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“I’m not who I used to be, and people in this town are never going to get past that.”
“Well then, they’re just ignorant. Don’t they realize you’re too damned old to be prancing down a runway in a tiara?”
Meri laughed. “Gee, thanks.”
“It’s true. You’re too old to be a beauty queen and too beautiful to be bothered by the pettiness of someone who should know better than to run their mouth.”
She cocked a grin at him. “Are you complimenting me, Jack Barlow?”
“Hell, no. Gentlemen compliment women, and I am no gentleman.”
He closed the gap between them and touched her cheek, and her heart tripped. She was sixteen again, thinking there was no one in the world she’d ever love as much as she loved Jack Barlow. Then he’d broken her heart, and she’d vowed to never, ever let anyone get that close.
When he brushed her hair back behind her ear and told her she was beautiful, she forgot her promise to herself. She’d thought about him kissing her—did she want him to kiss her? How would it be, after so many years? Better? Sweeter?
* * *
The Barlow Brothers: Nothing tames a Southern man faster … than true love!
The Homecoming
Queen Gets
Her Man
Shirley Jump
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author SHIRLEY JUMP spends her days writing romance so she can avoid the towering stack of dirty dishes, eat copious amounts of chocolate and reward herself with trips to the mall. Visit her website at www.ShirleyJump.com for author news and a booklist, and follow her at Facebook.com/shirleyjump.author for giveaways and deep discussions about important things like chocolate and shoes.
To all the brave heroes in our military, but especially to my husband and my father, who have demonstrated true heroism many times, both in the military and in life.
Contents
Five years ago, Meri Prescott left Stone Gap, North Carolina, with a fire in her belly and a promise that if she ever came back, she’d be doing it in style. She’d imagined riding down Main Street in the back of a limo while the blue-haired ladies at Sadie’s Clip ’n’ Curl gawked and the fishermen who parked their butts and their one-that-got-away stories on the bench in front of the Comeback Bar shook their heads and muttered about the good old days when a two-tone Chevy was fancy enough for getting around town.
Meri had imagined a homecoming that would tell everyone in this nowhere town that she had made it, become more than anyone imagined. That she was more than just a pretty face, someone who worried about her manicure but not her grade point average. A girl, really, who had thought New York City would be the cure for all that ailed her, and that in that giant city she had finally found the person she was meant to be, not one who had been manufactured like a store mannequin.
Okay, so she’d been blinded by the stars in her eyes. The Meri Prescott who had left Stone Gap with a tiara and a plan was not the Meri Prescott who was returning. Not by a long shot. And she wasn’t so sure Stone Gap was ready to accept the woman she had become.
Frankly, she didn’t give a damn either way. She was here for Grandpa Ray, for as long as he needed her. To help him, and in the process...help herself.
Her fingers drifted to her cheek, to the long, curved scar that had yet to fade, a constant memory of the division between her past and her present. There were nights when she woke up in a cold sweat, reliving the attack outside her crappy outer-borough apartment. She’d tried, tried so hard to stay in New York, to keep up with her photography job, but the city had changed for her, and the buildings she used to love had become like prison walls.
She needed air and space and warm sun on her face. Then maybe she’d be able to conquer the demons that haunted her nights and shadowed her days. Maybe then she’d be able to hold a camera again and see something through the lens besides the face of her attacker.
Maybe.
At the stop sign holding court in the intersection of Main Street and Honeysuckle Lane, her ten-year-old Toyota let out a smoky cough. The car’s AC had stopped working somewhere back in Baltimore, and exhaust curled in through the open windows, a sickly sweet stench that made it seem like she hadn’t journeyed very far from the congested streets of Brooklyn.
All it took to remind her that she was back in the small-town South was a glance out the window, at the wide verandas fronting the pastel