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“I’m sure it’s a simple misunderstanding.” Nate tried to keep his voice light. Easy. As the family peacemaker, he was good at defusing drama.
“In that case, it won’t take you long to fix.” The note of finality in Everett’s voice was unmistakable. “How soon are you going to be home?”
Cursing himself for picking up the phone in the first place, Nate knew he couldn’t possibly deny his grandfather the one favor he’d asked of him in the last five years.
“Tomorrow,” he admitted, having already made arrangements.
All the more reason he needed to find his doc and get his discharge in order.
He scanned the recovery room for his clothes and landed on a newspaper open to the sports page with his team’s most recent win the lead story. The club sure as hell wouldn’t need him on the roster if they kept winning without him.
“Good enough,” Everett said, his voice suddenly sounding tired. “Stop by the house and let me know what happened after you see her.”
Gramp’s weary tone reminded Nate what a close call the older man had this spring when he’d suffered an injury leaping out of the way of an out-of-control tour bus in a freak accident in downtown. Nate hadn’t been around then either.
The thought sent a fresh wave of guilt through him. So no matter how much he didn’t want to talk to Keely again, he knew he owed it to his grandfather to help any way he could.
“Of course, Gramp. I’m sure I’ll get things sorted out.”
But as he disconnected the call, remembering his last heated exchange with the woman who’d torn up his heart and danced on the remnants, he realized that might be overly optimistic thinking.
Chapter One
An inescapable factof life in a small town? News about an ex travels fast.
So Keely Harper wasn’t surprised that she started getting updates about Nate Ramsey’s return to Last Stand, Texas, as soon as his truck was spotted out on County Route 10. Ignoring it, she redoubled her focus on cutting stems of yellow bells, the last of this season’s harvest on her wildflower farm.
Then she got a text from her friend Emma, a teacher at Creekbend High School, when Nate stopped by to speak to his old baseball coach. Keely didn’t respond, but she quit cutting flowers for the day and retreated into the relative coolness of her prep room to work on a couple of bouquets she’d promised for a local wedding. Sometimes the cement walls of the converted cellar made her cell coverage spotty. Hopefully that would be enough to forestall any more updates on a guy she’d moved on from long ago.
But she hadn’t even finished trimming leaves on the stems of the fresh flowers before another message pinged on her phone. This one from the cashier at the Rough Hollow Orchards Farm Stand, where Nate stopped by to check on his grandfather’s retail outlet for the Ramsey family’s fruits and vegetables.
That text had even gone so far as to inform her that Nate still looked hot, even though he’d just had surgery the day before for the injury he’d sustained in a game four days ago.
Keely didn’t want to know about his injury. Or his surgery. Or how hot he looked, damn it. She juggled her work shears so she had a hand free to shut off her phone altogether.
Cranking the volume dial on an ancient radio that sat on her worktable, Keely breathed in the calming scent of fresh flowers and sang along with a bluesy country tune. She tried to remember that, normally, she liked life in the small town of Last Stand. Even if it yielded more updates on her ex than if she’d installed a GPS tracker on his vehicle.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to contend with the flurry of notifications too often. As a professional baseball player, Nate spent far more of his time on the road than in his Texas hometown. That was part of the reason she’d broken things off in the first place—so he could live his dreams without being tied down. They’d dated in high school and into college, but once he’d become a hot prospect in the baseball draft, she didn’t see the point anymore. He’d been on a totally different trajectory from her, poised for a life of travel around the country that she could never lead. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would just attach herself to a guy and hope for the best. She needed to earn a living to feel good about herself, for one thing. Nate’s promise to share his signing bonus with her had only made her feel worse about her inability to contribute.
And while she might have been able to build a home-based career while she followed Nate around for baseball—something she’d briefly allowed herself to dream about—she wouldn’t have been able to hold together the remains of her dysfunctional family rooted here, in Last Stand. Back then, no one in town had known how deeply dysfunctional things were for the Harpers. At the time, she couldn’t let anyone find out either, because her younger sister had still been a minor.
Keely had spent months terrified that child protective services would take her sister away if they discovered how little their father provided for them. Or the potentially dangerous situations his drinking landed them in. Keely did what she could to keep her sister safe, remaining at home to take college classes online so Alexis was never alone when their dad called for a ride or brought equally drunk friends home at night.
The song on the radio shifted to an old Patsy Cline number about heartache and loneliness, themes she wasn’t in the mood for except that no one changed the station when Patsy Cline came on. Keely reached for some bright orange Texas lantana for the bride’s bouquet she was making, carefully trimming all the leaves away from the stems, since the leaves had a pungent odor.
The work helped to calm her, and she reminded herself she was in a good place with her family, all things considered. Her alcoholic father had mellowed in the last few years, even managing six months of sobriety that made her feel like he’d finally turned a corner. That made things easier to manage now that he wasn’t getting into bar brawls or tearing up their home in a rage. Her mother had taken off long ago, but even now that her dad was sober, he still needed someone to look after him as his health deteriorated. Her grandfather was in a retirement home, safe enough but full of regrets and dying early from the ravages of his own alcohol problem. As for her only sibling who’d recently finished her schooling to become a full-time physical therapist, Alexis was the family success story. The one who’d defied the odds, avoided addiction, and escaped the emotional trauma of her family imploding.
Mostly.
Thankfully Alexis now lived far from Last Stand, and that was a good thing since it distanced her from the stress of being a Harper. Stress that had induced some risk-taking behaviors that had scared Keely before her sister got those tendencies under control. Last year, Alexis’s specialty in sports medicine rehab had landed her a job with Houston’s baseball team that put her in close quarters with Nate Ramsey. An excellent job, Keely knew. But her own relationship with baseball had deteriorated since Nate had been drafted. She had no right to resent a whole sport for derailing her relationship with the one guy she’d allowed herself to dream about taking her away from Last Stand. It had been her choice to stay, after all.
Reaching for a white and yellow gingham ribbon to tie around the bride’s bouquet, Keely reminded herself that was ancient history, even if her friends in Last Stand couldn’t seem to get the message. Whatever love had been there died when Nate signed a contract even though he’d promised he’d finish college first. If he could have waited one more year, her sister would have turned eighteen, would have been away at college herself.
Not that any of it mattered now. If it bothered her when well-meaning friends texted her about him, that was only because she wanted to have her agency as a single woman respected. She didn’t need a man in her life to feel complete. After four years of hard work, she had a fledgling wildflower farm finally netting enough money to pay her bills. A job that allowed her the freedom to oversee her father and visit her grandfather, enough money to keep them all afloat and pay off the loans she’d taken out for Alexis to defray some of the cost of her education. Keely’s business degree—received from an online institution in just under four years—had been considerably cheaper, but she’d paid that off, too.
Wrapping a damp cloth around the stems to keep the flowers fresh, Keely placed the bouquet in a box with the bridesmaids’ arrangements. She arched her back from the strain of the day, and turned from the table in time to see the cellar’s exterior door swing wide. The heavy metal hinges squealed in protest before the July sunlight shone down the concrete steps.
And since Keely knew that she and Nate were ancient history, she didn’t have the slightest explanation for why the sight of him there should suddenly make her heartbeat skip just like it had the first time he’d held her hand.
