Cara Colter - Chasing Dreams

Love.

Okay, love and good cars, but mostly love.

He had succeeded with his eldest daughter, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams at his first awkward attempt at matchmaking.

But Jessie, his second daughter, was different. Jessie was disconnected and intellectual. Given those defects, Mitch Michaels was simply unsuitable. The good professor, while obviously an honorable and stable man, could only bring out those qualities in her. Her beauty would remain forever hidden under layers of prim control that Mitch actually seemed to encourage.

Poor Jessie. The girl was twenty-four years old. She had no business acting so old. She always seemed to have her head down, in a book. She needed a man who could show her how to look up, dream a little, touch the sky.

He mulled over the surprising poetry of those thoughts while the baby pulled at his nose and his ears.

Really, especially after his episode with the Blake lad, it was beginning to feel like too much for him. What did he know of poetry and passion? Where could he find such things for his daughter? His energy was waning, his light dimming, and so much more quickly than he had expected.

“Look what I found,” Sarah said. She looked like Brandy. And sometimes there was a lilt in her voice that reminded him of a time long ago.

She plunked a picture down in front of him. Over the objections of his secretary, James, and just about everybody else in this household, he had given Sarah a job. She was sorting through mountains of photos and assembling memory albums, one for each of his daughters. Sarah was good at it, and he was glad he had hired her to put together a suitable memento for the daughters who had no idea that soon they would be looking at their father only in picture albums.

“I didn’t quite know what to make of it.”

Jake studied what she had placed before him. It was an old photo, sepia, the edges curling. It was a picture of himself as a young man, his arm looped casually around the shoulders of his best friend, Simon Blake. Jake felt a slight tremble in his hand. How odd that he had just hung up on Garner Blake and now this picture would be presented to him.

Or perhaps not odd at all…The veil between the worlds of the seen and the unseen were thinning. Perhaps all things were linked in ways he had never allowed himself to believe before.

He studied the photo of the two happy young men. Behind them, draped in a grand opening banner, was a building that couldn’t have possibly been big enough to hold all their youthful hopes and dreams. K & B Auto, the humble beginning of the Auto Kingdom empire in Farewell, Virginia.

And the beginning of the end of something far more precious than all the successes he had ever enjoyed.

The beginning of the end of his lifelong friendship with Simon. Not Simon’s fault. Simon’s son, Billy’s. Billy had managed to squander every single thing his father had worked for. In the end, Billy owned only his half of that small shop. No doubt he would have lost that, too, had Jake ever been willing to sell his share.

Jake felt the sharpness of regret.

Had he been too hard on Simon’s son? Probably. It was not until he had children of his own, long after Billy had grown, that he understood the complete helplessness of that love, the compulsion to overindulge.

He recalled his conversation with Garner. Hadn’t he heard the stamp of Simon’s own resolve in that young man’s strong, confident voice? Yes. And he’d heard more. A fierceness of spirit that reminded him of who he himself, Jake King, had once been. Plus, that love of cars, passed to Garner straight from Simon.

Jessie’s love of cars remained, too, under all that intellectual frou-frou.

Jessie and Simon’s grandson. Was it possible? Could Jake repair his mistakes of the past and manipulate his daughter’s future in one fell swoop? A shiver traveled the length of his spine.

Perhaps the gods would take pity on a man with so much to do, and so little time left. He snorted. This kind of thought had to be contained, or next he would be consulting his daily horoscope and reading crystals to find direction.

Of course, where he was going, who was to say where the direction would come from? Perhaps hunch and instinct and all those nebulous things came from heaven’s door. Meanwhile, he had a lot of homework to do on Mr. Garner Blake before Jake would cross the young man’s path with that of his beloved Jessie.

Reluctantly, he passed the baby back to Sarah. “Tell James I need to talk to Cameron McPherson, at once.”

Did she color at the mention of that name? Ah, yes, he recalled. She had danced with Cameron at the wedding. He saw the longing flash through her eyes. Too bad it wouldn’t be so easy with Jessie.

Three days later, with a thick folder in front of him, Jake redialed that number in Farewell, Virginia. He knew everything there was to know about Garner Blake. And he liked what he had found out. Garner was tough, but innately decent. What was best about his grandfather had survived in him. He had been nominated Citizen of the Year by the town of Farewell, and Jake’s sources told him Blake would win.

He let none of what he was feeling—excitement and hope—show in his voice. Instead, Jake King informed Garner Blake, coldly, that his daughter would be coming to work at K & B Auto for the summer, to fill the long-vacant position of office manager.

“Have you been spying on me?” Garner asked, his voice hard and incredulous.

Jake chose not to answer. Instead, he reminded Garner that he owned half the business and was, according to the legal documents he was looking at, entitled to hire and fire employees.

There was the faintest veiled threat in his statement. He knew from the dossier in front of him that Garner Blake hired good men to work for him and he was intensely loyal to each of them. Jake also knew one of those men had just had a baby, another had just bought a home. They were men who needed their jobs.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

Then Garner said, “Is this about the car?”

“If it was, would you change your mind?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Jake hung up the phone thoughtfully. He hadn’t broken it to Jessie that he’d found her a summer job. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to be any happier about the arrangement than Garner Blake was.

She had just completed a master’s degree in science and she was contemplating beginning her Ph.D. She was brilliant and academically successful and she wasn’t going to want to work the front counter of an auto repair shop.

She could refuse. But he doubted she would. If he was dealing with her younger sister, Chelsea, he would have to threaten the trust fund, the allowance, the car and the credit cards. But Jessie was not Chelsea. She had always wanted to please him. He recalled, affectionately, the soft worry in her green eyes when she looked at him, even as a child.

Despite his treachery in playing with his unsuspecting daughter’s well-ordered life, he decided to call her immediately and smiled when he heard her voice on the other end of the phone. It was all for the greater good, after all.

The wedding gown was designed by Dior. The bride was slender and radiant. Her bouquet held pure white French Lace floribunda roses, flown in from Oregon.

The groom waited at the end of the aisle. He was turning toward her—

The daydream ended with a bang. Literally.

Jessica King’s head flew forward and hit the steering wheel. After a stunned moment, she stared at the crumpled hood of the car she had rented earlier this morning after flying into Harrisonburg, Virginia. Beyond the damaged front of the car was the parking meter she had hit, and beyond that was the rather dingy cream stucco storefront of K & B Auto.