HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS EUGENE, OREGON ® ® Scriptures are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version , NIV . Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011, by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com and the King James Version of the Bible. Cover by Garborg Design Works, Savage, Minnesota Cover photos © Chris Garborg; iStockphoto/adpower99; Bigstock/msv, Elenamiv; Back cover author photo by Robert C. Turner Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370, www.booksandsuch.biz. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental. FLORA’S WISH Copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Y’Barbo Published by Harvest House Publishers Eugene, Oregon 97402 www.harvesthousepublishers.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Y’Barbo, Kathleen. Flora’s wish / Kathleen Y’Barbo. p. cm. – (The secret lives of Will Tucker ; bk. 1) ISBN 978-0-7369-5210-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-7369-5212-5 (eBook) I. Title. PS3625.B37F57 2013 813’.6–dc23 2012027222 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. To My Bonus Kids Clint and Katie Turner Emily and Josh Miller Alex and Liz Turner Austin Turner Bailey Turner Kyle Turner Logan Turner I love you like my own… Over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. COLOSSIANS 3:14 “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.” ~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice “To believe every man to be honest till he is found out to be a thief, is a motto most self-respecting men cling to; but we detectives on the contrary would not gain salt to our bread, much less the bread itself, if we adopted such a belief. We have to believe every man a rogue till, after turning all sorts of evidence inside out, we can only discover he is an honest man. And even then I am much afraid we are not quite sure of him.” ~ Andrew Forrester, The Female Detective (May 1864) Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Acknowledgments Discussion Questions About the Author One May 1887 The Crescent Hotel Eureka Springs, Arkansas he last thing Flora Brimm needed was to lose another fiancé. While there Twas no evidence to prove Will Tucker had met the same unfortunate fate as the other four—an early and untimely demise—there was also no prospective groom in residence at the Crescent Hotel this evening. Flora stepped off the elevator and walked toward the ballroom to make her entrance late and alone. She paused to take in the grand sweep of glittering chandeliers and the wide expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows reflecting the electric light back into the room. Oversized potted palms climbing almost high enough to touch the ceiling hid the four corners of the grand room. Though the ballroom was crowded with guests, Flora glanced around in hopes of finding the man she hoped to wed. The search was futile, of course, as tonight’s celebration of the Crescent’s first anniversary was a masked ball. Those who dared ignore the requirement were given a generic mask, white for the ladies and black for the gentlemen. And yet she hoped that somehow she might recognize him. Or, perhaps, he would recognize her. Flora waved off a liveried man with a tray of white masks. At her grandmother’s insistence, a disguise of pale blue silk dotted with seed pearls had been created to match her gown. She tied the mask in place and then touched Grandmama’s diamond choker with its half dollar–sized aquamarine set into a butterfly shape. The heirloom weighed heavily against her throat, but it was lovely and she would endure it for the evening. Tiny earrings with perfectly set pearls dangling among sparkles of diamonds, aquamarines, and sapphires completed the ensemble and caused her to smile. The earrings had been Mama’s