Being With Beau: Southern Gothic, #1

By M. L. Bullock

Beautiful and intelligent, Harper has a major flaw--she's a chronic liar. After the death of her military father and an unexpected move back to rural Alabama with her distant mother, Harper deals with her emotions as best she can but finds the loneliness overwhelming. During a walk down a quiet country road, she meets a boy who slowly steals her heart. But Beau is shrouded in mystery. Harper suspects that there's something unusual about the boy she's falling in love with. Will discovering the truth about Beau cause her to lose him forever?

 

Being With Beau is the first novella in M.L. Bullock's Southen Gothic series. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.L. Bullock
• Release date: Aug 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201732127

M. L. Bullock

M. L. Bullock is the bestselling author of the Seven Sisters series. Born in Antigua, British West Indies, she has had a lifelong love affair with haunted houses, lonesome beaches, and forgotten places. She currently lives on the Gulf Coast and regularly haunts her favorite hangout, Dauphin Island. A visit to Historic Oakleigh House in Mobile, Alabama, inspired her successful supernatural suspense series Seven Sisters. For more information, visit mlbullock.com.

Book preview

Dedication

For Carolann, who always supported me, even when I was not sure who I was or what I was doing. I miss you every day.

Prologue

Walking down the sandy lane again, I can hardly believe it was sixty years ago that I last saw him. Some days I wake up and almost convince myself that it was just a dream. A sweet, honey-hued dream, the kind you only experience once in your life—if you’re lucky. Sometimes I think maybe it was only the imagination of a lonely, sad girl, but my heart tells me I’m wrong. I did feel his breath on my cheek, smelled the sweet smell of sunshine in his hair and on his skin. We did dive into Turtle Creek together, climb out laughing and then bake ourselves in the sun on the warm sand to dry off. We shared those moments, and yet I cannot explain why or how it happened.

I pat the head of my granddaughter who walks beside me. Only six, she cannot know how important this pilgrimage is to me—what my return to Semmes, Alabama, means. How I longed to see the old farm, to find and follow the path in the woods to the hollow where we used to meet! Now here I am, and the moment is bittersweet. As the sweet child beside me chatters away about a friendly yellow butterfly who decided to kiss her arm before it flew away, I smile. This is real life. Aster beside me, bouncing down the lane determined to fly like a butterfly. Yes, this is real, but wasn’t he real too?

I cannot release him. Not yet. I’m tied to him. Like all first loves, we are tied together with an invisible silver thread that neither time nor distance can break. I may never see him again or feel the strength of his arms, but I must go as I promised. I wonder what I shall find beyond the curve in the road.  Will I find him standing there smiling, his hands in his overall pockets? Will he step out of the woods as he had done so many times in my dreams of late? Perhaps I will find him in sitting on the rock, the place where we spent all those lazy summer Alabama afternoons.

I do not know, but onward we go...

Chapter One

I kicked my feet in the sand as I walked down the road to Aunt Kissy’s house. The sand felt cool on my skin, and it comforted me. Most of the back roads in Alabama were thick, red clay, but a few forgotten old trails like this one were nice and sandy. I loved the way the path curved, always obscuring what was just ahead so it seemed like a mystery. Even at night, I loved looking down the path from the safety of my room, which I shared with my late grandmother’s old sewing machine and collection of dusty fabrics. I would daydream about what might be just beyond the house. Maybe a castle filled with magical beings, or perhaps a mysterious door that would appear only at night. On a clear evening, the soft, sandy pathway gleamed white in the moonlight. Many nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d stare out the window until I was convinced the shadows moved. Then I’d run back to bed, carefully leaping the last yard to avoid whatever was underneath it.

Along the sides of the path were tall pine trees that grew as straight and rigid as my grandfather. As I walked the half mile of McCrory Road, I paused occasionally. I could hear animals that wanted to stay hidden moving in the dense shrubs that lay parallel to the path. On some walks, I would hear a tree crack or a branch snap—a sure sign that living things were in the woods with me. Beyond the occasional startled brown rabbit, lethargic black snake or belligerent squirrel, I didn’t see much. But I still looked every trip.

Yesterday was my birthday—I turned thirteen, but I’d been telling everyone who didn’t know me that I was fourteen. What a shameful age—I hated being thirteen! Not quite old enough to wear Candies Lip Gloss, but too old to watch cartoons on Saturdays. Momma caught me lying about my age to the lady at the Greer’s and corrected me in public, but it didn’t faze me. That wasn’t going to stop my tale-telling—I had told too many lies to quit now. On the way home from the supermarket that afternoon, Momma told me that I must have bad genes because Grandpa did the same thing—which was shameful because he was a preacher. I didn’t mind, though. I liked it when Grandpa told his stories. It was the only time I felt close to him. He understood me, I hoped.

Unfortunately, at my old school, parents, children and teachers knew me well for telling tall tales. I don’t know why they prettied it up—I was a liar, plain and simple. Once, I lied to the Sunday School teacher. I told her Momma had cancer and that’s why she couldn’t come to the church dinner. Imagine my surprise when my Sunday School teacher showed up to the door with a prayer team and a casserole. I heard a woman on TV once say it was a kind of coping mechanism. I had no idea what that meant, but my heart felt perpetually heavy.

I knew I was going to burn in hell for lying to Momma about things like whether I had finished my homework, but the truth was I had lost my math textbook toward the end of the school year last year. I knew if I told her I needed to buy a new one, she would have to work extra hard to pay for my mistake. How I dreaded seeing that all-too-familiar look of disappointment slide across her face! Momma worked