Joanne Rock - Wishes At First Light

Starting over, one wish at a time...

Gabriella Chance has devoted her life to helping others overcome traumatic events. Now it’s her turn. Gabby’s come home to Heartache, Tennessee, to finally face her past. She finds solace in an unlikely ally, her high school crush, Clayton Travers. But while Clay wants to be Gabby’s refuge, he’s returned to Heartache to confront his own demons. With so many painful secrets in their past, can they hope to wish for a happy future...together?

“Is there anything I can do for you to make this easier?”

Gabby locked on his gaze, taking comfort in knowing he was there for her. With her. Holding his hand made the years they’d been apart disappear. Made all the unsettling nightmares that she was about to face in that courtroom fade in significance.

It was just her and Clay. The guy who’d always had a way of making her feel special.

The words leaped out before she had a chance to measure them, a true wish from her heart: “Just keep holding my hand...”

Dear Reader,

Welcome back! I’ve been eager to share the next story in the Heartache, TN series with you. It seems that once I started pulling at a thread in this town—uncovering the awful things a local villain had done over the years—I discovered a lot of people hurting because of it.

Gabriella Chance thinks she has a good handle on her past, and her efforts with a website for victims of cyberbullying have been healing for a lot of people. But when she returns to her hometown for the trial of the man who hurt her, she runs into someone else who has another sort of claim to her past: a man she never forgot.

Clayton Travers would have never returned to Heartache if not for the news of his half sister, but as soon as Mia is settled with a new foster family, he’ll gladly put small-town Tennessee in his rearview mirror. Gabriella Chance is an unexpected reason to stick around, but a sizzling attraction might not be enough to overcome their different views about what’s best for his troubled teen sibling.

Happy reading,

Joanne Rock

Wishes at First Light

Joanne Rock

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Four-time RITA® Award nominee JOANNE ROCK has penned over seventy stories for Harlequin. An optimist by nature and perpetual seeker of silver linings, Joanne finds romance fits her life outlook perfectly—love is worth fighting for. A former Golden Heart® Award recipient, she has won numerous awards for her stories. Learn more about Joanne’s imaginative Muse by visiting her website, www.joannerock.com, or following @joannerock6on Twitter.

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For Bernice and Ernie Rock, the most wonderful in-laws I could have ever imagined.

Thank you for treating me like family from the very first time I sat down at your dinner table as Dean’s girlfriend. Little did I know back then how much I would come to look forward to those meals and evenings spent at your house for many years to come.

When I count the reasons I’ve been blessed in life, you are always on my list.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THERE SHOULD BE a limit on the number of times the same dream could haunt her.

Even knowing she was dreaming didn’t rob the memories of their power as they flickered to life behind Gabriella Chance’s closed eyes again. Each image burning. Hurting. Opening old wounds that had never healed.

The day unfolding in her mind was so familiar by now, every moment etched in her memory. How many times had she dropped into that buttery leather office chair in front of her father’s big desktop computer in the house where she’d grown up? How many more times would she secretly open a chat window to talk to the boy she had a crush on, the thrill of doing something forbidden giving her almost as much pleasure as imagining Clayton Travers on the other end of the chat window?

Been thinking about me?

In the dream, she typed the words one key at a time, mindful of her older brother’s best friend nearby. Samuel Reyes seemed far older than his seventeen years. He was Mr. Responsible, and determined not to let her have any fun, somehow deciding to be her watchdog anytime her older brother wasn’t around. So Gabby typed quietly and quickly when Sam wasn’t looking, desperate for company from a boy who would gaze at her with heat in his brown eyes.

Clayton.

The messaging program lit up with a new icon as a response popped up.

You’re all I think about.

The butterflies in her stomach went crazy. Wings fluttered at hyper-speed, her nerve endings jumping to life at the thought of Clayton sitting in his foster family’s den, thinking about her. Usually he wasn’t on the computer at the same time as she was, so there would be a delay in their chats. But tonight it was like he was sitting there just waiting for her to type something.

The butterfly flutter in her belly took on a dark, foreboding chill. But Gabriella knew that sensation was just a product of the dream over time. When that first message had popped up on a bright blue chat window a decade ago, she’d simply been thrilled that Clayton was thinking about her. She hadn’t had a clue what was about to happen.

Or that she hadn’t been talking to a sixteen-year-old boy at all.

Legs tangling restlessly in her covers, she fought the onslaught of nightmare memories. The conversation had taken a heated turn that had been confusing but exciting at the time. Afterward she’d understood how thoroughly twisted it all had been.

Are you wearing a dress?

How short?

The chill in her belly spread, encompassing her hips and freezing out her sensuality. That chill had happened later, too—the past and the present getting all mixed up in the dream world. At the time, she’d been warm and excited about the things Clayton—she’d thought it had been Clayton—had said to her. Things that should have been merely a hint of the forbidden coming from someone in her high school. Not anything dangerous. She’d been excited to see him, her teenage exuberance tinged with her immature sexual feelings.

It had all been delicious—a welcome distraction after the hell she’d gone through with her family earlier that year. Her father had been carted off to jail. Her mother had defected emotionally from the family, caring more about Gabby’s dad than her two teenage offspring, leaving Gabriella feeling like the world’s biggest outcast.

Those chats with Clayton had distracted her with happier thoughts, and that night’s talk had been the best yet.