Excerpt
Prologue
The bouquet of flowers she’d given her mother for her birthday had done more than serve its purpose. The arrangement of yellow mums, pink carnations and white daisies had remained fresh looking and had lasted more than the customary few days, managing to dazzle for a little more than a week and a half.
However, now, as to be expected, the flowers were finally dying, no longer brightening the family room where her mother usually spent a good deal of her day. Their present drooping, dried-up state accomplished just the opposite, so it was now time to retire the cluster of shriveling flowers to the trash can on the side of the house.
But as she began to throw the wilted bouquet away, one white daisy caught Holly’s eye. Unlike the others, it had retained some of its former vibrancy.
On an impulse, she plucked the daisy out of the cluster, pulling the stem all the way out and freeing it from its desiccated brethren. After dumping the rest of the bouquet into the garbage, she closed the lid of the trash can, then stared at the single daisy in her hand.
Holly shut her eyes, made a wish—the same one she’d made over and over again for more than a decade and a half—and opened them again.
Then, very slowly, she tugged on one petal at a time, denuding the daisy gradually and allowing each plucked petal to glide away on the light late-fall breeze that had begun to stir.
“He loves me,” Holly Johnson whispered, a wistful, hopeful smile curving her lips as she watched the first white petal float away. “He loves me not.”
Just to say those words made her chest ache. She knew she was being silly, but it hurt nonetheless. Because in all the world, there was nothing she wanted more than to have the first sentence be true.
The petal floated away like its predecessor.
“He loves me,” she recited again, pulling a third petal from the daisy.
Her smile faded with the fourth petal, then bloomed again with the fifth. With two petals left, the game ended on a positive note.
She looked at the last petal a long moment before she plucked it. “He loves me.”
This petal, unlike the others, had no breeze to ride, no puff of air to take it away. So instead, when she released it, it floated down right at her feet.
Unable to live?
Or unable to leave?
She sighed and shook her head. What did flowers know anyway? It was just a silly game.
The next moment, she heard her mother calling her name. “Coming!” she responded, raising her voice.
Then, pausing just for a second, she quickly bent down to pick up the petal, curling her fingers around it. She pressed her hand close to her heart.
Turning on her heel, she hurried back into the house, a small, soft smile curving the corners of her mouth. The corners of her soul.
The last sing-song refrain she’d uttered echoed in her head.
He loves me.
Chapter One
“Hi, Doll, how’s it going?”
Holly Johnson’s heart instantly skipped a beat and then quickened, the way it always did when she heard his voice or first saw him coming her way.
It had been like that since the very first time she had set eyes on the tall, broad-shouldered and raven-haired Ramon Rodriguez, with his soul-melting brown eyes, all the way back in the first grade.
The beginning of the second day of the first week of first grade, to be exact. That was the day she’d started first grade. Looking to change his luck, her father had moved his family—her mother, older brother Will and her—from a dirt farm in Oklahoma to Forever, Texas.
Back then she’d been a skinny little tomboy and the only reason Ray had noticed her at all was because she was not only determined to play all the games that boys played, she was actually good at them. She could outrun the fastest boy in class, climb trees faster than he could and wasn’t afraid of bugs or snakes, no matter which one was dangled in front of her face.
And she didn’t care about getting dirty.
All those talents and qualities had been previously acquired in Holly’s quest to gain her older brother’s favor. She never quite succeeded, because during their childhood Will had never thought of her as anything other than a pest he was glad to ditch. During those years, Will was only interested in girls, and he’d thought of her as just holding him back from his chosen goal.
Ray and Will, although several years apart in age, shared the same interest; but while Will had thought of her as a pest, Ray came to think of her as a pal, a confidante. In short, he saw her as—and treated her like—another guy.
Holly was so crazy about him she took what she could get. So over the years she got close to Ray as only a friend could, and while she would rather have had him think of her as a girlfriend, she consoled herself with the fact that in Ray’s life girlfriends came and went very quickly, but she remained the one constant in his life outside of his family.
It was a consolation prize she could put up with until Ray finally came to his senses and realized just what had been waiting for him all along.
It was a decision Holly had come to at the ripe old age of eleven.
That was thirteen years ago.
She was still waiting.
There were times, Holly had to admit, when she felt as if Ray didn’t see her at all, that to him she was just part of the scenery, part of the background of what made up the town. These days, because money was short and she had to provide not just for herself but for her mother and for Molly, the four-year-old Will had left in her care when he abruptly took off for places West, she worked as a waitress at Miss Joan’s diner.
The highlight of her day was seeing Ray.
He stopped by the diner whenever he came to town—which was frequently, because he was in charge of picking up supplies for Rancho Grande, the ranch that he, his father, his brothers and his sister all owned equally. And every time Ray walked into the diner, she’d see him before he ever said a word.
It was tantamount to an inner radar that she’d developed. It always went off and alerted her whenever Ray was anywhere within the immediate vicinity. She’d always turn to look his way, and her heart would inevitably do its little dance before he called out his customary greeting to her.
Ray had taken to calling her Doll, because it rhymed with her name and she was a foot shorter than he was. She loved it, though she was careful not to show it.
“I’ll take the usual, Doll.”
The “usual” was comprised of coffee, heavily laced with creamer, and a jelly donut—raspberry. In the rare instance that the latter was unavailable, Ray was willing to settle for
