The only addition?
Cardboard boxes stacked in each corner.
The only subtraction?
Personal items. No figurines in his mother’s curio cabinet, no family photos on the walls, no folded dollar bills and torn sticks of gum on the entry table.
All Jameson had left were two side-by-side granite headstones and a home that no longer belonged to him.
Oh, and a pissed-off woman on his hands if the spray of gravel on the pebbled driveway, the slamming of a car door, and the pounding footfalls of a determined woman in heels was any indication.
“What in the fresh hell!” Chloe’s outrage echoed off the foyer walls. “What did you do?”
She was still in the same fancy outfit she wore earlier when he walked out of Doug’s office and saw her wrapped around another man. A tight black pencil skirt and flowy white top, heels included. A perfect blend of high class and hot piece of ass.
Dragging his gaze from her body, he shrugged. “I told you five o’clock.”
“It’s five oh-eight, you Neanderthal! Can’t you tell time?” She held up her wrist, tapping her gold watch. “And some of us work for a living! I had to cancel my last appointment.”
“I can tell you it’s eight minutes past the deadline I gave you.” He walked toward his father’s study but hesitated before entering the room. “I actually waited an extra three minutes. Figured you were busy letting your boyfriend cop a feel on Main Street. Didn’t look like you were working all that hard then.”
And why the hell did he bring that dude into this?
Her boyfriend—and when and how he copped Chloe—wasn’t his business.
“Wyatt was hardly copping a feel. And you waited an extra three minutes before you kicked down my door? Put a size thirteen, steel-toed work boot through antique carved mahogany?”
“I waited until five-oh-three.” What more did she want from him?
She’d already taken everything he had.
“Do you know how much this is gonna cost me to repair?” Her outrage grew while she examined the door from every angle. As if she might figure out a way put it back together herself. “A lot!”
“Don’t care. Wait,” he corrected, holding up a finger, “That’s not true. I hope it costs you a fucking fortune.”
“Nice.” She scoffed, her attempt to re-hinge the heavy door—in heels and a perfect manicure, no less—failing. “Real mature, Jameson.”
“I doubt your biggest problem is money. Never was.”
Avoiding his father’s study, he left Chloe analyzing the breached door and headed for the kitchen.
It looked the same as when he left. The only room in the house his parents had remodeled—the year before his mother’s cancer diagnosis—and while just over a decade old, the appliances were still shiny and barely used.
Curiously though, the kitchen was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust or protective drop cloths anywhere. And there were cake tins and measuring cups in the drying rack next to the sink.
“Who’s been baking in here?” he shouted over his shoulder.
The question went unanswered as memories of his mother, a master home chef, cooking in this kitchen assailed him.
She’d only been dead six weeks when he left for boot camp, his dad barely upright by that time. He had to report, though, or lose his opportunity at BUD/S, and the guilt of leaving his father to grieve alone had never left him.
Another fault he assigned to Chloe.
When he returned, she was still assessing the front door, pushing slivers of splintered wood back into place, only to have them pop back out.
“I don’t have the money to repair this,” she sputtered, glaring at him. “So, either you’re fixing this door for me or hitting an ATM immediately. Cash only.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have the money?”
There was a mansion next door worth five times what Maine Lane was. It might be Genevieve’s house, but as her only child, Chloe wanted for naught.
Except attention. And unconditional love.
Those she got from her dad, not so much from her mother. But money? That Genevieve did provide, and no way in hell was she running low.
“What do you think it means? It means it’s not in my budget, okay? Kindly stop damaging my property.”
“Copy that, cupcake. Problem is, I’m still waiting for that key and until you produce it, I’m getting inside however necessary. Might break a window next time.”
Sliding the study’s pocket doors open, he took in his dad’s sanctuary. Where he hid out at night, processing invoices and alphabetizing receipts for the store. Smoking cigars without his mother complaining about the smell wilting her potted philodendrons.
Like the kitchen, nostalgia threatened to overwhelm him.
A copy of the New York Times lay open across the desk. A tackle box with handmade lures sat on the rug. A framed photo of his mother as a young woman was propped on the credenza.
As if Jonah had just been there this morning. Would return any moment.
Jameson looked behind him, expecting a paternal shoulder clap and the latest fishing tale going around town. Instead, he saw her.
Staring at him, no longer focused on the broken door. Pink-tinted lips rolling together, her eyes shone with sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and it sounded so much like the Chloe he knew back then, it gut-punched him.
Sweet. Loving. Devoted.
And any nostalgia he felt . . . evaporated.
“For what, Chloe? You’ve committed so many wrongs you’ll have to clarify which one you’re actually sorry about.”
“I’m sorry that your dad died. I’m sorry that he died alone because you were too much of a coward to visit him like you should have.”
“Asshole yesterday. Coward today. Looking forward to what complimentary name you’ll call me tomorrow.”
“I can think of so many,” she shot back, cocking a hip. “It’ll get us from tomorrow to Christmas before I run out.”
Her hand propped on that cocked hip created a bombshell of a silhouette against the setting sun filtering in through the broken door behind her.
He smiled at her spunk. That hadn’t diminished one iota in ten years. Neither had her sex appeal.
Annoyed with himself for noticing, he looked away, seeing more boxes lined up against the wall, some stacked precariously.
“I don’t know what’s in them,” she said, her heels clicking on the wood floor as she approached.
He did. To a degree anyway.
The same as those boxes in the living room.
His parents’ life.
Keepsake cards. Mementos from vacations. Photographs and scrapbooks. Years of household bills collected prior to a paperless world. And probably his baby teeth and a lock of his fucking hair, too.
“I saved them for you.” Her shoulder nearly brushed his arm as she stopped next to him, staring at the towers of cardboard. “Jonah had most of them packed up before . . .”
Before he died.
“The rest I packed myself,” she added, not completing her previous sentence. “I didn’t sort through or throw anything away, I just boxed it all up. Figured you’d want to make that decision. Hang on to anything worthwhile.”
“So considerate.”
“There’s more upstairs. He must’ve been packing for weeks. Before I made the offer on the house, I think.”