Meeting Miss Mystic
Read Meeting Miss Mystic Online
Authors: Katy Regnery
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Family Saga, #Literary, #Contemporary Fiction, #Sagas, #Literary Fiction, #Romance
“Regnery’s writing and tempo are top-notch!”
—
Library Journal Xpress Reviews
on
Midsummer Sweetheart
INSIDE & OUT
High school principal Paul Johansson has never been lucky in love, which is too bad, because few men in Montana are more naturally romantic. Then his friend Maggie signs him up for Internet dating, and while Paul is initially furious, he’s soon blown away by Holly Morgan, a blonde, blue-eyed art teacher from Connecticut. She might just be the girl of his dreams.
Zoe Flannigan—aka Holly Morgan—totally forgot about the account she set up two years ago on Meet-the-One.com. In fact, after an accident that left her physically and emotionally scarred, she hasn’t been up for meeting or dating anyone. Until Paul. Handsome, sweet, and too-good-to-be-true… But while the built-in anonymity of the Internet offers a buffer, she can’t hide in cyberspace forever, either from Paul’s expectations or from herself. There’s a journey she must take, and at the end of it will be a love as beautiful and boundless as the wide Montana sky.
Meeting Miss Mystic
Katy Regnery
www.BOROUGHSPUBLISHINGGROUP.com
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Boroughs Publishing Group does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites, blogs or critiques or their content.
MEETING MISS MYSTIC
Copyright © 2014 Katharine Gilliam Regnery
All rights reserved. Unless specifically noted, no part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Boroughs Publishing Group. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or by any other means without the permission of Boroughs Publishing Group is illegal and punishable by law. Participation in the piracy of copyrighted materials violates the author’s rights.
Digital edition created by Maureen Cutajar
www.gopublished.com
ISBN 978-1-941260-08-1
For Callie, my very own Miss Mystic,
who makes every day magical.
This one is yours.
I love you.
CONTENTS
Sneak Peek: Heart of Montana #5
Meeting Miss Mystic
Chapter 1
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Paul Johansson.
Paul had big dreams about falling in love.
He had big hopes for his own personal “happily ever after.”
He just didn’t have the best luck.
And he blamed this—in part—on the movie
The Princess Bride
, which his mother encouraged him to watch on a sick day at the tender, impressionable age of ten. He was captured with the angelic beauty of the heroine, his first genuine crush, and more, he was desperate to be Westley, her handsome, quick-witted hero. What young boy, on the cusp of adolescence with pre-hormones raging, wouldn’t want to be the hero to the perfect heroine (who had long blonde hair and mouth-watering ta-tas in a low-cut dress)? Who wouldn’t want to be the swashbuckling pirate who saved the princess (and got to kiss her…
with tongue
!) and rode off into a lavender sunset happily ever after?
Paul’s fever had broken that evening, after a second fascinated viewing of the movie, and he’d returned to fourth grade the next day on the hunt for his Buttercup. The hunt took a while, but by seventh grade, he was fairly sure he’d found her.
Dana Durant, a transfer student from Florida, was everything Paul’s thirteen-year-old eyes had been searching for. Tall, blonde, ridiculously tan for January in Maine, Dana had a bright white smile and the most gorgeous set of ta-tas any boy at Kennebunkport Junior High School had ever seen. After watching her in the cafeteria for weeks and learning of her great love of chocolate pudding, he’d convinced his mother to buy some from the store and brought some in to school. One cup of pudding. Two spoons. Her face had brightened when he suavely sat down beside her and asked if she wanted to share, but his luck soon went south when Bradford Kennedy Spearman sat down on Dana’s other side. He slipped Dana a note in flagrant disregard of their pudding date, which she opened, checking the “yes” box with a proffered pen and flashing that white smile at his rival. Sliding the half-eaten container of pudding back to Paul, she stood up, taking Bradford’s hand and agreeing to be his date for the Winter Formal before Paul could finish his pudding, let alone muster the courage to ask her.
By high school, Paul had developed into a handsome, fit young man who regularly whipped Bradford Spearman’s ass on the tennis courts, thereby attracting the attention of one Sybil Wentworth.
Paul, who’d known Sybbie all his life, had recently noticed her Buttercup potential: she was a perky blonde, who also happened to be the high school Homecoming Princess and Kennebunkport Country Club tennis champion. Won over by Paul’s earnest eyes and wandering hands, they spent two summers hand in hand, winning at doubles, swimming in the club pool and making out in the backseat of his dad’s Jaguar convertible. However, it turned out that Sybbie wasn’t loyal to Jaguars—or Paul, for that matter—and finding her in the back of Bradford’s BMW after the club Golf Championship had ended things between them.
Paul didn’t mourn Sybil for long. Docile and appropriate with a perfect pageboy, she was basically a younger version of Paul’s mother which—once Paul had the perspective to realize it—grossed him out sufficiently that he never looked at the backseat of a Jaguar the same way again. With an available, though more guarded, heart, he packed his bags for Brown University and headed south to Rhode Island, putting dreams of Buttercup, Dana and Sybil firmly from his mind, determined to put his studies first and ta-tas second…a good plan that lasted for about an hour, until he met Gia Fortuna.
Gia, an international student from Italy and Paul’s freshman hall R.A., was everything that Sybil was not. Witty and irreverent, sophisticated, exotic and bright, Gia kept their conversations hopping during the day and introduced Paul to acrobatic sex and talking dirty at night. Within weeks he was ready to ask her to marry him and rode the wave of assumed true love, enjoying the bounty of Gia’s physical offerings for the ensuing two years. Sadly, upon graduating, his princess had patted him on the head with a friendly smile, thanked him for the good times and departed for Milan without leaving him so much as a forwarding address. This efficiently broke his heart in half then torched it.
As Paul sorted through the ashes of his charred heart, he realized that Gia hadn’t been “the one” either. She was beautiful, spirited, adventurous and sharp-minded, like Buttercup, but she was also fickle and not faithful.
Plus, if Paul was honest, while Sybil lacked some originality and zest, Gia had been a little too edgy for him.
Somewhere inside of Paul was the ten-year-old who still wanted the fairy tale—Westley to Buttercup, a hero to a heroine—he wanted to be everything to the woman he loved, and he’d never meant everything to Dana, Sybil or Gia.
And then he met Jenny Lindstrom.
His heart squeezed painfully at the memory of Jenny. She had it all. If any woman was Buttercup incarnate, it was her.
Beautiful, blonde, spirited, principled Jenny, whom he’d met when she was grieving the loss of her mother, was the younger sister to his best friend, Lars. Even as he’d lent his shoulder to cry on, his feelings for her had grown exponentially. At the school where he was a principal and she was a science teacher, he was constantly looking for her, finding her, and falling for her. He had tried to do everything right with Jenny: he gave her space to grieve, made himself available to her as a friend, and then he fell genuinely and thoroughly in love with her, convinced she would reciprocate his feelings as soon as she was able. But when he’d finally offered his heart to her, she’d gently refused him and married someone else instead. So it turned out that, once again, appearances had been deceiving and Jenny wasn’t Paul’s happily ever after, after all.
Paul’s beaten heart was resilient, though, even in the wake of Dana and Sybil and Gia and Jenny. He still hoped for true love, albeit more quietly now, a little gun-shy after a good bit of heartbreak. He woke up every morning and devoted himself to his job, to the little high school in Gardiner, Montana, which was the best in the state. He loved his students and his friends; anyone who knew Paul would say he was a happy man with a good life. But he lived his life with quiet longing, his heart full of love for the right girl, just wishing deep down that he could finally find her: his heroine, his princess, the Buttercup to his waiting Westley. A girl who would be his happily ever after.
“Earth to Paul! Come in, Paul!” His friend Maggie stood behind the coffee bar of his favorite café.
A smile spread across his face and he wished—for the thousandth time—that he could fall in love with Maggie Campbell. Maggie, the proprietor of the Prairie Dawn Café & Bookstore, was, along with Lars Lindstrom, one of his very best friends.
“Can’t a guy daydream, Mags?”
“
Day
dream? It’s almost ten o’clock, dreamer. We close at ten o’clock on Sundays.”
He smiled at her soft Scottish burr, more pronounced after a long day. She nudged his elbows with the dishtowel she was using to wipe down the copper bar where he’d been sitting for the past two hours. Pivoting on the bar stool, he turned to look at the empty café. It had been hopping earlier, full of folks anxious to spend an evening in the air-conditioned cafe where they could read books, magazines and newspapers, listen to soft music and enjoy Maggie’s many baked and caffeinated creations.
How had it emptied out so fast? He’d been lost in thought again. Feeling lonely. Thinking about Jenny Lindstrom.
When he turned back to Maggie, she was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at him, lips pursed, dishtowel gone.
“Paul.”
“Mags.”
She took a deep breath. “I have a confession to make.”
Paul sat up a little straighter, narrowing his eyes anxiously. Maggie was known to take more than a cursory interest in Paul’s love life. The last three confessions she’d made to Paul had to do with setting him up on the most incredibly awkward blind dates known to man in an effort to help him get over Jenny. Really and truly, he was mostly over Jenny at this point. She was married and had moved away to Great Falls. He didn’t need or want Maggie’s unsolicited advice and help. Sure, there were some days when Jenny’s loss still hurt. Let’s face it: if any woman in the world could have been his Buttercup, Jenny was—
“Earth to Paul.
Again
. Do you want my confession or no?”
“Who’ve you set me up with this time?”
Her face broke into a bright, satisfied grin. “No one.”
“Well, that’s a relief because after my date with Ms. Phillips, I believe I told you to stop meddling.”
Mary Phillips, the forty-something secretary at Grace Church, was not only more than a decade older than thirty-year-old Paul, but she’d spent the majority of their evening together complaining about the greasiness of the food at the Grizzly Guzzle Grill, or describing—in considerable, stomach churning detail—her various attempts to get rid of a bad case of shingles. As if that wasn’t gross enough, she’d grabbed Paul’s shoulders at her doorstop and smashed her red lips against his. It took every ounce of strength in his body not to push her into next week and keep the revulsion from showing on his face. He still hadn’t mustered the courage to return to church.
“I admit, that wasn’t my finest matchmakin’ hour. She seemed bonnie enough when she came in for coffee. I dinna realize she was
diseased
.” She tilted her head to the side, her smile fading just a little. “I care about you. Just hate to see you so lonesome, Paul.”