1
LUCAS MCBRIDE had spent the past fourteen Christmases alone. And he’d had every intention of spending this one the same way. But that was before a two-month-old article in the Honoria Gazette had brought him back to Honoria, Georgia, a town he’d once vowed never to set foot in again.
Strung with multicolored Christmas lights, even the oldest part of downtown Honoria looked festive. Enormous wreaths made of tinsel hung from each lamppost. As he drove down Main Street, deserted on this Sunday evening only five days before Christmas, Lucas looked behind the decorations to note that many of the twenties-era buildings were unoccupied, the windows boarded up or gapingly empty. The few remaining establishments looked as though they struggled to survive. A Revitalize Downtown poster fluttered halfheartedly on a pole beneath a glittering wreath.
He passed the corner of Main and Oak, where he and his teenage buddies used to hang out on Saturday nights, smoking cigarettes and trying not to look too anxious to meet the girls who cruised by in their daddies’ cars. The alley behind the old, empty hardware store brought back memories of a fight Lucas and his pals had gotten into with a bunch of football jocks from rival Campbellville. Chief Packer had broken up the melee and hauled all the participants to the city jail.
Lucas had spent that night in a cell. His father had been the only one who hadn’t come to bail out his son.
It was the first night Lucas had spent in jail, but it hadn’t been the last. Chief Packer had made arresting Lucas a hobby after that.
At the end of the block sat what had once been the old soda shop. Lucas had met Rachel Jennings there.
She’d been seventeen, he’d been nineteen. During the next ten months, they’d come to see themselves like Romeo and Juliet, kept apart by old family feuds. They’d met in secret, heightening the romantic thrill of their trysts. No one had been aware of their feelings for each other—until Rachel’s brother Roger had found out about them.
Few of the townspeople would have imagined that the fiery-tempered bad boy, Lucas McBride, had a hidden streak of romanticism. But the events that had eventually run him out of town had destroyed whatever idealism he’d once possessed, just as time had decayed the buildings of old downtown Honoria.
Lucas had driven through the west part of town earlier, and had hardly recognized the heavily developed area with its shopping strips and fast-food restaurants and service stations and car-sales lots. He still remembered when his uncle Caleb had taken him deer hunting in the woods that had once stood there.
Progress, he thought, looking at the sadly dignified brick building that had once held the old fiveand-dime store, wasn’t all it cracked up to be.
Seeing the changes in his former hometown inevitably made him think of what else had changed since he’d left in the middle of that spring night so long ago. His father was dead now. His cousins scattered. His baby sister a grown woman. And Rachel...
As always, he pushed back his thoughts of Rachel into the darkest part of his mind, along with the other painful memories of his past. At least he wouldn’t have to face her on this reluctant visit. He knew she’d moved away from Honoria not long after he had.
Out of old, half-forgotten habit, he turned right on Maple Street, thinking he’d drive past the high school and see if that had changed as much as everything else. Almost immediately, he saw a flashing blue light reflected in his rearview mirror. The dark-colored Jeep had pulled out of nowhere and was now right on Lucas’s rear bumper, the light flashing from its dash identifying it as a police officer’s vehicle.
Hell. Lucas had been back in Honoria less than two hours and already he was being hassled by the local authorities.
Apparently, some things hadn’t changed at all.
He drove into the deserted parking lot of an auto-repair shop and stopped beneath a street lamp decorated with a glowing, horn-blowing Christmas angel. He rolled down the driver’s side window and pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, extracting his driver’s license from its plastic sleeve. He’d been through this drill enough to know what to do.
The thirty-something officer was dressed in civies—a heavy denim jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. He held a badge in his hand to identify himself.
“License and registration, please,” he said in a low drawl that marked him as a native Southerner.
Lucas held the license out the open window. “What did I do?”
“Did you happen to notice that you turned the wrong way on a one-way street?” the officer asked dryly as he pulled a
penlight out of his pocket and aimed it at the driver’s license.
“Maple’s one way now? Hell, I didn’t notice.” Lucas glanced automatically toward the street, wincing when he saw the prominently displayed one-way arrow at the exit of the parking lot.
The officer looked at the license in his hand, then seemed to go very still. His voice held a note of strain when he asked, “You’re Lucas McBride?”
Lucas knew this guy hadn’t been around fifteen years ago. Did they instruct all new cops to be on alert for Lucas McBride, in the unlikely event that he ever reappeared?
“Yeah, I’m McBride. What of it?”
The officer sighed. “I can’t give you a ticket tonight.”
Startled, Lucas scowled suspiciously. “Why not?”
“I’m marrying your sister in a couple of weeks.”
Lucas’s hands went slack on the steering wheel. “Well, hell.”
The officer tossed the driver’s license back through the window.
“That’s about the size of it,” he muttered. And he didn’t sound any happier about the situation than Lucas was.
LUCAS DREW a deep breath as he stared at the house in which he’d spent the first twenty years of his life. Though multicolored Christmas lights glowed from the eaves, and porch lights burned on either side of the front door, the night’s darkness wrapped around the place like a heavy blanket that might have seemed cozy to some, but had ultimately felt smothering to Lucas.
“It looks the same as I remember it.”
Wade Davenport nodded. “It needs some maintenance. I’ll be taking care of that when I move in.”
“You and Emily are going to live here when you’re married?”
“Yes.”
His gaze still focused darkly on that white-frame, black-shuttered house with its wraparound porch and winter-browned lawn, Lucas muttered, “Are you sure that’s such a good idea? No marriage has ever lasted long in this house.”
“We intend to change that.”
Lucas had a sudden urge to climb back in his car and speed away, as fast as he’d driven when he’d made his escape fifteen years earlier. He’d made a mistake coming back here. Emily was obviously safe and well, busy with her own plans. She was marrying a cop, going on with her life. She probably hadn’t given her long-lost half brother more than a passing thought in years.
He’d been a fool to let a strange compulsion draw him back here—a vague, unsettling feeling that Emily was in trouble, that she needed him. It was obvious that he’d been wrong.
He took a step back toward his car. “It’s too late for an unannounced visit. Tell Emily I’ll give her a call sometime, okay?”
“If I let you leave now, she’d never forgive me.” Wade’s voice was even, but there was a faint hint of steel beneath the easy drawl. “I think it’d be better if we just go on in.”
Lucas narrowed his eyes. Davenport had insisted on following Lucas to the old homestead after he’d stopped him on Maple Street. “Why are you so determined for me to see her tonight?”
“Because I want to be there when you talk to her.” Wade crossed his arms over his solid chest and leveled a look at Lucas, his brown eyes glittering in the gleam of security lighting, his face shadowed.
Lucas lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t trust me?”
Wade shrugged.
Running a hand through his hair, Lucas released a deep breath. “I suppose you’ve heard about me.”
“A few things.”
“None of them particularly flattering, I’m sure.”