Finding Hope (Nugget Romance 2) Read online

  STARTING OVER

  Clay swiped off his hat, tossed it onto one of the old Adirondacks, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “You seeing that photographer now?” He waved at Emily’s hair. “Is that what that’s all about?”

  “Hayne?” she asked with ire. “What is it with you about him?”

  “Obviously he made you feel the need to fix yourself up, when you looked just fine the way you were.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with him,” she said in that same acerbic voice, unfolding her legs and straightening in the chair. “And no, I wasn’t fine the way I was! I wore my grief like a mantle. This is who I used to be and what I looked like before my life fell apart.”

  Clay sucked in a breath, propping himself against the wall. At a loss for words, he just stood there feeling like an insensitive jackass, pretending to hold up the house. Emily got up.

  “Where you going?” he said, afraid that she was about to slam the door on their friendship.

  “To get the wine, and you a glass.”

  But before she could move, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her against him. With his callused hands, he framed her soft face. “You are beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, lowering her eyes.

  “Here too.” Clay touched her heart. “And here.” He pressed his lips against hers, kissing her softly, tracing her mouth with his tongue, surprised that she didn’t tug away. This time, no walls. She was letting herself go for a change . . .

  Books by Stacy Finz

  GOING HOME

  FINDING HOPE

  SECOND CHANCES

  STARTING OVER

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  FINDING HOPE

  STACY FINZ

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  STARTING OVER

  Books by Stacy Finz

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Teaser chapter

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  To my husband, Jaxon Van Derbeken.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all the cattle ranchers I’ve interviewed over the years. Your stories have been invaluable. Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle Food & Wine section. Everything I know about food I learned from the fabulous staff. Any mistakes, technical or otherwise, are mine.

  A special thanks to Amanda Gold, Tara Duggan, and Sarah Fritsche for consulting so generously on all things food and about cookbook writing. I appreciate your continuing support and for being my beta readers.

  To Wendy Miller and Leah Garchik (I don’t have to tell you).

  To everyone who made this book happen: my agent, Melissa Jeglinski, of the Knight Agency; my editor, John Scognamiglio; production editor, Rebecca Cremonese; and all the other folks at Kensington Publishing.

  Thanks to my family: Jaxon, Iris, Janet, Laura, Noah, Kendra, Kaley, Zach, Paulina, and Garyn. For everything.

  Chapter 1

  Emily gingerly wended her way around the moving boxes, each one labeled with bright red marker. Clutching a fistful of silverware, she managed to make it from the kitchen to the dining room without tripping over one of the cartons.

  It was amazing how much stuff people accumulated over the years. Her cookbooks and kitchen equipment alone would take up most of a large U-Haul. At least Drew, her ex-husband, was taking the furniture, and the rest could be donated to the Goodwill. Where she was going, she wouldn’t need half the contents of this big house.

  She did a quick appraisal of the table with its last-minute centerpiece—a bouquet of hydrangeas cut from the backyard—and began setting her best Laguiole steak knives at each of the six place settings. The knives had languished in storage since the last lunch.

  Emily knew that etiquette dictated that the sharp edge of the knife face the plate. To point the blade toward a guest was an ancient sign of aggression.

  Not good in a room full of FBI agents and police detectives, she reflected wryly. But this would be the last time. The last lunch. Soon she’d be leaving here, the only home Hope had ever known.

  Her hands shook as she tried to rearrange the glasses. The guests were due to arrive in thirty minutes and Emily needed every second of that time to pull herself together. Even though it had been four years, the anniversaries were particularly difficult. Every painful detail of that July day—the chaos, the frenzy, the terror—looped through her brain like a skipping record.

  Drew and her attorney had warned her against hosting that first anniversary lunch.

  “The police will use it to try to slip you up,” Drew had said. “They’re not coming because they’re your friends, Em. I’m a lawyer, I know.” She had learned in those first few days of the investigation that the parents are always the primary suspects.

  But it had been a full year since Hope had been taken from them, and even if the police weren’t her friends, she needed them. The lunches had been Emily’s attempt at keeping Hope’s memory alive and her case file active, instead of being relegated to a dusty basement somewhere.

  Later, the lunches seemed to serve as a combination vigil/healing ceremony. The investigators were no closer to solving what had happened to her daughter than they were four years ago. And that had left indelible scars—even on jaded law enforcement.

  To paraphrase the news clips, the trail had gone cold. The reporters had pounced on the next sensational story and the police had new, more pressing crimes to solve.

  Everyone except for her had moved on. Even Drew. He was getting remarried. And more than anything she owed him a fresh start, a chance at happiness. Even if it meant relocating to the ends of the earth.

  She hadn’t been able to bring back their daughter, but she could at least make amends for what she’d done.

  Four days later, Emily climbed the steep grade into the Sierra mountains. Her old friend Joe had certainly been right about this part of the state being unbelievably beautiful. Verdant fields and miles and miles of pine trees. Snow still dusted the highest peaks of the mountains and her ears popped from the altitude. With the back of her hand she touched the driver’s-side window. Surprisingly, it felt warm.

  She’d been driving for nearly four hours from the Bay Area and figured she had to be close to her destination. Nugget. She’d lived in California her whole life and had never heard of the little railroad town.

  Not only did the town have a paltry population of six thousand people, but she would be living in a barn. If the pictures did the place justice, it was a very nice barn indeed. Joe had gone on and on about Nugget and his friend Clay McCreedy’s cattle ranch—“It’s exactly what you need. Fresh air and a fresh start.”

  What she needed was to get her business rolling again so she could afford to pay her own way. At least in this mountain hamlet the rent was a pittance compared to the mor
tgage on her and Drew’s Palo Alto house. Even after the hefty sum they’d sold it for, there was little left. They’d racked up a pile of debt paying lawyers and private investigators.

  Not only would it be far cheaper than anything she could afford in the Bay Area, but here, her neighbors weren’t likely to connect her to Hope. No longer would she have to suffer pitying looks. Or worse. Faces filled with suspicion and condemnation.

  She glanced down at the directions she’d printed off Google Maps as she traveled the two-lane highway. There it was, to the left, McCreedy Road. She pulled in, drove for less than a mile, and parked on the shoulder to reread Mr. McCreedy’s instructions. They said to meet him at the big white farmhouse at one o’clock to collect the key. Up ahead, in the distance, she saw an outcropping of trees and assumed that must be the location of the house.

  According to Joe, McCreedy Ranch, one of the first cattle spreads in the area, covered thousands of acres. He said Clay’s great-grandfather drove his cattle across the Nevada desert into Plumas County in the eighteen hundreds to sell beef to the gold miners.

  She had no idea where on the property her new home was located, whether it was near the house, or somewhere remote. The whole rental transaction had been done via email and Emily braced herself for the possibility that the place would turn out to be a total disaster. Although the photographs had been lovely, she knew from experience the tricks a camera and a good stylist could play. How many times had she sprayed the outside of a cocktail glass with glycerin to make it look frosty for the lens, or drenched a day-old, dried-out pastry with hairspray to make it look fresh-out-of-the-oven luscious? Too many times to count.

  But she’d gotten the impression that Mr. McCreedy couldn’t care less about renting out the barn, that he was only doing it as a favor to Joe. So hopefully he wasn’t trying to sell her a sow’s ear.

  Emily glanced down at her watch. It was nearly one o’clock. She nosed the van out onto the road again when a man on horseback caught her attention. On the other side of the split-rail fence, in a field carpeted with orange poppies, he galloped so fast it made her heart pound. With his head and shoulders pushed forward over the horse’s flowing mane, they beat across the pasture fast as a freight train. For a second, she thought her imagination had conjured him, a centaur, untamed and magnificent. From this distance she couldn’t make out the man’s features, just a black cowboy hat that began to blur as he faded into the copse of trees up ahead.

  She sat back to catch her breath; the sight and speed, so exhilarating, stirred something dormant in Emily’s breast. Something she hadn’t felt in four years.

  Life.

  When she reached the white farmhouse, she found the man dismounting from the horse. Not a centaur at all, Emily noted, but a tall, strapping cowboy. Besides the hat, he wore leather chaps that fit snuggly over his jeans and a scarred pair of brown boots. In all the time she’d known Joe, she’d never seen him ride a horse. And he wore tennis shoes.

  “Hello.” He tipped his hat, tied the horse in a shady spot, and deftly removed the saddle. His large hands moved quickly, like he’d done this a thousand times. “You Emily Mathews?”

  A squat man with a big belly and silver hair materialized out of nowhere and started brushing the sweaty steed.

  The rider took the brush. “I’ve got it, Ramon. I’ll take Big Red back to the stable when I’m done.”

  The squat man seemed reluctant to relinquish the chore, but eventually wandered off.

  The cowboy looked at her and arched his brows with impatience. “Emily, right?”

  “Oh. Yes.” There was so much to take in, she’d become distracted. The house with its long, sweeping porch and the yard’s expansive lawns were gorgeous. If not for the musky smell of horse and cows, it would have felt like she had wandered onto a Hollywood set.

  He continued to rub the comb in circles over Big Red’s coat, occasionally scratching the horse behind his ears. “Your moving truck came this morning.”

  Emily nodded. The man still hadn’t introduced himself, but she presumed he must be Clay McCreedy. She’d expected a much older man to own such a big cattle operation. But he was about her age, thirty-seven, forty at the most.

  “As soon as I’m done here we’ll put Big Red up and I’ll take you over to the barn,” he said, bending over to lift and clean the horse’s hooves with some kind of a pick. Emily tried not to notice how the chaps nicely framed his backside.

  “Great.” She had a million questions to ask him: Where’s the nearest grocery store and gas station? Who did she need to call for cable? Instead, she stood there like a mute, her hands stuffed inside the pockets of her khakis. There was a time when she’d been adroit at small talk and at socializing. In fact, Drew used to call her the “belle of the ball.” But years of hiding in her house had made her rusty.

  Even when she’d been good at it, Emily suspected Clay McCreedy would’ve made her stammer. The man, with his low, gravelly voice and that rough-and-tumble cowboy thing he had going on, was larger than life.

  “So you did Joe’s cookbook, huh?” He untied the horse’s lead and grabbed the saddle with one hand, beckoning her to follow him down the driveway. Big Red’s hooves made clip-clop noises on the blacktop.

  “Yes, I did,” she said, hugging his side. The only thing she knew about horses was not to get behind them. They kicked.

  His lips quirked. “Didn’t know old Joe could cook.”

  “He’s pretty good at it, actually.” In fact, he’d been one of Emily’s few clients who had recipes that worked. They’d met through the Bay Area’s vast food community, worked together, and become fast friends.

  Officially, Emily was a freelance cookbook editor. In truth, she was a cookbook ghostwriter. The dirty little secret about famous chefs and celebrity cooks is that they couldn’t formulate recipes to save their lives. She’d never met one who measured or weighed, paid attention to cooking times, or didn’t use exotic ingredients unavailable to home cooks.

  So publishing houses, and sometimes the authors themselves, hired her to do everything from creating and testing recipes to styling dishes and writing the text. Essentially, she wrote the whole book and slapped someone else’s name on the cover. In Joe’s case, he’d needed help telling the story of how his ranch had grown from a backyard hobby to one of the most popular gourmet beef businesses in the country. He was a cattleman, not a writer.

  “You’ll be writing cookbooks here, then?” Clay asked.

  “Editing them,” she corrected. “Yes, that’s the plan.”

  “You don’t need to be near the action?”

  It figured that he would be curious why she’d come to Nugget instead of staying close to San Francisco’s thriving food scene. “Nope. All I need is a computer and a kitchen.” And a fresh start.

  When they reached the stables, he opened a gate to a large paddock, took off Big Red’s halter, and gave him a slap on the rump. The horse nickered and trotted away.

  “Colin’s installed your electric stove,” he said. “So you’re set.”

  The kitchen already had a gas range—it had been the first question she’d asked in her emails—but she liked to test recipes on both types of stoves so she could tweak cooking times accordingly. She’d bought an electric brand popular with home cooks online at the Sears in Reno, the nearest city, and had it delivered. “I’ll write you a check for your man’s labor. Thanks for letting me make the modification.”

  He shrugged. “No big deal. Just means you’ll have fewer cabinets.”

  She followed him inside the stable and peered into a row of horse stalls. The man, Ramon, was laying down fresh straw with a pitchfork. Clay said something to him in Spanish and the man let out a loud belly laugh. When they got to a small room filled with saddles and bridles, Clay began to unbuckle his chaps. Although he was fully dressed under the sturdy leg coverings, she could feel her face heat, and turned away.

  “We can walk to the barn from here,” he said. “Afterward, if
you want, you can drive the van over.”

  “Sounds good.” She was getting impatient to see the place.

  Two boys came rounding the driveway as they headed back up.

  “Hey, Dad,” the younger boy called, and gazed at her with open curiosity. The older one never looked up from his phone.

  When they reached Clay, he asked, “How was camp?”

  “Okay, I guess,” the boy said, while Clay waited for a reply from the eldest.

  When he didn’t give one, Clay pulled out one of the boy’s earbuds. “When I ask you a question, I expect an answer.”

  “Yes. Sir.” The boy clicked his heels and saluted.

  “How was camp?” Clay asked, annoyance at the boy’s insolence edging his voice.

  “It sucked.”

  Clay turned to Emily. “These are my sons, Justin and Cody. This is Ms. Mathews, our new neighbor.”

  Cody stuck his hand out for a shake. “Good to meet you, ma’am.”

  Justin grunted something unintelligible.

  Clay gave him a quelling look and the preteen simulated the voice of a robot. “Nice. To. Meet. You. Ms. Mathews.”

  Even sullen and disrespectful, he was a beautiful boy. Dark hair and deep blue eyes like his father. He was still filling out but would eventually have his dad’s frame too. Sinewy and broad shouldered. Cody had the same blue eyes, but fairer hair and complexion; he was maybe a year or two older than ten, the age Hope would be now.

  “Nice to meet the both of you,” Emily said brightly, hoping to smooth the awkwardness. Clay seemed a hair away from smacking Justin.

  “There are snacks in the house,” he told the boys. “Then get started on your chores.”

  “Are they good-for-you snacks?” Cody wanted to know.

  “Brownies. Mandy brought them by earlier.”

  Cody raced for the house, his pack bouncing up and down against his back.