The Woodsman

by Blake North

  “Are you still going to the therapy place and doing art?” I ask, “Did Mom take you today?”

  “No,” his brow scrunches up and I know he’s not happy, “They say I can’t go there anymore. I have a job, so I can’t. Mom says it means I am doing too good, and it’s not a bad thing. But I think I’m in trouble there, and she won’t tell me.”

  It breaks my heart. He feels like he got in trouble at the therapy facility. They’re just denying him services because of his level of functioning. We’ve fought so hard to get him to this point. I hate that he has to give up the therapy center where he does OT and art and music therapy. It’s where he sees his friends and gets to do things he loves and that help with his fine motor skills. I want to cry. This is something I could change, if I didn’t have that debt hanging over me. I was planning on a couple of years at the charter school to save money, and then I’d get investors on board and open a center like that one, only more inclusive and less expensive. I’d have to get help finding and applying for grants, but there has to be a way to make these services more available for the people who need them. I hate it for him.

  “I’m sure you’re just too advanced for them now. You outgrew them. You’re so good at making sandwiches and getting to work on time, that they think someone else needs it more,” I say soothingly.

  He nods, but he doesn’t answer. I think maybe he’s trying not to cry. I let him go and then I go cry in the shower because there’s nothing I can do for him right now. Part of what I want with my own special needs center is to have Benny as a worker who helps set up classes and helps decide what activities to feature—to give him a productive role there in an environment where he feels valued and loved. But because I was stupid about Danny, because month after month I let him handle the credit card and the bill and didn’t ask questions, now I’m years away from making my dream a reality. I can save money as a nanny, sure, but I’m not getting the experience in regular and special education that I did at a school. I’m not getting administrative mentorship like I want. I guess I can research nonprofits in my spare time, but it’s not like the on-the-job learning I counted on. It sucks knowing how I screwed up my life, how it’ll be ages before I get back on track.

  I go to bed early and depressed. I hear noises from Lydia’s room and wander in there in my nightgown. When I peek in the door to see if she’s having a bad dream, I see Ridge holding her in his lap, reading to her from her fairy tale book. She’s holding her kitty, leaning her head on his shoulder. I duck out of the doorway, heart pounding. I almost walked in there in my nightgown, but what’s got me distressed is the sweetness of the private moment I just witnessed. That she is awake, and her dad comes in to hold her and read to her. The tenderness of their quiet time together melts my heart. I creep back to bed, but I lay awake for a long time after that.

  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking of Ridge.

  THE BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET

  Hayley Morris has never thought of herself as a beauty. In fact, the whole idea of putting herself in the public eye is something she has actively fled from following her dancing career. Following a serious breakdown, twenty-eight-year-old Hayley is pleased to simply escape from the madness of Broadway and from her uptight family, secluding herself with her writing in the countryside. She is content with that, until a freelance job with a difference brings her face-to-face with Beckett Sand, a multimillionaire hotel magnate with a very dark past. And he has a very odd job for Hayley, one that will test her acting skills and take them to a new limit.

  Beckett wants her to be his wife.

  Just for bureaucratic purposes, you understand. No funny business.

  As retiring and emotionally exhausted Hayley is thrust into the high society she has dreamed of, she must test herself and her perceptions to the limit. And she finds that she actually enjoys her new job.

  But not only for bureaucratic purposes.

  For love.

  Which makes it all so much more complicated, doesn’t it?

  PROLOGUE

  I caught my breath as he smiled at me, then slowly, taking his time, pushed himself inside me. His gasp of pleasure met the groan that escaped my lips. Then we were both moving together, pushing and thrusting in the dance that always led to both of us crying out in pleasure.

  He collapsed on top of me, and my arms held him close.

  “Hayley,” he growled into my ear. “I love you.”

  I smiled and stroked my hands down his slick, thick-muscled back, marveling again at how a man whose life revolved around sitting at a desk on a board of trustees could have such a body. He was taut with muscle, his arms bulging, waist small, back rippling with it. I squeezed him hard.

  “And I love you.”

  He lifted up and looked down at me a moment and then slid off to lie beside me. I rested my head on his chest. We lay like that a long while. I think he dozed. I was awake.

  How was it that I came to be here?

  I knew the answer, of course, but it still seemed crazy. We had been together for a year, but it never lost its magic, and I never felt less than grateful, somewhere deep inside, for the fact that it had happened. And grateful, too, to be alive.

  That was a dark thought and a darker memory, so I thrust it aside and looked around the room, still as amazed as ever at the wonder of the place.

  Beckett Sand, the wonderful man in whose arms I now lay, was a billionaire. His bedroom reflected it in the extreme restraint and exquisite quality of everything. The place was a poem to minimalism and modernity—white walls, black window frames, white carpet, white sheets beneath me. But that was where the minimalism stopped. The sheets were 100 percent satin, the furniture by the greatest designers of the age. The one piece of decor in the room—a black and white painting—was by Rothko and worth more than my low-income house in Montrose.

  I giggled.

  Beckett rolled over and smiled at me, his green eyes slowly opening. “What?”

  “Sorry, dear,” I said, managing to keep the laugh from my voice. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “What was so funny?” he asked, still grinning. “I wasn’t snoring, was I?”

  I considered lying. “No,” I said truthfully.

  “What was it, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ll find out what it was, you know,” he said, eyes lighting with merriment. “I’ll tickle it out of you.”

  I yelled in protest, but he had already begun his promised interrogative technique. He had a way of tickling that always left me at once helpless with laughter and pleading for respite.

  “No! Beckett, stop it,” I said, laughing loudly. He grinned.

  “Not unless you tell me.”

  “I was just thinking…how lucky I am,” I said honestly.

  He stared at me. “You were?”

  “Yes,” I said, wiping a strand of chocolate-brown hair out of my eye and blinking at him. Why was he looking at me like that?

  “Hayley,” he sighed. “I don’t know how you can think that.”

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “Well, I am the lucky one. I am so, so lucky.”

  He bent and kissed me, lips moist and clinging to mine. I smiled and shifted to lie on my back, my mouth open for his questing tongue. He lay down beside me, and when the kiss ended, I was smiling.

  “We are both lucky,” I said firmly.

  He laughed.

  We were. I was alive, I was here. I was with him. Thinking back over my life and how I came to be there, all those three seemed impossible, and yet they had happened. I could not have been more fulfilled. My life could not have turned out happier, especially considering how it all began a year before that.

  CHAPTER ONE – HAYLEY

  “Yuck.”

  I pulled a face as I drained my coffee. I had forgotten to put milk in it, but I barely noticed the acrid taste. I needed the caffeine. I put the cup down and turned back to the article I was writing.

  How to dan
ce so guys take note.

  I sighed. I didn’t even like the title—not my title—or subject matter. To my mind, you danced how you wanted, and if guys noticed you or not, that was well and good. You see, I was a dancer.

  “Not that I ever want to be that again,” I reminded myself. I had a career on Broadway for two and a half years. It almost killed me.

  We danced all day and then danced all night in a show. The next day we repeated it all again. The publicity and the criticism, the schedule and the workouts and the trainers, the pressure and the reviews—they all ate away at me and almost drove me mad.

  I am a private person, and I went into the acting world with a low self-esteem anyway, starved for love and approval. I left it with a self-esteem you could have measured in milligrams, a body that would still need a knee replacement before I was fifty, and a mind that was suicidal more days than not. I had crawled away from LA and come out to the countryside, relieved to escape. And this was where I intended to stay.

  Come on, Hayley! Stop griping and finish this article. You have a deadline, remember.

  I sighed. I had a deadline, and I really needed the money. I might not have needed to pay rent, as I owned my cottage, but I did need to buy groceries. As it was, that was starting to get scary.

  Working as a web-based writer was fun. It made me grateful for my dual major in drama and literature, but the remuneration wasn’t great. I could certainly live on it myself, since I had blown all my savings on my cottage, but the idea of saving anything was a distant dream, and that bothered me, especially given the precarious state of my health.

  The one thing I refuse to do is rely on my parents.

  My parents, Paige and Lawrence Morris, were decent, respectable citizens. They were more than usually wealthy, well thought of, and not ungenerous with me, their only child, during my growing up. The fact that everything—from toilet tissue to gas bills—was paid grudgingly, and that I was elbowed out of “adult conversation” until I was nearly eighteen. The unwelcomed rebel teen did not make generosity easy to accept. In fact, it made me hate each morsel of it during those years and hate myself. I would not ask them for anything in a hurry. I sighed.

  This musing is not helping with my article.

  Chastising myself had become a habit. I turned back from the window to my screen and had another go.

  “The first thing you should remember is to dance as if no one’s watching,” I added, then read it aloud. It was true, but did it sound dry? Boring? A cliché? I groaned.

  Hey! Back from the climb. Want to talk? B.

  I smiled. You bet!

  The message was from my cousin, Brianne. Brianne and I had been friends since we were kids. I imagined a sister would be like her—a best friend with added trust and love. If anyone was able to help me through this self-doubt, it was her.

  “B?”

  “Hey! Lula!”

  I grinned. She had called me that since we were six years old. I have no idea why, and she never explained either. It made me smile, though. Having a unique nickname was good fun, and it showed our closeness.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m great, thanks, Lula. Just got back from the Grand Canyon. It is so, so beautiful! You’d love it. You have to see it. We still have to go sometime.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “The weather was amazing too,” she said. “We had sun almost every day! It was awesome.”

  “Oh?” I asked. As much as I loved hearing her, I was tired and stressed and didn’t seem to have as much energy as I had hoped to have when I called her back.

  “You sound distracted,” my cousin said bluntly. “What’s up?”

  I sighed. “Nothing, B. I just feel a bit, you know, gloomy. It’s probably just the weather or something, but—”

  “You need to get out more. You’re getting all down and turned in on yourself.”

  “I guess so,” I agreed sadly. “But I can’t help it. I applied for a new job the other day, so I am trying,” I justified myself.

  “That’s cool! What job?”

  “As a content writer for some hotel chain,” I said flippantly. In truth, it was a big hotel chain, Sand Hotels. Owned by reclusive, ultrasexy Beckett Sand. The thought of working for something owned by him made my palms itch. He was his brand: refined, elegant, untouchable. Or so it seemed.

  “Cool!” Brianne said cheerily.

  “It’s probably not my thing, though,” I said cautiously. “And not likely I’ll get it either.”

  “You always think the worst will happen. That’s your problem,” Brianne said flatly. “You always did. The sun will come out, Lula. You know that. You’ve just got to trust.”

  I smiled. “Oh, B, I needed to hear that. Thanks.”

  “Pleasure. Now, have you seen the latest trend for rainbow hair? I’m lovin’ it.”

  “B?” I laughed. “You haven’t. Please tell me you haven’t…”

  “Well, I’ve put green in, and some purple…”

  I giggled. “Brianne Smith! You are the craziest girl on the planet. You must know that.”

  “What?” she said, sounding mildly affronted. Then she laughed. “Well, I have to keep up appearances. It’s great to have a job where purple hair is keenly encouraged.”

  “It suits you, B.”

  “Thanks.”

  We chatted a bit more, and then hung up.

  I smiled and reached for my laptop. She was right about the trust.

  You always have been a bit gloomy, Hayley. You need to trust more. And you need to check your email.

  Just in case there was a message from Sand Hotels, owned by the aforementioned reclusive billionaire. I felt my heart do something funny.

  I had applied with a good feeling. My CV matched their requirements, and it felt right. But then I had forgotten until saying something today. I opened my other mailbox.

  I stopped. I stared.

  “What? No way…”

  I opened the mail. It was what it looked like it was: an invitation to attend an interview. From Sand Hotels.

  “Hurray!”

  I leaped out of my desk chair and did a little dance around the room. As I did it, I realized it was the first time in two years I had got up and danced. I grinned and flopped back onto the bed.

  I shouldn’t really be that excited. But…yes!

  I grinned again and felt my cheeks hurt.

  “This is amazing!”

  It was the first job interview I had received in a year. I was very excited.

  What should I take with me? What should I wear? How to prepare best?

  My brain was flooding with ideas, but I decided first things had to come first. I went through to the kitchen and put on the kettle. This was a celebration. I rustled out my special Assam tea—the one in a fancy Indian tin and needing loose-leaf bags. It was my favorite, and this was a good time for it.

  I sat at the kitchen table and drank my tea, looking out of the window at the sun, a big egg of gold floating above the hilly horizon, a few hours from setting. My heart was full of gratitude.

  This could be the start of something.

  I laughed. I felt excited. I couldn’t have quite said why. Sometimes, on Broadway, I would get a role and the anticipation would shiver through me like wind in a cornfield. It felt like that now. Some kind of premonition that the role was just going to be great.

  I finished my tea and then stretched and headed through to my bedroom again. I had two things to do: plan my portfolio and plan my outfit. I flopped onto the bed and opened the job advertisement again, just to check.

  “An upmarket and innovative hotel chain,” I said aloud, “with a strong reputation, we are looking for a writer and office assistant to manage several critical areas of our publicity. The candidate should have strong communication skills and be presentable, organized, and ready to deal with multiple responsibilities and challenges.”

  I frowned. Now that I looked at it again, the description was a bit vague. I assumed
“several critical areas” of their publicity meant their brochures and web content.

  “Better just include some web articles and that one pamphlet you did for the furniture-transporting people,” I said to myself.

  I slid over to the wardrobe side of the bed and stood up, taking stock of what I had in my closet.

  “Okay, I’m going to an upmarket, innovative company. I need to look presentable and ready for the challenge.”

  Formal but not severe, I decided.

  I glanced at myself in the long mirror on the closet door. Of medium height, with wavy dark-brown hair, caramel-brown eyes, and an elongated oval face, I supposed I was pretty enough. It was difficult to get out of the habit of criticizing myself, but I was trying.

  “You are pretty, Hayley,” I told myself firmly.

  I dug in my closet and drew out a pale-gray pencil skirt and blazer, pairing it with a dove-blue blouse. It seemed to say “organized and efficient,” without making me look like a dragon. I stripped off my comfortable skirt and T-shirt and slipped them on.

  “Not bad.”

  The Hayley Morris who looked out of the mirror was petite, with big eyes and a big bust for her slim waist. The jacket fit just right, the skirt clinging nicely and made respectable by the midthigh length of the coat. My figure was an hourglass shape, toned from years of dancing. The soft-blue color of the blouse made for a dramatic contrast with my eyes.

  “Yes.”

  I liked it. I struggled out of it again and then placed it neatly back on its hangers, leaving them hanging on the closet door. I pulled on my own clothes again and checked the interview date on my laptop.

  “The fifteenth.”

  I frowned. I went to the calendar, just to check. I wasn’t wrong.

  The fifteenth was the day after tomorrow.

  “Oh. My. Goodness. Me.”

  I laughed.

  My biggest worry at that moment was how I was going to sleep tonight. I was so excited. I accepted the interview, checked my portfolio, and then I turned back to the article I had been writing.