Page 1 of Make Me Love You

Chapter One

It said something that the town of Hart’s Ridge, North Carolina, was named for the mountain peaks that encircled it like a halo rather than for the valley in which it was actually located. Maybe it said that the people of Hart’s Ridge were optimists, that they were always looking up. Then again, maybe they were always looking up because they knew the minute they turned their backs, the volatile mountain weather would bite them in the butt.

Emma Andrews leaned out the window of her Airstream-turned-food-truck, her gaze tracking the straight line down Main Street to where Hart Mountain loomed behind City Hall like a sentry. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, except a benign puffy white type here and there. Emma narrowed her eyes.

Yep. Definitely a bite-you-in-the-butt kind of day.

“Ain’t no point in staring out that window,” Cesar Martinez said, not bothering to look up from his book to verify the truth of his statement. “Nobody’s coming.”

Emma sighed. Only a month ago, she would have sold a couple hundred cups of coffee and twice that in burritos. Her Airstream was the last stop on Main Street before the road turned to ten miles of nothingness that stretched all the way to the chicken processing plant. The processing plant employed nearly a thousand workers, which meant every morning a couple hundred swung by on the way into work to pick up coffee and a breakfast burrito, and maybe a second burrito to save for lunch.

The processing plant that had, exactly one month ago, given formal notice to its thousand employees that it was consolidating its operations in Delaware. The North Carolina operations were shutting down. The law required sixty days’ notice, but now thirty days in, the plant was already nearly deserted. Workers who commuted in from other towns had no reason to come to Hart’s Ridge now—they weren’t going to make that drive just for Cesar’s burritos, even if they were the best burritos east of the Mississippi and north of Mexico. Some workers had probably left for Delaware. A good number lived in Hart’s Ridge, but who knew if they would stay? In a town of less than four thousand, there weren’t many jobs to go around.

All of which meant they’d had a grand total of six customers that morning.

Six. That wasn’t enough to cover her own wages, much less Cesar, her lone employee. Cesar was sixty-five and needed the job. And if she couldn’t cover herself and Cesar, then she definitely couldn’t cover her dad. He’d be home in four months—four months, good Lord—and who was going to hire him if not her? The good folks of Hart’s Ridge were not exactly lining up to hire themselves a convicted felon.

And what about—

No. She halted the doom train in its tracks before it could run away with her sanity, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth. It wouldn’t do her any good to go down that path. She needed solutions, not nausea.

“What are we going to do?” she said, as much to the universe as to Cesar.

Cesar leaned against the oak cabinet that stretched from floor to roof, folded his arms over his chest, and crossed one long leg over the other. “I figure you will come up with something.”

“Why in the heck would you figure that?” she demanded.

“Because that’s what you do. You make it work. Eight years ago, your life was a mess. Mom dead, dad in jail, no money. A house that needed upkeep and this trailer that had seen better days. You didn’t know how to cook, didn’t know how to get this thing running. Look at you now.”

Emma blinked. That was a pretty generous assessment of her life, and glossed over quite a bit of failure. College, for example. She hadn’t been able to keep up with classes and a job waitressing at Dreamer’s Cafe, which she’d needed to pay the mortgage and basic necessities like food and soap. She’d flunked her classes before dropping out altogether—to the surprise of absolutely no one. As for fixing up the Airstream, yeah, she had done that, with Cesar’s help and a lot of internet tutorials. It was honestly amazing what was on the internet these days.

“You made it work. Though,” he amended, “you still can’t cook.”

“I can cook,” she protested.

“You can follow instructions. There’s a difference.”

Considering that her cooking consisted of tortillas, scrambled eggs, sauteed vegetables, and heating beans that Cesar had worked some magic on the night prior, she had to admit he had a point. Cesar was responsible for everything that tasted good. When she’d first come up with this hare-brained idea, born of sheer desperation, she’d provided the Airstream—a relic from her family’s happier life before her mom’s cancer diagnosis—and he’d provided the skills. They made a good team.

“Well, I haven’t come up with anything,” she grumped. “What am I supposed to do, chain myself to the plant until they agree to stay?”

Cesar shrugged, completely unconcerned, as though both their livelihoods weren’t at stake. “You’ll think of something.”

Emma slapped a dishrag against the counter and then did it again twice more, for good measure. She felt helpless. She couldn’t even clean anything—her go-to for stress relief—because without customers, the place was already spotless.

“So, what, if I don’t come up with something, the town is just going to fall down around our ears? The processing plant was the biggest employer in Hart’s Ridge. Small towns die when they lose income like that.”

“Yeah, yeah, go tell the mayor,” Cesar said drily.

The mayor.

Someone who could actually do something. Supposedly. And even if he couldn’t, it would make Emma feel better to yell at someone.

“I will tell the mayor. See if I won’t.” She untied her apron and hung it on its hook. Underneath she wore a plain white T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed sneakers that had more than one hole. Her mom would have told her to wear a nice dress if she was going to yell at someone important, but her mom wasn’t here to stop her. Cesar just shook his head. He was used to her by now. “You good here without me?”

Cesar made a big deal about looking left and looking right. “But what about all the customers?”

“Shut up,” she growled, already halfway out the door.

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