[The Secret Lives of Will Tucker 01] - Flora's Wish

333 Pages·2016·1.53 MB·English

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
® ®
Scriptures are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version , NIV .
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011, by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of
Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com and the King
James Version of the Bible.
Cover by Garborg Design Works, Savage, Minnesota
Cover photos © Chris Garborg; iStockphoto/adpower99; Bigstock/msv,
Elenamiv;
Back cover author photo by Robert C. Turner
Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission
Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370,
www.booksandsuch.biz.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
FLORA’S WISH
Copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Y’Barbo
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97402
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Y’Barbo, Kathleen.
Flora’s wish / Kathleen Y’Barbo.
p. cm. – (The secret lives of Will Tucker ; bk. 1) ISBN 978-0-7369-5210-1
(pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-7369-5212-5 (eBook)
I. Title.
PS3625.B37F57 2013
813’.6–dc23
2012027222
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,
mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief
quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
To My Bonus Kids
Clint and Katie Turner
Emily and Josh Miller
Alex and Liz Turner
Austin Turner
Bailey Turner
Kyle Turner
Logan Turner
I love you like my own…
Over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
COLOSSIANS 3:14
“I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
~ Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
“To believe every man to be honest till he is found out to be a thief, is a motto
most self-respecting men cling to; but we detectives on the contrary would not
gain salt to our bread, much less the bread itself, if we adopted such a belief. We
have to believe every man a rogue till, after turning all sorts of evidence inside
out, we can only discover he is an honest man. And even then I am much afraid
we are not quite sure of him.”
~ Andrew Forrester,
The Female Detective (May 1864)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
About the Author
One
May 1887
The Crescent Hotel
Eureka Springs, Arkansas
he last thing Flora Brimm needed was to lose another fiancé. While there
Twas no evidence to prove Will Tucker had met the same unfortunate fate as
the other four—an early and untimely demise—there was also no prospective
groom in residence at the Crescent Hotel this evening.
Flora stepped off the elevator and walked toward the ballroom to make her
entrance late and alone. She paused to take in the grand sweep of glittering
chandeliers and the wide expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows reflecting the
electric light back into the room. Oversized potted palms climbing almost high
enough to touch the ceiling hid the four corners of the grand room.
Though the ballroom was crowded with guests, Flora glanced around in
hopes of finding the man she hoped to wed. The search was futile, of course, as
tonight’s celebration of the Crescent’s first anniversary was a masked ball.
Those who dared ignore the requirement were given a generic mask, white for
the ladies and black for the gentlemen. And yet she hoped that somehow she
might recognize him.
Or, perhaps, he would recognize her.
Flora waved off a liveried man with a tray of white masks. At her
grandmother’s insistence, a disguise of pale blue silk dotted with seed pearls had
been created to match her gown. She tied the mask in place and then touched
Grandmama’s diamond choker with its half dollar–sized aquamarine set into a
butterfly shape. The heirloom weighed heavily against her throat, but it was
lovely and she would endure it for the evening. Tiny earrings with perfectly set
pearls dangling among sparkles of diamonds, aquamarines, and sapphires
completed the ensemble and caused her to smile. The earrings had been Mama’s