Waiting for Sparks

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.

Sparks laughed and chucked her under the chin.

His touch set off so many alarm bells that Emma forgot to watch for the inevitable with Trouble and the lake. The dog shook the water from himself, gathering velocity as the shake intensified. Sparks and Emma ducked behind the cottonwood tree that had been there ever since Emma could remember.

That tree would be gone, as well. No need for a shade tree under bazillions of gallons of water.

She turned to Sparks. “It really is true. It’s not just that the town is out of money. It could also be flooded?” Surprise tears stung her eyes. Why did she care? She was leaving as soon as her plans were finalized.

Sparks’s shoulder, so close to hers, invited her to snuggle into him, hoping he’d tell her everything would be all right.

Dear Reader,

As a teen, I handwrote pages and pages of romance novels after discovering Mills & Boon books in my Adirondack Mountains village library. Years later, welcome to my first novel for Mills & Boon Heartwarming, titled Waiting for Sparks.

While staying by a lake with the same too-blue-to-believe water as is in my book with my husband and border collie—the model for Trouble—I thought: What if this place was Heaven for one person and another couldn’t wait to leave? Then, the hero, Sparks, introduced himself. And I met Emma and her grandmother Nomi. Soon afterward, I knew secrets and running after what you think you want would make a great story.

I hope you get caught up in this special place and its people just as I did. I’d love to hear from you.

Kathy

Waiting for Sparks

Kathy Damp

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KATHY DAMP loves to write about characters who discover they are more than they know and who realize that saving the world can take many forms. Walking on fire this past summer caused her to wonder what else she could do that she didn’t think was possible. When not writing, she rides bikes and kayaks with her husband throughout the West.

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To my Adventure Guy and husband, Fred. Without your unflagging support, Emma and Sparks would never have gotten together. Thanks for always being willing to stop the car one more time to explore a novel idea. Here’s to ever so many more adventures.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Copyright

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?”

CHAPTER TWO

DOUG “SPARKS” TURNER GRUNTED, curling his lip. A gutless sedan. It wasn’t what he had envisioned for his hair-blowing, stereo-blasting drive up Bigelow Canyon to Heaven, his home for the summer. An hour and a half from the airport, Sparks had had enough of the crappy car and intermittent country music on a tinny-sounding radio.

As he reached over to silence the noise, the right wheels caught the dirt of the curving road’s shoulder. Only a narrow strip separated him from a long drop. He yelped and overcorrected, shooting the little blue car into the opposite lane—thankfully temporarily empty of cars, RVs and trucks towing boats.

Another thump on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop on the wrong side of the road. The woman at the car-rental desk had asked if he’d wanted insurance. Maybe he should have considered it. He shifted to Park, lifted his quivering foot off the brake and sat very still, breathing in pine and dust.

“Pull yourself together, Turner,” his pyrotechnics scheduler had said. “Running in every direction gets you nowhere.”

“Steady,” Sparks spoke aloud. “They can’t pay a dead man.” He needed this job more than he needed the vacation. His last two firework-design gigs had finished with fingers pointed at him, murmurs that he’d lost his touch.

On his most recent job all of the fireworks went off at once. A show that was supposed to last twenty minutes had lasted ninety seconds. One big grand finale with no build-up.

He put the car in gear, placed one hand at ten and the other at two on the steering wheel. Carefully returning to the correct lane, he forced his thoughts to remain on the twists and turns of the granite and evergreens, instead of his problems.

“Watch out for the last curve before heading down into Heaven,” the female clerk had said, brushing his hand with hers and giving him a smile. “I’ve heard it’s a killer.” Worse than the ones he’d already navigated? Ah, a sign heralding the summit. Downhill run. Good.

After meeting with Naomi Chambers in town to discuss business, he’d be able to officially start his vacation. Playing hard and long would retire the doubts he’d begun to have. It would push that yearning for something just out of reach back into the place where he wouldn’t think about it. Home.

Compared to his previous occupation—fighting isolated forest fires—and given his vast experience with pyrotechnic displays all over the world, this particular design for such a small town would be a piece of cake. Small towns were hometowns. He’d borrow this one for the summer. Maybe that would help him out.

He had to be getting close to that turn. He flexed one hand, then the other on the steering wheel. Good. He was tired of green trees, tired of the canyon, tired of thinking... He turned the blind corner in third gear, where, instead of the road continuing straight or even at a reasonable curve, a wall of rock appeared along with a ninety-degree angle.

He barely had time to stomp the brake, wrench the wheel all the way to the right and hope he would skirt the outcropping of granite.

* * *

SHE SHOULD HAVE seen it coming.

Kissing the edge of the speed limit on her way to Heaven, the phone call with Brad—made as soon as she’d ended the call from Chet—bounced around in her brain. Brad’s voice, breezy as always, had stunned Emma.

She smacked the old Omni’s steering wheel with a fist, remembering his words. “No problem, you have to go back home,” he’d said.

“It’s not home,” she’d snapped, apologized and, after his next words, wished she hadn’t.

“Given all those phone calls you ignored from Granny, I had a feeling family ties would come home to roost. I snagged Carmen a few nights ago. She can fly standby. You remember her.”

Carmen was hard to forget with bleached hair, bleached-white teeth...and a husband.

“Carmen? The married Carmen?” Despite wanting to keep her tone neutral, Emma couldn’t stop the sarcasm from catching the word married.

Emma heard the woman in the background call to Brad and ask him where he’d put the massage oil. Brad muffled the phone to answer. When he returned, he said, “We had some good times, Emma. Let’s leave it at that.”

Don’t hang up on me. Emma’s stomach started to grip like it did when she was going to be sick. Then he was gone.

In a swirl of hurt, she’d decided to confront her grandmother. Emma would firmly tell her only relative she was not falling for this ruse, that it was a shame she’d roped Chet into it and that Emma was turning around right now and heading for the airport.

She’d board that plane for England whether Brad and Carmen were on it or not. She could do this. She had to do this. She’d go with, with...a man moratorium in place. Yes, that was it.

Her brain cleared, and her foot pressed the accelerator firmly. No man for her until—well, until a very different type of guy showed up. One that made her see fireworks—or at least a spark. And who was trustworthy. Dependable. One who, when he said, “I’ll be there for you,” really was. Yet, from her perspective, it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

Ninety minutes later, pulling off the interstate at Evanston, Wyoming, the venerable Omni rumbled along the two-lane highway toward Bigelow Canyon. Emma kept an eye out for deer, skunks and raccoons with their nonexistent road-safety habits. The speedometer climbed; every mile brought Emma closer to the place she had vowed never to return to.

Grumpa had referred to Heaven as the intersection between Are We There Yet and Nowhere. Tucked in a valley with steep canyon sides, it boasted maybe a thousand people, which swelled into many thousands as tourists flocked there for the summer, and especially for the town’s main moneymaker—the Fourth of July Jamboree.

The event lasted from Thursday till Monday. A celebration of a small Western town and America.

It was almost nine o’clock now. And as surely as she took her next breath, by the time she crossed the town limits, her grandmother would be fine, Emma reassured herself. Nomi would be formulating some powerful reason for making Chet her minion on a new project.

Emma remembered she would need both hands on the wheel for the final turn. Only idiots blew down this canyon.

No way would her grandmother actually allow herself to fall ill. Not with her riding herd over the upcoming Jamboree in July. When God created Naomi Chambers, He had given her a double shot of stamina, and on the way out, she had snatched another.

Recognizing a familiar landmark, Emma shifted down for the descent. No one else on the road at this hour. Though Memorial Day weekend, travelers would be up and at it quick tomorrow; the early birds were already in their RVs for the night, parked at the local campgrounds, ready for the kick-off of the town’s summer season.

The Omni’s headlights swept left and right, with Emma letting the engine hold the car back. Biting her lip, she tapped the brake around another curve, readying for the last one.

She recalled smelling tourists’ and semitrailer brakes burning clear through to the center of town, coming from this canyon. Others, who thought they knew better than to slow down, rode with the tow truck or in an ambulance. The slow signs meant slow.

After she downshifted to first for the final blind corner and hairpin turn, she lowered the window; cool canyon air poured in. Here came the turn. She tapped her brakes. What was that ahead? When her headlights illuminated a blue sedan, she squinted. Off into the dark, up against an outcropping of rock spray-painted every year by graduating high school students, was a car lying on its side, steam pouring out from the hood, which was bent at many angles. Emma hit the brakes.

Pulling carefully to a stop at the side of the road along faint double tracks, she eyed the car, heart rate ramping. Yanking up her parking brake, she prayed it would hold on the steep downgrade, shut off the car and regretted that she couldn’t use her cell phone. Everyone in Heaven knew precisely where the lack of signal coverage ended for cell phones, and she wasn’t anywhere near it.

Please don’t be dead. Chastising her short height once again, she ran toward the car, looking around for something to stand on to see into it. Stepping onto a large flat rock that was close—yet not close enough to be really useful—she flung herself toward the car door, hanging on by her fingertips. Now what, genius? She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t let go, so she stretched up and peered into the sedan. She could see him now, see the blue collar of a shirt, a man’s head against the seat. He was blond, he was bloody and he wasn’t moving.

Do something. What?

The figure stirred as her fingers cramped from clutching the car’s side. Any minute now she was going to have to fling herself backward to avoid falling under the car.

His eyes opened, and despite the blood seeping down from a cut on his forehead, she couldn’t help noticing the dark blue eyes. Eyes staring right at her. Eyes with—deep questions? Don’t be dumb, Emma. He has a question as to what happened, not some complicated existential need.

“You’re beautiful—an angel? Am I dead?” he asked, then groaned and put a hand to his head. “My head.”

That struck her as funny—both the beautiful comment and that he actually did have questions—and she giggled, albeit a trifle hysterically. “No, you’re in Bigelow Canyon. The last turn. We call it The Last Nasty.”

“Nasty. Sure. About...how...my luck has been going.” He squeezed out the words.

Her aching fingers reminded her that she needed to change positions. Bending her knees slightly, she edged to the rim of the rock on which she teetered, and then shoved off the car. Back she fell, rear end hitting the ground first. She rolled to the side quickly and stood up, legs shaking. Dramatic rescues had not been part of the itinerary for the England trip, nor were they a common occurrence in her life.

The car door squeaked and then swung open with a metallic groan. The bloody, blue-eyed guy gazed at her and took in the surrounding area with a fuzzy frown.

She stared up at him. Even bloodied he was a jaw dropper. Blond hair sticking out all over, strong cheekbones that rose above a carved chin. Those eyes. Those questions.

“I think we’re both in trouble,” he mumbled, and dragged himself toward the open car door.

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT HAD THE angel girl just asked him? Thunderbolts banged around in Sparks’s head. The dampness and sting on his chin told him he’d have a souvenir of the Compact Car Crunch.

“I said, do you think you have a concussion?”

Minutes before, he’d started a slow pitch out of the car. Somehow—perhaps he’d recall later—she’d grabbed his long legs at the same moment he’d pushed off from the frame. It took him a few moments to realize he’d landed on his rescuer. She uttered gasping, grunting sounds from underneath him.

After he’d rolled off her, they’d both regained their breath, and she’d lugged his two suitcases out of the trunk and into her car. He focused on standing upright and making his legs move toward it, only to collapse onto the passenger seat. Oh, was his head throbbing.

She’d steered out onto the road, and they were on their way. Angel girl, Sparks thought. Short, dark haired and curvy in beige capris and a light-colored knit shirt, she was the prettiest part of the trip so far. And the prettiest thing to ever save him. Now, what was her name? It wasn’t like him to miss getting a name.