Fireworks at First Sight is now available!

Wendy Cunningham has built a careful, steady life for herself and her autistic brother, William. Then Green Beret Steve Reid arrives in Fox Hollow on leave, hears her sing at the Flag Day ceremony, and treats William like someone worth knowing. For three summer weeks, love is easy. Then the Fourth of July fireworks go up, and by dawn Steve is gone. When he comes back, will Wendy let him in, or shut him out before he can explain?

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Here’s chapter 1:

Steve swung the duffel over the side of the truck bed and let it drop to the gravel.

The drive in ran longer than the map had promised, a pale ribbon of limestone curling back through the trees to a cottage lit at one window. Dusk sat blue and easy over the fields. Off in the dark a whip-poor-will kept at its one note, patient and dumb, and the air came warm through his open collar.

He stood a moment and took the place in. The cottage was built from fieldstone, like someone had put together a jigsaw puzzle made from rocks. A deep porch ran along the front. It was the kind of house you could disappear into for a month and nobody would come looking.

The screen door banged.

“You found it.” Daniel came down the steps with his hands in his pockets, in no hurry at all. “I had money on you missing the turn and winding up in Tennessee.”

“I don’t miss turns.”

“No.” Daniel stopped an arm’s length off and looked him over. “You wouldn’t.”

He hadn’t seen Daniel in over a year. They’d been roommates at University of Kentucky and eventually moved from the dorm to share an apartment. Daniel carried the same unbothered slouch he’d had at twenty, like the world could come to him when it was ready. He looked Steve over.

“The Army’s been getting its money’s worth,” he said.

“They keep the receipts.”

That got the grin. Daniel clapped him on the shoulder, once, hard, and the time apart disappeared.

“Took you what, three years to take me up on it?” His friend bent and grabbed the duffel before Steve could, hefted it, made a face at the weight. “I’ve been saying come out since you got to Campbell. Every leave. ‘Next one,’ you said. Every time.”

“I meant it every time.”

“I know you did. That’s what made it so annoying.” He slung the strap over his shoulder. “What changed?”

Steve looked back down the dark drive, at the truck cooling and the trees closing the gap behind it. His body ached, but he thought maybe his soul ached more. He needed this break, deep inside the trees on a creek where no one would find them. “Ran out of next ones, I guess.”

“How was the drive?”

“Long. Beautiful. It will be hard to beat Kentucky.” He rolled his shoulder out.

“Oh? Are we leaving Kentucky?”

He followed Daniel onto the porch. “I’m coming on three years here.” He paused. “I expect orders soon. Army usually PCS’s people in August.”

“You looking for anywhere specific?”

His mind ran through the duty stations available to him — the ones that had Special Forces Units that catered to his specialty. “I have my hopes, but I dare not mention them out loud. I’d hate to jinx it.”

“Ha! Well, Lieutenant Reid,” Daniel opened the door. “Come on in. I’ll show you the grand estate.”

The grand estate had two bedrooms and a kitchen with modern appliances. Books stood in stacks on the floor where the shelves had run out. A laptop sat open on a long table by a window that looked out on the creek.

Daniel showed him to his room and pointed out the stack of towels and washcloths. After Steve set his duffle on the bed, they moved into the main room. “My aunt lives in the big house up the hill.”

“How’s the book coming?”

“It hit a snag in the plot, but it’s coming now.” Daniel picked up the mug next to the laptop and carried it to the sink. “I’m only three weeks behind.”

“What’s it about this time?”

“A man who can’t leave a thing alone.” Daniel said. “And there are forces at play that make the story a little interesting.”

Steve waited, then when nothing else came, he laughed. He appreciated Daniel’s brain and his desire to keep things close to his chest. Steve had learned a long time ago not to push for details Daniel didn’t want to give. He’d want the same courtesy.

He wandered over to the framed book picture on the wall. “I saw the movie for this one a couple of weeks ago. It was a little different from the book.”

“In a word,” Daniel said, but a pleased grin covered his face. He opened the fridge and pulled out two green bottles of beer. “My creative control only carried so much control.”

“You remember our first apartment?” Daniel asked. “The one with the radiator that screamed?”

“I remember you saying it was haunted for a month.”

“It was haunted.”

“It was a forty-cent valve.” Steve crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the kitchen island. “You wrote a whole short story about the ghost before you let me fix it.”

“And it was a good story.” He handed over the bottle opener. Steve took a sip of the cold beer.

“I drove through your town on the way in,” Steve said. “You didn’t tell me it was a postcard.”

“It’s worse in the fall. Whole place smells like cider and tourists are everywhere. There’s autumn galas and autumn festivals.” He shook his head. “Fun locales to plot thrilling stories about espionage and perfectly situated explosions.”

Having read all of his stories, he suddenly placed the small town in a recent bestseller. “You blew up the courthouse once already.”

“Yeah.” Daniel sat in his office chair and spun it around to face the room. “Fun times.”

Daniel laughed and dropped onto the sofa, and for a minute they just sat. It was strange. It felt like the two of them had spent their entire lives together and he’d never been apart. But at the same time, it felt weird to be here.

He thought of his last deployment. What a mess that had been. Someone with a higher pay grade than his had received orders from someone who shouldn’t have hands in the pot and if not for the professionalism of his team leader, his Alpha Team would have paid for that decision, and no after-action report could have undone it.

The unit went onto block leave when they got back and they had a full four weeks. Instead of hanging out in the barracks and waiting for all of the family guys to return, he’d just called Daniel. He hadn’t tried to put it into words on the phone, and he wasn’t going to try here with a cold bottle sweating in his hand. But he’d needed the break.

Daniel tilted his head as if looking at him from a different angle. “You look wrung out.”

“I’m fine.”

“Didn’t say you weren’t fine. I said you look wrung out.” Steve drank his beer and didn’t answer that. “There it is.” Daniel grinned. “The famous wall. I missed the wall.”

Steve chuckled and looked out the now dark window. The room reflected back at him. “The break came at a good time.”

“Glad you came, Steve. Even if you only came to sit still.”

“Where else would I go?” His mother left when he was a baby. She couldn’t take the life married to a Navy officer. But she’d never returned. Occasionally, Steve would get a letter in the mail from her, but sometime in high school, he quit opening them.

His father would leave him with his sister and her children when the Navy sent his ship off. And he’d come home with gallant stories and presents from far-off places, and for six months Steve’s life would settle into a rhythm.

His dad retired in Jacksonville, Florida, right after Steve turned sixteen. He finished high school and took an Army ROTC scholarship in the landlocked state of Kentucky, much to his father’s dismay. He’d died last summer.

“I think I won’t take offense at that,” Daniel said on a laugh. He set his beer bottle on the counter and stood. As he walked past Steve, he slapped him on the shoulder. “I have a call with my editor I need to take. Don’t mind me. Entertain yourself, come and go. I don’t lock the door. The fridge and pantry are stocked.”

“Thanks, man.” He stood as well. “I think I’ll just go read a bit, then turn in.”

Daniel’s voice faded as he stepped outside onto the porch. Steve went to the bedroom. While he unpacked, he fought off the waves of exhaustion trying to do him in. He probably should have waited until tomorrow to drive, but he was glad he was here now. Within ten minutes, he slid under the sheets and closed his eyes, falling asleep almost instantly.

‹—☙—∞—❧—›

Wendy peeled the supper card off the fridge and slid it up a row before William could tell her it was out of order.

“It’s out of order,” William said.

“I’m fixing it.” She pressed the laminated square back into place. Green border, fork-and-knife icon, SUPPER in her own block letters under the picture. The cards ran down the fridge door in their colors, the whole evening where he could see it. Homework. Supper. Reading. Shower. The half hour with his soldiers before bed.

“Life is easier in the school year, William,” she remarked, still bemoaning the end of the school year a week later.

“That’s because the schedule is strict.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “It should always be strict, regardless.”

A lack of a good schedule was something William felt in his teeth. It was easier now that he was older. When he was little, the smallest change to the schedule could come apart on them both.

“You had reading before supper,” he said. “I’m not reading hungry.”

“Nobody’s reading hungry. See? Supper, then reading.” She tapped down the row. “Better?”

“Better.” He pulled the stool back to the counter and bent over the paperback he picked up the second he turned the dishwasher on to clean the supper dishes. “I want to see the George Washington movie.”

“Yes. But you need to watch the review from your guy you watch and make sure you’re emotionally ready for any changes to the battles. I’d rather you got prepared.” William could give step-by-step replays of any major battle American soldiers had fought in going back to the French and Indian War.

“He saw the special release in May and I’ve already watched the review three times. I’ll be fine.”

She pulled out the carton of ice cream. “You say that. But, are you?”

“Wendy,” he said on a sigh. “You need to trust me.” He put a book mark in his book and carefully shut it. “I’ll take some of that,” he said.

She scooped both of them vanilla ice cream. When she held up the chocolate syrup, he made a face and shook his head. “More for me,” she remarked, drizzling chocolate syrup over hers. “And yours is just boring.”

He spooned some ice cream into his mouth. “There’s nothing boring about vanilla. It’s richly complex.”

He had her blond hair, but his eyes were more gray than her blue. At sixteen, he’d caught up to her five-seven, but the doctor said she should expect him to grow at least four or five more inches.

On the table beside him sat the model, a Black Hawk at 1:72, half its decals on, the tweezers squared to the edge of the cutting mat. He would give it thirty minutes tonight starting at nine o’clock. Then he would go to the Battle of Cowpins he was building with little metal soldiers and a paper mache landscape and work on that for sixty minutes before bed.

He picked his book back up. Wendy carried her ice cream outside.

When her parents died in a train wreck her senior year of college, she’d taken William without hesitation. But even with all of the child psychology classes she’d had to take in her path toward a teaching degree, living with him full time for the first time since he was eight years old had taken some pretty serious adjusting. She worked with a therapist to build a strict schedule, to understand how his brain worked, to know how to help him come up with compromises so that he didn’t lose control.

So far, they’d done all right together. 

She pulled out a magnetic card with a pink border and a picture of an old-timey movie projector. She wrote “George Washington,” on the card, then set it off to the side. She didn’t know what day it opened, but she didn’t want to forget about it, either.

She capped the dry erase marker and set it in the drawer. Then she carried her ice cream outside.

She examined the seedlings of the tomato plants while she rolled ice cream around on her tongue. She would need to thin them out, but she hated to. It killed her to pull a perfectly healthy plant out of the lineup just because it was too close to its neighbor.

“Well that was a fun teacher work week,” Annabelle said, wandering outside from her side of the duplex carrying a glass of wine. “I for one say good riddance to this year.”

Annabelle worked with the special needs children in the elementary school where Wendy taught fourth grade. She’d had a rough year with one of the parents.

“They’re moving this summer, right?” Wendy asked.

“Who,” Annabelle said, her pink lips puckering and her brown eyes batting. “Whoever do you mean?”

Wendy chuckled and shook her head. “Here’s to a better year next year,” she said, toasting with her ice cream bowl.

“In your planning the summer to the microsecond, did you work in anything fun?” Annabelle asked.

“For me or for William?”

Her friend shrugged. “Sure.”

She laughed. “Well, he gets to see that new George Washington movie. I’m sure he’ll see it at least three times.”

“It does look good,” Annabelle said. “And you’d see it without him.”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“I thought we’d go to Fort Boonesboro and let him talk me through some skirmishes.” She brushed a leaf off of a patio chair and sat down. “We haven’t been in a couple of years.”

Annabelle shook her head. “What about for you?”

“Me?” She took a bite of ice cream and seriously considered what Annabelle meant. “Seriously, what would I do all summer if I didn’t have him? Sit around and read?” She dismissed it with the wave of her hand. “I’ll be doing that anyway.”

“You could travel if you didn’t have him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Where will you be jet setting off to this summer?”

Annabelle put a hand to her chest. “Who, me?” She plopped down next to Wendy. “I’m not going anywhere. Student loans have seen to that.”

“Exactly.” She leaned her head back and looked at the evening sky. “I’ll take lying around for the next few weeks while reading over anything else. And that suits William just fine.”

“Wendy.” William’s voice came through the open window, even and certain. “We need to talk about Sunday.”

She swallowed another bit of ice cream. “What about Sunday?”

“The observance. On the square.” He said it as though she’d brought it up herself and then wandered off. “The flag-day observance, and the Army’s birthday. They do the color guard.”

“I remember.” She did, more or less. She remembered the bugle playing.

“The Army turns two hundred and fifty-one this year.” He said the number like the other boys at school recited a batting average. “It’s older than the country. Founded June fourteenth, seventeen seventy-five. The Continental Congress authorized ten companies of riflemen before there was a United States to defend.” He checked her face to be sure she had it. “A year and two weeks before.”

“It won’t be as big of a celebration this year because it’s not the two-fiftieth.”

“That’s okay.”

She took another bite. “What time?”

“The color guard forms at ten. We should be in our seats by quarter of.”

“Okie dokie,” she said as she nodded. “Find a holiday card and put it next to the movie card. We’ll arrange next week when it’s time.”

“I already did.”

He shut the window. She turned her attention back to Annabelle. “You’re a good sister,” Annabelle said.

“It’s easier now. I can leave him alone. He has his routines and system. I don’t have to worry about him eloping anymore.” She sighed. “You’ve been a big part of it.”

Annabelle shrugged. “Maybe. But your attitude has a lot to do with it.”

“His, too.”

She nodded. “His, too.” She took the last sip of wine. “Well, I am heading back in. I’m going to see what the Hallmark channel has lined up for me this summer. What about you?”

“I’m going to sit out here and watch the tomatoes grow,” she said. “Finish this ice cream before it melts.”

“See you tomorrow, friend.”

Get your copy here: https://link.amazon/B0cJT8Zc8