Waiting for Sparks
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Kathy Damp
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Sometimes love is right in front of you. Emma Chambers wasn't supposed to be spending July Fourth rescuing a handsome stranger and the holiday festival. New to town Doug "Sparks" Turner has an important job to do, yet it's Emma who's feeling the heat. No way the roving fireworks designer is the man she's been waiting for, right? Helping Emma makes Sparks long to name this his permanent home. Too bad Emma isn't staying, especially given the life-changing secret she's discovered. What Sparks is hiding could also keep him from earning Emma's trust. Unless he can make her see that he's a man worth taking a chance on.
Chapter One
SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING.
Naomi Chambers clutched at her son’s hand, her salt-and-pepper hair plastered wet against her skull. Where terror ought to have been, her son’s face revealed only a cocky boredom. Her grip on him was saving him from the abyss, but her hand was cramping with fatigue. Why didn’t he fight? Try to help himself? His hand slipped from hers.
Jerked half-awake, Naomi Chambers opened her eyes.
Plants... She’d been watering the plants in the front room and thinking about the upcoming Memorial Day weekend.
Now, she was... She turned her head to the right, toward the beep-beep of a machine. She was at the regional hospital, most likely. Where her husband, Raymond, had died. The results on the screen looked a little puny.
Next to the machine, a plastic bag hung on a pole with a long tube dripping into the back of her hand. The two prongs blowing oxygen into her nose rubbed her nostrils; her left hand traveled to them.
Her darling granddaughter, Emma. I need to tell you... Naomi had waited too long.
The same night Emma had arrived as a tiny infant, a shrieking duet of anger and anguish between two women had exploded outside the house, a sound unheard in their town of Heaven.
Then the doorbell.
Every detail remained scoured into her being: Raymond checking his Timex, her insisting he take the gun from the bedside table in case a rancher had gotten tanked at The Wayside Inn and decided to persuade the bank president to reconsider a declined loan with the business end of a shotgun...
Some time later, she lifted heavy eyelids toward the beeping monitors. She dashed away wetness from her cheeks, but not before a few tears dropped into an ear. “Tears don’t solve problems,” her mother had always said. Looking toward the door, Naomi saw only graininess. She blinked. No change. She blinked again, becoming aware that she couldn’t feel her left arm. A singeing terror flared from her chest and out to the tips of the opposite arm.
Trying to breathe deeply, blinking again at the hospital ceiling, she fought the shadow of sleep. Two years had been too long for this stalemate between grandmother and granddaughter. If only Emma would be sensible and return to Heaven. Naomi hoped the young man she’d hired for the Jamboree fireworks would ignite a hometown spark in her granddaughter.
She’d met him at a Western Alliance conference of mayors, where he’d spoken on the advantage of pyrotechnics for civic events. From the longing in his eyes as she’d regaled him with the wonders of her Rocky Mountain village, he’d stay. Fall in love with Emma. Then she’d stay, too.
“Naomi? You decent?” A gravelly voice interrupted her plotting. Chet Jensen’s weathered face peered into the room. He approached, a frown creasing his expression as he took in the machines. “I told the nurse I was your fiancé so she’d let me in.” Gently taking her hand in his, he wriggled his eyebrows. “’Course, that means you’ll have to marry me now.”
Naomi tried to smile, riding the wobbly waves of semiconsciousness. As the crackle of terror began to subside thanks to Chet’s presence, she struggled to think. Had he called Emma? Surely, he had called Emma...
“To save you the bother of trying to spit out all the questions, I’ll fill you in,” Chet said, settling himself in the chair next to her bed. “It’s Thursday night. The EMTs got a call that you’d fallen.” He seemed to read her mind. “I don’t know who called. Good thing someone did. You’ve had a stroke. Do you remember the ride here?”
On the heels of the horror of the word stroke applied to her for the second time in as many years, Naomi tried to recall how much Raymond’s ambulance ride had cost and if that irresponsible Juggy Burnett had driven her in the silly thing.
“N-no.” But how could she not remember? Memory like an elephant, everybody said. Then her insides were seared with a remembrance. She had not yet told Emma what the girl needed to know, what Emma must hear only from Naomi. Her eyelids fluttered. “Wh-where’s Emma?” Bags of flour pressed her lids down. “I almost missed my chance to tell her that...” Sleep closed in.
* * *
EMMA TOOK A deep breath and blew it out. Suitcases by the door.
Check.
Mail set to be held at the post office.
Check.
Passport—her first. Big smile.
Check.
Ticket to England.
Oh, check, check, check.
She was doing it. Actually keeping the promise she’d made to her grandfather to get a new life while he’d been ending his. Emma Chambers’s lips trembled as she swallowed the thickness in her throat. A crooked smile formed as she glanced at the rest of the checklist in her hand. Her with a checklist. Normally, she was as scattered as leaves in the wind, but not with this trip. It was too important. The smile faded. For almost all of her thirty years, Emma had vacillated between wishing she was more like her grandmother to avoiding any habits that hinted at her grandmother’s top three: order, control and action. Naomi Chambers, Nomi to Emma, lived by checklists. And controlled everyone. Especially Emma. She loved her grandmother. She just wanted an ocean between them for a while.
Emma bit her lip and shifted her purse to her other shoulder, peering out the basement apartment window. Hurry.
A horn sounded outside as the blue and yellow van pulled up. The shuttle to the airport, then on to Denver to meet Brad. Then—England. I’m doing it, Grumpa.
Picking up her suitcases, she shook her head. “Boyfriend. Brad is your boyfriend.” She said it out loud to make the point. So why did her heart skitter away from thinking of him as that? Brad was always telling her, “Baby, I’m here for you.” The peripatetic day trader was fun. She needed fun. Yet sometimes—she refused to let her thoughts go here often—Brad seemed, well, about half an inch deep.
Her cell rang in the new traveler’s purse. Setting down one suitcase, she dug in the bag slung across her chest and checked the caller ID. She wouldn’t put it past her grandmother Naomi to try one last ditch effort to get her to her lair, the tiny Rocky Mountain village of Heaven.
Seeing Chet’s name, she grinned and punched the green button. Good old Chet, retired pharmacist and family friend. “Hey, Chet!”
Moving to the window, she waved at the driver and took in the dust-covered flowers that were at eye level at the edge of the sidewalk. She’d felt like those flowers until the details for the trip had been cemented. No more coated with other people’s ideas. England, here I come. We come, she amended.
“Emma?” Chet Jensen’s deep voice floated over the line. He sounded old and tired, unusual for this vigorous bachelor, who was in love with her widowed grandmother. “Listen, E, honey, your grandma’s had a stroke. Will you come, even with the—the way things are between you?”
