Loving Jessie Read Free Page B

at passing females, maybe develop a beer belly and a permanent sunburn. Maybe, if he pounded a few thousand nails into submission, he would start sleeping nights again, stop jumping every time a car backfired and be able to look at himself in the mirror without wondering if he could have changed things, if he…
    “No.” He said it aloud, using the sound of his own voice to cut off that line of thought. “If only” was a fool’s game. What was done was done. Life didn’t offer any do-overs. Tipping his head back, Matt downed the last of the scotch, barely tasting it. The past was past. The only thing he could do was move on.
    If he could.

Chapter One
    M att took his time getting home, stretching a two-day drive into more than a week. He tried to tell himself that he was savoring the journey, enjoying the scenery, taking time to smell the roses, but he’d never been very good at lying to himself. The truth was, the moment the decision was made to come home, he’d begun questioning it. And the closer he got, the more he was caught between the hope that this was the one place that would offer him the peace he needed and the conviction that this was the last place on earth where he could find anything resembling peace.
    So he dawdled his way down the coast to California like a five-year-old dragging his feet about getting ready for church. He stopped to see scenic views that barely registered, ate fast food that gave him heartburn, drank coffee that didn’t deserve the name and veered off his route to visit tourist attractions that gave new meaning to the word tacky . But, despite his best efforts, he eventually found himself on the outskirts of the town he’d called home for the first twenty-three years of his life.
    Millers Crossing had started out life as a wide spot in the road that provided services for local farmers in California’s Salinas Valley. A feed store, a small general store with gas pumps out front and a café. Located just off Highway 101 on a reasonably scenic route to the Pacific, the town had grown at a steady pace, reaching its peak in the fifties, when cars were big, gas was cheap, and the whole country seemed to be spending vacations on the road. A movie house, motels and more shopping had been added to accommodate both tourists and residents.
    In the mid-sixties, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles decided that Millers Crossing was just the spot for a hotel specializing in luxury and romance. Built on a hill overlooking a golf course and an easily ignored stretch of highway, the Willow Inn was a Spanish Mission fantasy, complete with pale pink stucco, red-tiled roof and arched doorways. Courtyards, tinkling fountains, wrought iron and palms added to the atmosphere. Locals sneered and predicted bankruptcy within a year, but the Willow Inn built a reputation for sugarcoated romanticism that, combined with the location, brought in honeymoon couples from as far away as Chicago. Heart-shaped tubs and mirrored ceilings achieved a nice balance between the romantic and the erotic, the nice and the naughty.
    It didn’t take long for local business owners to discover that, if a fool and his money were soon parted, it was nothing compared to the eagerness with which newlyweds divested themselves of cash. Fueled in part by the success of the Willow Inn, other businesses took root—gift shops and restaurants, boutiques and beauty parlors. During the seventies and eighties, when many Valley towns were suffering the effects of a depressed farm economy, Millers Crossing managed to hold its own.
    Matt had grown up there, had skinny-dipped in the man-made lake that marked one edge of the golf course; learned to drive on the long, empty dirt roads that stretched out north and south of town; had gotten his first glimpse of a girl’s breasts underneath the bleachers at the high school when Marcy Woodbridge let him remove her cheerleader’s sweater. A few weeks later, she’d let him remove considerably more and the