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  OTHER FICTION

  Red Heart Tattoo • Reaching Through Time • Heart to Heart • Breathless • Hit and Run • Prey • Briana’s Gift • Letting Go of Lisa • The Time Capsule • Garden of Angels • A Rose for Melinda • Telling Christina Goodbye • How Do I Love Thee: Three Stories • To Live Again • Angel of Mercy • Angel of Hope • Starry, Starry Night: Three Holiday Stories • The Girl Death Left Behind • Angels Watching Over Me • Lifted Up by Angels • For Better, For Worse, Forever • Until Angels Close My Eyes • Till Death Do Us Part • I’ll Be Seeing You • Saving Jessica • Don’t Die, My Love • Too Young to Die • Goodbye Doesn’t Mean Forever • Somewhere Between Life and Death • Time to Let Go • Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep • When Happily Ever After Ends • Baby Alicia Is Dying

  From every ending comes a new beginning.…

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Lurlene McDaniel

  Jacket art copyright © 2013 by Justin Case/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McDaniel, Lurlene.

  The year of luminous love / Lurlene McDaniel. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eighteen-year-olds Ciana Beauchamp, Arie Winslow, and Eden McLauren of Tennessee rely on their close friendship as they face serious problems the summer before they start college, from parents’ illnesses, to cancer, to loving the same cowboy.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98675-8

  [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction. 5. Tennessee—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M4784172 Ye 2013 [Fic]—dc22 2012024904

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to my longtime friend

  Artie Pullen,

  who lost her fight with cancer in 2011.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I

  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

  PART II

  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

  PART III

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Author’s Note

  Excerpt from The Year of Chasing Dreams

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Something was wrong.

  Ciana Beauchamp bolted upright in bed, her heart pounding and fear closing off her throat. What had she heard that had awakened her out of a sound sleep? Something was wrong. The noise came again, from outside, in the distance. She heard the horses locked in the stables neighing in alarm.

  Her bedside clock read 2:00 a.m. The horses should be asleep. What was spooking them? She tossed off her covers and fumbled around for her jeans, which she had discarded in a heap on her floor before she had fallen into bed that night. Ciana tugged the cold denim on over her pajama bottoms, grabbed an old sweatshirt, and padded to her door. She opened it carefully, stepped into the hall, and listened for sounds from her mother’s room at the far end of the hall. She heard Alice Faye snoring and knew that the horses’ distress hadn’t disturbed her mother. But then, how could it have? When Alice Faye fell into bed dead drunk every night, she could sleep through anything.

  Ciana hurried through the house, through the kitchen, and into the mudroom. There she pulled out her work boots from beneath the old timber bench where she’d stashed them after feeding the horses and locking down the house for the night. She removed a rain slicker from a peg beside the door, slipped it on, and reached for the doorknob. She hesitated, then turned, opened a cabinet door, and took out the double-barreled shotgun. No telling what she might run into—a marauding coyote, a rabid raccoon, something more dangerous. She opened the cabinet over the bench and took down a box of shells and quickly loaded the pump shotgun. She went out the door, moving quickly, stepping through puddles left from yesterday’s cold April rain. Her boots made a sucking sound.

  The closer she got to the stables, the louder the shuffling of the two horses in their stalls. She squinted as she approached the door and saw that it was standing ajar. Fear prickled up her spine. No animal except the two-legged variety could have unlatched the door.

  She stood still for a moment, taking deep breaths to slow her heartbeat. She missed her grandmother with an ache that made her knees weak. Olivia should have been handling this, just as she’d handled all the Beauchamp family issues over the years.

  Suck it up! Ciana told herself. Olivia couldn’t help. The ball was in Ciana’s court now.

  She eased inside carefully, knowing that the hinges needed oiling and their squeaking would give her away. Another thing to put on her to-do list. The scent of her caused the horses to calm somewhat. Still, Firecracker, her favorite riding horse, snorted and moved against the side of the stall, making the old boards creak. She commanded silently, Don’t give me away.

  She stood stock-still, listening for noise. Shuffling sounds came from the tack room. She heard the lid lifting on the oak chest where blankets were kept and hear
d the thump of a saddle as it hit the floor. Her heart squeezed as she remembered Granddad Charles’s antique Mexican saddle with the sterling silver trim. Whoever was inside could steal it. The tack room needed a better lock. Maybe the whole barn needed a security system. There was so much for her to do. Too much.

  Ciana swallowed against the lump in her throat formed partly from fear and partly from being overwhelmed. She stole to the door and saw a candle flickering and a man kneeling in front of the trunk, tossing out the contents, his back to her. The guy had lit the way for her and presented a broad target.

  The shotgun had grown heavy in Ciana’s hands. She’d shot it many times growing up and knew the damage it could do. But she’d never aimed it at a human being before. “Don’t ever raise a gun unless you’re prepared to use it.” Olivia’s words came back to Ciana. Was she prepared to shoot? What if the man was high on meth? She’d heard stories that such people could charge like raging bulls. She raised the gun, pumped it, and with a bravado that came from holding the weapon, said, “What are you doing in my barn?”

  The man spun, but the unmistakable sound of the shells being chambered kept him on his knees. The whites of his eyes were glowing in the light of the candle. “Don’t shoot. Please.”

  Emboldened by his fear, Ciana aimed at his chest, her hands rock steady. “You stealing from me?”

  He stared wide-eyed at the twin barrels. “Please, I’ll go.”

  Now she had a dilemma. Fumble for a phone and call the cops? What phone? She fumbled for her cell and realized she’d left it in her bedroom. Let him run? He was a thief. “Cops in this part of Tennessee don’t prosecute landowners for defending their property, you know.” That wasn’t quite true, since the man had no weapon she could see, but she wanted to keep him very afraid.

  The man was shaking all over. “You empty out anything you’ve already put in your pockets,” she commanded, nudging the gun toward his open coat.

  He hurriedly obeyed, dropping a handful of coins she kept in a mason jar on the old scarred desk against the wall. He dropped matches and a few candle stubs. Had he been planning to burn her barn before he left, trapping her helpless horses and sentencing them to certain death? The thought focused her anger, melting away all fear. “I should shoot you!”

  “No, no, please!”

  She stood her ground for a minute, then finally backed out of the doorway and motioned with the barrel of the gun for the vagrant to stand and exit the small room. She stood far back, out of reach but with the gun still aimed at him. “Don’t you ever set foot on my property again,” she said in as menacing a voice as she could muster. “Because I will shoot you dead.” She motioned with the barrel of the gun. “Now get out!” The man seemed frozen to the ground. “I said, out!”

  He didn’t need another prod. He sprinted through the barn door like a squirrel chased by a fox. Ciana took a deep breath and lowered the shotgun, for it had grown unbearably heavy in her suddenly trembling hands. She figured she should call the police and report what had happened, but she realized she couldn’t cope with waiting for them to get out to the farm and fill out a report. She went to the stalls to calm the restless horses. She gave each a cup of oats, picked up the gun, and returned to the house.

  She scraped off her boots in the mudroom, rehung her slicker, removed the shells from the shotgun and shoved them into her jeans pocket, and took the gun with her to her room. Once inside, she leaned against the wall, her legs rubbery, too quivery to hold her up. She sank to the floor, grasping the gun in her lap. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Olivia was supposed to be in charge. Ever since Ciana had been six and her father and grandfather had died in the crash of Granddad’s single-engine Cessna, Olivia had been the backbone of the family. She had taken care of Bellmeade, the family farmland that traced its origins to before the Civil War.

  No more.

  Dementia and old-age frailty had claimed Ciana’s beloved grandmother. She was in a continuous-care facility in downtown Windemere, fifteen miles away. As for Alice Faye, Olivia’s daughter, well, she lived inside a gin bottle, unwilling and unable to take the reins. Ciana longed to talk to her friends, Arie and Eden, but it was almost three in the morning. She couldn’t call them now.

  Ciana began to weep as the tension of the night’s confrontation began to leak out of her body. She might have killed or severely wounded the intruder. She muffled her sobs with her fist, her shoulders shaking hard with each racking breath. Just weeks before high school graduation, everything had fallen on her shoulders—the farm, the debt, caring for her mother and grandmother. It was all hers.

  And she was only eighteen years old.

  “Your CT scan looks good, Arie.”

  “How good?” she asked. Every CAT scan was a lesson in hand-wringing, coupled with hope.

  “The spots on your liver are greatly diminished. They’ve shrunk to dots.” Dr. Austin gave a self-satisfied nod. “We can remove your shunt.”

  Artemis Diane Winslow let out the breath she’d been holding. She’d spent her entire senior year going back and forth from this hospital in Nashville for treatments, longing to be normal, praying that the cancer she’d been fighting since age five and that had popped up in her liver last fall would be defeated. All she wanted was to be free permanently of cancer and medical procedures. Was that too much to ask?

  “The sooner, the better,” she told her longtime doctor. “I always feel like I’m climbing a cliff and just when I get to the top and stand up, cancer pushes me over the edge again.”

  Dr. Austin touched her shoulder. “You’ve fought hard, and better treatments come along every day. Hang in there.”

  He hadn’t said, “The worst is over. Clear sailing now.” Disappointing, but with the shunt coming out and her latest chemo protocol over, she might have a normal summer—her last summer before starting college.

  “Chosen a college yet?” Dr. Austin asked, numbing the skin around her shunt for the removal and stitching process.

  “Middle Tennessee State University. I plan to study art history. It’s close to home.” She’d wanted to go away to college, but living at home would be cheaper. Eric, her twenty-year-old brother who worked with their father in his cabinetmaking business, liked teasing her about her love of art and ancient cultures. “Four years of college and you still won’t be able to do anything,” he’d say, and she’d answer, “I’ll be a sought-after lecturer, and you’ll be begging for my autograph.” He always laughed, tickled her side, and dashed off before she could retaliate.

  “We’ll keep up the oral meds and check you again in two months,” Dr. Austin said, smiling.

  She’d take the pills, but Arie’s pipe dreams included travel abroad to the great museums of Europe. One thing at a time, she told herself. Today the shunt, tomorrow the world.

  “I guess I should let Mom come in to hear the news,” she said, positive that Patricia was outside the exam room with her ear to the door.

  “I don’t know how you’ve kept her out,” Dr. Austin said.

  Arie had put her foot down months before over her mother or father haunting her every visit to the doctor. All she wanted now was to tell her best friends Ciana and Eden the good news, certain they would make plans to go somewhere fun and celebrate.

  “Call her in,” Austin said, “and let’s get you out of here.”

  Riding home from the doctor’s office, Arie felt renewed optimism about the future. She glanced over at her mother, driving with a smile and humming to herself. Arie hadn’t insisted on driving so that she could talk and text. She called Ciana Beauchamp first, her best friend since the fifth grade, the one who’d cheered Arie through two other remissions, one at twelve and another through their senior year of high school. On the phone, Ciana first cheered, then said, “Come straight over. We’ll go for a ride.”

  Nothing would make Arie happier. The feel of the sun hitting her face and the smells of freshly turned earth, newly mown grass, horseflesh, and saddle-soaped leather always
comforted her. And without a horse of her own, she had learned to ride on Olivia’s horse, Sonata, at the Bellmeade farm, Ciana’s home. For graduation, Ciana had given Arie a glittery cowgirl jacket. “For the rodeo parade this summer,” she had said. Arie had never owned a jacket so beautiful. Over the years, such jackets had been loaned to her by Ciana or bought at the Goodwill store and decorated by her mother with sequins and hot-glued rhinestones. Arie had cried when she’d lifted the jacket out of its box.

  Next Arie called Eden, who’d joined their friendship in middle school to make an unbreakable trio. Eden worked in a fashion boutique in the downtown area of their small town of Windemere. “Awesome!” Eden said after Arie shared her news. “We have to have some fun.”

  Arie wanted to ask if Eden was sure she could break away from Tony, her possessive boyfriend, but she stopped herself. Why darken Eden’s mood? “I’m open to everything! Come over to Ciana’s when you get off.”

  “We’ll do something bodacious,” Eden said.

  “Nothing that involves a police presence,” Arie said with a laugh. Beside her, Patricia glanced over with an arched eyebrow. Arie ignored her.

  “I’ll be there.” In the background, Arie heard a bell jingle. Eden said, “Whoops, customer just walked in. See you later.”

  “What about our celebration?” Patricia asked as soon as Arie ended her call. “You know, your family? You may be eighteen, graduated, and all grown up, but we want to celebrate with you too.”

  Arie sighed. A party with her family meant crowds, because she had more relatives in the area than Cooter Brown had hunting dogs. “You and Dad plan the party and I’ll be there, but for tonight, I just want to be with my friends. Please.”

  Patricia grumbled but followed it with a smile. “All right. Tonight with your friends, but a barbeque with the family soon. You’ll be glad you came. Trust me.”

  She imagined a cake and balloons as in years past when she’d been pronounced cancer-free. There would be lots of good wishes, hugs and squeezes, mountains of grilled meat, casseroles, salads, molded gelatins, chips and dips. She’d hear congratulations, and she’d be toasted with sodas and beer. Her family loved her and she loved them—all of them, the entire army of them—but in many ways they still saw her as a little girl, a broken fair-haired, blue-eyed doll cursed to bear the burden of cancer through a life always on the brink of disaster.