Stardust Valley (Firefly Hollow Book 9)
Table of Contents
Also by T. L. Haddix
Genealogy Chart
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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Epilogue
Also by T. L. Haddix
Streetlight Graphics Publishing
A division of Streetlight Graphics
Stardust Valley
Copyright © 2015 by Tabatha L. Haddix. All rights reserved.
First Edition: December 2015
Visit www.tlhaddix.com for updates, news, bonuses and freebies.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Streetlight Graphics Publishing, a division of Streetlight Graphics.
Also by T. L. Haddix
The Firefly Hollow Series:
Firefly Hollow
Butterfly Lane
Dragonfly Creek
Cattail Ridge
Cricket Cove
Stormking Road
Fern Valley
Snapdragon Way
Stardust Valley
The Shadows Collection:
Secrets in the Shadows
Under the Moon’s Shadow
Shadows from the Grave
Hidden in the Shadows
In the Heart’s Shadow
Deception in the Shadows
Seduction in the Shadows
Redemption in the Shadows
Writing as Mallory Love:
Capturing Colleen (Sunset Motel, Book One)
Seducing Samantha (Sunset Motel, Book Two)
You can connect with T.L. on Facebook and her website:
www.tlhaddix.com
www.facebook.com/tlhaddix
If you’d like to receive email notifications about future releases, please subscribe to T.L.’s newsletter at the address below.
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Genealogy Chart
Chapter One
He couldn’t believe he’d kissed her. Of all the stupid, boneheaded moves he’d pulled in his life, kissing Sophie Turner ranked right up there at the top of the list.
The entire time it took him to walk home from his grandparents’ farm, Noah James Campbell cursed himself, his actions, his brother, Sophie, and most of all, his stupid heart. “Fool,” “freak,” and “imbecile” were some of the nicer things he said to himself.
They’d been taking a walk after a small family gathering on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, a sunny, warm day for October in Eastern Kentucky, following a dinner his grandmother and everyone had thrown together to say “welcome to the neighborhood” to his brother’s girlfriend, Haley, who’d moved into a rental down the hill after losing her home following her grandfather’s death. Sophie’d decided to stretch her legs. Noah’d followed her.
He hadn’t meant to kiss her. He really hadn’t. But she’d ended up in his arms after a stumble, and… out of his body went his mind. In rushed need and longing and reckless action.
God, she’d been so soft. So warm and soft and real. He hadn’t been able to stop kissing her until he’d had her backed up against the wall of the barn and they were both struggling for air. If reason hadn’t moved in between them, if the kiss had continued much longer, Noah had the sneaking suspicion he would have been begging to get inside her. Because, God help him, she’d kissed him back.
Yeah, it had been that powerful.
But then again, Sophie and her kisses and her softness and her smile—her damned perfect, shy, slightly off-center smile—had always been powerful.
She was the one who’d spoken first. She lifted one of her hands off his chest, hands she’d curled into his shirt tightly enough to stretch the fabric, and put her fingers over his lips.
“Don’t you do that again,” she said breathlessly, gazing at him with wariness in her cobalt-blue eyes. She licked her lips, tracing their swollen lines, and swallowed. “You gave up the right to touch me when you slept with my cousin. Don’t ever touch me again.” She slipped from his loosened grasp, putting much-needed distance between them.
Noah stood there, his hands braced on the barn, and stared at her. “I never so much as touched her. Ever. Not even for a kiss. Not that you give a righteous damn—why the hell should it matter to you what I did with her? You were never serious about us. Everything was a game to you. A game you set up with her. So why the hell does it even matter what I did or didn’t do with her? Stop pretending it does.” His voice reflected his weariness with the situation despite his best efforts not to let it show.
Sophie, who’d been heading toward the sunny side of the barn, stopped and turned her head toward him. But she didn’t turn to face him. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter.”
And with that, she was gone.
Noah could have run after her. He could have caught her and finished the “discussion” they’d started before the kiss. The one in which finally, after more than a decade of holding back his feelings, he let her have it. When he told her he knew about all the devious lies she’d told him when they were dating back in high school. When she was his first kiss, his first everything.
He could finally get it all off his chest, the knowledge that she’d been using him as part of some sick, twisted game so she and her Satan’s spawn of a cousin and their friends, including his own brother, could make fun of him in front of the entire school. Tear him down. Destroy him from the inside out.
Which was what they’d nearly done.
But after that kiss, Noah had lost all interest in the argument. Her motivations back then didn’t really matter anymore. Confronting her now wouldn’t change a damned thing. And it might make him appear as though he cared, which was an expense he couldn’t afford. Not around Sophie.
Erica, her cousin, was dead. Had been dead for four years now. His brother, Eli, who’d married Erica in the midst of all that turmoil, was finally home after years away, and he and Noah had fixed the hurt between th
em. Noah had never thought that would happen, but thank God, it had.
One point of contention that still stood between them was the fact that Eli was close with Sophie, who’d been raised almost as Erica’s sister. And in a few weeks, Sophie was going to move to Hazard to work for his grandfather. So Noah would be seeing her from time to time. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t seriously considered running away from home, even at the ripe old age of thirty-one.
There were a thousand and one other things he could be concerned about, things more important than Sophie being back in his life. He had built a world that didn’t include her—and never would if he could help it. A full life. A happy life, he thought, ignoring that old adage about protesting too loudly.
That full, happy life didn’t stop him from calling himself ten kinds of fool as he stomped his way to the cabin he called home, which wasn’t far down the ridge from his grandparents’ farm.
Kissing Sophie had opened a can of worms he’d never intended to open, one he didn’t know how to slam the lid closed on again. It had taken him years to get over her the first time. As much as it galled him to admit it, he wasn’t strong enough to go through that hell again.
No, the only way he’d stay safe would be if he didn’t let her get a shot at him to begin with this time. He would have keep his eyes open and suck it up, spending time in her presence as though it didn’t cut into him every time they crossed paths.
Because he didn’t trust Sophie. Not as far as he could throw her. She was dangerous. And if that meant he had to come up with a strategy to keep her at a distance, then maybe the time had come for him to plan that out.
While her motivations from way back when didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, especially as he would put himself and his feelings safely behind a wall, he had a vulnerable, caring family that didn’t see her for what she really was. No way would he sit back and let her work them over the way she’d done him.
Chapter Two
She couldn’t believe it. That son of a biscuit maker had kissed her! Sophie was still reeling from their exchange an hour after she’d left the Campbell family farm. She’d gone straight back to the hotel room she was staying in and hopped into a hot, soothing bath. She was still soaking her muscles, which were aching and protesting the abuse of long-distance travel and stress.
If she stayed in the tub much longer, she risked turning into an absolute prune, but she wasn’t quite ready to get out yet. Instead, she sank a bit lower, risking getting her hair wet, and ruminated on Noah and that damned kiss.
She’d hurried back to the farmhouse, made her excuses to Noah’s grandparents, Owen and Sarah Campbell, then hightailed it to the hotel.
“Why did he do that?” she asked for what felt like the thousandth time as she tried to work through what the heck had happened in the meadow behind the barn.
She kept coming back to the same answer: to punish her.
“There’s no other reason he would have touched me. It had to be a punishment.”
When she’d tripped over the loose branch on the ground, Noah caught her. That was a surprise in and of itself—she would have thought he’d let her fall flat on her face given his obvious distrust and dislike of her.
What happened next had been a sweet, painful torture. That kiss…
“Oh, God, why couldn’t he have had garlic breath or sweaty hands or something?”
But he’d been perfect. Every bit as perfect as he’d been the first time he’d kissed her when she was only fifteen years old. When he’d been a stunningly gorgeous young man, all of seventeen, charming and funny and endearingly quiet and her entire world.
He’d only gotten better with age. His frame, which had been lanky as a teen, had filled out, his muscles now honed into absolute lean perfection. And instead of the slightly baby-faced youth he’d been, time had given his countenance character, slimming his cheeks so that the faint dimples he’d inherited from his mother shone through even more now than they had years earlier.
The kiss itself? Had curled her toes.
With a disgruntled sigh, she let the water out of the tub and eased to her feet, grimacing as her lower back and hips protested. Given her long, delay-ridden flight from Texas the day before, a few hours spent in cars driving to and from the airports, and her twisting fall, her muscles were threatening to seize up entirely. The bath had helped, but she would have to give in and take a muscle relaxer or else she’d spend the rest of her visit flat on her back in bed.
She stood in front of the mirror for a moment, naked, and stared at her reflection. Sophie knew she had the kind of body other women envied and men supposedly dreamed about. She was on the tall side of normal with a generous bust, small waist, and softly rounded hips. She wasn’t thin, not by a far stretch, but she was proportioned nicely, and she wore her clothes well.
“For all the good it does me,” she murmured as she ran her hands over her belly, her breasts, her thighs. She had scars here and there—nothing hideous, but telltale signs that something traumatic had happened to her.
Those scars told a story that Sophie didn’t like thinking about. A story of loss, of grief, of betrayal. And whenever she was ever able to forget about the scars, it seemed like her body knew and put her in situations that forced her to remember. She’d move wrong or sit too long in a cramped space, and she’d have a flare-up of the old aches that had come with traumatic muscle injuries, aches that stress only made worse. And when she was around Noah for any length of time? She was stressed.
She slipped her nightgown on, and after rummaging around the small bag of medicine she’d stashed in her makeup case, she pulled out the nearly full bottle of muscle relaxers.
Sophie hated taking the pills, hated the way they made her feel as if she was wrapped in cotton and moving through syrup physically and mentally. She didn’t drink alcohol very often for the same reason. She liked remaining in control at all times. But when she had to have them, the muscle relaxers beat the alternative. She took one out, considered it, then swallowed it.
As she chased the pill with water, she eyed the bottle. More than once, she’d had a stare down with that bottle and its companions, the potent pain medications she fortunately only had to use once in a blue moon. Thus far, she’d won the stare downs and not given in to the temptation to swallow all the pills and embrace the permanent oblivion they promised.
Those battles hadn’t always been easily won. She’d barely been strong enough to manage to keep her head above water at times.
Much like an alcoholic who kept a bottle of their old favorite on hand to remind themselves they were in charge, Sophie kept her painkillers and muscle relaxers close by to remind herself that she was alive by choice as well as chance. And that life hadn’t gotten so bad yet that going on felt like an unhappy alternative when she had a ready-made solution.
“One of these days, I’m afraid you’ll win,” she told the bottle of pills as she recapped it and put it back in its place. “But not today.”
Today, she stretched out on the comfortable bed, propped up with strategically placed pillows, and tried to forget the kiss from a man she felt as though she’d spent most of her life trying to forget. She especially tried to ignore his proclamation that he hadn’t betrayed her as she knew he very well had.
Because if she let herself believe, even for an instant, that Noah’s infidelity and betrayal hadn’t been real? She might end up on his doorstep, trying to fix a romance that died violently more than ten years in the past, and Sophie wasn’t quite that pathetic and desperate. Not yet.
Chapter Three
A few weeks later in mid-November, Sophie found herself making the drive that would relocate her from Texas to Kentucky. As she drove, memories rushed through her of the first time she’d made the trek, when she was just a young girl. Though she and her father had taken a different route on
that trip, the last leg of the journey was the same. And though some of the landmarks had changed since a lot of local businesses had taken hits from the failing economy, the trip was familiar enough to be eerie.
As she pulled up in front of the house she was renting from Noah and Eli’s cousin Sydney, she exhaled shakily. “Never say never, I guess. I can’t believe I thought this was a good idea.”
She’d be living in the same town as Noah and her aunt and uncle—Erica’s parents—who still blamed her for their only child’s death. Working for Noah’s grandfather, with whom he was close, on a genealogy project that was likely to take at least a year.
She groaned as she got out of the car, then she stood beside the vehicle for a minute, stretching. The weather was quite a bit cooler than what she’d left behind two days ago in Texas. The day was a bit damp, overcast, and moody. This would definitely be an adventure—good, bad, or ugly—and was a journey she felt compelled to take. But as much as she wished it would, that compulsion didn’t stop her from remembering the painful truth of how she’d gotten here.
1992
“You’re so pretty, Mama.” Sophie giggled as she sat beside Marcy Turner on the bench in front of the delicate vanity. “You’re the prettiest lady in the whole wide world.”
Marcy put the finishing touches on her makeup and gave Sophie a smacking kiss on her cheek, leaving a sultry pink stamp in the shape of her lips. “My sweet Sophie Sunshine.”
Sophie frowned. Even though she was only six years old, she’d picked up on something in her mother’s voice that didn’t sound right. “Mama, are you sad? You look sad.”