Book 8: Finding Family in a Small Town
Love in Harmony Valley Series
On this page, you’ll find the story blurb, an excerpt, the story behind the story, and bonus content.
This beautician is determined to find beauty and kindness everywhere.
Brittany Lambridge wants to bring beauty back to small town Harmony Valley. Not only is she opening a beauty shop, but she’s also salvaging junk and giving it a second life as art. Of course, that means she’s poking around a lot of abandoned properties looking for salvage. And not every property comes without its share of secrets.
What she doesn’t expect to find is a beast and a secret.
While prospecting an overgrown plot of land filled with abandoned vehicles, Brittany comes across an intriguing car grill and a cranky car mechanic, a man named Joe with rumpled black hair, icy blue eyes and an inability to trust. Joe believes those cars are his and they can’t seem to come to a truce. Not about the rusting cars, where they came from, or his past as the town bad boy.
Fans of bad boy-nice girl movies like A Walk To Remember or 10 Things I Hate About You will enjoy this heartfelt, sweet romance with a happily ever after.
Readers love Finding Family in a Small Town:
“Oh my goodness, this one made my insides twist and turn with the feels and emotions! I didn't want to put it down.” Goodreads Reviewer, 5 Stars ★★★★★
“This is a heartwarming story of second chances! I loved it!” Goodreads Reviewer ★★★★★
Excerpt:
“What do you think you’re doing?” a deep masculine voice bellowed across the overgrown, wreck-strewn field in Harmony Valley.
Brittany Lambridge jumped and thunked the back of her head on the hood of the ancient BMW sedan.
Add headache to my list of injuries this morning.
“I told you we’d get caught,” Regina whispered. Brit’s sister was the queen of I-told-you-so’s.
Brit stepped back from the decaying car, rubbing the back of her head beneath her baseball cap. The nip of early morning bit into her scraped knuckles while dewy knee-high grass dampened her coverall pant legs. She peered to the left, then the right, but the rusting, abandoned cars were still rusty and abandoned.
No one else was in the flat patch of land with them. No one drove past on the two-lane highway bordering the field. No one stood near the thick blackberry bushes along the river. And she’d been told the car repair shop and nearby house had been empty for at least a decade. Had she imagined the voice? Or...
Brit stopped rubbing her head and faced her sister.
“Don’t look at me.” Regina rolled her artfully made-up brown eyes and said with disdain, “I’m not a ventriloquist.”
“No, but you hate helping me with my art.”
“I love helping you and your hobby,” Reggie corrected. “I just worry about getting bitten by angry, territorial spiders or snakes, or—” she glanced around nervously “—angry, territorial property owners.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” An angry, territorial-looking man appeared from behind a dented gray minivan, striding toward them. “I said, what are you doing here?”
Guilt, disappointment, and a feeling she couldn’t name froze Brit more completely than a complicated updo with too much hair spray.
The man quickly approached. Broad shoulders, muscular arms, rumpled black hair and... Brit stopped cataloging his parts because that hair glinted almost blue in the sunlight and made Brit’s fingers twitch for her hair-cutting scissors.
“Oh, my,” her twin murmured wistfully, having already forgotten her fear of getting bitten.
A thin boy appeared next, wearing light blue, grease-splotched coveralls like Brit’s and a preteen’s poor attempt at a sneer. Instead of approaching, he slouched against the minivan’s rear fender, thrusting his hands in his pockets. His dark brown hair stuck out from beneath a faded green baseball cap.
Brit’s fingers twitched again even as Shaggy Man drew closer. As a licensed beautician, bad hair drove Brit nutty. As did the feeling she could now name: artistic appreciation. Shaggy Man was like a Pollock painting—a riot of energy that was perfect chaos. She couldn’t look away.
The man stopped ten feet from her, propping hands on hips. His black T-shirt and blue jeans had seen better days, while those bladed cheekbones and ice-blue eyes had probably appealed to a fair share of women. Everything about him said he was the kind of man her mother had warned her and Reggie about while they were growing up—tempting, dangerous, a man more concerned with who warmed his sheets at night than who made his coffee in the morning.
“That car is mine.” Those cool blue eyes of his skated across the landscape with chilly calculation before returning to them. “Leave.”
Reggie glanced at Brit.
Who reminded herself about big-girl panties. She unwound guilt, brushed out disappointment and gripped her defenses as firmly as the socket wrench that she’d been using to remove the BMW’s grill. “I was told this was Harmony Valley’s vehicle graveyard.” That the deserted cars and trucks were fair game for picking.
“The garage over there, this land and everything on it used to belong to my father.” His stance remained as rigid as his words, at odds with that distracting, rule-breaking hair.
“But...” Used to belong to? What did that mean other than Brit was trespassing? Shoot and darn. “It’s yours then? The garage and the land?”
His glacial gaze found hers, so cold it crackled between them like icicles on eaves before they plunged to the pavement. “Papers went through yesterday.”
A day late. That should have been the title of Brit’s life story.
“Let me handle this,” Reggie said, half under her breath. She waded through the tall grass toward trouble. In her tight jeans and off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, she looked like she was walking across a catwalk, not the junkyard. “I’m Regina. I manage the B&B in town.” An overstatement. Their cantankerous grandmother owned the modest B&B that Reggie hoped to buy one day. “And this is my twin, Brittany. She uses junk for her arts and crafts projects.”
Arts and crafts?
Brit bristled. How was she ever going to be taken seriously in the art world if her own family dismissed her efforts? “Upcycle artist,” she muttered, although based on the iceman’s smirk, the damage was already done.
“I’m Joe Torino. That’s Sam.” Joe gestured to the youth by the minivan. He didn’t come forward to meet Reggie. He didn’t even remove his fists from his hips to shake hands. He held his frown and his ground, not being the type to shake hands with trespassers or fawn over beautiful women.
Couldn’t Reggie see that?
Apparently not. Reggie cast a confused look over her shoulder toward Brit. Being the twin who’d gotten all the good bone structure, Reggie wasn’t used to being overlooked, trespassing or not.
A breeze blew the wild grass and Joe’s unruly hair. The wind swirled and tugged and then, when neither Joe nor the grass bent, it died out.
Brit’s hopes of free materials for the gate ornament she’d been commissioned to create nearly died along with the breeze.
The Story Behind the Story
I was in the mood to write a bad boy romance when it came time to write this story. Joe may have been “Just Joe” to Brit as the story progressed, but he was “Oh, wow, Joe!” to me.
I absolutely love that Brit is an upcycle artist, giving junk new life. I think part of that comes from growing up on a ranch where stuff just gets put to the side and come spring there are wildflowers growing in and out of it.
Bonus Content
You can listen to Chapter One in this YouTube Video.
If you’ve read the book, make sure you download your free Bonus Epilogue.
Get Your Copy Here
Amazon (digi, KU, print) BN (print only)
