Heartland Joy

Bridgett Rawlings is known in her small town of Prairie Rose, Iowa as The Bad Luck Widow. She just lost her father. Before that it was her second husband, and before that, her first. Every man Bridgett has ever loved has been killed on her family farm, but it is all she owns and the basis of her livelihood. It seems there is no escaping the curse laid upon her.

So, when Shawn Barclay, the son of an old friend of her father’s, shows up to help on the farm, Bridgett tries to deter him. She explains the curse and how the town has shunned her. She tells him to go back to Arkansas, where he came from.

But Shawn doesn’t believe in curses. When he looks at Bridgett, he sees a kind and thoughtful woman forced to endure incredible grief alone in a community that should be showering her with support. The least he can do is stay on the farm to help her.

As they work alongside one another, Shawn begins to see Bridgett in a different light, as a woman of incredible strength with more capacity for love than anyone he has ever met, a woman he is falling in love with.

Bridgett is falling for him too, but what if the locals are right? What if she is bad luck? She is not willing to risk Shawn’s life to prove them right.

But will she be giving up a heartland of joy by not daring to prove them wrong?

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

How long had it been since he’d ridden on a grocery store cart?

Shawn Barclay watched as an older teenage boy, or possibly a young man in his early twenties, started at the back end of the parking lot, pushing his cart with one foot on the back bar and one foot pushing like a skateboard, gaining momentum as he hurled across the blacktop.

Shawn held his watermelon under one arm and slowed his stride just a little, grinning.

It was a good thing he’d bought a watermelon, or he might have been tempted to join the dude in a shopping cart race.

He and his brothers had done that more than once growing up, much to his mother’s disapproval.

Never in a lot that had been so busy, though.

It was unseasonably hot for October. October in Arkansas anyway.

That’s where Shawn had grown up.

But for Iowa?

It was his first day here, and he wasn’t sure.

Still, the watermelon would be a great lunch before he found the farm where his parents wanted him to help out over the winter.

The dude with the shopping cart must have done it a time or two before because somehow, he managed to tilt the cart up on one wheel and spin it in an entire circle before it thumped back down and he gave it two more giant pushes with his leg.

Shawn’s smile had slipped, however, because a woman, her cart laden with groceries, hurried out of the store, glancing at the dark, billowing clouds rolling in from the west.

Shawn didn’t think it was going to start pouring in the next five minutes, but maybe the woman wanted to get home and have her groceries unloaded before the storm started.

Regardless, she wasn’t paying attention to the dude on the cart, and the dude certainly wasn’t paying attention to her.

He’d developed a little bit of an audience, and he seemed to be playing to them, swerving the cart into screeching S turns before he grinned at the folks standing and watching, then shoved with two more big pushes before he rode the cart with both hands in the air.

It was at that point that the lady hurrying out of the store must have heard the commotion and jerked her head around in the direction of the dude on the cart barreling toward her.

Maybe she could have avoided a collision if there hadn’t been so many groceries in her cart.

She yanked back on the handle; her frame, though slight, seemed strong and agile.

Iowa was a lot different than Arkansas. Flat for one.

The sky was huge, not hidden by any mountains and very few hills. It was farm country, just like Shawn had come from in Arkansas.

Still, it wasn’t home, although there were plenty of people in Arkansas just like this woman in front of him: short, no-nonsense haircut, and despite her predicament of being directly in the way of a barreling cart, she definitely wasn’t a maiden in distress, seeing the danger and working to avoid it rather than standing like a deer in headlights, waiting to be rescued.

Still, Shawn could never resist even the idea of a damsel in distress, and he ran forward, dropping his watermelon and grabbing hold of her cart, adding his weight to hers for a second or two while the dude riding toward them, finally aware there were other people in the parking lot, put all of his skills to work to try to avoid the imminent collision.

Maybe if Shawn had gotten there just a second earlier, they might have been successful.

As it was, he hit the front right corner of the cart, jerking it with enough force to spin it and throw the woman and Shawn to the right as the cart swung left.

Shawn might have been better off if he hadn’t run to help at all, since he ended up landing on top of the woman, getting both feet tangled in the wheel of the cart, and tumbling to the ground.

“That didn’t quite go the way I planned,” Shawn muttered as the woman moved under him, grunting just a little.

He unwound his long legs from hers and stood, the jeans he wore protecting his legs from any scrapes, although the palms of his hands burned from catching himself on either side of her.

The lady, on the other hand, didn’t make it out quite so well. He could see a scrape on her upper arm and some blood on her wrist. As she rolled over, both of her knees were scraped because of the knee-length skirt she wore.

He offered his hand. She grasped it, and he pulled as she leaned back against it, wedging her feet on the blacktop and stretching to her feet.