Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 114011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Single mom Palmer Clark will not be sidelined by the new man in town. Sure, the honey-tongued baseball legend is gorgeous, loves puppies, and has charmed his way into the community’s heart, but Palmer craves stability. Nothing about Cole says forever. So why is he so hard to resist?
Cole is swinging through town to visit his parents when he meets the kind of down-to-earth distraction he’s been looking for since retiring from the majors. True, his long-term relationship score is zero. But even though raising his average with Palmer seems impossible, it’s worth a shot.
As promising as the summer nights are, fate turns small-town dreams upside down, and some lessons are learned the hard way. But having faith in love and choosing hope over fear might get Palmer and Cole to the sweet spot they’re looking for.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
PALMER
You’ve been warned.”
I plop on a barstool across from my best friend, Val. She wipes her hands on a white dishrag and side-eyes my situation. Because I’m clearly a situation.
My mascara doesn’t look as neat as it did when I applied it . . . yesterday morning. But that’s what happens when you stay up late matching socks and wake up to a hungry twelve-year-old who’s already missed the bus. Still, it might’ve been okay if I hadn’t rubbed my eyes during a bout of allergies after bebopping through the bus yard at work like I own the damned place.
I sigh.
Early-afternoon sunlight streams in the windows of Fletcher’s, the only restaurant in a ten-mile radius. The aroma of my favorite Friday lunch, open-faced beef manhattan sandwiches, perfumes the air. Before I can order one to go, I notice the line drawn through it on the menu board.
Of course.
“I’m afraid to ask . . . ,” Val says, handing me a glass of tea. God bless this woman.
“If I didn’t enjoy my job so much, I’d quit.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You need the money, and Kirk pays you too much to walk away.”
“Fine.” I sigh, swirling the straw around the glass. “If I didn’t enjoy my job so much and Kirk didn’t pay me well, I’d quit.”
Val giggles.
“I had a customer call for a radiator surge tank today,” I say.
“A radiator what?”
“Surge tank. I’ll spare you the details. It’s a very specific bus part that we usually keep in stock. That’s all you need to know.”
“Okay. Noted.”
“So, I get the order for the tank, and I call the shop to see if we have one. Burt insisted we didn’t. Like, he was ready to fight me over it. But the whole time we were talking, I could hear the little farming game he plays on his phone mooing and clucking.”
“Ooh, this isn’t going to end well,” Val says, her eyes sparkling.
“I have two choices, right? I can take Burt’s word for it, since he is the shop manager, and just call the customer back and relay the information. Or I can do what’s right by Kirk, since I am the assistant general manager, and go see if there’s a bus with the tank in the yard—because I know there is. I know it.”
Val bites her lip. “You had one, didn’t you?”
“Three!” My blood pressure shoots up again. “I wasn’t going to go look. I was just going to call the customer back and tell them we were out of stock, but it ate at my soul. So I put my boots on and marched into the bus yard—through the mud from the last five days of rain—and found them my damn self.” I take a quick breath and blow it out. “I then proceeded to have a brilliant come-apart worthy of a night in the hospital, but we’re not talking about that.”
She laughs. “This explains the mud on your jeans.” She leans toward me and peers at the side of my head. “And on your ear. Come here.”
I tip my head toward her, and she plucks a glob of gunk off my right earlobe.
“You just . . . sit there, drink your tea, and calm down. I’m going to go wash my hands,” she says. “Be right back.”
I take a long, cold drink and feel the sugary sweetness slide down my throat. The tea helps settle the tornado roaring inside me. But that’s what life always feels like these days—a giant natural disaster.
There’s beauty in the storm. I know that and I appreciate it. I even start my day off by listing things that I’m grateful for out loud. It’s supposed to help build a pattern of positive thinking—at least that’s what the TikTok influencers say while I’m scrolling in the middle of the night.
But it’s still a damn storm.