Out of My League: a Hope Valley novel Read online

  Out of My League

  a Hope Valley novel

  Jessica Prince

  Copyright © 2018 by Jessica Prince

  www.authorjessicaprince.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

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  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek of Come Back Home Again

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  About the Author

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  HOPE VALLEY SERIES:

  Out of My League

  Come Back Home Again (coming March 2019)

  Wrong Side of the Tracks (coming May 2019)

  The New Normal (coming July 2019)

  THE PICKING UP THE PIECES SERIES:

  Picking up the Pieces

  Rising from the Ashes

  Pushing the Boundaries

  Worth the Wait

  THE COLORS NOVELS:

  Scattered Colors

  Shrinking Violet

  Love Hate Relationship

  Wildflower

  THE LOCKLAINE BOYS (a LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP spinoff):

  Fire & Ice

  Opposites Attract

  Almost Perfect

  THE PEMBROOKE SERIES (a WILDFLOWER spinoff):

  Sweet Sunshine

  Coming Full Circle

  A Broken Soul

  CIVIL CORRUPTION SERIES

  Corrupt

  Defile

  Consume

  Ravage

  GIRL TALK SERIES:

  Seducing Lola

  Tempting Sophia

  Enticing Daphne

  Charming Fiona

  STANDALONE TITLES:

  One Knight Stand

  Chance Encounters

  Nightmares from Within

  DEADLY LOVE SERIES:

  Destructive

  Addictive

  Prologue

  Eden

  I fell in love with Lincoln Sheppard in an instant.

  Okay, well maybe not an instant. It took a solid three minutes, but you get my point.

  Anyway, it happened one hot summer day during our neighborhood block party. I’d never lived in a place where the neighbors threw block parties, so I was beyond excited to attend my first one ever. I was new to Hope Valley, and being new to a small town as an adult was pretty intimidating when everyone seemed to already know everyone else. I felt like the new girl sitting alone in the cafeteria, hoping to make friends when all the other kids had already formed their cliques.

  But I’d been searching for a place like this all my life, a place where I could belong and build a life for myself, and, most importantly, where I could escape my past and start over fresh as the woman I wanted to be. The instant I drove through the quaint, idyllic town, I’d fallen in love. It looked like something out of a TV show, beauty as far as the eye could see. In the center of town was an awesome square, complete with gazebos, benches, a fountain, and a grassy area that would have been perfect for an outdoor concert or a movie night on one of those huge inflatable projector screens. It was surrounded by shops and restaurants and offices, and there was even a hair and nail salon and a massage parlor. And bonus, the square had its very own clock tower right in the center. A clock tower! If that hadn’t already sold me, then the panoramic view of hills leading to mountains surrounding the whole town would have done it. It gave the place the feeling of being in a bubble, closed off from the rest of the ugliness in the world. There were evergreens and pine trees and oaks, all of them with leaves so deeply colored it looked like a sea of green leading up to the sky.

  I knew the moment I stood in the town square, slowly turning in a circle as I tried to take it all in, that I was home. I’d never had a home before, not in all my life. Growing up, we’d moved from town to town, trailer park to trailer park. Just as we settled in one place, my daddy would cheat someone out of their money with the promise to pay it back that he never came through on. Or my brother would have a run-in with the law, having robbed someone or vandalized something, as he was prone to do. Or my mom would sleep with one of my classmates’ dads, sending rumors spreading through the school like wildfire about me and my white trash family. Word would eventually get back to my father or the man’s wife, all hell would break loose, and we’d be on the road once more.

  I never had a chance to make friends, but even if I had, gossip had already run rampant through whichever town we were in, painting me with the same brush as the rest of my family. A brush that wasn’t flattering in the slightest. It wasn’t that it was the wrong brush for my family, it was just the wrong one for me.

  I’d learned early on to watch what my parents and brother did very closely, then do the exact opposite. They were the worst of the worst. They made Honey Boo Boo’s folks look well adjusted. They were constantly humiliating me with the crap they pulled, and if it wasn’t that, they were riding me for thinking I was better than they were. I never admitted it out loud, but I was better. I’d strived from childhood on not to make the same horrible, self-destructive decisions they did. It was like a mantra for me: If Billy Joe, Josephine, or Shep Brenner would do it, you do not! I repeated that to myself while staring in the mirror every morning, and before I went to bed each night.

  When I stumbled on Hope Valley, Virginia, I knew I’d finally found my place, and I did everything I could to settle in, meet the town folks, and start living the life I always wanted.

  So when Wynona from across the street came wandering up the front path of my cute little cottage-style home to knock on my door and ask me to the block party, I’d jumped at the invite.

  I decided I was going to make my potato salad, mainly because it was easy to make in bulk, and also because my potato salad was damn good, if I did say so myself. My mom hadn’t taught me much growing up, but her lack of attention and all-around mothering had turned me into an awesome cook. It was either that or starve, and I wasn’t about to let that happen, so I scoured through every cookbook I could find at the local libraries, plus absorbed all those cooking
shows on the rare occasions we had cable, so I could not only eat but make things I actually liked.

  The potato salad was a hit, and it had given me the perfect in to start talking with the other people who lived along the block.

  I was in the middle of a conversation with a sweet older couple, the Shillings, when something from the corner of my eye caught my attention. When I turned my head, the Shillings all but disappeared, their voices drowned out as I stared, transfixed by the sight before me.

  He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, probably the most beautiful man in all the world. And I should know. Thanks to my family, I’d seen a lot of the world, and not very many of those places were the good parts.

  His sandy blond hair was in need of a cut, but nonetheless, it worked on him in a big way. His features were strong; a chiseled jaw, sharp cheekbones, and masculine nose made up a perfect face that looked like it could break your hand if you attempted to punch it. Even from a distance I could tell he was tall, so tall, at least a head above me. And every. Single. Inch of his tall frame was ripped with bulging muscles that could be seen beneath his gloriously faded jeans and worn cotton tee. He was all man in the best possible way—strong, brawny, and absolutely gorgeous.

  But it was his eyes that drew me in the most. The vivid, shimmering greens were like jewels twinkling in the sun, and the beauty of them took my breath away. The way he was wrestling around with all the neighborhood kids, not only letting them use him as their own personal jungle gym but seemingly enjoying it, made my heart palpitate and parts inside of me that had laid dormant for far too long quiver.

  I spent the rest of the party secretly stealing glances his way, feeling somewhat like a stalker. As the sun began to set, a woman I didn’t recognize and knew didn’t live in the neighborhood came skipping up to him excitedly and jumped at the last second, giving him no choice but to catch her. She planted a quick kiss on his lips before lowering back to the ground.

  That was when my heart sank, because as I stared I saw him shove his hand in the back pocket of her obscenely tight cutoff jean shorts to cop a feel without being obvious about it, and a few seconds later he guided her up his driveway and into his house two doors down from mine. According to block gossip, they didn’t come out for the rest of the night.

  In spite of trying my best to get over it, I held on to that lust for a good long while. Jean Shorts Chick was far from the last woman to randomly show at his house for countless hours at a time over the next couple of months, and after girl number three, I was starting to notice a trend. Each woman had legs that went for miles, and they were built like they were born to walk a runway. They were like Hope Valley’s own personal Victoria’s Secret models.

  In other words, the polar opposite of me. Where they were tall, I was short, like really short. Where their long, lustrous hair gleamed in the sun, my dull brown locks fell flat. And not a single one of them had an ounce of fat on their lithe frames. Meanwhile, I loved my sweets and carbs, and my ample behind and the pudge around my midsection made that obvious.

  Based on the type of women he leaned toward and the fact that he looked like a Nordic god, there was one thing I knew as absolute truth.

  Lincoln Sheppard was totally and completely out of my league.

  Chapter One

  Eden

  The sun was shining brightly up above, but autumn had officially fallen on Hope Valley, making the temperatures mild and pleasant, comfortable enough to spend the whole day working outside to turn over my flower beds.

  I’d spent the first half of the day at the garden store, learning all the plants that were best for the colder seasons. Thanks to the kindly old man who worked there and his infinite knowledge, I now had trays and trays of camellias to plant so my yard would still have pops of color during the winter.

  I never had a yard growing up, and I’d always dreamed about one day finding myself a little house of my own with a big yard I could spend hours and hours toiling away in. Lucky for me, I’d found just that. My small two-bedroom cottage was not only adorable and perfect, something out of a storybook, but it sat on a large plot of land a ways back from the road, giving me a huge front lawn to work in. The backyard wasn’t so bad either, fenced on both sides with the back open to the thick, lush woods behind my house. It was a landscaper’s dream, and I turned out to have a pretty deft hand when it came to gardening.

  In the past months I’d discovered that there was no peace on this earth like getting your hands dirty to create something beautiful. It was just one of the hundreds of reasons I’d come to love Hope Valley so damn much.

  “Yoo-hoo! Hey there, neighbor!”

  I looked over my shoulder to see Wynona crossing the street and heading in my direction, carrying what looked like a glass of lemonade in each hand.

  Smiling brightly, I pulled the gardening gloves from my hands and rubbed my palms on the ratty jeans I wore while doing yard work. “Hey there, Wynona,” I greeted as I climbed to my feet.

  Her face scrunched up like she’d just bitten into week-old pizza. “Oh God, please. Just Nona. No one calls me Wynona.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, on account of I don’t like my name at all. I curse the day my mama fell in love with those damn Judd singers. Why couldn’t she have loved Fleetwood Mac or somethin’? I’d prefer the name Stevie over Wynona any day. Plus, Fleetwood’s music is hands down far more superior.”

  I let out a soft giggle at her rambling. “I can’t disagree with you there, but if it’s any consolation, I think your name’s pretty.”

  “Thanks. You’re sweet.”

  “So how are you?”

  Nona was nice and had taken a liking to me as soon as I moved onto Rosewood Lane three and a half months ago. With our different schedules, we hadn’thad a chance to sit down and really get to know each other, but I liked what I knew so far.

  She was roughly around my age, a mother of two, one twelve-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl, and had—according to her—finally put her worthless waste-of-space husband out before filing for divorce a few months ago. She was a sweet, petite redhead a few inches taller than me with a tiny waist and an abundance of boobs and booty. She was like a shorter, rounder version of the women Lincoln brought home, and I probably would have disliked her on principle alone if she hadn’t been so damn sweet.

  “I’m good, doll. Just saw you puttering around out here all day long and thought you might be thirsty. I brought you this.”

  She extended the glass, and I grabbed it and took a sip. I was right, it was lemonade, but with a little—okay, a lot—something extra.

  “Gah!” I coughed violently as my esophagus began to burn like crazy. “What is that?”

  She took the glass back and held it to her nose. “Oh damn. Sorry, honey. That one’s mine.” She quickly handed me the other one. “I’m the mother of two kids going through puberty, one of them bein’ a boy. Vodka’s a necessary part of life,” she said before slugging back a huge gulp as I burst into laughter.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a cautious sip of the second glass, discovering it wasn’t spiked and was actually really good. “I kinda have a one-track mind when it comes to gardening. I get in the zone and everything else tends to disappear, so I appreciate you looking out.”

  “Girl, what are friends for?”

  We moved to the stairs that led up to my covered wraparound porch and sat on the second step, looking out toward the shady tree-lined street as we drank and chatted.

  “So, you’ve been here over three months now, and I think it’s high time I got the full skinny on you. Who is Eden Brenner?”

  I turned to face her and asked, “What do you mean?” with a curious tilt of my head. “I’m just me. Nothing really special.”

  “Nothin’ special, my inflated behind,” she scoffed. “A beauty like you comes waltzing into town and everyone’s all aflutter about the new girl.”

  My cheeks heated as her flattering compliment warmed me fr
om the inside out. I didn’t believe it for a minute. She was the beauty. I was a plain Jane through and through, but it was still nice to hear.

  “Seriously, there’s nothing exciting. I work from home doing freelance editing on romance novels. I grocery shop every Thursday evening because that’s when it’s the quietest. Sundays are designated for laundry and house cleaning, and I’m too nice to telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen, so I always get stuck talking to them for at least half an hour.” That was all I was willing to give up. If I let her in on the messed-up drama that was my family, she’d probably never speak to me again. White trash didn’t live in pretty little cottages with huge, beautiful yards. They lived in ratty trailers that stank of beer and stale cigarettes. I’d left that Eden Brenner behind and created one worthy of this house and this town.

  Her head fell back on a husky, attractive laugh. “So what you’re sayin’ is you’re responsible and nice.”

  “Well, when you put it like that…” I shrugged. “Makes me sound pretty great.”

  She smiled brightly. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  The loud roar of a huge truck driving down Rosewood Lane pulled our attention to the street. I’d know that sound anywhere. My entire body had spent the past three and a half months reacting to that deep rumble. Every time Lincoln left or returned home, my skin tightened and my nipples pebbled in an embarrassing Pavlovian response to the sound. I all but salivated whenever his truck growled up the lane.