Healing Beau (The Brothers of Beauford Bend Book 6) (27 page)

Then Jackson took control of the audience, as great performers are able to do, with a hand gesture and an expression change.

“Thank you for coming out tonight for the fourteenth annual Camille Beauford Memorial Concert. As you know, the proceeds from the concert will benefit the Vanderbilt Medical Burn Center. By rights, I shouldn’t be the one talking tonight.” He gestured to Beau, Gabe, and Rafe. “Gabe talks prettier, Rafe is the most sensible, and, as you can see, baby brother Beau here is prettier than the rest of us. What you can’t see is he’s smarter, too.”

Beau gave the audience his Charmer smile, but when he let it settle on Christian, she saw some love mixed in.

Jackson let the applause die down again. “But I’m going to talk anyway, because I’m the big brother. We’ve been meeting here for fourteen years now. We appreciate all of you for the honor you have shown our parents and our sister, whether you’ve been here for all of those fourteen years or if tonight is your first time.

“Over the years, sometimes two, sometimes three of us have been here for this event, but tonight is the first time that all four of us have been on this stage together.”

More applause.

“There’s a reason for that. We’ve had a harder time with these losses than we may have shown. Hell, you saw me have a meltdown here two years ago and announce my retirement.”

Laughter from the audience.

“You also saw how long that lasted. But there were reasons. We’re close, my brothers and I, always have been. But we have only recently found out that each of us blamed ourselves for the deaths of our parents and sister, when none of us were to blame at all. And I’ve got to think if we had talked to each other, we might have walked this road a little easier.

“But with the help and love of some good, gritty women who don’t know how to take no for an answer, we’ve found our way.”

And as he said that, the brothers put their arms around each other and each one met the eyes of his own good, gritty woman.

Christian feasted on Carolina blue eyes and placed her hand over her heart. Beau returned the gesture.

“So I have this to say to you,” Jackson said. “No matter what’s going on with you, don’t walk it alone. Tell your brother, your sister, your friend, your mama, or your daddy. It’ll go easier.”

There was a moment of poignant, magical silence. It might have gone on forever if Jackson had not broken the spell.

“Okay!” The men broke apart, and someone put a guitar in Jackson’s hands. “We’ve got a lot of good talent here tonight, and the Barroom Brawlers and I will be out to wrap things up in a couple of hours. But if my brothers will get off this stage, I’m going to start us off with a song.”

The cheering crowd rose to their feet, and Christian stood, too, but not for the same reason.

Her husband was coming down the steps of the old Ryman stage with his hands held out to her, and she wanted to meet him halfway.

Many thanks to:

Lin Steffanun for naming Will and Arabelle’s future twins.

Ken Hovey for his never-ending patience and support.

Lynn Raye Harris and Rhonda Nelson for helping work out the details.

As always, Tara, Jess, Julie, and Stephanie at Crimson Romance, who always give their best.

Alicia Hunter Pace is the pseudonym for the writing team of Jean Hovey and Stephanie Jones. They are
USA Today
best-selling authors who live in North Alabama and share a love of old houses, football, and writing stories with a happily ever after.

Find Alicia Hunter Pace at:

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www.aliciahunterpace.com

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“How’s your daddy? I hear he fell out of his tree stand and broke his leg.”

“Yes, ma’am. He did.” That’s why Hope MacKenzie had made the sudden, emergency trip back to her hometown. She stood on the sidewalk in the middle of Beauford, Tennessee’s Harvest Festival, talking to Miss Stella “Sticky” Stinson. Seated at a table set up outside her knitting shop, String, Miss Sticky was dressed as a ham. Hope wasn’t surprised.
To Kill a Mockingbird
was Miss Sticky’s favorite book, and she’d been emulating Scout’s costume on Halloween for as long as Hope could remember. Hope carried on, “It was a bad break, but the surgery went well.”

Miss Sticky and her sister, Miss Julia, had taught English and biology, respectively, at Beauford High School until they retired and opened their shop. Hope could remember sitting in class listening to them lecture, their knitting needles clicking in the background. Between the two of them, they must have knitted around the world fifteen times.

Miss Sticky stroked a hank of yarn on the table like it was a beloved pet. “What was Mac doing in a tree stand anyway? It’s not deer season yet, and I know he’s not the kind to hunt out of season.”

That was true. Vincent Ambrose MacKenzie III, owner, president, and head honcho in every way of Beauford Savings and Loan, didn’t do anything out of season.

“I’m not sure. I would guess he was checking to make certain it was in good shape before the season starts.” Or maybe he’d just gone out to the farm to get away from Hope’s mother. If that were the case, it had backfired because he wasn’t going to be able to get away from her for quite a while—starting with an almost unheard of weeklong hospital stay and a stint in rehab.

“So I guess the stand wasn’t in very good shape,” Miss Sticky said. “Not that it matters much now. I don’t suppose Mac will be doing any deer hunting this year.”

“No. Turns out, a femur break is the grand champion of them all.”

“Still. Sounds like he’s better off than Marla Ledow. Did you hear what happened to her? No? Well. She was driving down the road, and there was a pickup truck in front of her with a tanning bed in the back. They came to an incline, and that tanning bed slid out of the truck bed and flew through Marla’s windshield. If she hadn’t ducked, it would have decapitated her for sure. As it was, it crushed her shoulder.”

So many questions … so many. Why was someone moving a tanning bed? Was it not tied down? How did one go about ducking while driving a car? Hope could have come up with dozens and dozens of questions, but there would be no real answers, only long-winded debate and speculation.

She was for sure back in Beauford—though not for long.

“I know your mother was glad to see you coming,” Miss Sticky went on. “Now, where is it you’re living? Charlotte? Didn’t I hear you’re an investment banker at the Bank of America?”

None of this required verbal answers. Miss Sticky had it right; Hope just had to nod.

“Sticky!” Miss Julia came out of the shop door dressed as a giant black cat, and encircled Hope in her furry arms. “You’re grilling the best student we ever had like a rib eye steak in the backyard. How are you, Hope? I’m still bitter you didn’t use that brilliant science mind of yours to go to medical school. But I guess after three generations, banking is in your blood.”

“She wasn’t the best student I ever had,” Miss Sticky said.

Hope laughed. “It’s true. I wasn’t much for analyzing literature, and my writing was terrible.”

Miss Sticky nodded. “Perfect grammatically, but no soul.”

“Sticky, that was rude,” Miss Julia said. “Tell you what, Hope. To make up for my sister’s bad manners, come into String while you’re home, and we’ll give you some yarn and teach you to knit for free.”

“Thank you, Miss Julia, but I’m not going to be in town long enough for that.”

“Anyway, Julia,” Miss Sticky said. “You know what Heath said. We’ve got to stop giving things away. We’re a business. We are supposed to sell yarn and charge for lessons.”

Heath.
Hope stopped mid breath. “Heath?”

“Yes, Heath Beckett.” Miss Sticky beamed. “Do you know him? He’s the stained glass artist who owns Spectrum. He’s tremendously respected in the art world. A real master craftsman, and at such a young age, too. He’s forever going off to Europe to repair this window or that. He made a set of contemporary angel panels for the Milton building in Chicago a few years back. You should look them up on the Internet.”

But Hope didn’t have to. She knew those panels. They’d ripped her life apart and broken her heart. No. That wasn’t fair. She’d done that to herself. But there was no reason for Miss Sticky and Miss Julia to know the history between her and Heath. He hadn’t grown up here as Hope had, and Heath had never been one for telling his business. They’d met their junior year at Chapel Hill.

Even back then, Hope had liked a plan and hated the unpredictable. She’d thrived on rules and order and run from the nebulous. While it wasn’t in her plan to fall in love at Chapel Hill, Heath Beckett made sense. They were both in the school of business with similar goals. She thought it was charming that he drove to Ashville twice a week to take stained glass classes. Maybe he would use his hobby to make a window for their house one day. But when Heath told her shortly before graduation that he was quitting school to become a stained glass artist, it unnerved her so badly, she broke up with him.

They were supposed to go to graduate school, become investment bankers, get married, and live happily ever after. How could she be with someone who’d upset the plan? She couldn’t even hear him when he tried to explain that he’d been given the chance of a lifetime—to design and make stained glass panels for an important building by a renowned architect.

She didn’t understand all that. She dealt in clean, pure facts, figures, and plans.

Still, she’d been shattered, and there’d been no diagram, no equation, no business plan that could ease her broken heart. So six weeks later, right after graduation, she’d steeled herself and driven to Ashville, determined to see if she could make sense of a dream made of molten colored glass and lead.

Hope had just thought she’d been shattered before. The only saving grace was that Heath never knew she came looking for him. When she stopped to comb her hair and collect herself at the coffee shop near the studio where Heath worked, the barista told her that Heath had married his mentor’s daughter.

Hope’s hair never got combed that day.

When her grief had reached the anger stage, she’d vowed to fight her way to success while Heath tried to spin dreams into gold as his ethereal, little, violet-eyed, gauzy-skirt-wearing wife looked on.

The irony was the Milton building won award after award and was featured in every architectural periodical in the country—with pictures of Heath’s creations in every one. Within certain circles, Heath became a household name at twenty-three years old. Heath had his passion and success while Hope was still slugging it out in graduate school.

Outwardly, it might have seemed too fantastic to be true that Heath had landed in Hope’s hometown, but given Beauford’s status as an artisan boutique community with some of the most renowned craftsmen in the country, it was entirely believable. Hope’s trips home since had been so infrequent and brief that avoiding Heath had not been hard. She had certainly never been in his shop.

Miss Julia brought Hope back to the present. “Yes, Heath is a sweetheart. He’d been working out of Foster Garrett’s shop in Ashville where he made the angel panels, but we were all thrilled when the Beauford Arts Council persuaded him to open a shop here.” Hope was very well aware of when that had happened—seven years ago, three years after their breakup and a year after his big success. During that time, Hope had dated some here and there, but nothing had stuck. But who had time for it anyway? Well, except for Heath. He hadn’t wasted any time moving on.

“Heath’s got a real head for business, too,” Miss Sticky went on. “We’re lucky that he’s been willing to give us some tips now and then.”

Hope forced herself to smile. “Like to not give away goods and services?”

“He’s hard on us,” Miss Sticky said, “but he’s so cute I can’t stand it.”

Me, either, Miss Sticky. Me either.
His big, brandy-colored eyes would be the same. She wondered if he still wore his tawny hair in that tangled mess that so suited him.

“He never talks about it, but we heard his wife died,” Miss Julia whispered the way people do when they talk about the dead.

Hope had heard that, too—had verified it, in fact. Leukemia, just six months after the wedding. Hope didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

“Let me bring you a chair from inside,” Miss Sticky said. “Sit with us and enjoy the festival. We’ve got candy for the children. You can help us give it out. We might even sell some yarn.”

Hope shook her head. Under other circumstances, she’d be tempted. But she was in Beauford for a purpose. “I can’t. I need to get back to the hospital pretty soon to relieve Mama. My cousin Neyland is kidnapping me to grab some dinner and see the festival, since Halloween is my favorite holiday. But I should go.”

After saying her goodbyes, Hope walked toward Piece by Piece, the quilt shop where Neyland sold her handcrafted jewelry. She had to pass by Heath’s shop, Spectrum, on her way to meet Neyland, but the streets were so thick with people, there was little chance he’d see her.

Her parents had never given up hope that she’d return home and go to work in the family bank. She sometimes wished for that, too, but as long as Heath was in residence, that would never happen. But no matter. She was happy in Charlotte with her impressive client list and ever-growing salary.

But if Beauford were capable of calling her home, it would be on a night like this. The air was just crisp enough, and the streets were resplendent with pumpkins, gourds, and mums. Costumed children played games in the closed-off street and music drifted from a portable stage a block away. Beauford’s most famous citizen, country music star Jackson Beauford—soon to be Neyland’s brother-in-law—would perform later.