Christine Flynn - Confessions of a Small-Town Girl

Sam turned the diary toward Kelsey. “What’s all this about?”

Heat moved up Kelsey’s neck. “It’s just something teenaged girls do. It doesn’t mean a thing,” she insisted, reaching for the diary again.

He immediately lifted it away as he flipped ahead a few pages. “‘I dreamed about Sam again,’” he began aloud, only to pause, glance up, then start reading more slowly. “‘I’d give anything if he’d kiss me. Really kiss me…’”

Kelsey heard him cut himself off as he read the rest. A moment later he looked at her with a grin that would have stopped her heart had she not been so busy being horrified.

“You thought I had a great butt?”

Her cheeks had turned a telling shade of pink. But this would be nothing compared to what color they would turn after his perusal of a few more pages would reveal him to be the subject of a few more rather specific fantasies.

Very specific, actually.

Dear Reader,

Well, as promised, the dog days of summer have set in, which means one last chance at the beach reading that’s an integral part of this season (even if you do most of it on the subway, like I do!). We begin with The Beauty Queen’s Makeover by Teresa Southwick, next up in our MOST LIKELY TO…miniseries. She was the girl “most likely to” way back when, and he was the awkward geek. Now they’ve all but switched places, and the fireworks are about to begin….

In From Here to Texas, Stella Bagwell’s next MEN OF THE WEST book, a Navajo man and the girl who walked out on him years ago have to decide if they believe in second chances. And speaking of second chances (or first ones, anyway), picture this: a teenaged girl obsessed with a gorgeous college boy writes down some of her impure thoughts in her diary, and buries said diary in the walls of an old house in town. Flash forward ten-ish years, and the boy, now a man, is back in town—and about to dismantle the old house, brick by brick. Can she find her diary before he does? Find out in Christine Flynn’s finale to her GOING HOME miniseries, Confessions of a Small-Town Girl. In Everything She’s Ever Wanted by Mary J. Forbes, a traumatized woman is finally convinced to come out of hiding, thanks to the one man she can trust. In Nicole Foster’s Sawyer’s Special Delivery, a man who’s played knight-in-shining armor gets to do it again—to a woman (cum newborn baby) desperate for his help, even if she hates to admit it. And in The Last Time I Saw Venice by Vivienne Wallington, a couple traumatized by the loss of their child hopes that the beautiful city that brought them together can work its magic—one more time.

So have your fun. And next month it’s time to get serious—about reading, that is….

Enjoy!

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.

This book is dedicated to every

woman who kept a diary in high school…

with the hope that she knows where it is.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Having fantasies about a man wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fantasies were normal. Fantasies were healthy. Writing them down wasn’t terribly bright, Kelsey Schaeffer conceded to herself, trying not to panic at what she was overhearing. Especially in detail. But she’d never dreamed that the subject of those wild imaginings would ever be anywhere near where she’d hidden her old diary. She’d had no idea that Sam MacInnes had even returned to Maple Mountain. She’d barely been back twelve hours herself.

“You going to flip those cakes, honey?”

Kelsey’s mother bustled into the kitchen of her busy little diner, one eye on the spatula Kelsey held, the other on her order pad. With her silvering-blond hair in its usual braided bun, her pretty features softening with age and a white bib apron tied around her ample waist, Dora Schaeffer looked much as she always had to Kelsey. Friendly. Efficient. Enduring. Like a rock that could weather any storm or challenge and remain unchanged. The only difference about her since Kelsey’s visit home last year was the white cast that ran from elbow to palm on her left arm. She had fallen from a ladder while adjusting the bunting she’d hung out front for the Fourth of July parade next Sunday.

The red, white and blue bunting now lay bundled on the storage room floor. Dauntless and headstrong to her core, her mom had pulled down the sections she’d hung rather than have them hang crooked before she’d walked down the street to the doctor’s office to get her arm set. There were no half-measures with Dora Schaeffer. Something was either done perfectly, or it wasn’t done at all.

Jerked from her alarm by her mom’s reminder, Kelsey hurriedly flipped the two orders of buttermilk pancakes turning golden on the griddle. With most of her attention on the conversation taking place on the other side of the service window, she stacked a third order onto a plate, added a side of sausage and eggs and slid the plate onto the window’s long ledge.

Amos Calder and Charlie Moorehouse, two of the community’s inherently stubborn senior citizens, sat with their elbows on the lacquered pine counter, coffee mugs in hand, waiting for their breakfast. According to what she’d just overheard of their laconic conversation, Sam’s sister had bought the old Baker place and Sam was refurbishing it for her and her boys. What had her mentally hyperventilating was Amos’s comment about Sam tearing out the upstairs bedroom walls.

Her old diary was up there. The one she’d kept in high school. It was behind a wall in the back bedroom. Her name was in glitter on the cover. Sam’s name was all over the inside.

Until a minute ago, she had nearly forgotten the thing even existed. Now, her only thought was that she would die if Sam found it.

She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d written. At that moment, all she recalled was that he had been a college senior the summer she’d turned sixteen and that he’d worked on his uncle’s farm. Big, buff, and totally out of her league, he had awakened her heart, her dreams and inspired a host of wild fantasies, the bulk of which she’d duly recorded, then ultimately hidden in the wall of the very house he was now tearing apart because her mom would have killed her had she found something so explicit in her bedroom.

Her then-best friend, Michelle Baker, in whose room she had hurriedly hidden her rather risqué writings after she’d discovered that her original hiding place in the old grist mill wasn’t safe, hadn’t had a clue what was in that diary. Since she kept a diary herself, Michelle had understood, however, how important it was for a girl to protect her private thoughts and assured her that no one would ever know the little book was there. As it was, Kelsey had never intended to leave it there permanently. But when she’d put it behind the loose wall panel Michelle had pulled out partway, it hadn’t caught on the little ledge that held her friend’s own treasures. It had slid all the way to the floor and they hadn’t been able to get it back out.