Home > Stolen Hearts (Hearts #1)(9)

Stolen Hearts (Hearts #1)(9)
Author: M. O'Keefe

Not because she made me tea and helped me send thank you notes and boxed up the senator’s clothes for donation, but because she went for long walks with me in the cold spring March mornings.

“Do you want to go back?” I’d ask her.

“Nope,” she’d lie through pale lips.

She made dinner out of things I hadn’t had in two years. Pizza delivered to our door. Macaroni and cheese. Veggies dipped in ranch dressing. Goldfish crackers. The food of that summer. Of our childhood.

Freedom.

Because in the middle of the night when I left the king-size bed I’d shared with Jim and crawled into the guest bed with her, she didn’t say anything. She put her arm around me and curled up tight.

And she didn’t ask me if I was all right. Everyone in the world was asking me if I was all right, but she knew that everything I was feeling was so much more complicated than just ‘all right.’

I wasn’t happy or sad. Or relieved. I was nauseous and scared. Jumpy. Unsure. A rabbit out of its cage. I was a mess, and she knew it. And didn’t try to change it.

She just took care of me.

“The will is very straightforward,” he said, adjusting his Keebler glasses on his nose. He left it all to a charity, I thought. To his foundation. He left it to another woman. He left it to another woman, and he sold me to another man.

God, I was really spiraling.

“As his only family and heir, you get everything,” he said, flipping through a file. “The house. The cars. The bank accounts, equalling—” He turned another page. “5.2 million.”

He looked at us over the top of his glasses. Zilla shook her head, and I found it hard to breathe. “Dollars?” Zilla finally asked.

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s standard.”

“What’s the catch?” I asked.

“There . . . ah . . . is no catch,” he said, glancing at Zilla and back at me.

“No.” I stood, panicked and more scared than I was before. “There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.” Every gift from him was a double-edged sword. Nothing was free. Nothing was safe.

“With the senator?” he asked.

“Does it say my name? Show me—”

“Poppy,” Zilla said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Calm down.”

“It’s right here,” he said. Standing up and holding out the paper. “He wrote his will just after you were engaged. He was very clear. His wife would get everything. Are you all right?”

“Perhaps if we could have a second,” Zilla said.

“No. No. Let’s just do this.” I wanted to go home. The rabbit longing for her cage.

I signed paperwork where he pointed as the truth hovered somewhere above real comprehension in my brain. An hour later, we carried the box out with us. I could only sit in Zilla’s car.

“Poppy?” Zilla said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re rich. You’re rich, and you’re free.”

“I am,” I said, watching the rain hit the windshield and splatter.

“You still think there’s a catch?” she asked.

“There always is.”

“Maybe . . . the catch was everything before? Being married to him. Maybe – karmically – you’ve already paid for this. Maybe this is only good.”

I actually laughed at her.

“Pops. You have everything he had. It’s all yours now.”

“Everything,” I said.

“It hasn’t sunk in?”

“Not even a little.”

Zilla started the car. “It will. Just give it some time.”

We pulled out of the small parking lot behind the lawyer’s office and headed for the road up the hill to the mansions. My mansion. Zilla chatted away about dinner and maybe getting a bottle of champagne, and her words flowed over and through me. Until there was only one truth left. The one I’d been pushing away and pretending didn’t exist.

“You need to go home. Back to the city,” I blurted.

“What?” she said, looking at me and then back at the road. “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t babysit me forever. I need to move on, and you need to go back to your life.”

“I want to stay,” Zilla said. “I should stay.”

I wanted her to stay so badly I could taste it. The house was warmer when she was in it. I felt less like Jim’s widow and more like . . . I don’t know. Something between Jim’s wife and that girl I’d been. But I wasn’t either of those things anymore.

I was something else entirely. And it was time to figure out what that was.

And Zilla finally had her feet under her. I couldn’t take that away because I was lonely.

“It is in fact insane that I would leave you,” Zilla said. “And I know insane.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It is. A little.” She smiled at me, but I didn’t take the bait.

“You have a life to get back to,” I said. “School?”

“Poppy,” she sighed. “It’s my first year of nursing school. I can defer a semester.”

“No. You’re not going to defer anything on my account. You’re just getting back on track.”

“You realize you’re saying Fundamentals of Nursing is more important than the total unravelling of my sister’s life, and I am here to tell you it is not.” She grinned at me. The grin it was impossible not to return. God, Zilla could be so fun, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had fun.

Ronan in the dark at the party, my brain supplied, as if it had been waiting for the chance to remind me.

“Come on, let me take care of you, Pops,” she said. “You fired the senator’s secretary. You fired the housekeeper. You’re alone.”

“I still have Theo.”

“Yeah, and if you knew how to drive you’d get rid of him, too.”

She wasn’t wrong. I studied her profile.

Zilla was a stunner. Olive skin and dark hair cut short and edgy, making the most of her delicate features from my mother’s side of the family. She had a tiny frame she covered in tight shirts, dark denim and high heeled boots. I was a giraffe compared to her. All elbows and hips. Long red hair I dyed blonde because . . . well, because the senator liked it that way.

My sister looked like a punk imp. And not at all like the type of person who’d held a knife to a priest’s genitals after he’d been caught abusing young boys.

But it was hard to guess what that kind of person looked like.

No matter what Zilla looked like, she was a twenty-one-year-old woman in nursing school. A woman with a future she could finally see and grab a hold of, and I wanted no part of derailing that. I was a widow at 22. Full of dust and fear.

“I don’t need taking care of,” I lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. I didn’t need taking care of. I wasn’t injured or prostrate with grief, it was just nice. Nice to be someone else’s priority for a second.

She parked in the long driveway, and we stepped out of the car. I grabbed the box from the lawyer from the back seat.

“We should go through that,” Zilla said.

“Not today,” I said. Maybe never.

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