The Return
Second Chance Flower Shop, Book One
Noelle Adams
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About The Return
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Epilogue
Excerpt from The Rebound
About Noelle Adams
About The Return
RIA PHILLIPS HAS A plan. Stay strong. Stay busy. Stay focused on what's important. And don't start daydreaming again about a certain pair of soulful brown eyes.
No, it won't be easy. Jacob Worth was her first love. Her first time. Her first everything. Until he left town one day without explanation. He broke her heart back then, but she's not a teenager with a crush anymore. She's an adult—with a plan.
In the past eight years, Ria has built a good life for herself in her small hometown. She and her friends have used their creativity and business savvy to turn the little florist shop she inherited into an astonishing success. She's got more than enough in her life to be proud of, and she's going to make sure Jacob sees that.
She's not going to let him rattle her. She's not going to watch him from afar, even if he's even hotter than before. And she's definitely not going to fall into bed with him. Or, if she accidentally slips up, it will only be once.
She learned her lesson a long time ago, and she's not going to fall for Jacob again.
One
FOR THE PAST EIGHT years, Ria Phillips had been the object of her hometown’s tragic love story, a tale told over and over again with increasingly dramatic (and inaccurate) detail.
She knew people in Azalea, Virginia, still gossiped about it. They mentioned the story as requisite background when referencing either the Phillips family or the Worths. She saw kind sympathy behind the smiles of her parents’ friends when they asked about her continued single status, as if they assumed her heart hadn’t yet healed, eight whole years after it had been broken. Acquaintances were always trying to set her up with any available male they encountered in a hundred-mile radius.
And Ria was over it.
Over it.
Jacob Worth had broken her heart eight years ago, packing up and leaving town the morning after the first time they’d had sex. She’d been eighteen, and they’d been dating for two years. It had been her first time. She’d thought it was love. She’d believed he’d felt the way she had.
She’d been wrong. She’d been stupid. She’d been utterly crushed, and it had taken a long time before she’d gotten over it.
But she wasn’t so spineless that she’d still be broken so many years later. Jacob hadn’t been back to Azalea since. Not even once. Not even when his grandfather and only living relative had a heart attack six months ago and almost died.
Jacob had left her behind, just like he’d left everything else. He’d given her a flimsy explanation, but it wasn’t good enough. All she’d believed was sweet and gentle inside him had clearly been a cover for selfishness. She didn’t want him anymore. She didn’t want anything to do with him.
And she really wished her town would believe her when she said so.
On a Thursday morning in May, she was stewing over yet another conversation about Jacob. One of the old ladies who hung out at the laundromat—not to actually do their laundry, since most of them had machines at home, but to use it as the best vantage point for the three blocks of downtown Azalea—had called Ria over as she was walking home for lunch from the flower shop yesterday. The lady Ria had known all her life as Mrs. Mildred had asked her how she was doing and then sympathetically told her she’d find someone eventually. To not give up hope.
Ria had been hard-pressed not to growl in response.
She was fine. Better than fine. She was really good. Twenty-six. Healthy. Relatively attractive. She had a tight circle of friends and a thriving business that was starting to earn her good money. She went out with guys as regularly as was possible in a town as small as Azalea.
She didn’t need a man right now.
She didn’t need to recover from a heartbreak she’d already recovered from.
And she didn’t need anyone to still believe she was hung up on Jacob Worth.
“Hey, Ria, can you— What’s the matter?” Madeline had been talking as she walked into the back room of the shop, but she jerked to a stop in obvious concern.
“Nothing.” Ria smiled at Madeline, who’d been one of her best friends since Madeline had moved to town in the eighth grade. “I’m good.”
“You don’t look good. You look like you’re beating those flowers into submission.” Madeline was pretty in a quiet, curvy way with ash-blond hair and gray eyes. She projected a very serious presence that Ria knew from long experience wasn’t entirely true to her dry, clever character. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing. Just stewing about Mrs. Mildred yesterday. I know it shouldn’t bother me so much, but it does.”
“Of course it does. No one likes to be pitied—particularly when they have nothing to be pitied about. Unfortunately, King Asshole has been irretrievably branded into your identity for a lot of people in town. Even if you fall in love and get married, they’ll still probably talk about how you bravely overcame your heartbreak to make a new life with someone else.”
Ria groaned and slumped onto a nearby stool. “Maybe I should do something wild and crazy just so they’ll have something else to talk about.”
“Wouldn’t work. They’d just blame it on your tragic history. Jacob Worth demons still flagging your steps and all that. It sucks. It really does. But you can live with it or you can move somewhere else.”
“I’m not going to move.”
“I know that.” Madeline quirked her lips briefly in
