Need You Now (Love in Unknown)
Read Need You Now (Love in Unknown) Online
Authors: Taylor M. Lunsford
Tags: #romance, #romantic suspense, #Suspense, #Lovers, #Stalker, #Texas
Need You Now
Book 1
of the
Love in Unknown Series
Taylor M. Lunsford
Naked Reader Press
2013
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright© 2013 by Taylor M. Lunsford
ISBN-13: 978-1-61136-069-1
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover design by Sarah A.Hoyt
Cover art elements:
Portrait of young couple
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Sergey Pristyazhnyuk
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Dedication
To Mom and Dad—for never getting mad when I read under the covers until all hours of the night.
Acknowledgements
I could write an entire book full of the names of people I need to thank, but for my first book I’ll keep it brief. Buckets full of thanks to my crazy family for always supporting me and indulging my love of the written word. An extra special shout out goes to my aunt, Angela, for reading some of my roughest drafts and liking them in spite of their flaws.
This book wouldn’t be here without the support of my Twitter cheerleaders. Allie, Alyssa, Tiffany and Roni – thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your encouragement and advice. Allie more than anyone knows what a labor of love these works have been and I couldn’t have asked for a better critique partner.
I also want to thank my wonderful editor, Amanda. She’s given me a lot of encouragement over the years and I’m so thankful that she helped this dream become a reality.
Table of Contents
Free Preview of Ready to Love Again
Chapter 1
Twenty-three. It had taken twenty-three boxes, one large moving van, and three people to move her from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Unknown, Texas, a hole-in-the-wall little town three hours west of Austin.
Melody Carr knew she hadn't had this many boxes when she left home ten years ago. She definitely hadn't had this many boxes when she moved from Brown University to the University of North Carolina a few years later.
"Little sister, where did you get this much crap?" Micah hefted a box of medical textbooks over the threshold of the apartment above their family's bakery. "I didn't have this much stuff when I moved last week and I was moving a five-year-old, too."
Melody made a face at him as she set her own box down. "I'm a girl. There's a line in the girl handbook that we're supposed to have a lot of stuff. At least I coughed up the money to have someone else move it all down here for me. We just have to unload. Plus, you barely lived in your apartment in New York.
Someone
was a workaholic."
"Mel-bell, you do not have room to talk." Gage Maddox, Mel's best friend, carried in an arm chair, his muscles straining beneath the cloth of his ancient James Maddox High football shirt. At well over six feet tall, Gage and Micah seemed to take up all the spare room in the bread-box-sized apartment. Of course, the piles of big brown boxes littered around the living room didn't help much. Mel couldn’t quite believe that her great-great-grandparents lived here during the first years of their marriage. It was fine for a single woman, but a married couple? There was not a lot of elbow room.
"That's different," she said. "I'm a doctor. We're workaholics by necessity."
Micah snorted. "And chefs aren't? I work just as many hours as you did, squirt, even if I didn't spend eight years going to school."
"Seven. I did undergrad in three years, remember?" She batted her eyelashes innocently. Mel had been blessed—or cursed, depending on how you looked at it—with a high IQ and a nearly photographic memory. As a result she’d had few friends, but school had been a cake walk. Despite her parents' desire for her to have the "high school experience"—whatever that meant—she'd graduated two years early with Gage's class. She’d kept the pace up straight through college and medical school and never looked back.
"How's your mom doing?" Gage asked when they went back down to the truck to get more boxes. Micah slipped into the bakery to check on their mother and his son, Jax, escaping the unseasonable warmth of the early spring day for a few minutes. Passersby nodded and greeted Gage, smiling politely at Mel. Most people in town probably wouldn’t even recognize her. She hadn’t had much time to visit in the last few years, between med school and her residency.
Micah and Mel had both moved back to Unknown with one purpose in mind: to help their mom. The sudden death of their dad the previous January had sent her into a tailspin and eventually landed her in the hospital three weeks ago with a bad case of dehydration and exhaustion. Emma Carr didn't like to admit it, but the bakery had finally become too much for her to handle on her own. Mel trusted her brother to handle the bakery, but she knew their mother would never tell him anything about her health, which meant Mel would have to step in too. So she quit her job at a clinic in Chapel Hill and she and Micah moved back, Micah’s son in tow. They were hoping taking care of Jax would distract their mother enough for her to leave the bakery in Micah’s more than capable hands.
Mel sighed. "She's doing all right. We keep telling her to slow down, but you know how stubborn she is."
"Mama Em's tough. I think she just got lonely once your dad passed. I see her when I can, but it's not the same as being with her real family." Gage nodded toward the old, red brick building that housed the bakery. Identical to all of the other buildings on the town square, it had been the home of Carrs’ Cakes since the late eighteen hundreds. Through the big front window, Mel could see her mother and nephew sitting with their heads together at one of the front tables. "Having you and Micah and the little guy around will be the best medicine in the world for her."
Mel hoped he was right. She knew her mom missed her dad, they all did, but even Ethan Carr wouldn't expect his wife to kill herself trying to run the family business on her own. Her mother was a retired school teacher. She wasn’t meant to run a bakery by herself. Grunting, Mel helped Gage pick up one side of a massive bookshelf and maneuver it out of the truck. "You are real family, doofus. How's life as police chief?"
"It's life." He shook his head. "Lots of paperwork and dealing with minor nuisances."
"Hey now. I remember when you used to be the minor nuisance." Mel smiled at him around the case. Bright March sunlight beat down on Gage, catching on the sandy brown hair that escaped his Texas Rangers baseball cap. She'd missed the comfort of being around someone she'd known all her life. "I even seem to recall perjuring myself on occasion to keep you out of one of those cells you throw people in now."
Gage laughed. "You never really perjured yourself. Bent the truth a lot, yeah, but no outright lies."
"Well, someone had to have your back. Lord knows, those hideous parents of yours would have let you rot there." Mel grimaced. She couldn’t remember either Joseph or Olivia Maddox ever once showing up when their son needed them. Nine times out of ten, they’d been off at some fancy party in Austin or Houston when anything happened. It was her parents who were always there to take care of Gage. They were the ones who stood toe to toe with the old police chief and his weasel of a sidekick, Officer Shelton, when they tried to pin every piece of criminal mischief in town on Gage. The chief and Shelton had done everything they could to humble the son of the richest, most self-absorbed people in town.
"Not everyone could be Caine the Good," Gage said after greeting one of the old ladies who buzzed around town square, his voice full of affection for his brother. The Maddox boys might have acted like they were different, but deep down the bond between them never ceased to amaze her. "Being police chief's nothing compared to being mayor
and
a big shot lawyer."
Mel would have stopped in her tracks if they hadn't been climbing a narrow set of stairs. "Caine's back in town?"
"The Golden Prince never strays far from the kingdom, Mel. You know that." A sympathetic look replaced the humor in his silver eyes. "You didn't know he was in town? I thought someone would have said something last time you were home."
She didn't respond until they'd dropped the bookcase in one corner of the living room and her brother had gone back downstairs. When her father died, she’d come to town for two days, forty-eight hours that passed in such a blur, and she couldn't remember hearing that the older Maddox brother had moved back from Boston. Then again, everything about that time was a blur. She and Gage made an unspoken agreement ten years ago never to discuss his brother. "No, I didn't. Guess I didn't think too much about it. Or tried not to."
Caine Maddox. She closed her eyes, fighting back the tornado of feelings circling around her. Not in her wildest dreams had she imagined he'd be mayor of Unknown. He'd always been destined to be a big shot politician, but if he was the mayor she wouldn't be able to avoid him. The mayor was everywhere in a small town like theirs. She’d held onto some apparently futile hope that he would be in Washington or at least Austin, so that she wouldn’t have to feel this knot —part pain, part anxiety—every time she saw him or heard his name. She should have known a true Maddox would never stray far from the town his family founded over a hundred and fifty years ago.
"He never told me everything that happened, Mel, but I do know he's always missed you." Gage shrugged. “Can’t say I’d be upset to see you guys get back together.”
Mel narrowed her gaze at her best friend. "He might be your brother, but that doesn't mean you get to take his side on this, Gage. Whatever we had was a college fling. I'm here to start a new, healthy life in Unknown. And Caine has never been healthy for me."
Caine had been her hero as a kid, her secret crush as a teenager, and her first boyfriend in college. Okay, maybe boyfriend was the wrong word. Lover? Friend with benefits? Either way, when everything went to hell between them, she’d lost a big piece of herself. Since then, every man in her life took a piece of her heart and squashed it. She was done giving away pieces. She had a medical license, a shiny new job at the local doctor's office and hospital, and a wonderful family. She was starting over, and that meant no ex-boyfriends.