Her Hometown Hero - Melody Anne Page 0,102

since it’s only June now, maybe we’ll get lucky and swing that wedding, and then a Christmas baby for the next year.”

“That would indeed make a mighty fine Christmas,” Eileen said with a sigh.

When Spence took Sage back into his arms, both their faces shone with the pure love that they shared. They might not have been thanking the five people who’d plotted their union, but their radiant joy was thanks enough.

“To love,” Joseph said, and the four friends joined the toast. They hadn’t had a single miss yet.

Turn the page for a sneak peek of the next heartwarming novel in the Unexpected Heroes series

HER FOREVER HERO

Coming in spring 2016 from Pocket Books

Some welcome home. The railing and eaves of the porch were decorated thickly with spiderwebs, and weeds were doing their bit, too, creeping up between the now rickety boards to act almost like potted plants. Mother Nature had pulled out all the stops in her honor.

Grace picked up a dull gray stone, tossed it upward, then felt its expected weight as it landed back in the palm of her hand. She tossed it over and over, her mind adrift and haunted.

Why was she here? Why torment herself?

Because she had nowhere else to go. Her life had been in shambles for the past ten years, ever since she’d left Sterling. She could fix up her childhood house—a house, never a home. The spacious rooms could be cleaned, the rotten boards replaced, the cobwebs torn down. But she didn’t have any desire to live in a house with no pleasant memories to be found inside its walls.

Her happiest times in Sterling had been outside this mausoleum that had been her mother’s pride and joy. They might not have been the wealthiest family in the small Montana town, but they’d had a lot, and Mrs. Sinclair felt true love for her possessions, including the six-thousand-square-foot home now standing nearly empty before her daughter.

Grace’s journey down memory lane—tiptoeing through the funeral tulips—wasn’t finished yet, though. Letting the rock drop to the ground, she walked up the rickety steps, cautiously avoiding the sticky cobwebs. She tested the door handle, only to find it was locked. She hoped the key still worked.

It took several tries, but twisting the key a little this way and that, she finally managed to get the lock to free itself, and then, with the help of a strong push, the door was swinging open. Sunlight filtered through the dust-coated windows, showing years’ worth of grime covering the floors, counters, and odd pieces of furniture that had been left behind.

“Somebody call Better Homes and Gardens!” she said out loud to break through the gloom. Too bad it didn’t work.

Her father had told her he wouldn’t sell the home, that someday she might want to return to it. This property had once belonged to her grandfather, and to her grandfather’s grandfather before that. Her ancestors had moved to the area in the eighteen hundreds and had made a beautiful settlement for themselves.

Her mother had wanted to tear down the original homestead, a quaint one-room cabin with a woodstove and loft. Her father had refused, and restored it instead. That was where Grace had some of her best memories, because they had been outside the walls of her jail—the Big House. She and Sage had spent many nights sleeping in that small cabin, telling each other their dreams.

Never had she thought back then that her life would turn out the way it had. Never had she thought she would become this bitter, broken woman. No. She wasn’t broken. She was too strong for that. As soon as she had time to heal, she would once again show the world that Grace Sinclair was a fighter.

The old piano she had spent so many hours playing sat forlornly in the corner of the family room. Sheesh. Even thinking the word family made a bitter laugh escape Grace’s lips. Her father had once tried to be a good man, but he was so focused on making the next dollar and on making her mother happy that he wasn’t capable of real love, and her mother—well, her mother was the proverbial . . . okay, the Total Bitch of the West. Grace had tried to escape them every chance she got, after she’d learned that, on the outside, away from this house, real families existed. But her parents always managed to get their chains back around her, making sure she knew exactly where she came from