Ember Read online

  Ember

  Emma Renshaw

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Bonus Scene

  Enjoy This Book?

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Emma Renshaw

  Connect with Emma

  About Emma Renshaw

  Ember

  Copyright © 2020 by Emma Renshaw, Just Read Books, LLC. 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.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Editor: Susan Barnes

  Copy Editor: Stephanie Marshall Ward

  Proofreading: Julie Deaton, Janice Owen, Carisa Carico

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Cover Photography: Wander Aguiar

  Cover Models: Kerry and Sam

  Paperback Formatting: Stacey Blake, Champagne Designs

  Visit my website: www.emmarenshaw.com

  Created with Vellum

  For the Texas Rangers. It doesn’t matter if y’all are above or below .500; I will always love watching y’all play on summer nights under stadium lights.

  And, as always, for my husband. There’s no one else I’d rather enjoy a baseball game with. I hope our life has endless extra innings and the game never ends. I love you forever.

  “Baseball has a way of ripping your heart out, stabbing it, putting it back in your chest, then healing itself just in time for Spring Training.” — Noah Syndergaard, All-Star pitcher

  Prologue

  Gunner—10 Years Ago

  Fire crackled and hissed over the tower of burning logs. Sparks jumped from the flames and floated to the ground, singeing the dry grass. It hadn’t rained a drop in over a month. I tilted the neck of the amber beer bottle toward my lips and let the cool liquid wash down my throat.

  “On the count of three,” Marissa shouted, raising her maroon cap in the air.

  We’d walked across the graduation stage only hours earlier, and the weird combination of nostalgia and power was taking over my now ex-classmates. A group of girls to my left stood with their arms around each other and silent tears tracking down their faces. On my right was a mixture of guys and girls, but they weren’t shedding tears and they weren’t reminiscing. They were foaming at the mouth, with their graduation caps clenched in their hands, ready for the three count.

  “One,” everyone shouted at the same time.

  “Two!”

  “Three!”

  I flicked my itchy polyester graduation cap toward the flames along with everyone else. The fire hungrily grabbed the hats that landed on the bonfire. A few caps fell short and littered the ground around the towering Jenga-like structure that I’d helped build with some of the guys.

  “Are you packed?” Declan bumped my shoulder with his beer bottle.

  I tugged at the chain around my neck and shrugged. Tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting for and dreaming about since I played T-ball. Declan had been waiting for this day too. We’d been talking about it for as long as I could remember, and it was happening tomorrow night. We weren’t heading off to college like our classmates. We were taking a completely different path.

  “Mostly. My mom had my suit pressed at the dry cleaners. We’re picking it up in the morning on the way to the airport. You?”

  “Brother, I’ve been packed for days. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight. I’m ready to go and leave all this shit behind. Except Makenna. I can’t believe we’re going to be on different teams. It’ll be weird crouching behind home plate and not being able to see your ugly mug in the outfield.”

  “You don’t know that we won’t be on the same team.” I scratched the label on the bottle with my thumb and turned my attention toward the flames. They were jetting out of some of the holes in the bonfire. It was twice my height. We’d used ladders to build it and kept stacking until it started swaying.

  “I know we’re both going first round.”

  “No, you don’t.” I pulled at the chain around my neck again.

  “Yeah, I do. Who the fuck wouldn’t want us? We’re going first round. I’ve been practicing the face I’ll make when my name is called.”

  “I just want my name to be called,” I muttered and took a long swallow of beer.

  “It will be.” Declan pushed my shoulder. “Check it out. Which do you think is best?”

  I turned toward him and tucked a hand into my pocket while raising an eyebrow. He rubbed his hands in front of him and tilted his face toward the ground, sucking in a deep breath, preparing himself. Just before he spoke he whipped his head around, staring across the field past the bonfire. I followed his gaze, spotting Makenna, Declan’s longtime girlfriend. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, shooting him a smile. He winked and placed a hand over his heart. I snorted. “I don’t know how she puts up with you.”

  “Yeah, I’m definitely playing out of my league with her,” he said and turned his attention back toward me. The corner of his lip twitched before he whispered, “Call out my name.”

  “Kinky.” I laughed.

  “Shut the fuck up. You wish you could get someone as sexy as me. Just say my name.”

  “Declan Young,” I said dryly.

  Declan looked up. “With a little more enthusiasm.”

  “Declan Young.”

  Declan’s head popped up, and he put his hand over his heart and looked around, turning his head from left to right. His mouth dropped open and his eyes were wide.

  “How was that?” he asked. “It’s a little over the top, but if the cameras are on me, I really want to sell it.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said, chuckling and shoving his shoulder as I shook my head. “You look like an ass.”

  “It’ll be better than you.” His eyebrows drew in and he mocked a serious scowl. I punched his arm and laughed. The weight that’d been hanging around my neck all day disappeared. He’d always been able to do this, bring me out of whatever funk I was in.

  After my dad died, I thought I would never laugh again, but Declan, my best fr
iend since before we could talk, kept making an ass out of himself until I did.

  “Thanks, brother.”

  “Cradle to grave,” he said, holding out his fist for a bump.

  “Sandbox to the pine box.”

  “Home plate to center field,” he finished. I clinked my beer against his and turned back to the fire, taking in the scene around me. It was surreal to have two paths in front of me. The MLB draft or college. If my name was called tomorrow, I’d sign the contract, no matter what team had chosen me, but if it wasn’t, I’d keep my commitment to Louisiana State University.

  Declan was the same. We were both committed to LSU if neither of us was drafted.

  Logs shifted on the bonfire pile, causing the fire to roar even higher in the sky. Shitty graduation caps were still holding it together in the flames, charring along the edges and slowly burning toward the center.

  A loud crack snapped through the air, and a girl screamed. I looked at the bonfire. A branch had snapped under the weight of the others. The crowd hushed. And for a moment the only noises in the field were the country song playing through the speakers and the fire snapping harshly in a slight breeze.

  For just a moment time stood still as every pair of eyes focused on the same thing. I broke eye contact with the bonfire and looked at Declan. His face turned toward mine, and confusion was replaced by shock.

  And then my world became searing pain at the top of my head and intense and suffocating heat burning my skin and lungs. Weight crashed down on top of me, but my vision was too blurry to see—before my entire world went black.

  “He’s barely breathing,” a harsh voice said, breaking me from my sleep. Fingertips were pressed against my neck, and solid weight was on top of me. Heat was still scalding me on all sides. “We have to remove the body from on top of him.”

  My eyes slowly opened and settled on the burned face of my best friend. My brother. The single person I trusted most in this world. His face was almost beyond recognition, but I’d spent enough of my life next to him that I would have recognized him anywhere. My mind couldn’t focus on the pain or the tiny piece of my brain that was alerting me that our skin was burned and stuck together. The only thing I could focus on was his eyes. His blank blue gaze was on me, but his eyes were unmoving.

  1

  Gunner

  I ran my hand over the top of the cool concrete headstone, a little roughened from age, and brushed away a few fallen leaves. Declan’s lifeless blue eyes swarmed my mind. I shook my head to clear it and crouched in front of the grave. The grass was thick with brown, dry patches.

  DECLAN YOUNG was inscribed in thick letters across the top of the slab. A baseball was engraved underneath his name, and below was the epitaph beloved son and friend.

  He had been so much more than that.

  And yet this was my first time visiting his grave since his funeral. It had taken ten years for me to sit here and stare at his name etched into concrete and know that my best friend was six feet beneath me. If only my back hadn’t been turned. If only I had moved out of the way of the branch, we both could’ve been here. And if one of us had to go, it should’ve been me. He was better.

  He was still with me though. Every time I took the field and stuck my hand in my smooth leather glove, he was with me. I hit my first Major League homer, in my first at-bat, on Declan’s death anniversary. That was all him, creating some magic with the baseball gods, and I fucking knew it. It took everything in me not to round those bases crying like a damn baby. After I touched home plate, I jogged down the steps to the dugout and walked into the tunnel to slow my breathing before I had a panic attack on national television.

  Declan was never far away, even ten years later.

  And yet I could barely force myself to set foot in our hometown, and I hadn’t been able to face his grave. I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for my mother asking me to come home. I hated this place.

  I took a deep shuddering breath, hitting the glove in my hand against my thigh as I let my eyes wander to the horizon. An acorn fell from the tree branches above me and plinked against my head. I laughed.

  “Alright, man. I get it. It took me too long to get here.”

  I took the ball out of the glove and tossed it up before snatching it out of the air and holding it between my fingers. I smirked.

  “Know what this is?”

  I knew the headstone wouldn’t reply, but I still waited a second before answering my own question.

  “A signed ball from Pudge Rodriguez. I met him this summer at the All-Star game. It was like I was a kid again, stumbling over my words and asking for an autograph. I got this for you. You should’ve been there though.”

  I turned the ball toward the marker to show the inscription.

  Declan,

  Play Ball!

  Pudge Rodriguez.

  “And this is the glove I used this season.” I ran my finger over Declan’s name and number, which I’d had stamped into every single one of my gloves. “I can’t believe I’m a man without a team. I also can’t believe I’m home. I don’t know how Mom convinced me, but she did.”

  I placed the ball back in the glove and set it down on the edge of the headstone. “I’ll be by more often, brother. I’ll check in on your mom. She stopped taking my calls years ago, but I swear I’ll make it right. I’ll watch out for her while I’m here and make sure she’s doing okay.”

  Phantom pains hit my scarred arm every time I focused on Declan. I folded my fingers into a fist, ignoring the pain as I stood, placing my hand on top of the headstone.

  “From cradle to grave. Sandbox to pine box.”

  My chest clenched and my throat tightened. Anger bubbled to the surface. He’d reached those way too soon, and it should’ve been me. Guilt seeped from every pore as I choked out the last part.

  “Home plate to center field. Always, brother.”

  A breeze ruffled the leaves on the tree shading Declan’s resting place and gently brushed against me.

  There wasn’t much in Hawk Valley. One movie theater that got the latest flicks about a month after the rest of the world. One grocery store and a Main Street filled with mom-and-pop shops. The old town hadn’t changed too much since I’d been gone, but someone had built an inn out on the eastern bluff.

  My choices were the old motel at the edge of town, which hadn’t seen a good day since the fifties; my mom’s tiny one-bedroom house, which she’d bought after watching a special about tiny houses, and after video chatting with her I wasn’t even sure my six-foot-five frame would fit inside; or a cabin at the new inn.

  The decision was easy.

  I pulled onto the black asphalt drive and followed the curving road up the hill. The sun was casting its last few minutes of light over the town and the surrounding areas as the moon made an early appearance in the sky. A white wooden sign hung from a post, at the edge of the clearing, at the very top of the hill. The scripted letters Castle Rock Inn were in a deep forest green and beneath that, in smaller black letters, was “where our family becomes yours.”

  I groaned. The seedy motel might’ve been the better option. I wanted to keep my head down while I was here, and I just needed a damn place to stay. I wasn’t going to sit around their breakfast table and then go bird-watching with them.

  I ran a hand through my hair and tugged on the ends, slowing my truck to a crawl as I swept my gaze over the space. There was a gazebo near the edge, overlooking the town and the lake below. A dirt path led into the woods with a post holding multiple signs at the trailhead.

  Beginners Hike.

  Cedar Springs.

  And sure enough: Bird-watching.

  I blew out a breath and continued my perusal. It was a nice property, but I sure as fuck wasn’t a bed-and-breakfast type of guy. It wasn’t until I spotted a makeshift baseball diamond at the far corner of the clearing that I decided to stay.

  I swung into a spot and hopped out of my truck, keeping my eye on the field as a little kid sto
od in the batter’s box and pointed his metal bat toward the sky. His mom tossed the ball, but it hit the dirt about two feet in front of the kid. He turned toward her, the end of the bat touching the ground and his hand on the knob.

  Their voices carried easily over the open space. “How am I supposed to launch a rocket if you don’t throw me a strike?”

  I smothered my laugh with my hand. “Just throw it back,” the mom called.

  I watched her pitch one more, this one sailing right over the center of the plate. It was the perfect sweet spot, and the little kid took advantage. Thwack! His bat connected with the center of the ball and sent it sailing to the outfield as he raced around the bases. This place just might be alright.

  I opened the back door of my truck and took out my bag before heading inside to check-in.

  The large porch creaked beneath my shoes, and thuds echoed in the empty space. Warm light greeted me from the windowpanes in the door before I opened it. A deep groan escaped past my lips when I walked in. Something sweet with a hint of cinnamon was filling the air. My mouth watered, and I wanted to trail the scent until I found the source.

  “Hey there.” A woman rounded the corner with a platter in her hands. My stomach grumbled loudly enough for her to hear. She chuckled, the laugh lines on her cheeks deepening. Her dark hair, with a few strands of gray, was swept back from her face and held together by a clip at the back of her head. I immediately knew she must’ve been the one to come up with the family slogan on the side. She looked like the mother that would wrap up all the neighborhood kids in a hug and feed them before sending them back out on their bikes. And, in that way, she reminded me of my mom. “Want one?” She held out the plate of cookies.