Hometown Hope. Laurel Blount

you and this store of yours have gotten tangled up in my situation, so I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d take the time to talk with me about it. At my house. Tonight.”

      Jess is all I have. Anna chewed on her lower lip. She knew what it was like to have only one person in the whole world left to love. She also knew how it felt when that person slipped away from you into a place you couldn’t access, no matter how desperately you wanted to.

      She was going to kick herself for this later, but—

      “Okay.”

      “Please, Anna, I—” Hoyt stopped short. For once in her life, she’d thrown him off-balance. “Okay?”

      “Yes. I’ll come.”

      Hoyt blinked a couple of times. “I really appreciate that. I guess I’ll see you tonight.”

      “Right.” They considered each other for an awkward second or two, and then Hoyt nodded and headed out of the store toward his truck.

      Anna relocked the door behind him, her heart skipping nervously. Glancing up, she caught Hoyt studying her from the cab of the truck.

      Their eyes connected, and she realized something. For probably the first and only time in their lives, she and Hoyt Bradley were thinking the exact same thing.

       What on earth did I just get myself into?

      * * *

      Hoyt Bradley didn’t spook easy, and he had his dad to thank for that. When you grew up in a house with a mean drunk, you learned early to cope with stuff that made most people turn tail and run.

      So it made no sense for his palms to be sweaty when he reached for the doorknob at six thirty. On the dot.

      Trust Anna Delaney to be right on time.

      She was waiting in the shade of his deep front porch. Maybe she was trying to make up for that crazy outfit she’d been wearing earlier because now she looked like she was headed to a job interview at a funeral home. She had on a pink blouse buttoned up to the neck and gray slacks with a knife-blade crease down each leg. Somehow she’d even wrangled her unruly mop of hair into a prissy bun.

      That must have taken some doing. And as far as Hoyt was concerned, it had been a big waste of time. He’d meant what he told her back in the bookstore. Her hair looked better the other way.

      Still. Hoyt glanced down at his own rumpled blue cotton shirt and jeans. All things considered, he probably could have stood a little sprucing up himself. She poked a foil-covered dish in his direction. “I brought dessert.”

      She’d taken his suggestion. Maybe this was going to be easier than he’d thought. “I hope it’s those caramel brownies you used to make.” She’d once bribed him to read an entire act of Julius Caesar by allowing him one bite per page.

      “Sorry. Banana pudding.”

      He’d never much cared for bananas, and from that sharp twinkle in Anna’s eye, she remembered. So much for easy. “Come on in.”

      She edged past him into his living room and threw a startled glance upward.

      “Oh, wow.” For a second or two she seemed to have forgotten he was standing there, which made the raw admiration in her voice mean even more. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Well, not in somebody’s home, anyway. I feel like I just walked into a cathedral.”

      He’d designed the front room of his home with a vaulted ceiling that soared into a high point. Large triangular windows brought in the blue sky and tops of the old pecan trees in his yard. The back wall of the room was mostly glass, too, showcasing the sparkling pond he’d dug out in the back field.

      He always enjoyed seeing people react to it, but nobody had ever commented that it looked like a church before now.

      Strange, since he’d actually patterned this space after a sanctuary he’d helped build down in Savannah several years ago. He’d liked the way that building had brought in the outdoors, spotlighting God’s creation rather than focusing on man-made curlicues. He thought he’d done a pretty fair job of copying that here.

      Weird that Anna Delaney of all people would be the one who picked up on that.

      “Thanks,” he said simply.

      Anna flushed and nodded awkwardly. She reached up a hand to tuck a straying lock of hair back into place. It flopped right back down as soon as she quit fussing with it.

      Hoyt tried not to grin. For such an uptight girl, Anna sure had some wild hair. It was a glossy brown, and when she wore it down, it fell in loose spirals past her shoulders. She’d been fighting with it—and losing—as long as he’d known her.

      “Where’s Jess?” Anna dug in the bag she had looped over one elbow and produced a storybook. “I brought her something.”

      “She’s not here.” The immediate alarm in Anna’s expression might have been funny if there hadn’t been so much at stake. “We need to talk about some stuff she doesn’t need to overhear, so I asked Bailey Quinn to take her out to Tino’s for a pizza.” Anna still looked uneasy, so he added, “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

      She hesitated but then set her bag down on the table by the door and nodded. “I guess so.” She tilted her head and sniffed. “Hoyt? Is something burning?”

      He made it to the kitchen about the time the smoke alarm started going off. He opened the oven and drew out four charred lumps of garlic bread. Even by his low standards, they weren’t salvageable.

      Not a good start.

      “If that’s our dinner maybe we should skip right to dessert.”

      Anna had followed him and was leaning against the doorframe. Bombing the bread had served one purpose at least. She didn’t look suspicious anymore. She looked amused.

      “Nah, the lasagna’s okay.” Mainly because it had started out in the supermarket’s frozen foods section. “I was trying to hurry this bread along. Me and the broil setting on this oven have a love-hate thing going on. I like it because it cooks stuff fast, but if you forget about it—” he gestured to the smoking lumps “—charcoal.” The smoke alarm was still shrilling. “Could you hand me that broom?”

      Anna picked it up. Instead of passing it to him, she upended it and poked the button on the ceiling alarm. The shrieking stopped.

      When she saw him looking at her, she shrugged. “I went through a stir-fry period right after my dad died. I think I learned more about the smoke alarm in our old kitchen than I did about Chinese cooking.”

      That reminded him. Avoiding her eyes, Hoyt grabbed another pot holder and picked up the hot tinfoil pan of lasagna. “I’m sorry I missed Principal Delaney’s funeral. I don’t know how it slipped by me. I was planning to go, but then I never saw the announcement about it.”

      “There wasn’t one.”

      “You should have announced it. I imagine pretty much everybody in town would have been there. Your dad was principal at the high school forever.”

      “No. I meant there wasn’t a funeral.”

      Hoyt set the steaming pan down on the table and turned to look at her. “What?”

      “I mean no public one.” Anna avoided his gaze. “I just had a private memorial service. Only the minister and I were there.”

      “Why?”

      “Well, Dad was sick for years and toward the end he didn’t even recognize people. He was...disconnected. Nobody would’ve come.” She glanced up at him and frowned. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

      Hoyt realized he was staring at her with his mouth open. “Are you crazy? Everybody would have come. This whole town loved your dad.”

      She looked at