Claiming Emma Read Free

for a long time, Hannah for the first time in a long time feeling not so alone sitting next to a stranger.  Then when Emma's friend Marley returned to the shop she introduced Hannah and only smiled when the fire haired old lady in the flowing purple caftan who owned the tea shop, and apparently an apartment above it, tisked and went to get Hannah some slippers to wear home, since she was "not putting those dirty things back on your poor feet,".
    Emma, Hannah was informed, was just passing through on a visit to some of her vendors and had offered to watch the shop for Marley since her regular girl was sick and Marley had a doctor appointment she didn't want to cancel.  Emma had her own home further up into the mountains where she grew flowers and herbs and sold the soaps and lotions for shops like Marley’s.
    Hannah tried to argue about taking the slippers and was over-ruled by both women.  Then Emma took her out to eat, and when Hannah tried to feebly argue, not because she wanted to, but because she thought she should, she was overruled again. 
    By the time dinner was over Hannah had told her life story to the woman with the pretty eyes and Emma had talked about her herb farm that sat on twenty acres in the mountains and had a stream that flowed year-round, with horses and an old cow named Lazy Maize she never had the heart to replace after it died.
    "Lavender Farms" was as pretty and foreign sounding to Hannah as a woman who grew grapes and squeezed lemons to make ice cubes, but two days later and a few more meals out with Emma, Hannah felt as if she could see the place if she closed her eyes. 
    When Emma offered her a job at the farm that included on the job training and room and board, Hannah accepted.

CHAPTER ONE
     
    Noah hung up the phone with a grim face and dropped it to the car seat beside him when the answering machine picked up for the third time.  Like every previous call he'd made to the number his father’s widow reluctantly provided him, he did it without leaving a message.
    He turned the key in the trucks ignition and the Chevy Colorado rolled over and growled smooth for him.  He appreciated the power of the 2.8-liter turbo diesel of his new truck as much as the clean brown leather seats that were big enough for even his massive six-foot six-inch frame.  Buying it was the first thing he did when he retired from the Rangers after twenty years at the age of forty.  A forty that felt far older than it should. 
    The second was to visit his half-sister Hannah.
    He glared out the windshield at the house where she had grown up.   The porch was decorated for the Spring, the yard well maintained.  The house looked like every other house on the block with its small yard and wide front porch.  A house his father had bought his second wife when he left his first wife for a younger version and started a new family two states away.  Somehow the spring decorations seemed particularly insulting to him after what he had just found out.  Hannah had been gone six months.
    Noah had joined the army after two years trying college and realizing a classroom was not where he wanted to be.  He didn't have much to do with the new family, but he had always assumed his father had chosen better the second time.  After all, it would be difficult for him to have chosen worse than Noah's narcissistic bitch of a mom, but after what he just heard he was revising his opinion.
    Marcella Gregory Hale had kicked her pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter out onto the streets.  Canceled the girls cell phone as soon as she shut the door in her face, and even months later with no word from her pregnant teenage daughter, when a strange woman left a message to call about Hannah and "complications of early labor," Marcella blew it off.
    The only thing that Noah could be grateful for was that Marcella, for some reason he could not fathom, kept the number and nothing else.  Not the woman's name, not the town she had mentioned, or the