Love Like Ours (A Porter Family Novel Book #3) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Becky Wade

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207 pages

English

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2016 RITA Award FinalistFormer Marine Jake Porter has far deeper scars than the one that marks his face. He struggles with symptoms of PTSD, lives a solitary life, and avoids relationships.When Lyndie James, Jake's childhood best friend, lands back in Holley, Texas, Jake cautiously hires her to exercise his Thoroughbreds. Lyndie is tender-hearted, fiercely determined, and afraid of nothing, just like she was as a child. Jake pairs her with Silver Leaf, a horse full of promise but lacking in results, hoping she can solve the mystery of the stallion's reluctance to run.Though Jake and Lyndie have grown into very different adults, the bond that existed during their childhood still ties them together. Against Jake's will, Lyndie's sparkling, optimistic personality begins to tear down the walls he's built around his heart. A glimmer of the hope he'd thought he'd lost returns, but fears and regrets still plague him. Will Jake ever be able to love Lyndie like she deserves, or is his heart too shattered to mend?Praise for Becky Wade"I wasn't ready for this story to end, but when it did, I sighed the happy/longing sort of sigh that romance readers know so well..."--USA Today on Undeniably Yours"They are a couple you'll be rooting for to have their Texas fairy-tale ending."--Romantic Times on Undeniably Yours"I adored this book. It was hilariously funny, heartwarming, and too cute! I laughed. I cried. It made me smile countless times."--Will Bake for Books blog on Meant to Be Mine

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Romance

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	28 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441269454
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0202€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2015 by Rebecca Wade
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2015
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—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6945-4
Scripture quotations are 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
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the aut hor’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Jennifer Parker
Cover photography by Mike Habermann Photography, LLC
For Linda Kruger, my literary agent
You’re an amazing supporter of my work, my ally in business, and the one I count on to give me wise feedback on each and every novel. Thank you! I’m very fortunate to have you on my team and even more fortunate to have you as my friend.

Special thanks to Kari, Aaron, Lily, and Claire for sharing your family’s story with me. Your family inspired Lyndie’s family. And your story inspired me personally. God bless you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Questions for Conversation
About the Author
Books by Becky Wade
Back Ads
Back Cover
Prologue
T welve-year-old Jake Porter never felt a hundred percent right unless Lyndie James was beside him.
She was his sidekick. Or maybe he was hers. She was the one with the flair and the imagination. He was the one with the even temper and the sense.
They were a pair.
Jake stood at the edge of the pond, watching Lyndie try to skip a stone. Without bouncing even once, her rock dropped straight into the afternoon sunshine sparkling on the top of the water. Another dud. Her fifth dud in a row.
“Well, shoot,” Lyndie muttered. Standing halfway up to her knees in the pond, she bent over to look for another rock.
“Hold still. I’ll get one for you.” He didn’t want her cutting her foot on a piece of glass or a sharp stone. Jake put his boots on just about as soon as he got up in the mornings. But Lyndie only wore shoes when her mom made her. He sort of wished her mom made her more often.
He handed her the two smoothest, flattest rocks he could find. Lyndie was ten. For a girl who could do almost anything else, she was getting kind of old not to be able to skip a stone.
Jake’s brother Ty approached them. “Still can’t skip one, Lyndie?” He grabbed a rock and showed her how to use her wrist. “Like this. See?”
Jake frowned at his brother, irritated. Ty was only fifteen months older than Jake, but he acted like he knew everything. It annoyed Jake, sometimes, to be the youngest of the three Porter brothers. He was only older than his sister, Dru, which didn’t even count. She was just two years old.
Ty sent his rock flying and it bounced off the water four times, leaving circles. Ty had always loved for people to watch him do stuff, so he picked up another rock and did it all over again. “See that?”
“Lyndie doesn’t need your help.” Jake had already shown her how to skip a rock lots of times. “She just needs practice.”
Ty looked at Lyndie and lifted one eyebrow. “I skipped one twenty times once.”
Lyndie’s eyes rounded.
Anger shot though Jake. “No, you didn’t. The most I’ve ever seen you do is six.”
“That one time, at the Millers’ house?”
“No.”
Ty shrugged and pushed sweat off his forehead with his wrist. “I’m getting hot.”
Now that the spring weather had turned warm, the Porter brothers and Lyndie spent their weekends riding horses, exploring, and seeing what kind of orneriness they could get themselves into when their parents weren’t paying attention.
“I’m going to jump in,” Ty said.
“You’re not supposed to,” Jake warned.
“Who said?”
“Dad.”
“Nah. I don’t remember that.”
Ty definitely remembered. Their dad had told them more than once that they weren’t supposed to swim in the pond without permission or without an adult around.
Jake looked toward their older brother Bo, who was sitting against the trunk of a nearby tree reading a book about horses. Bo was sixteen. Their mom had made him come along to keep an eye on the rest of them.
Jake cleared his throat. When Bo lifted his head at the sound, Jake pointed in Ty’s direction. Ty had already started climbing the hill that curved around the side of the pond.
Bo rose in one smooth motion, his book dropping to the side. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going swimming.” Ty pulled off his T-shirt.
Bo started toward him. “No you’re not.”
Jake gave Lyndie a small smile. Tattling on Ty made having Ty for a brother a lot more fun.
Lyndie smiled at him in answer, her brown eyes dancing. A few pieces of long, white-blond hair blew in front of her face. She reached back, grabbed all of her wavy, windblown hair, and brought it over one shoulder. She wore a shirt with a faded picture of a dog on the front and jeans she’d cut off herself to make shorts. Both of her thin knees had Band-Aids on them.
“Ty!” Bo broke into a run. “Don’t you jump in.”
Ty yanked free his boots. “Of course I’m gonna jump in, Bo. Rolling in or crawling in would take too long.”
Bo didn’t have a chance of making it to Ty in time to stop him. Jake reached for Lyndie’s hand and led her carefully from the water.
Two seconds later, Ty did a running cannonball off the hill. He hit the surface with a loud ker- splash .
Bo groaned and stuck his hands on his hips.
Ty came up smiling and laughing. He whooped and used both hands to send water high into the air.
One edge of Lyndie’s lips tipped upward. “ Now how am I supposed to learn to skip rocks?”
“You could go ahead and skip them right into his head,” Jake suggested.
Lyndie laughed.
The sound made Jake’s heart turn big and warm.
Bo and Ty started arguing about whether Ty should get out of the water now or later. Lyndie watched them with her arms crossed and Jake watched Lyndie.
He’d known her always. Their moms were best friends. Lyndie had a younger sister named Mollie with cerebral palsy, and since Mollie couldn’t play with Lyndie, Lyndie spent a lot of time at their house playing with them. Playing with him was a better way to put it.
He’d heard Lyndie’s mom say that Lyndie trailed along behind the Porter boys. But Jake had never let her trail. He’d always stayed beside her. And he’d never minded.
He had friends at school his own age, but he didn’t feel the same way about them that he did about Lyndie. He was a normal kid, but Lyndie? Lyndie was more than that. She could draw amazing pictures. She loved animals even more than he did. She was the bravest girl in Holley, Texas. And she had a really good imagination. Almost every day, she talked him into going on made-up adventures with her.
She was his favorite person.
“Did you hear that, Jake?” She stilled and turned one ear up.
“What?”
She looked hard into the area beneath a group of trees. “It sounds like chirping. Like a . . . a little bird.”
Together, they moved toward the sound. Off to one side, a shrub shook, and beneath it, a black cat paused to watch them. It had something in its mouth. Before Jake could take a step in its direction, it dashed off like a streak of black chalk.
Lyndie followed the chirping and located a baby chick covered in fluffy gray and yellow feathers. A swipe of blood marked its chest.
“Oh no,” Lyndie whispered, kneeling beside it. “Hi, little one. Okay. Don’t be worried. Did the cat get your nest? Hi.”
Jake dropped onto his knees. The chick’s mother had made a ground nest of mud, grass, and sticks but the chick had spilled out of it onto the dirt. If the rest of the chick’s family had been here earlier, they were all gone now.
Lyndie and Jake lived outdoors more than they lived in. They both knew they ought to leave a baby bird alone. This baby looked weak and injured, though, and Jake already knew what Lyndie was going to want to do. For years the two of them had been able to communicate without words, like two halves of a circle.
“He’s hurt,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to pick him up and take him to the house. If I don’t, that cat will come back for him.”
“What are you going to do with him once you get him home?”
“Mollie will help him feel better.”
Jake didn’t see how.
“And then my mom will take him to the wildlife center,” she said.
“You think your mom will take another animal to the center?” This wasn’t even close to Lyndie’s first rescue.
“She will when she sees him.” She scooped the chick into her palm. “Oh, little guy. Don’t worry. I’ve got you.” Then she pulled up the bottom of her T-shirt and used it like a hammock to carry the chick. She ran toward the horses, her legs moving fast.
Lyndie had more ideas than anyone he’d ever met. Some of them were pretty close to crazy, but when she got an idea in her head, she also got real determined about that idea. He’d learned that a