Her Hawaiian Homecoming (Mills & Boon Superromance) by Cara Lockwood

instinctively reached over to grab Jason, to tell him she’d had the dream. She clutched at empty sheets.
    The heartache of realizing he was gone hit her so hard, she felt as if the wind was knocked out of her. A sob escaped her throat. He might have been awful in the end, but he had comforted her half a dozen times whenever the dream sneaked its way back into her life. She hadn’t had it in at least a year, she realized.
    Now that she was back in Hawaii, was it any wonder the dream had followed her back home?
    The early light of dawn peeked through her window shades and Allie sat up sniffling and wiping her eyes. It was barely after five, but Allie wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. Despite being here several days, her body still felt as if it was on Chicago time. She slipped from bed and stooped by her suitcase to dig for clothes. She glanced up at the two white double doors of her grandmother’s closet and knew one of these days she’d have to dig into her grandmother’s things. Decide what to keep and what to give away. Of course, every time she opened her grandmother’s closet she was overcome with memories so thick she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The dress her grandmother had once worn to play with her on the porch, or the straw hat she always had on at the beach. She found every time she started to go through her things, she’d be stymied by emotion and memories. She always shut the closet door in a hurry and vowed to attack it the next day.
    She pulled on a simple tank top and jean cutoffs; all the while her sunburn itched like crazy. She glanced at the oval mirror above her grandmother’s dresser and saw her skin was already beginning to peel.
    “Great,” she mused aloud, scratching at the back of her shoulder.
    She grabbed some aloe and decided to head out to the porch with it. No sense in missing a beautiful sunrise in paradise if I’m up this early.
    Allie saw the clouds grow pink from the rising sun as she slathered on aloe. From her seat, she couldn’t quite see the water. Dallas was right: she had no ocean view. Curious about the seaside view from his side of the plantation, Allie decided to take a walk. She carried the small bottle of aloe with her as she went, walking down the little path between the coffee trees, the sweet smell of their tropical flowers in the air. Maybe I can go knock on Kaimana’s door , she thought. Catch the woman unawares. It sounded like a good plan.
    The sound of rustling in the orchard on her left caused her to stop and be still. The low-lying leaves of a coffee tree shuddered. Whatever it was, it sure was bigger than a bird. Bigger than a squirrel even.
    Allie felt her heart launch into her throat. She wasn’t used to wild critters on the streets of Chicago. Was it a skunk? Or, oh, Lord, something worse. Did they have mountain lions on the Big Island? Wild dogs? Allie didn’t know.
    The leaves rustled more decidedly, and in another instant, a furry black torpedo launched itself out of the brush.
    Allie gave a little screech of surprise and jumped backward before she realized it was just a wild pig. Then she remembered: wild pigs ran loose everywhere on the Big Island. They’d been brought over by settlers and had no natural predators.
    This little pig clearly had been stuffing itself on Dallas’s coffee plants, since its snout was bright red from coffee cherry juice. As her heartbeat returned to normal, she waved her arms at the beast.
    “Shoo, you,” Allie said, advancing on the pig that didn’t seem the least bit fazed, clearly used to seeing people around the farm. She stomped her feet again, trying to rouse it out of the bushes, but it just snorted, as if laughing at her, and ducked back into the thick row of shrubs. As she walked out of the row of trees, she saw Dallas’s house. She remembered the dwelling from when she was little, a place always in need of new paint, but Dallas had made improvements on the house where old plantations workers