 by Lucy Lennox.jpg)
Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 62643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 251(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
When your turkey-thieving, town-abandoning, former childhood friend reappears in Licking Thicket after fifteen long years, looking like a snack and smelling like all your favorite treats put together, it might be tempting to, well, dig in.
Don’t.
And when your plan to teach the man a lesson goes spectacularly awry, becoming less of a wattle-wearing walk of shame around the Thicket’s Thanksgiving festival and more of a sexy turkey-twerk in a skin-tight bird costume featuring the hottest pair of drumsticks the town’s ever seen, you might think it’s time to get over your feud and, well, take a bite.
Resist.
But when Charlton Nutter finally shows you the sweet, pure heart he’s hiding under all his fine, big-city feathers, and you realize, thanks to the town’s meddling matchmakers, that the man is hungry for the kind of love and belonging that only the Thicket can provide, you might decide that both of you have been acting like a pair of turkeys, and in that case you should…
Gobble. Him. Up.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter One
CHARLTON
They say “you can never go home again.” Unfortunately, I was learning this was not true. Notably, I felt the concept should be corrected to “you should never go home again”… especially if “home” was a tiny speck of southern-fried lunacy somewhere in north-middling Tennessee.
I stared out the front window of the town car at the sign flapping in the breeze above Walnut Street and stifled a groan.
It’s Stuffin’ Time! the sign proudly proclaimed in bright orange paint, though it was unclear whether this was a threat or a promise. How many Thicketeers’ goodies can YOU fit in your pie hole this Thanksgiving? Stuff your neighbors and get stuffed in return this Wednesday morning. All are welcome! The more the merrier! At the bottom, a dancing parade of red, brown, and orange handprint turkeys looked way too much like people raising their hands to volunteer as tribute.
“Whoa. So, ah… this is your hometown, huh?” my driver asked. He’d been silent and professional from the moment he’d picked me up at the airport in Nashville, but it was clear his professionalism was no match for the tsunami-level force of the Thicket’s pun-tastic holiday cheer.
One could hardly blame him.
“I’m from Chicago,” I corrected, silently adding “now” to the end of my statement and telling myself it wasn’t a lie. “I have family here, but I haven’t visited in years.”
“Right,” he agreed, still staring at the sign like the double entendres might disappear if he looked hard enough. More fool him—nothing much changed in this town, ever, and the puns were eternal. “It’s, ah… it’s real different here, huh?”
I snorted. Understatement.
Licking Thicket—the actual, believe-it-or-not, on-the-map name of the town where I’d grown up—was considered by most folks in the area to have a sort of “rustic charm.” A lovely place to live, they said. A welcoming and safe place to raise a family. A fine locale for any human with an affinity for rich soil and hearty livestock. A haven for those who enjoyed seasonal festivals, zany local rituals, and terrible double entendres.
And this was true.
But for those of us who’d had the good sense to leave the place, the Thicket was more rustic than charming and held way too many embarrassing memories to ever be comfortable.
It was not, for example, a place where a man’s colorful polos and tasteful but quirky business socks had ever earned him any sort of respect or deference.
Not a place where a gay man could hope to find romance since it was probably the world’s only Grindr dead zone.
Definitely not a place where a man could hope to find a decent espresso, let alone an iced, skinny salted-caramel oat milk latte (no whip), either, since the town boasted more dairy cows than humans.
And it was most certainly not a place where people appreciated a heroic (if somewhat misguided) rescue carried out to avert a senseless tragedy.
“Never been out this way,” the driver went on. His eyes pinged from side to side as we made our way up the main drag, while I firmly kept my gaze on my phone, but I knew without looking exactly what he was seeing: the ancient “community center,” a renovated barn where all the most important Thicket gatherings had been held since the dawn of time; the Feed and Seed with its 1950s vibe; the Thicket Tavern, which was a throwback to the 1970s; the high school with its Fighting Bovines logo that I’d thought was so impressive when I was a child and so scornfully silly once I’d left town for St. Killian’s Prep.
“Pretty cool that your town has a bakery that does gluten-free, though,” he said cheerfully. “My girlfriend would kill to find a gluten-free place near us. And the Wisteria Cafe says you can ‘support local schools with every sip.’ What’s that about?”