Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish Read Free Page B

only time it really mattered?
    I could never fall for a boy like you.
    Lucy hesitated, looked out the open doors to gather her composure. “I saw a funeral-planning kit on her kitchen table. When she noticed it was out, she shoved it in a drawer. I think she was hoping I hadn’t seen it.”
    What she didn’t tell him was that before Mama had shoved the kit away she had been looking out her window, her expression uncharacteristically pensive.
    “Will my boy ever come home?” she had whispered.
    All those children, and only one was truly her boy.
    Lucy listened as Mac drew in a startled breath, and then he swore. Was it a terrible thing to love it when someone swore? But it made him the old Mac. And it meant she had penetrated his guard.
    “That’s part of what motivated me to plan the celebration to honor her. I want her to know—” She choked. “I want her to know how much she has meant to people before it’s too late. I don’t want to wait for a funeral to bring to light all the good things she’s done and been.”
    The silence was long. And then he sighed.
    “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
    “No! Wait—”
    But Mac was gone, leaving the deep buzz of the dial tone in Lucy’s ear.

CHAPTER TWO
    “W ELL , THAT WENT well ,” Lucy muttered as she set down the phone.
    Still, there was no denying a certain relief. She had been carrying the burden of worrying about Mama Freda’s health alone, and now she shared it.
    But with Mac? He’d always represented the loss of control, a visit to the wild side, and now it seemed nothing had changed.
    If he had just come to the gala, Lucy could have maintained her sense of control. She had been watching Mama Freda like a hawk since the day she’d heard, Will my boy ever come home?
    Aside from a nap in the afternoon, Mama seemed as energetic and alert as always. If Mama had received bad news on the health front, Lucy’s observations of her had convinced her that the prognosis was an illness of the slow-moving variety.
    Not the variety that required Mac to drop everything and come now!
    The Mother’s Day celebration was still two weeks away. Two weeks would have given Lucy time.
    “Time to what?” she asked herself sternly.
    Brace herself. Prepare. Be ready for him. But she already knew the uncomfortable truth about Macintyre Hudson. There was no preparing for him. There was no getting ready. He was a force unto himself, and that force was like a tornado hitting.
    Lucy looked around her world. A year back home, and she had a sense of things finally falling into place. She was taking the initial steps toward her dream.
    On the dining-room table that she had not eaten at since her return, there were donated items that she was collecting for the silent auction at the Mother’s Day Gala.
    There were the mountains of paperwork it had taken to register as a charity. Also, there was a photocopy of the application she had just submitted for rezoning, so that she could have Caleb’s House here, and share this beautiful, ridiculously large house on the lake with young women who needed its sanctuary.
    One of her three cats snoozed in a beam of sunlight that painted the wooden floor in front of the old river-rock fireplace golden. A vase of tulips brought in from the yard, their heavy heads drooping gracefully on their slender stems, brightened the barn-plank coffee table. A book was open on its spine on the arm of her favorite chair.
    There was not a hint of catastrophe in this well-ordered scene, but it hadn’t just happened. You had to work on this kind of a life.
    In fact, it seemed the scene reflected that she had finally gotten through picking up the pieces from the last time.
    And somehow, last time did not mean her ended engagement to James Kennedy.
    No, when she thought of her world being blown apart, oddly it was not the front-page picture of her fiancé, James, running down the street in Glen Oak without a stitch on that was forefront in her mind. No, forefront