Feels Like Home: A Southerland Family Contemporary Romance Book 1

FEELS LIKE HOME

A Contemporary Romance

Book One of the Southern Heart
Series

by

Evelyn Adams

Digital Edition

Copyright 2014 Evelyn Adams

All rights reserved

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Autumn Maddox stood in the middle of her
granny’s living room, worrying the trim on her best black dress,
and tried to imagine how many cans of gasoline she’d need to burn
the house to the ground. Two probably. One would be enough to set
light to the old wooden house. The original home had been built in
the late 1800’s and added onto over the years. It was bound to be
dry as dust, but it would take two to be sure it burned to the
ground before the Bedford Volunteer Fire Department had a chance to
save it.

Not that she had any intention of destroying
the home she grew up in. The worn chairs with their faded chintz
fabric where she and Gran and Summer would sit at night after the
dishes were done, the old TV in its clunky fake wood grained
cabinet that Gran watched her stories on during the day and Wheel
of Fortune on at night, the mantle with her great granddaddy’s
clock and her granny’s rosewood vase. Everywhere she looked held
memories, more good than bad.

It was hard to love something so much and
want it to disappear at the same time, but that’s how she felt.
Like everything else they touched, her step-brothers and sisters
seemed determined to defile Gran’s house. Her house now, according
to the lawyer.

The last neighbor left less
than an hour ago, patting her arm and telling her how much her gran
would be missed. They left their
‘bless
your hearts’
alongside their green bean
casseroles and Jell-O molds and went off whispering about what a
disappointment those Maddox and Smith children had turned out to
be. She was sure more than one of them tsked about the young woman
who left for the city and couldn’t be bothered to come home to
visit.

None of them could know what it cost her to
come home now. How hard it was for her to stand in the home her
grandmother had made for them without Gran’s steadfast presence any
more. And how much she needed it, needed the woman, who more than
anyone, had been her family.

Holding onto the mantle, Autumn rolled her
ankles to give her feet a break from the heels she’d put on what
felt like days ago. A gap-toothed little boy smiled at her from a
simple wooden picture frame. Matty. Things with her mother had
never been good – too many kids, too many men and only one of them
a husband – but they hadn’t gone to hell until Matty died.

He was just six, riding in the car with
Emory, her oldest half brother, driving. At nineteen, Emory was
wilder than most and about as smart as could be expected. He’d been
drinking and missed the turn. He and Matty died before the rescue
squad even got there.

Flighty at the best of times, losing her
oldest and youngest child together wrecked her mother. She stopped
looking for love in a string of men and started looking for
oblivion in the bottom of a bottle. She was gone within the year
and eleven-year-old Autumn and her ten-year-old sister, Summer,
moved in with Gran.

Colin came, too, but he was as wild as Emory
and he couldn’t stand Gran’s rules. He got out as soon as he could
and moved into a trailer down by the railroad tracks with some
friends. Lindsey got pregnant and then married. Like their mother,
she’d been very fertile, and her brood was running around outside.
Unlike their mother, she’d managed to stay married. Her husband,
Mark, was in the back room with Colin and Dwayne, Summer’s
boyfriend, dividing up her granddaddy’s guns.

She could hear Lindsey and Janice, Colin’s
latest sprayed and teased girlfriend, in the dining room arguing
over the dishes. Why Janice thought she had a claim was beyond
Autumn. She didn’t think Janice and Colin had been together for
long and her brother wasn’t known for his fidelity. Or his taste in
women. Janice had paired a mini-skirt with a t-shirt that rode up
in the back to reveal her bleeding heart tramp stamp. Her only
concession to the funeral had been that both were black.

Gran would have had a fit if she’d seen her
looking like that in the church. As it was, Janice had given the
Ladies Aid women more than enough to talk about this week.

Autumn stroked the picture frame and wished
for something – anything – different.

“
It’s hard to believe he
was a year younger when he died than Abby is now.” Summer came to
stand beside her and picked up the picture. “I still miss
him.”

Summer was the only one with the same father
as Matty, a boyfriend of her mom’s who’d hung around a couple of
years, long enough to make two kids but not long enough to make a
family. He was gone before Matty turned one.

Autumn looked at the dark smudges under her
sister’s eyes and promised herself she’d figure out what was going
on with Summer before she went back to the city. If she went back
to the city. But that was something to save to think about another
day.

“
You look tired.” Autumn
rested her hand on her sister’s arm and Summer smiled at her, maybe
weakly, but at least it was a smile. “Can I do anything to help? I
know it was hard on you. You were the only one there for Gran at
the end.”

Autumn didn’t think she’d ever be able to
forgive herself for not coming home to see Gran when she got sick,
or hell even before that just because she loved her and missed her.
Something always got in the way or seemed more important. More
often than not it was work. She’d given everything she had to her
job as an accountant for Chase and Maxwell. She sacrificed
relationships and family, working late nights and weekends just to
rise through the ranks of junior accountants. It cost her so much
and what had it gotten her? If she was lucky nothing, including an
indictment.

She pushed aside the panic which threatened
to swamp her whenever she thought about work and concentrated on
her sister. Summer looked like she was thinking, but before she
could speak, Lindsey flew through the doorway, her black crepe
dress flapping around her like wings.

“
That little slut thinks
she’s getting some of Gran’s china. I’ll be damned if she gets so
much as a chipped teacup.” Lindsey’s scowl emphasized the wrinkles
around her eyes. Her once lovely face looked as lined and worn as
Gran’s threadbare sofa. “And that skirt, my God, what was she
thinking? It’s all the blue hairs will be talking
about.”

Autumn met Summer’s smile with her own, sure
they were thinking the same thing. The old ladies were going to be
talking about Lindsey’s spoiled kids, too. They’d whined through
the whole service and climbed on tombstones at the cemetery. More
than one pair of eyes had rolled in indignation.

“
Do you want this?” Lindsey
picked the Rosewood vase up off the mantle, all the while avoiding
making eye contact with Autumn.

“
No,” said Summer, a little
sadly. “I don’t really have anywhere to put it where it won’t get
broken.”

Lindsey didn’t wait for the rest of her reply
before tucking the vase under her arm.

“
Do we have to do this
today? Can’t you leave something for later?” Summer looked so sad
and tired; she obviously wasn’t up to dealing with Gran’s stuff
right away. And while Autumn hated seeing her childhood home
scavenged, she hated it more for Summer.

“
You got the house.”
Lindsey spat out the words, finally looking Autumn in the eyes.
“Isn’t that enough for you? You always were the old bat’s
favorite.”

The words hit Autumn like a punch to the
stomach. Lindsey and Gran had never been close. She knew that, but
hearing Lindsey talk about her like that while she raided Gran’s
house was more than she could take. She squared her shoulders and
turned to blast her selfish, ungrateful sister with her pathetic
husband and bratty kids. Summer’s hand on her arm stopped her.

“
Don’t. It’s not worth it,”
she said, her words barely above a whisper.

Lindsey sneered and then turned and fled,
trailing black crepe and nastiness behind her.

“
Don’t pay any attention to
her. Gran wanted you to have the house. Lindsey would just sell it.
She’d never live here. Colin and his friends would trash the place.
Gran knew you’d take care of it. I think she always hoped you’d
eventually get tired of the city and come home to stay.”

“
What about you and Abby?
You live around here already. Why didn’t she leave the house to
you?” Even as she said the words, Autumn knew the answer. Gran
probably worried Dwayne would gut the place or turn it into a crack
house. She had to know if she left the house to Autumn, Summer and
Abby would always have a place to go.

She thought about the little girl she barely
knew but loved already, asleep upstairs in Summer’s old room. She’d
been quiet and sad through the funeral, a sandy-haired copy of her
mother and the opposite of Lindsey’s noisy brood. When they got
home, Autumn carried her upstairs so Summer could tuck her into the
twin bed she’d slept in growing up. The little girl had been a
warm, sweet weight in her arms. She barely weighed more than a bag
of groceries, but it was still too much for her delicate mother to
manage.

Autumn looked at her sister again. She’d
always been small boned and petite, but she hadn’t been frail. It
wasn’t only the circles under her eyes that made her look unwell.
She’s lost weight since the last time Autumn saw her and she didn’t
have any extra to lose to begin with. Something was going on and
Autumn was going to find out what and fix it.

“
Come on,” she said,
wrapping an arm around her sister. “I think there’s still some of
Mrs. Martin’s hummingbird cake in the kitchen. Let’s go get some
before Lindsey packs it up to take home.”

Jude Southerland pushed the massive black
Newfoundland onto the floor and took his place in the ancient brown
corduroy recliner. His sister, Bailey, called the chair an homage
to bachelorhood because no woman would ever live in the same house
with it. Taylor, his baby sister, said he was lucky to get laid
with it in the house. That had never been a problem for Jude. The
harder part had always been that the women he dated started picking
out china patterns after a couple of nights.

His dog, Max, liked the chair and he was the
only other living thing in the small upstairs apartment. It may
have been ugly, but God, it was comfortable. Jude loosened his tie,
kicked off his dress shoes and shifted his weight to raise the
footrest. He’d close his eyes for a minute, long enough to gather
his strength and then he could go downstairs and try to tackle the
paperwork, threatening to eat his small office.

His nurse/office manager Nancy’s maternity
leave couldn’t have come at a worse time. With back-to-school
physicals and end of season colds, his normally calm practice was
more than he and Kristen could handle alone. She was a great nurse,
and she’d grown up in the town. She knew everyone and his patients
were as comfortable with her as they were with him, some more so.
But she wasn’t any better with paperwork than he was. If he wanted
to keep his business afloat until Nancy got back – he wouldn’t let
himself think if – he had to get downstairs and deal with it.

He really shouldn’t have taken time to go to
the funeral today, but Marion Maddox had been something special. A
grand old lady in the best Southern tradition. Sharp tongued and
too astute for comfort, she’d kept him on his toes. As her illness
progressed and her visits unfortunately became more frequent, he’d
grown to really like her. Her heart was as honest as she was, and
she loved her grandchildren, especially the timid young woman who
seemed to disappear into the waiting room chair when she brought
her grandmother to her appointments.