Chapter One

      The last thing Jace Middleton wanted was to leave the place he loved so well. The place he knew, the town he’d called home for nearly thirty years and the land that beckoned him like a cow calls a calf. But the town had fallen on hard times, and the choices he wanted no longer existed in Shepherd’s Crossing.

      He ran one hand across the nape of his neck as he studied the family farmhouse that had been passed down for three generations. Three generations that ended with him.

      He shoved emotions aside and studied the old house from a builder’s perspective. The faded gray house lacked...everything.

      Not the essentials. The modest one-and-a-half-story home was solidly built, and the mid-twentieth-century addition nearly doubled the first-floor living space, but there was nothing about this house that tempted folks to make an offer anywhere near his asking price. The way Jace saw things playing out, he would be left with two choices.

      Walk away, begin life anew in Sun Valley and let the Realtor handle it. Or fix the place up, except...

      He sighed.

      He couldn’t do it. He was good at tearing apart other folks’ things and putting them back together. The thought made him flex his arms. There was nothing Jace liked better than reconfiguring something old into something new, but every time he went to change something in his parents’ home, he ground to a stop. These were family walls. Family memories. They belonged to him and his younger sister, Justine.

      These walls held all he had left of his parents, Jason and Ivy Middleton. He’d lost one to cancer and the other one to heartbreak, and he couldn’t bring himself to demolish one stinking part of this house, even to increase the resale value. It felt wrong. Plain wrong. But he was slated to begin a new job in Sun Valley by Labor Day, which meant he had a couple of months to get things in order, sell the unsellable house, pay off his sister’s college loans and start fresh. With dwindling jobs, cash and population, there was little left in Shepherd’s Crossing, and things had grown worse over time.

      He needed a fresh start.

      He pretended he didn’t downright hate that thought as a stylish SUV pulled into the nearby intersection. The car started to turn left, then paused.

      It pulled back, onto the main road. Then the driver cranked the wheel in the opposite direction.

      She paused again, looking left, then right, then frowned