1
LUCAS MCBRIDE had spent the past fourteen Christmases alone. And he’d had every intention of spending this one the same way. But that was before a two-month-old article in the Honoria Gazette had brought him back to Honoria, Georgia, a town he’d once vowed never to set foot in again.
Strung with multicolored Christmas lights, even the oldest part of downtown Honoria looked festive. Enormous wreaths made of tinsel hung from each lamppost. As he drove down Main Street, deserted on this Sunday evening only five days before Christmas, Lucas looked behind the decorations to note that many of the twenties-era buildings were unoccupied, the windows boarded up or gapingly empty. The few remaining establishments looked as though they struggled to survive. A Revitalize Downtown poster fluttered halfheartedly on a pole beneath a glittering wreath.
He passed the corner of Main and Oak, where he and his teenage buddies used to hang out on Saturday nights, smoking cigarettes and trying not to look too anxious to meet the girls who cruised by in their daddies’ cars. The alley behind the old, empty hardware store brought back memories of a fight Lucas and his pals had gotten into with a bunch of football jocks from rival Campbellville. Chief Packer had broken up the melee and hauled all the participants to the city jail.
Lucas had spent that night in a cell. His father had been the only one who hadn’t come to bail out his son.
It was the first night Lucas had spent in jail, but it hadn’t been the last. Chief Packer had made arresting Lucas a hobby after that.
At the end of the block sat what had once been the old soda shop. Lucas had met Rachel Jennings there.
She’d been seventeen, he’d been nineteen. During the next ten months, they’d come to see themselves like Romeo and Juliet, kept apart by old family feuds. They’d met in secret, heightening the romantic thrill of their trysts. No one had been aware of their feelings for each other—until Rachel’s brother Roger had found out about them.
Few of the townspeople would have imagined that the fiery-tempered bad boy, Lucas McBride, had a hidden streak of romanticism. But the events that had eventually run him out of town had destroyed whatever idealism he’d once possessed, just as time had decayed the buildings of old downtown Honoria.
Lucas had driven through the west part of town earlier, and had hardly recognized the heavily developed area with its shopping strips and fast-food restaurants and service stations and car-sales lots. He still remembered when his uncle Caleb had taken him deer hunting in the woods that had once stood there.
Progress, he thought, looking at the sadly dignified brick building that had once held the old fiveand-dime store, wasn’t all it cracked up to be.
Seeing the changes in his former hometown inevitably made him think of what else had changed since he’d left in the middle of that spring night so long ago. His father was dead now. His cousins scattered. His baby sister a grown woman. And Rachel...
As always, he pushed back his thoughts of Rachel into the darkest part of his mind, along with the other painful memories of his past. At least he wouldn’t have to face her on this reluctant visit. He knew she’d moved away from Honoria not long after he had.
Out of old, half-forgotten habit, he turned right on Maple Street, thinking he’d drive past the high school and see if that had changed as much as everything else. Almost immediately, he saw a flashing blue light reflected in his rearview mirror. The dark-colored Jeep had pulled out of nowhere and was now right on Lucas’s rear bumper, the light flashing from its dash identifying it as a police officer’s vehicle.
Hell. Lucas had been back in Honoria less than two hours and already he was being hassled by the local authorities.
Apparently, some things hadn’t changed at all.
He drove into the deserted parking lot of an auto-repair shop and stopped beneath a street lamp decorated with a glowing, horn-blowing Christmas angel. He rolled down the driver’s side window and pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, extracting his driver’s license from its plastic sleeve. He’d been through this drill enough to know what to do.
The thirty-something officer was dressed in civies—a heavy denim jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. He held a badge in his hand to identify himself.
“License and registration, please,” he said in a low drawl that marked him as a native Southerner.
Lucas held the license out the open window. “What did I do?”