“And that’s what makes you such an underdog badass.”
Sure, if she hadn’t been a trembling, skittish, clueless mess, yeah, maybe she could have felt some awesome, “I’ll show you” kind of vindication.
She shrugged. “I only knew I couldn’t stay. So I left, literally without a look back.”
“Yet, here you are. Returning.”
“Two weeks ago, a letter came in the mail from Edgar. He referred to—” She gestured to the backseat. “In the front pocket of my backpack. Just read it.”
As he twisted and reached to the rear of the car, Sammy indulged herself, checking out the taut definition of his pecs under his form-fitting t-shirt.
Running? That’s all he has to do to get so ripped?
Sliding back to his seat, her backpack on his lap, he unzipped the front compartment. He fished in the space and made a noise, something sounding like fatigue.
“What?” she asked, glancing at his hands.
He held two small canisters of Mace. “How many do you have?”
She pursed her lips. “They were kind of like a security blanket.” His eyes closed and he shook his head. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve never used any of them.”
He opened his eyes, seeming to search her face for peace.
“I learned to avoid getting into situations where I’d need them.”
“And hid yourself from the world,” he said.
She begged to differ, glancing down at her attire—a white tank top and denim cutoffs. Somehow she’d managed to get comfortable in what used to feel like skimpy. “I didn’t hide, per se.”
“Diluted yourself, then.”
She shrugged. It had worked so far. No other man had tried to assault her. And yet, I’m forgoing the layers now.
“You know, I could … show you some moves,” he said.
Here? In the car?
“Self-defense.”
Head out of the gutter, Samsy. Head. Out. Of. The. Gutter.
She smiled. That was the most thoughtful offer any man could ever gift her. Better than any sappy crap on Valentine’s Day, any glittery object on a birthday.
His views of women’s rights were empowering to begin with. And she doubted he would even flinch at physically protecting her from harm’s way. But his suggestion to teach her how to take care of herself, to enable her the know-how to cover her own ass… She fell in love with him that much more. He respected her independence, her desire to take charge of her own life.
“Actually, my friend Reese, the ecology grad student who found me that night, she signed us up. Those were the only times I agreed to leave my dorm. We went through a whole course for women’s defense.”
Adam patted her knee, leaving his hand there as he began to read Edgar’s letter. When he looked up again, squinting at the rear of the SUV in front of them in the drive-thru line, he snorted. “He’s yanking your trust fund?”
“I hadn’t even thought of it. In the back of my mind, I guess it was always there, pre-taking off, at least. When I was younger, I thought of college as an extension of expectations, more obligations, more classes I didn’t have the heart for. And when I left, it wasn’t on my radar at all. I cut the ties myself. When this came in the mail, though … things weren’t the same.”
“Struggling for money?”
“Not me, really,” she said as she pulled up to the window to grab their food. She exited the fast-food joint, letting Adam shift through their goodies. “For Clare.”
Around a mouth full of fries, Adam asked, “Your elderly neighbor? The one who fell and broke her hips?”
“The one and only.”
“Sammy, I know you’re a sweetheart. It’s part of how amazing you are. But how are her medical bills your responsibility?”
“Because they are.” She turned into a strip mall, seeing the familiar title of a national bookstore chain. “Wait here.” Shutting off the car, she unbuckled her seatbelt. “I can explain.”
She made quick work of dashing inside and buying the second of the series. Back in the car, she exchanged bags with Adam, her purchase for the food.
Digging into her burger, she shook her head at Ink whining and begging on the console for scraps. Next to her, Adam extracted the Landy book and flipped through the pages.
“Nice…”
“The title page,” she instructed.
He turned back to the front page. “Landy at the Pet Shop. By Clare Wheatman. Illustrated by—” He gaped at her.
She configured a smile with a stuffed mouth.
“By S.A.M.”
“Samantha Annalisa Millson,” she drawled. Wasn’t a pen name, yet it was.
“Holy shit!” Adam laughed and scanned through the pages. “These are fucking everywhere. I’m the last guy to know anything about kids’ books, but these are in gas stations, grocery stores, libraries… I saw something on about these books on Good Morning America last week. You’re famous!”
“No one is famous in the book world, Adam. Not really. You can be a trend or next-to-nobody. Doesn’t matter where in the market, it’s all oversaturated.”
Adam shook his head, studying the glossy pages. “You did this. You. So. Fucking. Did. This.” Another laugh left his lips. “I’m stunned. This is awesome, Sammy. Brilliant.”
“We did that, as in Clare and I, a team.”
“How?”
Finished with her food, Sammy started the car again. Better to be driving with the windows down than sitting in a parking lot with the AC on. “I heard Clare reading at a library near the tattoo shop on my lunch break. She likes to read to the kids as a volunteer. Every other day, she was there, same times. Stories were her power. Kids didn’t even fidget or fuss, sitting there. They were all mesmerized by her story telling. Adults, too. Clare is simply … magical. She’d read a book, then tell a Landy story, using a puppet.”
“She made up the stories on the spot?”
Sammy shook her head. “She had them written down. Tons of them. We said hello, which turned into her commenting on what I’d been drawing in my book one day, which turned into small talk, and we became friends. She got me the apartment next to her at a discount. I got her Ink from a portrait job I did. I can’t remember which of us thought to make the books, but we did, and they’ve been a hit so far.”
“I’m so proud of you,” Adam said, still checking out Landy’s pages. “So as her friend, you want to pay her bills? Shouldn’t she be comfortable on this income?”
“We pull in decent royalties. We’ve got a contract for a series of six right now, but it’s not like winning the lottery or something. There’s the formatter, the editors, our agent, the publisher’s acquisition rep, the publicist… Many cuts into the pie, and all on a strict timeline. We make okay money for newbies, and hopefully we’ll make more, but it’ll take time. I was hoping to use this trust fund as a way to keep her at home, next door, happy in her own space and not in a nursing home.”
“Can’t live on her own anymore?”
Sammy shook her head. “Not after the fall. I can’t imagine her in some facility. She wouldn’t be able to volunteer for storytimes. She’d be a number, an obligation, in a sterile lifeless room. I have to get this trust fund for her.”
Chapter Ten
“I think I love you,” Adam said, staring at the Landy book on his lap. His expression likely mirrored Sammy’s when she’d made that exact comment in the hot tub. Confused, shocked, startled at his own reflection.
The reaction to being smacked in the face that the woman next to him was … perfect.
“Yeah.” Sammy let out a light laugh. “Right.”
Could she be any purer? And at the same time more badass? She’d run away in a gesture of escaping her fears, chasing her true dreams, and flipping a big, fat middle finger to the lofty expectations the Millsons placed on her all her life.
For her to return to Concord, it’d have to be something drastic. He’d realized that in her flinches and reactions of fear. This wa
s no vacation for her, and he bet there’d be no welcome committee to hug her—other than Jake, of course. She knew that.
And yet here she was, already a third of the way in, zooming herself even closer to the source of her evils, risking the trip for her friend, a senior citizen children’s book author who’d broken her hip.
“Good Samaritan” didn’t even come close.
“Really. This is just…” He stared at the images Sammy had created to depict Landy the squirrel’s adventures. “You’re going back to Concord, facing your past, willing to counter Edgar of all people, for Clare.” He glanced at her.
Her hand gripped the skin between her neck and her shoulder, massaging it. “You say it like I’m heading into a nuclear war. I’m not a martyr.”
“But this takes some serious balls. And you’re not even doing it for yourself.”
Or for money. Growing up on mattresses stuffed with dollar bills, Sammy probably never knew how life worked without abundant wealth. In her time on the West Coast, without guaranteed finances, she had to have hit a harsh and rude awakening to how poor or even middle-class young adults survived. Coming back to demand her trust fund, she had motivations of assisting a helpless elder, not fattening her own accounts, wanting to splurge on a new car or an exotic vacation.
Altruistic, that was Sammy down to the bone.
“In a way, I am. Clare saved me. No, don’t give me that look,” she said. “I wasn’t suicidal or anything… Freaked, yeah. I think I’ve dealt with something like PTSD after what happened. Neurotic, not depressed. But Clare pulled me out of it little by little. She was my friend, my companion. A role model. She taught me how to knit, how to cook a lasagna from scratch, how to properly sew on a button and remove stains from clothes—” She laughed. “And with all the painting I did, her garment treatments saved me a lot of money replacing ruined stuff. She encouraged me to seek odd-ball painting jobs, to never quit drawing. She gave me space to recover with the constant promise her ears were always there to hear me out. For what she did for me in my darkest times … I owe her. She was the first person to remind me not everyone in the world is mean.”
Adam slouched further into his seat, scanning his gaze over the artwork in the kid’s hardback on his legs. “Well, for what she did for you, I’m grateful. And while you’re heading back to Concord, you can count on me to help you. Clare can’t be here for you now, but I am.”
Watercolor, not acrylics or oils, was her medium for the landscapes and scenes of Landy, the brown squirrel finding mischief and causing trouble. Instead of the uber-realistic paintings he knew she was capable of, Sammy had presented flowing pages of hues. Whimsical. Magical. Captivating. Intriguing.
Damn, she was good. He was no art connoisseur, but even his layman cultural background could acknowledge honest craft.
“I’ll back you up when you talk to him,” he offered. Of course old scrooge Edgar Millson wouldn’t even remember him. Adam didn’t delude himself into thinking he was a heavy figure of leverage. But he’d support Sammy any way he could, even if it were as insignificant as holding her hand or merely being present at her side.
She patted his thigh. “Thanks. But that’s if I can talk to him.” She let out a huff of air. “As soon as I received that letter and had the idea of using the money on Clare, I called his firm. His lawyer. His CEO, CFO, chairman of the board. My father. Anyone and everyone I could think of. None of them gave me the time of day. ‘He’s too busy.’ Edgar’s assistant thought he might be able to arrange a meeting four months from now—well after the terms of the trust fund would have been changed.”
“So what’s your plan, then? Barge into his office?”
She peered at him before returning her attention to the road. “How good are you at breaking down doors? Obviously you’ve got the strength.”
“I don’t want to rain on your parade. But really, how do you intend to get his attention, much less convince him to allow you the money?”
Sammy was silent a moment, and then explained. “I suspect it’s not a matter of getting his attention. More like he tried to snag mine. Think about it. I went over a year of nothing to do with him. No connection to him or his money. I’d left it all in the dust and it could have stayed there for all I cared. But he had to have been thinking about it. What’s his motive to change the trust fund now, after all this time? If he was trying to cut me off—which he did in every other aspect, closing my accounts, taking me off their health insurance—why do it now, after this Friday, and why even bother telling me about it? If I hadn’t gotten that letter in the mail, I would have assumed he’d already cut me out of the trust fund, just like he’d already done with everything else pertaining to inheritances.”
Adam mulled over her rationalization. “You think he’s up to something?”
“Has to be. No clue what though. I’m the black sheep, an insignificant failure.” She kept one hand on the wheel and grabbed her phone from the slot in the middle console. After unlocking it with her thumb, she handed it to him. “Look at my Facebook page.”
“You have one?” She seemed too antisocial to bother.
She winced. “Not for me. Clare and I were encouraged by our agent. For PR for the Landy books. It’s not just writing and depicting a story. There’s all the marketing and promo. Anyway, look at the post I saved from last week. From ‘Upper One’ or something.”
Adam scrolled his thumb pad on the screen, tapping when he found it. “‘Wonder where your money really goes?’” he read aloud. Beneath the heading of the post were a dozen thumbprint circles of faces, ID images no larger than the space of a pencil eraser. Third down from the top was the not-smiling-but-not-scowling smirk of Sammy’s grandfather. “Edgar Millson II, CEO of LifeCorp Insurance. Net worth $7.6 billion. Salary promotion for 2016 eighty-three percent.”
“Why would a person with that much money waste time on me?” she said. “Either closing the trust fund or manipulating me to want to worry about it? I can see him simply shutting it down out of spite. But to keep it, and only make it further from my reach? Why? He has bigger fish to fry.”
Closing the book, Adam made room for Ink to crawl onto his lap, apparently finding his thighs a better cushion than her pillow on the backseat. He locked the screen on Sammy’s phone and returned it to the console. “Only one way to find out.”
“Enough about my crusade. What about you? How come a cabin in Vermont?”
“Why not?” he retorted.
And better yet, he challenged himself morosely, why? Sammy was facing her demons to help an old woman stay out of a nursing home. He was checking out his CO’s remote cabin to… Hide? Waste time? Have fun? Explore the mountains, and have a bed to fall back on? His lack of ambitions rendered him immature compared to Sammy. He’d gone fresh out of high school into the service. Four years of active duty, two more of reserves, and then he’d still volunteered to provide two more years of his life. From one structured institution of rules to another. Some peers might have opted for the infamous gap year—traveling, volunteering, exploring—before enrolling in college. He’d done all those things, seeing new places, serving his country, and now he was in his belated gap year. Or that was what seemed safest to tell himself.
He still couldn’t land on a decision: reenlist, or stay out?
Would Dad call me a wimp to pass on returning—to a career that he considered the proudest accomplishment of his life? Can I really handle more of such a controlling environment? Am I a slacker, a flake to not go back just because it doesn’t feel right for me?
“Oh,” she said after a brief pause.
He hadn’t meant to reply so snappishly. His frustration with himself tended to make him prickly, another resistance to manning up, to finding a meaning to his life. “My CO passed away in the spring and he must have had some reason to leave the cabin to me. We were good buddies and all, but not brotherly, not like Jake is to me. I tried to give it to his widow, but she didn’t want anything to do with it. I have to acce
pt the key in order to settle the estate, and I figured I should check it out. Probably put it up for sale or something.”
“You don’t want to stay there?”
“Why should I? Just because he gave me a shack to call my own?”
“No… But if you don’t want to stay there, where do you want to stay?”
Everywhere. “Haven’t gotten that far in the planning stage yet.” Kuwait and another, deeper commitment to the Army hadn’t completely swayed him.
“Ah.”
Her one-word noises jarred him even more. He wasn’t trying to be flippant or shut down on her. He simply didn’t have anything to offer. To her or anyone. That was why he’d taken refuge in his nomad lifestyle, never sticking around in any one place to dig in any ties to others.
He could charm the pants off any woman, but he couldn’t imagine growing old with them. He felt awe and respect of all the scenic locations he traveled to, but none of them called to him like “home.” He picked up on trades—like basic carpentry when he’d spent a few weeks with his former CO before he succumbed to cancer—but they didn’t spark excitement.
Maybe I should just join the other unit. Maybe there really is nothing out there that can be mine.
“Never want to settle down?” she asked.
“Do you?” Question for question. It was a lame deflection, but his answer scared him too much. Did he want to belong somewhere, to someone, doing something meaningful? Yes. But he feared he’d never find it—the person, the vocation, the setting that was what meant for him. The lack of enthusiasm to accept the offer in Kuwait only proved to show that another deployment probably wasn’t his destiny, either.
Mom hadn’t found her true love in Dad, otherwise she would have been on board with the reality of what an Army wife tolerated, and not criticize him for ruining her career. Dad had discovered his true passion—being in the military, not his marriage.
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