-the-way farmhouse . . . to where she sat wearing a
Kiss Me, I’m Scottish
apron with a sleeping five-year-old upstairs.
She hadn’t missed Gregor in months. Her ex-husband might be a metrosexual philosophy professor, but at least he stood higher than five feet in socks. Why, oh, why had she enrolled in yoga instead of kickboxing last summer in Portland? No way would a sun salutation cut the mustard against a crazy-eyed bunny boiler. An alarmed buzz replaced the hollow feeling in her chest. Brightwater was a sleepy, safe backwater. Had it grown more dangerous since she tore out of here on her eighteenth birthday? Meth labs? Cattle thieves? Area 51 wasn’t too far away, so throw in possible alien abduction?
Well, she was alone now and would have to deal with whatever came.
As a rule, killers and extraterrestrials didn’t announce themselves at the front door. Still, this was no time to start taking chances. She grabbed her father’s single-malt by the neck and padded into the living room. The change from bright kitchen to gloom skewed her vision as blood shunted to her legs. Shadows clung to the beamed ceiling and brick fireplace. If the rocking chair in the corner moved, she’d pee her pants. That old gooseneck rocker starred in more than a few of her childhood nightmares—ever since her sister had mentioned that Great-Grandma Carson had died in it.
“Hello?” she called, her voice calm—but, darn, an octave too high. “Who’s there?”
Silence.
The door didn’t have a peephole. This was the Eastern Sierras, a place where shopkeepers left signs taped to their unlocked front doors saying “Went to the bank, back in five minutes.”
Think! Think!
What’s the game plan?
Retreat—not a choice. But more whisky was definitely a viable option. She opened the bottle, and the gulp seared her throat. At least the burn helped dissipate the cold fear knotting her stomach. She pressed her lips together while screwing the cap back on.
Here goes nothing.
Brandishing the bottle like a club, she flung open the door.
A light breeze blew across her face, cool despite the fact it was early July. Five Diamonds Farm sat at four thousand feet in elevation. She glanced around the porch. Empty. Unable to stand the suspense, she stepped forward, her bare toes grazing warm ceramic. A baking dish sat on the mat. Annie knit her brow and crouched—a neighborly casserole delivery? At this hour? Fat chance, but one could hope. She removed the lid, and an invisible fist squeezed her sternum.
If hope was a thing with feathers, all she had was chicken potpie.
Literally.
A toothpick anchored a Post-it note to the crust.
Caught your hen in my tomatoes.
Chicken #2 will be nuggets.
Welcome home.
She tightened her shoulders. No name, but none was needed. This had Grandma Kane’s fingerprints all over it. The crotchety old woman ruled the spread next door, Hidden Rock Ranch, like it was her own personal empire, and she regarded the Carsons as unwelcome squatters.
Annie smashed the note in her fist and hurled it as far as possible. Crud, such a crappy toss—the wadded paper barely cleared the bottom step. She couldn’t even throw right. Three seconds later litterbug guilt struck, and she scrambled to retrieve it.
An engine roared to life near the barn, brake lights illuminating the ponderosa pine grove. Tires kicked up gravel and the horn tooted twice before turning onto the main road.
Enough was enough. The Kanes had once made her life a living hell, and that old woman’s capacity to nurse a grudge went beyond anything remotely sane or reasonable. The one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old feud had to end. This was the twenty-first century, time to leave behind the kerosene-lit dark ages once and for all. After the last terrible year, she was due a little peace.
She tucked her chin to her chest and strode around the house to assess the poultry situation. Five Diamonds might have become a farm in name only, but at least the chicken coop remained operational. As a girl, she loved collecting the eggs, selling them for a few bucks a dozen. The money went to her college fund, but that wasn’t the reason she took over the chore. She loved how when she appeared with cracked corn, the flock approached at warp speed, offering nothing but cheerful clucks. The comical sight never failed to induce a giggle.
Tonight, the hens were quiet in the brooder box and nothing appeared amiss. Relief drizzled through her veins. Grandma Kane must be playing a joke. She probably shopped the poultry specials at the local Save-U-More and—
“Oh, no.” A corner of rusty wire bent at an awkward angle. Annie yanked it as her groan rose to the moonless sky. Nearby, a coyote joined in, harmonizing with a single, mournful note.
There was more than enough wiggle room, even for the fattest hen, to escape. The back fields were overgrown, the orchard was a gnarled jungle, and the house was more weatherboard than paint. Backbreaking chores stretched in every direction. Couldn’t Dad at least have kept the coop in one piece? She fought back a sniffle, dropped the whisky bottle, and wiped her nose before twining the wire around a nail, shaking it a few times to ensure the quick fix held. A better shoring of defenses would have to wait until morning.
In the distance, atop the low rise, a light flicked on. Grandma Kane must have been arriving home. She probably sat on a throne of chicken bones and gnawed drumsticks like a wrinkled Genghis Khan.
Annie clenched her jaw, eyes narrowing. As much as she wanted peace, all necessary recourses were on the table if that woman so much as inched a toe on her property again. There were laws, and they existed for a reason, such as protecting respectable people from bloodthirsty octogenarians. Five Diamonds and its inhabitants were now her responsibility.
Dad packed up his painstakingly restored ’68 VW van and left for his artist residency in Mexico yesterday. He was ready to sell the farm and move on. Before leaving, he mentioned that offers had started to come in for neighboring properties last year—unsolicited and mind-bogglingly high. Brightwater was on the map after
Tumbleweeds
filmed in the valley, won an Academy Award, and captured the public’s imagination.
Sunset
Magazine
followed up with a feature, “Last Best Secret in the West,” and local property values skyrocketed, LA types snapping up second, third, even fourth homes.
Chest caving, she trudged to the front porch to gather what remained of the wanderlusting hen. A committed vegetarian for years, choking down even a single bite was out of the question. It was hard enough to swallow the fact that with Dad off to Puerto Peñasco and her sister, Claire, running a food truck in San Francisco, Annie was the only person left with the time to deal with Five Diamonds.
Her summer could be distilled to one simple goal—get the old farm ready for sale. With her share of the profit, she would be able to afford the astronomical housing in the Bay Area and move Atticus closer to his beloved aunt. Her mother died not long after Annie’s birth, and Dad wanted to retire south of the border. This was a way for her and her son to have a taste of family life.
The city also had a vibrant tech scene, perfect for an ambitious blogger ready to re-enter the workforce. Atticus would start kindergarten in the fall, and at last she could blow the dust bunnies off her journalism degree. Perfect timing, as
Musings of a Mighty Mama
exploded this year, going from a hobby mommy blog to pulling in five figures in advertising revenue—low five figures, but a more than promising start. Gregor was legally committed to providing child support, but she needed to figure out a way to stand on her own two feet. A robust blog presence could open the door to a syndicated column on a national website, or a book deal, or—
Something.
But right now what she needed was more coffee cake. After scraping the potpie into the garbage, she snagged the last slice from the Bundt pan. Cinnamon sugar dusted her front as she trekked upstairs to bed. The bathroom’s toilet ran while she brushed her teeth. Wonderful. Add another bullet point to the near-biblical-length “to do” list. Everything in Five Diamonds was leaky—including her.
No! No tears. She practiced water conservation as a rule.
“Nature doesn’t deal in straight lines,” Dad said once, while taking her on one of his “scouts” as he called it, hunting for inspiration. He’d spend weeks trolling river bottoms for just the right stones to place in just the exact swirl, or days creating an elaborate nest from twigs. People called him a genius, and perhaps they were right. He certainly didn’t inhabit the same world as others, floating past broken chicken coops, leaking toilets, and dripping faucets as if they were background static. Reality didn’t interest him, only the beauty and possibility hidden in flotsam and jetsam.
“Look at that tree branch, see the jags and bends?” he had muttered. “Or how about the groovy arc to that pebble? The world isn’t a perfect Point A to Point B, Annie. Life’s infinitely more complex.”
It sounded nice the morning he said it beside the river bend, under cottonwoods starting to change color. But alone, in the dark, when you’re almost thirty, divorced, without a clue where you’re going—perfect lines, simple and clear-cut, were infinitely more appealing.
Growing up wasn’t magical; it sucked.