Always back home.
Where will you move next?she thought as she established one of the shelves for Aunt Leigh’s patterns.
Rosie broke down the boxes as they went through them, which created more room. Joey opened the cupboards built into the other wall to reveal more storage, more shelves, more places to put things.
She thought of Bryce and Codi and Kassie and Reggie about to become parents. She thought about Belle and Harry and their recent engagement. Joey wondered if she’dever meet that just-right man for her. She had dated a lot in high school and even had a couple of boyfriends in college. No one in New York City, as the enormity of that place had scared her more than she thought it would.
And no one here in Coral Canyon, though she knew some cowboys who hadn’t left town after they’d graduated from high school. No one seemed interested, and Joey wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend anyway.
She had just turned to tell Grace, Liesl, and Celeste to go put a sewing basket on the lowest shelf by the door, when OJ asked, “What about this, Joey?”
Joey turned and came face-to-face with a cupboard door that had not been open a moment ago, and she rammed it with her face. She cried out, and her hands flew up to cover her nose. She tasted blood on the back of her tongue, and tears flooded her eyes. Pain smarted through her sinuses and down her cheekbones, but Joey was more startled and embarrassed than anything.
She cried when her emotions got the best of her, and so it wasn’t surprising to her that tears streamed down her face.
“I’m sorry,” OJ said, and he really meant it. He was a sweet kid that wouldn’t hurt a spider, but instead carried it outside so it could be free.
“It’s not your fault,” Rosie said as she closed the door. “We just gotta be careful, guys.”
“It’s fine,” Joey said, her voice nasally and pinched. “I just need to go to the bathroom.” She rushed out of the sewing room.
Behind her, she heard Rosie start to lecture Ana foropening the cupboard door when Joey had been standing right there. Her nose stung and her heartbeat flopped in her chest for some reason.
She ducked into the bathroom, but her nose wasn’t bleeding too badly. Thankfully, as she didn’t handle the sight of her own blood very well. To her great relief, the bleeding stopped within a few seconds, but she couldn’t stop sniffling.
“This is so stupid,” she whispered as she tossed the tissue away so she didn’t have to see the blood. She wasn’t even sure why she’d completely lost control of her emotions.
Her uncles kept bustling by the bathroom with bigger boxes and items of furniture as they had to go past her to get to the stairs that led to the second floor where a lot of the children’s bedrooms waited. Down the hall, she heard crying, which had to be Leigh and Morris’s twins who had just turned two.
Suddenly, everything felt too big, too chaotic, and too fast. Joey rushed out of the bathroom, kept her head low as she ducked around the corner, and then went out the back door.
In the corner of the yard to her right, Uncle Gabe, Uncle Morris, and several of the older teen boys still wrestled with garden tools, a lawn mower, a wheelbarrow, several rakes and shovels, and other larger equipment waiting outside the shed for its proper placement.
Joey ducked to the left, away from them. Her chest hitched with every step, and she held a new tissue to her nose to check if it was bleeding. It wasn’t. Aunt Leigh andUncle Morris had built a large house, and it seemed to take forever to gain the corner and duck around it.
The side yard over here wasn’t very big, maybe only fifteen feet between the house and the fence beside it, and shade covered everything here. Joey pressed her back into the house and slid down until she reached the ground, her knees folded to her chest. She put her head against them and cried, hoping that this tsunami of emotions and this deluge of tears would subside, and she could get back and continue being helpful.
Several trees had been left on the property, giving Aunt Leigh and Uncle Morris a maturely landscaped yard. As Joey quieted, she listened to the wind rustle through the tall trees. The leaves had already started to fall, and in fact, most were gone as Halloween lingered only ten days away now.
She sniffled, but thankfully she wasn’t outright sobbing anymore. She’d just checked to make sure her nose wasn’t bleeding again when someone came around the front corner of the house, saying in a clipped voice, “I can’t help that, Delaney. It’s not my job to find you an assistant.”
Adam Harmon. Glorious, gorgeous Adam Harmon.
The blond god of a man took two steps and then turned as he paced back the way he’d come. Clearly, he hadn’t seen Joey. Her breathing turned shallow, because she didn’t want him to find her there, pressed against the side of the house, bleeding and crying.
You’re not bleeding, a voice whispered in her head. But she may as well have been, and Joey simply felt stitched together wrong right now.
Adam, however, had been cut from one of God’s choicest cloths. He had hair the color of the warmest sandy beach Joey could imagine, and those broad shoulders…. Joey dreamt about them at night.
He wore a suit coat as well as he did a polo, and Joey hadn’t realized he’d be there to help Uncle Morris move. In fact, Joey thought Adam had left Coral Canyon at the beginning of the month to start a new job with a new country music star in Nashville.
Her heartbeat thundered like a herd of stampeding mustangs as she heard his voice fill her ears. She couldn’t even tell what he said, but he certainly didn’t seem happy. She wondered who Delaney was.
Probably his girlfriend, she thought. Adam had to be a decade older than her, and she had no right to be crushing on the man at all. He’d helped her several months ago when a rude customer at Cake Bites had launched into her, that was all.
She’d fallen and skinned her knees, and oh, Joey couldn’t handle the sight of her own blood, and she’d nearly fainted in Adam’s car. He’d doctored her up and taken care of her, and she couldn’t help but wish he’d come around the corner of the house to do the same thing again today.
He’d sit down on the ground beside her, put his arm around her, pull her close, and say,Tell me why you’re crying, Roo. And she would, and he wouldn’t judge her, and he wouldn’t make her try to spell out why she felt the way she did.
