I laughed and reached for my door handle. Ford jumped out and ran around to open the car door for me. "Here's one for you: Exhausted Editor Fills Empty Spaces with Headlines."
Ford laughed and pulled me out to the scenic overlook. The sun was still warm as it nudged against the horizon. Still, there was chill sent to the air that meant autumn was on its way. It was my favorite season, especially when Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away.
"Did I tell you that my father and Polly will be home from Cuba in time for Thanksgiving?" I asked.
"I know, your father mentioned it when I talked to him the other day." Ford popped his mouth shut and admired the sunset with a sudden keen interest.
"Oh, no, what are you and my father planning now?" I asked. "I can just imagine the headline: Men Plan Elaborate Feast, Use Every Dish in the Kitchen."
I laughed at my own joke and turned, but Ford was gone.
He was down on one knee. The sky streaked with reds and golds as he reached for my hand. "I have one last headline for you: Will you marry me?"
I dropped to my knees and kissed Ford a dozen times over before I took a breath and said, "Yes. And you can quote me on that."
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SECRETS
By Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
© 2015 Claire Adams
Chapter 1
“I’m fine Rebecca, the taxi just turned down my street.”
“I’ll just stay on until you get inside the house.”
“Seriously Rebecca, I’m not going to get murdered in two blocks. It’s Bain, Missouri for gosh sake!”
My ability to humor Rebecca and her mothering significantly decreased the more exhausted I was. We had been friends for most of our lives, but she still didn’t think I was capable of taking care of myself.
“Are you at the house yet? Did you get inside?”
“I’m paying my taxi driver now,” I sighed as I walked up to the door to my house and looked for my keys. Unfortunately, I had forgotten them inside the house. Nothing to worry about though; I had a spare key, somewhere.
“Walking up to the door…unlocking the door… going inside,” I lied to her.
“Alright. Remember to take some Tylenol and drink some water. Do you have orange juice for the morning?”
Since losing my parents, Rebecca had tried to fill in the emptiness. Her heart was always in the right spot, but she never understood what it was like to be without any family. Moving into my grandparent’s house and remodeling it was the best way I could cope, at least for now.
“Yes, I will drink orange juice, take two pills and call you in the morning.”
“Great, yes. Call me when you get up,” Rebecca said.
“Ok mother Rebecca. Talk to you tomorrow.”
With Rebecca off the phone, I went to work looking for the spare key. I remembered putting it somewhere around when I had visited my parents and my mother was too sick to get up to the door. But after she died I had moved the key again.
Really it shouldn’t be all that hard to find a key, but when you forget things as fast as I do, you would understand. This key was going to be near impossible to find.
After searching the mat, flowers, and all the rocks around my grandparents old Victorian home, it finally dawned on me that I had put the key over in the neighbors’ rocks. The fake rock that held the spare key fit perfectly with their rocks and since the home had been empty for at least five years, it seemed like a good place to hide the house key. Now if only I could remember which rock I was looking for…at two o’clock in the morning, it was amazing how every single rock looked exactly the same.
Well this was just perfect. On my hands and knees in the grass was not how I wanted to be spending my Saturday night. I was crawling around in the wet grass and looking for the key to my dead parent’s home. Well, the house was actually my grandparent’s home, and then they passed it to my parents and finally on to me.
Why couldn’t I just have a normal life? Like those girls at the bar tonight. They had the kind of busy lives with friends and parties all the time. But no, I had by far the most boring life in the history of Bain. Fixing up my grandparents’ house was the only thing interesting on my calendar for the next three weeks. Oh, how I longed for some excitement, but instead I was here digging through rocks and grass in the middle of the night.
The rock that held my house key eluded me. I screamed out in frustration and threw a rock from the neighbor’s yard to my own.
“Can I help you?”
My breath caught as I looked up to see a strongly built man standing at the corner of the house. He looked to have been just woken up and stood there with sweatpants and no shirt.
The no shirt part is what had me so distracted. Even in the moonlight I could see more muscles on his stomach than I probably had in my entire body.
“Um. Well, I uh…I’m looking for my house key.”
“And you keep it in my flower bed?”
The way he stood there looking at me, it was like I amused him. He watched as I struggled to stand up and then fidgeted with my dress. As much as I tried to hide the level of my intoxication, I’m pretty sure there was no hiding it. The look on his face showed enough pity toward me that I knew he could tell I was drunk.
“I’m uh, yes I did hide it here. It’s a rock. Well, it looks like a rock. It’s a fake rock with a key in it. But I can’t find it because they all look the same.”
I watched as the mystery man walked closer to me and looked at the rocks surrounding the house.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“I’m Katelyn. Katelyn Peterson.”
I waited for him to respond with his name, but he did not. Instead, he reached down and grabbed a rock from the back of the pile of rocks. He handed it to me and I instantly knew that it was the rock I had been looking for. It was light and I could hear the jingle of the key as I moved the rock in my hand.
“There you go Katelyn.”
His voice was smooth, seductive and sexy, which was hard to pair up with the body that stood in front of me. The man in front of me looked more like a killer than a seducer. The muscles in his arms bulged with definition. Not bulk, but a refined sense of power. Even the way he clenched his jaw made me think of someone who was hiding something and wasn’t going to let you find out.
“Wow, thank you. That was pretty amazing. How did you know which one it was?”
“Just luck I guess,” he said as he looked me over.
I dropped the rock as I tried to get the key out and he quickly retrieved the key from the grass. I’m not sure if he was so helpful because I was annoying him by waking him up in the middle of the night or if he was just a nice person.
He took the key and walked over to my front door. I tried to keep up, but my short legs and high-heels were no match.