Mornings On Main

From the beloved and bestselling author of the Ransom Canyon and Harmony, Texas series comes a powerful, heartwarming story about generations of family and the ironclad bonds they forge

Jillian James has never had a place she could call home. So when she lands in the sleepy Texas town of Laurel Springs, she’s definitely not planning to stay—except to find a few clues about the father who abandoned her and destroyed her faith in family.

Connor Larady is desperate: he’s a single dad, and his grandmother, Eugenia, has Alzheimer’s. He’s the only one around to care for her, and he has no idea how. And now he has to close the quilt shop Eugenia has owned all her life. When Connor meets down-on-her-luck Jillian, he’s out of options. Can he trust the newcomer to do right by his grandmother’s legacy?

Jillian is done with attachments. But the closer she grows to Connor and Eugenia, the higher the stakes of her leaving get. She has to ask herself what love and family mean to her, and whether she can give up the only life she’s ever known for a future with those who need her.

Also By Jodi Thomas

The Ransom Canyon Series

Ransom Canyon

Rustler’s Moon

Lone Heart Pass

Sunrise Crossing

Wild Horse Springs

Indigo Lake

Winter’s Camp (ebook novella)

A Christmas Affair (ebook novella)

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Mornings on Main

Jodi Thomas

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08322-5

MORNINGS ON MAIN

© 2018 Jodi Thomas

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Praise for New York Times bestselling author

Jodi Thomas

“Compelling and beautifully written, it is exactly the kind of heart-wrenching, emotional story one has come to expect from Jodi Thomas.”

—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author on the Ransom Canyon series

“You can count on Jodi Thomas to give you a satisfying and memorable read.”

—Catherine Anderson, New York Times bestselling author

“Ransom Canyon will warm readers with its huge heart and gentle souls.”

—Library Journal

“[Sunrise Crossing] will warm any reader’s heart.”

—Publishers Weekly, A Best Book of 2016

“Thomas is a wonderful storyteller.”

—RT Book Reviews on Rustler’s Moon

“This tale will grab readers, who will fall in love with the main characters and be just as enamored of the others.”

—Library Journal, starred review, on Lone Heart Pass

“A pure joy to read.”

—RT Book Reviews on the Ransom Canyon series

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Reader’s Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Jodi Thomas

About the Publisher

1

Laurel Springs, Texas, had the warm feel of a Southern town long forgotten by progress. A hundred years ago the main street had been built wide enough to turn a wagon around. Today, the only sign of change was marked at every intersection by swinging stoplights. They clanked in the wind like broken clocks beating out time in red and green.

A trickle of day visitors flowed down the uneven sidewalks in front of quaint little shops with catchy names like A Stitch in Time, Hidden Treasures and Mamma Bee’s Pastries. Occasional sides of buildings and entrances to alleyways were painted with murals of cattle drives and oil fields, as if anyone needed reminding what built this state.

Jillian James drove through the heart of town, fighting back tears. This wasn’t where she wanted to be. It was impossible to remain invisible in a small town. Strangers would be noticed. People would ask questions. Welcome her with smiles or glare at her like no one ever did in large cities.

She dropped her chin, letting her dark, straight hair curtain her face as she waited for the light to change.

Look at the bright side, she almost said out loud. Time slowed in a place like this, and she had to catch her breath. She had to plan her next move. A small town. A slower pace would give her time to think.

She’d been a traveler, a wanderer for as long as she could remember, and like it or not, this town offered her a place to rest and regroup.

In a strange way, this dot on the map reminded her of Budapest, Hungary. But a creek ran through the center of this town, not the Danube river. No hauntingly beautiful Chain Bridge joined the split cities as it did in Buda and Pest, but she sensed the beat of two separate towns between the city limit signs.

Two worlds divided by a ribbon of water.

One side of town was dark and industrial, with warehouses and grain elevators that blocked the sunset to the west. The other side was postcard cute, with gingerbread trim on brightly painted cottages and the Texas flag hanging from nineteenth-century streetlamps.

Here she was, stopped at a tolling light in the middle of town. Not belonging to either side. Not belonging anywhere. At first, her traveling had been an adventure she thought she was born for, but lately it felt like drifting. Just wandering with no more direction than the leaves dancing along the gutters.

Sniffing, she managed a smile, remembering what her father used to tell her every time they packed. If you want to see the world, Jillie, you’ve got to rip off the rearview mirror and never look back.

Somehow, she doubted he’d been talking about Laurel Springs, Texas, when he’d said the world. She’d grown up moving with him. Alaska in the summers, the oil rigs off the coast of Texas in winters. Norway when she was eight. Australia at ten. Washington State when she reached her teens, and a dozen other places. Never the same. Never staying long enough to grow roots.

When she was eighteen, he’d left her at a dorm on a small college campus in Oklahoma and disappeared without a trace. She’d made it two semesters before her money ran out. She hadn’t bothered to look for him. Her father had spent her formative years teaching her how to live without leaving a footprint to follow.

Travel light, he’d once said. Pack nothing from the past, not even memories. And, finally, he’d left without packing her along. Deep down she’d known he would leave someday. Whenever he talked of her as grown, he never mentioned being in the picture.

Only now, a dozen years later, she longed for an anchor. One relative. One harbor. One place where she felt she might belong for a while.

The light changed. Jillian scrubbed her face with a napkin from McDonald’s, where she’d had lunch, and followed a sign advertising the town’s only historic bed-and-breakfast.

Papa’s rule: Never stay at a cheap motel. It marks you as a drifter.

A small bed-and-breakfast was cheaper if you considered the one meal a day could stretch into two if you picked up fruit on the way out, and the friendly staff usually offered a wealth of information. Innkeepers almost made Jillian feel like she had a friend in town.

She parked her car in one of the four Special Guest of Inn reserved spots.

When she climbed the steps of what looked like a miniature Tara mansion from Gone With the Wind, a tiny woman, in her late fifties, rushed out with a welcoming smile. Her chocolate-colored apron was neatly embroidered and read JOIN THE DARK SIDE. We have chocolate chips in our cookies.

“You must be Jillian James. I’m Mrs. Kelly, the innkeeper, but the locals call me Mrs. K. I’ve got your room all ready, dear. Did you have a nice drive? The internet didn’t give us a home address on you so I don’t know how long your journey was, but I hope it wasn’t too far. Don’t you just love our town?”

Papa’s rule: Never give out too much information. It’ll trip you up.

“I had a great drive and I love your beautiful home. You’ll have to tell me a bit of the history of this place.” Jillian smiled, thinking of one of her own rules. Never try to outtalk a talker.

“Of course, dear. This house is old enough to have not only a history, but a ghost, as well, though he’s quite shy.” The innkeeper handed her the key, then they climbed all the way up to Jillian’s room on the third floor. “I’ll tell you about Willie Flancher over coffee some cloudy morning. It’s the only time to talk about ghosts, you know. Folks in town talk about the house Flancher’s Folly because he built it for his fifth wife and died on their wedding night.”

Jillian didn’t care about ghost stories. All she wanted was a quiet, clean place to stay for a while. Third floor, back of the house. Usually least expensive and quietest.

Once Jillian circled the tiny room, she gave an admiring smile. This room would be perfect. Just what she needed.

The chubby innkeeper, who was very spry for her fifties, moved to the door and made her official announcement, “Breakfast at eight, if that’s all right. Soft drinks in the small fridge on the landing, and I put cookies out in the parlor after sunset for those who like a late snack.”

“Thank you.” Jillian pulled off her coat. “I think I’ll rest before I explore the town.”

“You do that, dear. There are maps in the foyer but you’re only a half block from Main, so you can park your car around back and walk if you like.” Mrs. Kelly’s head rocked back and forth as if ticking off an invisible list of what she needed to say. “I’ll see you in the morning. You’re the only one booked up here tonight. Both my other guests are on the first floor. No one wants to climb two flights of stairs these days.”

“I don’t mind.” Setting her suitcase and backpack down, Jillian grinned when she spotted the wide window. “It’s worth the climb for the view alone.”

Mrs. Kelly smiled as she backed out of the room. “I agree.”

When the lock clicked, Jillian pulled out her ledger and curled up in a window seat that had three times more pillows than it needed. On a blank page she wrote the date and “Day 1” beside it, along with the cost of the night’s lodging: “Winter rate: sixty-three dollars.”

Papa’s rule: Always keep count or you might lose track of how long you stay and forget to leave.

She had to be very careful. Thanks to car trouble a month ago and two crummy bosses in a row, she was less than a thousand dollars away from having to sleep in her car—or worse, a shelter. In her ten years on the road, she’d ended up broke twice before. Once in California when someone had stolen her purse, and again in New York City when she’d been in a wreck. None of her belongings had made it to the hospital with her. Both times she’d lost not only her money, but also her identification.

Papa’s rule: Always keep copies of vital papers somewhere safe. Birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, social security card.

In New York, without money and looking like she’d been in a street fight, it had taken her three months to collect enough cash to buy a bus ticket to Oklahoma City. There, she’d found her stash, money, ID and the letter, still unopened, that she’d left for her father just in case he ever used the secret hiding place beneath a shelf in the basement of the downtown library. Both times she’d come back to the hiding place, her stash was still there and the letter was unopened.

If he’d dropped by, he’d left no sign, and she doubted when she circled past Oklahoma City again that anything would be different. All her papers and the mailbox she rarely checked showed her as from Oklahoma. When she’d asked her father if that were true, he’d simply said, “Oklahoma City is the center of the country and as good a place as any to be from.”

Jillian took a shower and changed into dress pants and a sweater. She was close enough to her stash now to relax. If she had to, she could make the drive northwest for more cash in a matter of hours, but somehow that would mean she’d failed.

She wasn’t running to or from anything. She wasn’t hiding out. She just wanted to continue drifting. It was all she knew. Maybe in a few more years, she’d come up with another plan. Maybe she’d drift forever. To do that, she had to get better—smarter—at managing.

As she always did, she unpacked her few belongings. Clothes on hangers in the closet. Underwear in the top drawer. Shoes and backpack in the bottom drawer. Her father’s tiny journals on the nightstand beside the bed. Everything in order.

Her billfold and her laptop slid into her shoulder bag. The laptop went everywhere with her. The backup drive always remained with her clothes tucked away in the back of a shelf or tucked into a pocket. Against her father’s advice, she kept details of everywhere she stopped, be it for one night or a few months. He might have jotted only zip codes and number of days stayed, but she liked to log in the history of each place, how it looked, how it might feel to live there.

Walking out of her room, she studied the polished old mahogany of the staircase. The faded wallpaper peeling free in places, reminding her of fragile lace. The house was beautiful and well cared for, like an aging queen, still standing on a street with abandoned and broken-down homes huddled near, as if hoping the memory of great days gone by might still live in reality’s shadow.

Slipping past the foyer, Jillian rushed down the front steps like an explorer hungry to begin digging. This town’s zip code, like dozens of others, had been listed in her father’s first journals. Maybe in his early years, he’d left a trace.

She told herself she’d feel it if he’d been here. If this was the place where he’d stopped wandering just long enough to care for someone.

But she felt only the cool winter wind whipping between buildings, whirling her around as if pushing her off any direct course.

A few blocks later, she was strolling down Main, her still-damp hair swinging in a ponytail. She blended in with the crowds, window-shopping, as if she had no direction. The smell of cinnamon and ginger drifted in the winter air, blending around pieces of conversations and laughter like icing melts into warm cake.

Jillian swore she could feel her heart slow. The very air in Laurel Springs seemed to welcome her.

Halfway down the block she found what she was looking for. A small help-wanted sign in the corner of a window.

Above hung a faded sign that read LAUREL SPRINGS DAILY.

She let out a breath through her smile. Newspaper work. She could handle that. Selling ads. Writing copy. No problem. Mentally, she made up her resume in her head. Nothing too fancy, nothing too bright. Nothing too easy to check.

As she pushed open the newspaper office door, she selected a new identity as easily as she might change a hat.

2

Connor Larady looked up from the copy machine he’d been trying to murder for an hour. “Morning,” he said as he set down his latest weapon of destruction, a screwdriver. “May I help you, miss?”

The woman clamoring through his office door was tall and slim enough to be a model. With hair in a ponytail and little makeup, she could have still been in her teens, but the wisdom in her big, rainy-day-colored eyes marked her as a good ten years older.

He shoved his tools aside, walked over to the front desk and tried to find a scrap of paper to write on. No one ever came into a newspaper office without either wanting something written, or rewritten.

You’d think a writer would have a pen and pad handy. Only he wasn’t much of a writer, and this wasn’t much of an office. The Laurel Springs Daily had been whittled down to little more than a weekly flyer and a spotty blog of what was happening in town when he got around to it, but he kept up the office his father and grandfather had both run.

Considering himself a good judge of people, Connor had a premonition he’d be filling out a free obit form or a lost dog report, also free.

There were some days he’d thought of combining the two columns in the weekly paper. The header could read LEFT TOWN FOR PARTS UNKNOWN. The byline could be Those Recently Departed or Run Over.

The woman moved one small step closer. Connor had no idea if she was just shy or half-afraid of him. Maybe his grandmother and daughter were right: he was starting to look like the mug shots on the Dallas nightly news. Hair too long, this was the third day he’d worn the same old wrinkled shirt, and he hadn’t bothered to remove the raincoat his gram said only a vampire would wear.

He’d tried to tell them both that he didn’t have time to commit a crime. He was too busy running the town and keeping up with them. His grandmother had taken to wandering off alone, and his daughter was worse. She preferred wandering off with any pimpled-faced, oversexed boy who had a driver’s license. Between the two of them, his curly brown hair would be gray before he turned forty. That is, if it decided to stay around at all.

Connor shoved his worries aside and waited for the attractive stranger to say something. Anything. Or run back out the door. He didn’t much care which. He had more than enough to deal with this morning, and he didn’t want to hear a complaint. Everyone thought if you were the mayor, you loved listening in detail of what was wrong in town.

Maybe this stranger just wanted to talk, or ask directions?

Conversation wasn’t his strong point. Plus, she was just the kind of woman who made him nervous—pretty, and near his age. With his luck, any second she’d decide there was more to him than people could see and would start trying to remake him into marriage material.

Maybe he should wear a sign. TO ALL WOMEN: I AM MADE OF MUD. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MOLD ME INTO, WHEN IT RAINS, I’M BACK TO MUD. Save us both some time and move on to another project.

Raising her head, she studied him a moment, then said, without smiling, “I’m here about the job.”

“What job?” He hadn’t had a secretary for two years. That had been a disaster. He could go slowly bankrupt by himself without a helper continually suggesting they buy supplies or turn up the heater, or paint the place.

The attractive woman before him tilted her head, and he noticed her eyes weren’t quite blue or gray, but they were looking directly at him. “The help-wanted sign posted?”

She’d said the words slowly as if he might need time to absorb them. “I can write copy, proofread fairly fast, and I’m willing to try any type of reporting.”

He lifted an eyebrow, thinking maybe he should recite his resume to her if that was how she wanted to introduce herself. One degree in English, one in history, a master’s in anthropology. None of which had ever earned him a dime. Come to think of it, maybe he was slow? No one had bothered to tell him that he was wasting his time in school.

This stranger in town pointed at the faded note in the window and his brain clicked on. “Oh, that job’s not here at the paper. It’s across the street at the quilt shop.” He pointed out the window to A Stitch in Time, the shop directly across Main.

“It’s been so long since I put it there, I forgot about the sign.”

“Sorry to have bothered you.” She turned, obviously not a woman to waste time.

“Wait.” He hadn’t had a single bite for the job at the quilt shop in weeks. Everyone in town knew what it was and no one wanted it. But this outsider just might be dumb enough to take it. “It’s only a short-term job. Three or four months at the most, but it pays fifteen dollars an hour if you have the right skills.”

“What skills?”

She wasn’t running at the thought of working in a quilt shop. That was a good sign. “My grandmother has owned the town’s quilt shop for over fifty years. She’s closing down, but what we need done has to be accomplished carefully. Every quilt in the place has to be cataloged for the county museum. She holds the history of this town in there.”

Connor had no idea how to say what he needed to say, but he had to be honest. “Gram’s slipping a little. Beginning to forget things. Over the years she’s collected and made quilts that mean a great deal to the people of Laurel Springs. They’ll have to be treated with care. The history of each one logged and photographed.”