by Melody Anne
HER FOREVER HERO
Coming in spring 2016 from Pocket Books
Some welcome home. The railing and eaves of the porch were decorated thickly with spiderwebs, and weeds were doing their bit, too, creeping up between the now rickety boards to act almost like potted plants. Mother Nature had pulled out all the stops in her honor.
Grace picked up a dull gray stone, tossed it upward, then felt its expected weight as it landed back in the palm of her hand. She tossed it over and over, her mind adrift and haunted.
Why was she here? Why torment herself?
Because she had nowhere else to go. Her life had been in shambles for the past ten years, ever since she’d left Sterling. She could fix up her childhood house—a house, never a home. The spacious rooms could be cleaned, the rotten boards replaced, the cobwebs torn down. But she didn’t have any desire to live in a house with no pleasant memories to be found inside its walls.
Her happiest times in Sterling had been outside this mausoleum that had been her mother’s pride and joy. They might not have been the wealthiest family in the small Montana town, but they’d had a lot, and Mrs. Sinclair felt true love for her possessions, including the six-thousand-square-foot home now standing nearly empty before her daughter.
Grace’s journey down memory lane—tiptoeing through the funeral tulips—wasn’t finished yet, though. Letting the rock drop to the ground, she walked up the rickety steps, cautiously avoiding the sticky cobwebs. She tested the door handle, only to find it was locked. She hoped the key still worked.
It took several tries, but twisting the key a little this way and that, she finally managed to get the lock to free itself, and then, with the help of a strong push, the door was swinging open. Sunlight filtered through the dust-coated windows, showing years’ worth of grime covering the floors, counters, and odd pieces of furniture that had been left behind.
“Somebody call Better Homes and Gardens!” she said out loud to break through the gloom. Too bad it didn’t work.
Her father had told her he wouldn’t sell the home, that someday she might want to return to it. This property had once belonged to her grandfather, and to her grandfather’s grandfather before that. Her ancestors had moved to the area in the eighteen hundreds and had made a beautiful settlement for themselves.
Her mother had wanted to tear down the original homestead, a quaint one-room cabin with a woodstove and loft. Her father had refused, and restored it instead. That was where Grace had some of her best memories, because they had been outside the walls of her jail—the Big House. She and Sage had spent many nights sleeping in that small cabin, telling each other their dreams.
Never had she thought back then that her life would turn out the way it had. Never had she thought she would become this bitter, broken woman. No. She wasn’t broken. She was too strong for that. As soon as she had time to heal, she would once again show the world that Grace Sinclair was a fighter.
The old piano she had spent so many hours playing sat forlornly in the corner of the family room. Sheesh. Even thinking the word family made a bitter laugh escape Grace’s lips. Her father had once tried to be a good man, but he was so focused on making the next dollar and on making her mother happy that he wasn’t capable of real love, and her mother—well, her mother was the proverbial . . . okay, the Total Bitch of the West. Grace had tried to escape them every chance she got, after she’d learned that, on the outside, away from this house, real families existed. But her parents always managed to get their chains back around her, making sure she knew exactly where she came from and the limits of her freedom.
Though her father had wanted a son—all men were like that, weren’t they?—she’d ended up being his only heir, so once every few years he would try to do something fatherly, such as give her the title to the land and house that he knew he’d never return to. Love from her parents always involved money. Hugs were unheard-of in her family, and real emotion was to be held inside. They had a reputation to maintain, after all.
Drawn to the piano, Grace trailed her fingers absently along the top, smearing them with dust along the way. She lifted the curved wooden cover of the ebony and ivory keys only to discover more filth. The instrument was out of tune, but it, at least, brought up good memories. She’d taken lessons her entire childhood, and though she was certainly not a master pianist, she still enjoyed the soothing music a piano could create.
Sitting down on the bench, she hung her head. “It’s time for a new start. First of all, this house needs to go, though I think I’ll keep the piano,” she said aloud, her eyes closed as she fought emotion. There would never be a day she could live within these walls again. She’d rather live in the tiny cabin tucked in the trees behind this monstrous home.
“I remember when you used to play for me.”
Grace didn’t need to turn around to see who had walked in uninvited. That voice had lived only in her dreams since the day he had so coldly walked out of her life—Camden Whitman, her first, and probably only, true love.
She stared at the dusty keys of the piano, unwilling to face him. “What are you doing here, Cam?”
“My dad told me you were coming back to town. Then Maggie said she spotted your car heading out this way.”
She turned slowly and saw him still standing in the doorway as if he was waiting for an invitation.
“I forgot what it was like to live in a small town. There’s no such thing as privacy,” she said acerbically.
And then their eyes met and something shifted deep within her. Only one person had ever made her feel the unquenchable love that consumed the entire heart, and what a fool she’d been to think that time and distance would make that feeling go away. Not even taking another lover had weakened it.
What was even worse was knowing that, although his features might appear composed to anyone else, she once had known his soul, and for one unguarded fraction of a second, she saw surprise leap into his expression before he snapped the shutters closed and gave her a cool, nearly mocking expression.
The moment was so brief that she wondered if maybe her heart was asking her to see something that really wasn’t there.
Instead of showing him pain, she allowed her all-too-familiar anger to carry her. How many times and in how many ways had she tried to forget this man? And in a single millisecond all of that hard work almost came to naught when she misread something in Cam’s eyes.
Though she’d called him a liar, a cheater, a heartbreaker, it was really she who deserved to be scolded, because she’d told herself those lies for years, so long that she’d almost started believing them.
The velvety sound of his voice brought her back from her grim thoughts. “That’s certainly true. You can’t do anything here without it being broadcast at full volume into everyone’s ears by morning light.” His tone was light, careless. That was Cam—the life of the party and everyone’s best friend.
The guy who’d decided she just wasn’t good enough for him.
“It’s good to see you, Grace. I’ve missed you.”
She stared at him incredulously for a few heartbeats before her lips curled in a sneer. The lyrics of an old Rihanna hit, “Take a Bow,” came to mind. He certainly was good at putting on a show, but she wouldn’t be fooled by him ever again.
“Well, now that you’ve seen me, you can go,” she replied with syrupy-sweet sarcasm in her voice.
“Have you spoken to anyone since you’ve been back?”
“Do you listen when I speak?” she countered.
“You haven’t spoken to me in nearly ten years, so I guess we’ll find out.” He leaned against the doorframe and smiled, the smile that had haunted her for so long.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone because I haven’t been ready to announce my return.”
“Are you staying?”
“That’s really none of your business,” she said.
Ignoring her clear dismissal, he told her, “I’m meeting a client at the offices in an hour, but I should
be out of there by five. Why don’t I pick you up and bring you to my dad’s so you can visit with everyone? I’m sure they’ll be more than thrilled to see you.”
“Not gonna happen,” she responded flatly without skipping a beat.
He stared at her quizzically for a few seconds before speaking. “Come on, Grace. You’ve been gone a long time. The prom queen is back, and you know your court will want to hold a ball.”
“It’s funny you should mention that particular event, considering you promised to come back and take me to the dance. But your new girlfriend most certainly wouldn’t have approved of that. No, you had become a college stud by that point.” The bitterness in her tone gave away far more than she wanted, but she couldn’t rein in her feelings. Her heart thudded like a galloping Thoroughbred at the chance to say what she’d bottled up all these years.
“That was a long time ago, Grace. I think we’re both mature enough to let bygones be bygones.”
“I don’t forget anything, Cam.”
“We were young and foolish back then, and both of us made mistakes. It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends now,” he said, and took a step toward her.
No. That wasn’t what she wanted. She needed him to retreat, not come closer.
“That’s exactly what it means, Cam. I don’t want to be friends with you, I don’t want to sit around having idle chitchat, and I sure as hell don’t want to reminisce about the past.” She mentally dared him to push her further. He thought she’d been blunt? She was just getting warmed up.
“I guess you aren’t the same young girl who used to laugh and dream and always reach for the stars?” he replied bleakly.
“That girl has been dead and gone for a long time,” she said, her voice firm, her manner stiff. “If she ever existed. You can see yourself out the way you came in.” With that, she turned back to the lonely piano. She refused to turn around at the sound of his footsteps descending the old porch.
Grace’s shoulders sagged once she knew he was gone. Coming back home hadn’t been a good idea—not a good idea at all. Camden Whitman still had far too much pull on her emotions. But hell would freeze over before she ever let him know that.
ONE YEAR LATER
Camden Whitman raked a hand through his hair once again and let out a long-suffering sigh. “It doesn’t matter how many times I go through this file. All arrows point straight to Grace,” he snapped before leaning back in his desk chair and pushing the file away, disgusted with all of it.
“We both know she’s not capable of doing this, so you have to be missing something,” said his father, Martin Whitman, as he sat comfortably across from Camden. He didn’t seem worried at all.
“You’ve looked at it, Dad. You tell me what I’m missing.”
“The file turned up on your desk, Cam. I’m not the one who’s supposed to help her,” he said before pausing and throwing his son a smile. “You are.”
“I would love to know who put it on my desk. That’s still a big mystery. Somehow I don’t think either of her parents would care enough to want to help her. But I certainly do want to. The problem is that every time I approach her about this, we end up in a fight. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“Well, then, you’ll just have to make her listen,” Martin said, as if there was nothing easier than getting Grace to pay attention to anything Camden had to say.
“Ugh! It’s not that simple. We have history together. It’s just . . . I don’t know, it’s complicated. When she came back to town last year, I could see she was bitter, but it’s a year later and nothing I do seems to change those feelings. I can only help her if she allows me to.”
Camden moved to his window to look out over the small town square. Two kids played tag in the park while their mother sat on the bench watching them. Sterling was a great place to grow up, to work, and to raise a family. It’s why Cam had come back.
At one time, he’d imagined settling down with Grace, having children, and living a happy, normal life. But the world had a way of intercepting the ball even in the best of plays.
Grace and Cam had been friends from the time he’d moved to Sterling. She’d been four years younger than he was, but tougher than any boy, and their relationship had begun out of respect and deepened into a genuine friendship. They’d stayed in contact while he was away at college.
The summer he’d come home with a bachelor’s degree in hand, before he’d gone on to law school, he began to see Grace in a whole new way. She was eighteen, beautiful, and going into her senior year of high school. Their love blossomed over the summer, and when he left for law school, Cam had been sure their love could last—but he’d been wrong. By the end of his first year, there had been nothing left for him to come home to.
He would never forget what he’d found when he had come home, and because of it he’d made some very poor decisions during the next couple of months. Since then, the odds had seemed forever in their disfavor, and it appeared there was nothing Cam could do about it—nothing but annoy a woman who just might wind up in prison.
“I’ve been fighting with her for a year on this,” Camden said. “It won’t be long before the feds get involved, you know.”
“Okay, boy. Let’s take another look at the file together and see if there’s anything we can come up with.”
“We may as well,” Cam agreed with a sigh. Grabbing the file off his desk, he sat down at the large conference table in his office.
His father joined him and they pulled out the three-inch-thick pile of papers.
Martin flipped through the stack and stopped at a bank statement. “Right here is where it all began. Why don’t you describe to me what you’ve figured out, start to finish.”
“C’mon, Dad. You know everything I know.”
“Sometimes putting things into story form helps clarify it,” Martin said. “Let me start our little fairy tale off. Five years ago, one Grace Sinclair, the accused, opened a nonprofit by the name of Youthspiration. You pick it up from there.”
“This is so lame . . . okay, okay,” Cam said when his father gave him a warning look. “To an outsider, an auditor—hell, to the average person, it looks like all is well in paradise. If you look closely, the donation amounts coming in and then going back out all match up perfectly.”
Martin broke in. “There’s nothing wrong with starting up a nonprofit.”
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate, pretending I know nothing.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s serious. What can you possibly be smiling about?”
“I’m not enjoying the fact that Grace is in trouble. It’s just a pleasure to see you so focused about work, to see you on a mission,” Martin told him. “Right now think of me as just Joe Schmoe, juror, at your service.” Martin sat back and ran his fingers across his mouth as if zipping his lips shut.
“All right, I’ll play along. About a year ago, somebody made an anonymous tip to the IRS, telling them that they might want to dig a little deeper into this nonprofit. They dug, and found nothing. So then this file pops up on my desk, and me being me, I can’t help but do some of my own digging. The nonprofit looks aboveboard. But when you peel away the layers of the onion and get to the heart of it, something’s rotten. All the outgoing checks are written and seem to be going to real organizations, but there are duplicates, and those are heading straight into offshore accounts. Whoever’s doing this is smart, though, because the money is siphoned off in such a way as to not raise red flags, and to keep the culprit highly protected.”
“How so? If you found offshore accounts, can’t the feds?”
“Yes, they can, and I don’t see how they haven’t yet,” Cam said. “Anyway, all signs point directly to Grace.”
“And what does Grace have to say about it?” Martin asked.
“She says I’m out of my mind. That she never opened up this or any other nonprofit and she certainly didn’t take any money.”
“You’re Joe Schmoe, juror, remember?” Cam pointed out. “They don’t know Grace. Hell, Dad, we don’t know her anymore, either. She left home for a very long time. Life has a way of changing us.”
“That’s BS and you know it, son. Little Gracie would never be involved in something like this.”
“I don’t think she would, either, but then there’s also a bank account in her name, where large dollar amounts are randomly deposited and then immediately taken out as cash. The withdrawals coordinate with the times she’s in the area of that particular branch of the bank.”
“What do you mean?” Martin asked.
“I mean that she goes to Billings, and then there’s a withdrawal in Billings.”
“So, it looks pretty bad for her, huh?”
“Yeah, it looks pretty bad. And each time I’ve tried to discuss this with her, she says she has nothing to do with it, that it’s not her, and then we get into a fight.”
“You have no other choice but to make her listen.”
“Easier said than done, Dad. Now we go back to our history together. It isn’t exactly a smooth road.”
“This could mean the difference between her going to prison and being exonerated from a terrible crime. You have to make her listen.”
“It gets worse,” Cam said with a sigh, shutting the folder.
“How can it get worse than Gracie going to prison?”
“I think she either knows who is actually involved and she’s protecting them, or she’s been aware of this scheme the entire time.”
“No way!” Martin exclaimed. “Not a chance.”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it. I can’t contact the IRS without her hiring me as her attorney, and I’m really at an impasse until she agrees to do something about this mess.”
“Have you thought of option number three?” Martin asked. “Maybe she wasn’t aware this was going on, but she has an idea of who it could be, and she’s in denial.”
“Wouldn’t she want to go after the people smearing her name?” Cam asked.