The Sugar Maple Chronicles Collection, page 1
part #1 of Sugar Maple Series
The Sugar Maple Chronicles
4 Book Collection
Barbara Bretton
Free Spirit Press
Contents
Casting Spells
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
Epilogue
BONUS MATERIAL - BARBARA BRETTON
BONUS MATERIAL - WENDY D. JOHNSON
BONUS MATERIAL - DAWN BROCCO
Laced With Magic
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
Epilogue
Note from Barbara
BONUS MATERIAL - NANCY HERKNESS
BONUS MATERIAL - FRAN BAKER
BONUS MATERIAL - CAROLINE LEAVITT
BONUS MATERIAL - CINDI MYERS
BONUS MATERIAL - RACHAEL HERRON
BONUS MATERIAL - MARY ANNE MOHANRAJ
Spun by Sorcery
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
Epilogue
BONUS MATERIAL - Barbara Bretton
BONUS MATERIAL - DAWN BROCCO
BONUS MATERIAL - GEORG HAWKS
BONUS MATERIAL - LAURA PHILLIPS
BONUS MATERIAL - KIM HELMICK
BONUS MATERIAL - RACHAEL HERRON
BONUS MATERIAL - TERRI DULONG
BONUS MATERIAL - CAROLINE LEAVITT
BONUS MATERIAL - JEAN BRASHEAR
BONUS MATERIAL - MAURA ANDERSON
Charmed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Spells & Stitches
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
Glossary
Who’s Who in Sugar Maple
BONUS MATERIAL - JEREMY BREDESON
BONUS MATERIAL - KALI AMANDA BROWNE
BONUS MATERIAL - ELIZABETH DELISI
BONUS MATERIAL - LISA SOUZA
BONUS MATERIAL - FRAN BAKER
BONUS MATERIAL - DUSTY MILLS
BONUS MATERIAL - DAWN BROCCO
BONUS MATERIAL - MONICA JINES
BONUS MATERIAL - RACHAEL HERRON
BONUS MATERIAL - JANET SPAETH
Enchanted - The Wedding Story (Book 5)
About the Author
Also by Barbara Bretton
Casting Spells
The Sugar Maple Chronicles - Book 1
Praise for Barbara Bretton
Praise for USA Today best-selling author Barbara Bretton
“Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”
— Chicago Sun-Times
“Soul warming... A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”
— Midwest Book Review
“[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”
— Booklist
“Honest, witty... absolutely unforgettable.”
— Rendezvous
“A classic adult fairy tale.”
— Affaire de Coeur
“Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”
— Rocky Mountain News
Copyright 2017 Barbara Bretton
All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews, may be reproduced in any form by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the author.
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 events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Created with Vellum
Chapter 1
CHLOE
Sugar Maple, Vermont
Do you ever wonder why things happen the way they do? All of those seemingly random decisions we make throughout our lives that turn out to be not so random after all. Maybe if I had closed the shop twenty minutes earlier that night or gone for a quick walk around Snow Lake, she might still be alive today.
But I didn’t and that choice changed our lives forever.
At the moment when it all began, I was down on my knees, muttering ancient curses under my breath as I tugged, pulled, and tried to convince five feet of knitted lace that it would be much happier stretched out to six plus.
If there were any magic spells out there to help a girl block a shawl I hadn’t found them, and believe me, I’d looked. Blocking, like life, was equal parts intuition, brute strength, and dumb luck.
(Just in case you were wondering, I usually don’t mention the dumb luck part when I give a workshop.)
That Monday night I was two hours into Blocking 101, teaching my favorite techniques to three yarn-crawling sisters from Pennsylvania, a teacher from New Jersey, and a retired rocket scientist from Florida. We had been expecting a busload of fiber fanatics from northern Maine, but a wicked early winter blizzard had stopped them somewhere west of Bangor. Two of my best friends from town, admitted knit shop groupies and world-class gossips, rounded out the class.
By the way, I’m Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & Strings, voted the number one knit shop in New England two years running. I don’t know exactly who did the voting, but I owe each of those wonderful knitters some quiviut and a margarita. Blog posts about the magical store in northern Vermont where your yarn never tangles, your sleeves always come out the same length, and you always, always get gauge were popping up on a daily basis, raising both my profile and my bottom line.
Sometimes I worried that this sudden, unexpected burst of fame and fortune had extended the tourist season beyond the town’s comfort zone. Hiding in plain sight was harder than it sounded, but for now our secret was still safe.
A blocking board was spread open on the floor. A d
Since blocking lace was pretty much my only cardio these days, when the wolf whistle sailed overhead, I didn’t bother to look up.
“Wow!” Janice Meany, owner of Cut & Curl across the street, murmured. “Those can’t be real.”
If I’d had any doubt about the wolf whistles, Janice’s statement erased it. Last I heard, not too many women were ordering 34As from their neighborhood cosmetic surgeon.
“Implants,” Lynette Pendragon declared in a voice that could be heard in the upper balcony of her family’s Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse. “Or a really good wizard.”
It was times like this when I wished I had inherited a tiny bit of magick from my mother. Just enough to render my indiscreet friend speechless for a second or two. Everyone in Sugar Maple knows we don’t talk about wizards in front of civilians unless the conversation includes Munchkins and Oz.
Fortunately our guests had other things on their minds. “I’m glad my Howie isn’t here,” one of the Pennsylvania sisters breathed. “She looks like Sharon Stone. Howie has a thing for Sharon Stone.”
“Sharon Stone fifteen years ago on a good day,” the New Jersey schoolteacher added. “A very good day.”
What can I say? I’m only a human. (And a nosy one at that.) I dumped the lace and glanced toward the front window.
Winter comes early to our part of Vermont. By the time the last of the leaf-peepers have headed down to the lesser glories of New York and Connecticut, we’re digging out our snowshoes and making sure our woodpiles are well stocked. In mid-December it’s dark and seriously cold by four thirty, and only the most intrepid window-shopping tourist would
ever consider strolling down Main Street without at least five layers of clothing.
The woman peering in at us was blond, tall, and around my age, but that was where the resemblance ended. I’m the kind of woman who could disappear into a crowd even if her hair was on fire. Our window shopper couldn’t disappear if she tried. Her movie-star-perfect face was pressed up against the frosty glass and we had a full-frontal glimpse of bare arms, bare shoulders, and cleavage that would send Pamela Anderson running back to her surgeon.
“Am I nuts or is she naked?” I asked no one in particular.
“I think she’s strapless,” Janice said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“It can’t be more than ten degrees out there,” one of the Pennsylvanians said, exchanging looks with her sisters. “She must be crazy.”
“Or drunk,” Lynette offered.
“I’ll bet she was mugged,” the rocket scientist volunteered. “I saw a weird-looking guy lurking down the block when I parked my car.”
I was tempted to tell her that the weird-looking guy was a half-asleep vampire named Buster on an ice cream run for his pregnant wife, but I figured that might not be good for business.
The possibly naked woman at the window tapped twice, mimed a shiver, then pointed toward the locked door, where the CLOSED sign was prominently displayed.
“Are you going to make her stand out there all night?” Janice asked. “Maybe she needs help.”
She definitely isn’t here for a new set of double points, I thought as I flipped the lock. Not that I profile my customers or anything, but I’d bet my favorite rosewoods that she had never cast on a stitch in her life and intended to keep it that way.
My second thought as she swirled past me into the shop was, Wow, she really is naked. It took a full second for me to realize that was an illusion created by a truly gifted dressmaker with access to spectacular yard goods.
My third thought--well, I didn’t actually have a third thought. I was still working on the second one when she smiled at me and somewhere out there a dentist counted his T-bills.
“I’m Chloe,” I said as I looked into her sea green eyes. Eyes like that usually came with magical powers (and more than a little bit of family history), but she had the vibe of the pure human about her. “I own the shop.”
“Suzanne Marsden.” She extended a perfectly manicured hand and I thought I caught a shiver of Scotch on her breath. “I think you might have saved my life.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I asked.
I’ve dealt with lots of life-or-death emergencies at Sticks & Strings, but most of them included dropped stitches and too many margaritas at our Wednesday Night Knit-Ins.
She laughed as Janice and Lynette exchanged meaningful looks I tried very hard to ignore.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t seat me early at the Inn. I thought I could flirt with the bartender until my boyfriend arrived but no such luck.”
It was probably the first time anyone had ever refused her anything, and she looked puzzled and annoyed in an amused kind of way.
“The Weavers can be a tad rigid,” I said, studiously avoiding eye contact with my townie friends, who knew exactly why the Weavers acted the way they did. “I promise you the food’s worth the aggravation.”
“I left my coat in the car so I could make a big sweeping Hollywood entrance, and now I not only can’t get into the damn restaurant, I locked myself out of my car and would probably have frozen to death out there if you hadn’t taken pity on me and opened your door.”
“Honey, you’re in Vermont,” Janice said. “You can’t go around like that up here. You’ll freeze your nipples off.”
“She said she has a coat,” I reminded Janice a tad sharply. As a general rule I find it best not to discuss politics, religion, or my customer’s nipples in the shop. “It’s locked in her car.”
“With my cell and my skis and my ice skates,” Suzanne said with a theatrical eye roll. “All I need is to use your phone so I can call Triple A.”
“Oh, don’t bother with them,” Lynette said with a wave of her hand. “They’ll take all night to get up here. My daughter Vonnie can have it open in a heartbeat.”
