A Silken Thread - Brenda Jackson [0]
BRENDA JACKSON
A SILKEN THREAD
Acknowledgments
To the love of my life, Gerald Jackson, Sr.
To everyone who loves to escape between the pages of a good book. This one is for you. Happy reading!
Dear Reader,
I was born and raised in the largest city in Florida—Jacksonville. I often wondered how it would be to live in a smaller town where most of the people knew each other and everyone had a secret they never wanted told. That curiosity propelled me to write about a fictitious town in the northwest called Hattersville, Ohio.
I officially want to welcome you to Hattersville, where over the next books you will get to meet some of its town folks. Each has a different story to tell, some of survival, of belonging and others of wanting some things you just can’t have. Hattersville is being revitalized. New residents are moving in and in some areas, old residents who swore when they left they would never come back are returning. And it seems that love, sex, divorce and revenge are on some people’s minds. A new generation is determined to put the city on the map, while the old want to keep things as they’ve always been.
A Silken Thread explores how love can survive when threatened by vengeful secrets from the past and how two couples refuse to be denied the happiness they deserve and are determined to share a love that has no boundaries. This story is a very special one and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Happy reading!
Brenda Jackson
Love endures long and is patient and kind…it takes no account of evil done to it—pays no attention to a suffered wrong.
—I Corinthians 13:4, 5
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
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Epilogue
Chapter One
“So, tell me. Have wedding jitters taken a toll on you yet?”
Erica Sanders glanced across the table, thinking that only April, her close friend since junior high school, would have the nerve to ask her something like that with a straight face. April North knew her so well. She could tell Erica’s anxiety and stress were mounting, only a couple of weeks from the engagement party at which the couple’s families would officially meet. Erica was so not looking forward to that affair—unless her mother’s attitude changed drastically.
“Yes, I’m a little stressed,” she admitted. “My sanity is barely holding up. But it’s to be expected of every bride, isn’t it?” She figured if anyone should know, surely April would. After all, her best friend had walked down the aisle three times already. “Umm, a little stress is to be expected of every bride. But in your situation…” April left the words unsaid.
Erica’s mother was driving her crazy.
With one breath Karen Sanders would rant and rave about Brian Lawson not being good enough to marry her daughter, and with the next breath she’d give the wedding planner hell because she intended for Erica’s wedding to be the social event of the year.
It would be a wedding befitting the great-great-granddaughter of one of the founding fathers of Hattersville, a small town of seven thousand, noted in the history books as one of the first cities for freed blacks in Ohio. Erica had lived in Hattersville all twenty-seven years of her life, except for her college years in Wisconsin. Living in another city those four years had opened her eyes to a lot of things, especially how closed-minded and snobbish some of the residents of her