Reclaimed

RECLAIMED

Sarah Guillory

S
PENCER
H
ILL
C
ONTEMPORARY

Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Guillory

Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.

Spencer Hill Press

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA

Please visit our website at
www.spencerhillpress.com
First Edition: October 2013.
Sarah Guillory
Reclaimed: a novel / by Sarah Guillory – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary:
A girl determined to flee her small town finds a reason to stay when she falls in love with twin brothers, one who can’t remember his past and the other who doesn’t want him to remember.

The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this fiction: Band-Aid, Boy Scouts of America, Coca-Cola, Canopy, Crock-Pot, Diet Coke, Disneyland, Floaties, Ford Bronco, Formica, Frankenstein, Humpty Dumpty, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Jeep Cherokee, Little League, Peter Pan, Scooby Doo, Sheetrock, Shell, Technicolor, Walmart, Wonderland

Cover design by Jennifer Rush
Interior layout by Marie Romero

ISBN 978-1-937053-88-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-937053-89-5 (e-book)

Printed in the United States of America

ADVANCE PRAISE
FOR
RECLAIMED

“
Painfully beautiful, swoony, and full of surprises
. A must-read debut novel… Sarah Guillory has managed to make us shout, cry, swoon, and most importantly… fall in love.”

— Meg, Swoony Boys Podcast

“
Reclaimed
is
smart, intelligent and very well done
, and packs a mind-bending punch!”

— Jen, Young Adult Books Central

“
Reclaimed
left me speechless, awed by an unexpected plot unlike anything I have ever read… I was totally sucked in,
mesmerized by the story
that I lost track of time until I read the last word. Without a doubt,
Reclaimed
has claimed a spot on my
top reads list of 2013
!”

— Liza, WhoRu Blog

For Josh

October had tremendous possibility. The summer’s oppressive heat was a distant memory, and the golden leaves promised a world full of beautiful adventures. They made me believe in miracles.

The crisp air smelled like wood smoke, and I longed to lace up my running shoes. Fall was the best time to run—the air tasted better and was easier to move through.

In the fall, I could fly.

Instead, Mom and I were making the hour-long drive from our house in Solitude, Arkansas, to the hospital in Middleton. I drove. Mom kept picking at her cuticles and wishing I would do something with my hair other than a ponytail, and
surely
I had a pair of jeans that didn’t have holes in them. Mom had a tendency to come apart in a crisis—or a minor inconvenience, for that matter.

I understood Mom’s worry, but Pops was going to be fine. He’d promised. Just yesterday, he’d been sitting up and flirting with the young nurse who was checking his IV. Mom had poured him some juice and snapped at Mops for not doing it first, and Pops had told the joke about the bear, which had stopped being funny when I was six. I’d laughed anyway.

But today, when I got to his room, I knew Pops was worse. Instead of telling jokes, he gasped like there wasn’t enough oxygen on the entire planet. I couldn’t stand seeing him like that. Pops was supposed to be strong. He’d carried me on his shoulders until I was seven years old. Pops wasn’t old, or sick, or frail. This wasn’t Pops.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Mom shouted at Mops. “We would have been here sooner.”

Pops spoke up so Mops didn’t have to. He was good at smoothing things over. “I’m fine,” he said, but he barely got the words out, and I didn’t know if he was.

I was glad when the nurses told us we had to wait outside. I stood in the hallway, grateful to be away from the beeping machines.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d been at home with him,” Mom said, glaring at Mops.

“Or if
you’d
answered your phone when he called you,” Mops answered.

Mom paled, turning away. Mops ran a hand over her face and looked guilty. But neither of them apologized. They sat on opposite sides of the waiting room.

“I’m going outside,” I said. I needed to breathe.

I escaped the tension into a cold north wind. I tried to convince myself that Pops was going to pull through. He always did. He’d been in the hospital three times in the past year, and he’d always come out in a couple of days, ranting about how they’d tried to starve him. He’d told me he was too ornery to die, and I believed him. Pops couldn’t die in October. There was too much promise.

I grabbed my writing notebook from the car and sat at a cracked picnic table nestled in a cluster of trees. The ground was golden with pine needles, and the wind through the trees sounded like rushing water. I opened to a blank page and tried to change my worry into words, but I hadn’t yet mastered that kind of alchemy.

“Ian!”

I turned to see a woman leaning out of the back door of the building, then noticed a guy about my age sitting on the ground behind the hospital. He was almost invisible in the shadows. When he saw me staring, he put his finger to his lips.

The woman shouted for Ian again, but neither the boy nor I moved, and she finally went inside. I tried to focus on my writing, but his behavior left me with a curiosity as deep as the gloom the boy was sitting in. I wrote a few words and crossed them out. I looked back at the boy. His head was bowed, and it took me a minute to realize what he was doing—whittling. Strange.

When he looked up, I dropped my head back to my notebook, embarrassed that he’d caught me staring. After another minute of gazing at the mostly blank page, I ventured another look. He was whittling again. This time, when he glanced up, he grinned, and I had to laugh.

The boy stood and peeked around the building. When he was sure the woman was gone, he walked over.

He was tall, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans and his dark hair curling at the edges of his collar. He gave me a crooked half-smile, and his blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks for that.”

“No problem. What are you hiding from, anyway?” I asked.

His smile slipped away. “Everything. You?”

I admired his honesty. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t hiding, but it was a lie I wasn’t sure I could pull off. I gave him the easiest piece of truth. “I just needed some air.”

He nodded like I’d said something witty and wise instead of avoiding his question. The wind kicked up, and I hugged my notebook tighter to my chest.

“What’s in the notebook?” he asked, sitting beside me on the picnic table.

Words and wishes and a way out
. “My plan for world domination,” I said instead.

“Does yours include the Bond girls?” His voice was deep, and the way he spoke made me think he wasn’t from Arkansas. That made me even more curious.

I laughed. “No.”

He looked surprised. “Must be just mine, then.”

“You’re Ian?” I asked. He nodded, his eyes seeming to ask a question I didn’t know if I could answer. “I’m Jenna. What were you working on?”

He pulled a small piece of wood out of his pocket. At first it didn’t look like anything at all, just some wood with the bark still on it. But when he turned it over, I saw it was a bird—a seagull.

“Whoa,” I said, reaching for it without thinking. I stopped myself and looked up at him.

He handed it over. He obviously wasn’t finished with it yet. The bird had one wing and just the beginning of a head and beak. It looked like it was trying to escape the wood and was halfway between capture and release.

“Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.

“Boy Scout camp.”

I looked up at him. His mouth was twisted in a mocking way. There was something about the stubborn set of his jaw and the way he’d hidden in the shadows that made me think he had a hard time playing by someone else’s rules. “You don’t really seem the Boy Scout type.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh really? And how do Boy Scouts look?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Clean-cut.”

“And I don’t?”

His hair was dark and disheveled and made his eyes even bluer. But there were shadows underneath them, and his shoulders were stooped, like he was bracing himself for a blow. He looked cut, but not cleanly.

I handed the bird back to him. “I plead the fifth.”

The wind tangled my hair, and I pushed it out of my face and shivered. I’d forgotten to bring a jacket.

Ian stood up. “Let me buy you coffee,” he said, jerking his head toward the diner across the street. “Since you didn’t give me away earlier.”

“I don’t know.” Leaving the hospital grounds was probably a bad idea. I should have been keeping the peace between Mom and Mops. I needed to check on Pops, but I didn’t want to see him hooked up to all those machines. He was supposed to be in his shop, fixing an old chair, or sitting on the bank of the pond with a beer and a pole. I didn’t want to see him any other way. I was such a coward.

Ian put his hands in his pockets and looked at me from underneath thick lashes. “I’m infinitely better company than that notebook.”

“Are you sure about that?” I had to admit, he was much less intimidating than the blank page.

He laughed. “What? You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t know you,” I said.

He gave me a crooked grin. “But you want to.”

Maybe
. Wasn’t October all about possibility?

“Is that the best you got?” I asked.

“It usually works on most girls.”

“Probably not as much as you think it does.” But I was lying, because he was almost as charming as he thought he was. His grin was arrogant, but his eyes were sad. I was intrigued. Besides, I was cold and not yet ready to go back inside the hospital. I stood up. “I’m buying my own coffee.”

“My kind of girl.”

We trekked through the trees to the busy highway that ran next to the hospital. I stopped, but Ian stepped off the curb. When he saw I wasn’t following, he stepped back at the same time I started to walk. He laughed and grabbed my hand, pulling me forward as we ran across the street. I wanted to be shocked that I was holding hands with a guy I barely knew, but the connection was nice.

Ian dropped my hand as soon as we made it to the other side, but the warmth remained. We each bought coffee before sitting at one of the few open tables at the back of the crowded diner.

“Where are you from?” I asked, dumping in three packets of sugar. Ian drank his black.

He ran his hand through his hair and leaned back. “What makes you think I’m not from here?”

I grinned. “Your accent.” Ian finished his words instead of dropping the endings. And his one-syllable words stayed that way.

He laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

“Oh please,” I said, wrapping my hands around my cup to warm them. “You should hear my Pops.” His thick Southern drawl was one of the things I loved about him. It added depth to his already colorful stories. He’d be better tomorrow. Maybe they’d even let him go home.

“Are you okay?” Ian asked. His voice was soft and full of concern.

“Sure,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Why?”

“You looked sad for a minute.”

I didn’t want to be. I sighed. “My grandpa’s over there.” I jerked my head toward the hospital.

There was something about the way his eyes found mine that made me think he knew what it was like to lose someone. “I’m sorry.”

I looked away. I wasn’t ready to accept sympathy for something that hadn’t happened yet, something that might not happen for a very long time. “He’ll be fine.” I hoped saying the words out loud would make them true.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

I glanced at my phone and realized it was well past lunch and I still hadn’t eaten. I never missed a meal. “A little.”

“Be right back.”

He walked over to the counter with his hands in his pockets. I could just see his eyes as he leaned over to study the pastry case, a tiny crease between his brows. He was taking his selection seriously.

His phone buzzed, bouncing around on the table where he’d left it. I couldn’t help but glance at the screen.
Dr. Benson is waiting. Where are you?

Ian returned with four different pieces of pie. “I couldn’t decide,” he said, “so I thought we’d better try them all.”

“Best idea I’ve ever heard.” I took two of the plates from him. “I love pie.”

“Better than cake?”

“Much better. I actually don’t like icing.”

He froze, holding one of his plates in mid-air. “I’m sad for you.”

I laughed. “Don’t be. For my birthday my grandma always makes me apple pies. They’re my favorite.” And Mom’s. Our birthdays were three days apart, and we celebrated every year by eating apple pie and ice cream for dinner for an entire week. We also had matching birthday tiaras, but I’d stopped wearing mine when I was nine. Mom hadn’t outgrown hers yet.