Page 13 of His Wounded Heart

First, I check my business emails, and my smile gets even bigger. One of my old clients has recommended me to one of their friends who wants a brand-new website. I love it when that happens. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be working on websites, I would have laughed, but Maddie finally convinced me I’d enjoy doing it. I’m usually not a techie person, but when it comes to websites, I like the challenge. Besides, I outsource the ongoing technical support so that I’m not always on-call.

The email from the potential client is the first email I respond to. I ask what their availability would be and if they have three or four websites that they currently like so that I can get a sense of their style before our first meeting. That always gives me a good starting point for our initial conversation, besides just getting to know one another better.

There are a bunch of emails from different vendors after my big Christmas shopping binge. Seriously, I had totally over-bought for Christmas, and now I’m in every company’s newsletter. I can’t help clicking on the ones for purses and shoes. A girl needs to dream.

It is the third email on the second page that makes my blood run cold. A metal film coats my tongue, as if I’m sucking on a penny when I see the subject line. It’s titled Old Sins. The sender is “Nashville” followed by non-sequential numbers from an AOL account. Who in the hell has an AOL email anymore?

Nashville?

I never want to think about my time in Nashville. That is behind me. I might be considering leaving Jasper Creek, but there’s not a chance in hell that I’d ever end up in that city, or any other city in the state of Tennessee. Maybe the Pacific Northwest. That is far from Tennessee and far from a Navy SEAL base.

I swallow, and thoughts of Nashville swirl in my head.

Cold drops hit my boobs, and I jump up. Grabbing the tissues out of the box, I try to wipe up the melted ice cream off my chest and sweater. I’m a mess, both literally and figuratively. The ice cream is melted all over, but that doesn’t stop me from throwing the tissues in the garbage and taking a spoonful of the melted gooey mess so that I can banish the taste of fear from my mouth.

I push back from my makeshift desk and go to the kitchen to clean things up and pour the melted ice cream down the sink, then think better of it. I sip the melted cream from the container and look out the kitchen window, thinking back to one of my last days in Nashville.

I’d let myself into Brantley’s apartment.

He’d only just given me a key a week ago. It was the night he told me he wanted me in his life forever. I’d made such a fool of myself, because I’d burst into tears. He’d chuckled, and sent me to the bathroom to mop up. I was always making a fool of myself around Brantley. He was so much older and sophisticated, I couldn’t believe he’d chosen someone like me to marry.

Before I even had a chance to lock the door behind me, someone knocked quietly on the door. If it had been before last week, I wouldn’t have answered it, but because I was going to be Brantley’s wife, I knew it would be okay. I looked through the peephole and there was a middle-aged man in a suit outside. He was Brantley’s age, but not nearly as handsome.

I dropped my purse and overnight case beside the door, then put the security chain in place and opened the door.

“Can I help you?”

He looked me up and down. “Nice,” he drawled. “Brant sure can coax in the honey.”

I started to close the door.

“Wait,” he barked out. “I need you to give this to Brant. He needs to look at this as soon as he gets back from downtown. You got it? You can follow orders, can’t you?” He shoved a thick file at me through the opening and I took it.

“I’ll see that he gets it.”

“You do that, Honey. Tell Brant to bring you around to the club sometime. He needs to show you off.”

“Can I tell Brantley your name?”

“Tell him Jim from Rykers stopped by. Let him know he now has all the originals, and everybody has lost their memories, so he’s good to go, and I’ll send him my bill.” He turned and walked down the hallway. I still didn’t understand how he could have gotten past the security in the lobby. Brantley owned this building, and this apartment was on the top floor. I had to use a special code to get the elevator to even get up to this floor. I unhooked the chain and stepped into the hall.

“What’s your last name?” I called to his retreating back. He didn’t answer, he just pushed the button to the elevator and disappeared as soon as the elevator arrived. I shut the door and looked down at the file.

What in the heck was that?

The file was huge, and I needed both hands to keep the papers, blueprints, assay and inspection reports as well as perk tests all together, so best to put it on Brantley’s desk, even though he didn’t like for me to go into his study. Needs must.

His desk was an absolute horror. I would never have let my Mr. Fortnum’s desk get to such a point. Maybe they did things differently here than they did in Jasper Creek. Biting my lip, I put the file on Brantley’s office chair.

It slid off the smooth leather and hit the floor.

“Shoot!”

Kneeling down, I tried to put it into some semblance of order. It was for a fancy new development on the outskirts of Nashville. I’d heard Brantley and my new Nashville boss bragging about how they’d gotten the land for a song. Looking at the documents, I saw why. Most of this land rested over an old landfill that had been covered over in the late seventies. That was the reason for all the tests to see if the landfill would be safe to build on. Four reports from four different labs came back stating that the amount of dangerous gasses wafting off the landfill made the land unusable, or highly expensive to treat before construction could begin.

Brantley had already purchased the materials for construction, even after receiving the lab results, and his crews had already started fabricating the foundation. How was that even possible?

“Trenda?”