Broken Heart (The Hearts of Sawyers Bend #7)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

STERLING

“ G ive me the statue.”

Forrest stared at me, his hazel eyes surprised, then carefully blank. “What?” he asked, shaking his head.

Of course, he was confused. After refusing to speak to him for over a year, I was standing on his doorstep just before midnight, demanding he hand over a priceless family heirloom.

“I need to see the statue,” I clarified, impatient. “Let me in.”

“What?”

Forrest still wasn’t getting it. But why would he? He didn’t know that the statue had been haunting me. Teasing me. Demanding I come here and see if I knew what I thought I knew.

For most of the last year, that ugly little statue of Emperor Vitellius had meant nothing to me. Nothing and everything. The statue was the reason for my broken heart. It was the reason Forrest Powell had come to Sawyers Bend and taken a job at my family’s inn. The reason he’d pursued me and made me think he loved me. The statue was the cause of all my heartbreak.

Except that it wasn’t. Forrest Powell was the cause. He was the one who’d chosen to lie. He was the one who’d used me for his own ends. The statue of Vitellius was innocent. And while Forrest’s secrets had broken me, the Vitellius held its own secrets. Secrets that might have the power to set me free.

Even after a year, the sting of his betrayal hadn’t faded. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. I stared carefully at his left ear and said, “I need to see the statue. Just let me in.”

Without another word, Forrest stepped back to allow me through the door of his house. I’d never been here. He bought the place after I dumped him, putting down roots when I’d expected him to walk away. He had what he’d come for, after all.

It had been weird, not knowing where Forrest lived. Too many nights, I woke, dreaming of the statue of Vitellius, haunted by it. Until I’d hunted down Hawk, our head of security, and asked him for Forrest’s address.

Hawk knew all; he had a file on Forrest. He gave it to me grudgingly and only after asking, “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Nope,” I’d answered. “But I need it anyway.” Feeling the weight of his brotherly concern, I’d added, “It’s about the statue. It’s not personal. I promise.”

He’d grunted and given me the address, saying only, “Be careful.”

At the moment, I didn’t care about careful; I just wanted to see the statue. Following Forrest through the entry into the rest of the house, I had an impression of high ceilings, wood beams, and glass, but that was it. I didn’t bother to look around. I couldn’t risk letting my heart crack open even a little bit.

We came to a stop in his modern chrome and concrete kitchen, and I turned to face him, my eyes on the frayed collar of his T-shirt, ignoring the way it stretched over his broad shoulders. If I looked at him too closely, I’d be lost. Those dark, soft curls. Messy, as if he’d been running his hands through them. Cheekbones that would have made his face austere if not for his full lower lip and the golden warmth of his hazel eyes. I couldn’t look at his face and not remember everything I wanted to forget.

“Why do you need to see the statue?” he asked.

“I can’t explain until I look at it. I know it’s late, but this is important.” I could have waited for a better time. I could have come to see him in his office. But after months of that fucking statue teasing me, the answer had come to life the night before like a puzzle piece snapping into place. And I couldn’t wait a second longer, no matter how much it hurt to be this close to him.

I could feel Forrest’s eyes on my face, assessing me. “I’ll get it,” he finally agreed, turning to head for a hallway off the kitchen.

“Get a pad of paper and a pen. I forgot to grab one on the way out of the house,” I said, yanking out a chair and sitting at the kitchen table, then popping back up, prowling around the room for the switch that would turn on the light above the table. “I need a light. Do you have a magnifying glass?” I called after him.

I sat back down, tapping my fingers on the table. I was so close to finding out if I was right. I needed to know, needed it enough to put myself through this pain. I’d lied when I said the sting hadn’t faded. This wasn’t a sting. Being this close to Forrest was fucking agony.

People say time heals all wounds, but it wasn’t doing a fucking thing for this one. It was all my own fault, too. Not the breakup—that was one hundred percent Forrest’s fault. His lies, and his stupid attempts to convince me that he’d made a mistake, that he cared about me. I wasn’t falling for that bullshit again. Losing him the first time was bad enough, the ache in my chest a raw thing that never went away. Not that I could admit that. Like the perverse creature I could be, I’d convinced my brothers not to fire Forrest, setting myself up for the torture that was sharing the small town of Sawyers Bend with the man I never wanted to see again.

I took after my father, arrogance my failing. I was too proud to admit it was killing me, having Forrest this close. I could have changed my mind and asked my brothers to fire him. They would have done it gladly. I could have asked West, our police chief, to run Forrest out of town. West was notoriously by the book, but he might have done it for me if I’d asked.

But I wouldn’t ask, couldn’t ask. Everyone I loved had seen me at my worst; the whole goddamn town had seen me at my worst. Over and over. Now, I was clawing my way to my best, and I wasn’t going to let a single person see my broken, bleeding heart. Especially not Forrest Powell.

I waited for him to come back with the statue, my heart speeding up in my chest. I needed to see it. I needed to know.

I hadn’t thought about the statue at first. The shock of Forrest’s lies had clouded everything. It had been hard enough just getting out of bed in the morning. I didn’t have any room for wondering about the statue that had brought Forrest to me in the first place.

Later, after the worst of it became bearable, the statue began to invade my dreams. A rock crystal bust of Emperor Vitellius on a white marble base embellished with bronze medallions, the whole thing was only six inches tall. As a piece of art, it wasn’t particularly valuable. More than that, the bust of Emperor Vitellius was straight-up ugly. The rock crystal carving was mostly transparent, giving him a ghostly look that wasn’t enough to hide the petulant, whiny expression on his face.

As a child, Vitellius had reminded me of my father, Prentice. So much so that after my father had stolen the bust, I’d imagined he took it because the Vitellius reminded him of himself. Forrest’s father had a kind smile, unlike Prentice. Back then, I hadn’t known that my father hadn’t just stolen the statue from Forrest’s father, he’d taken his company as well. And Alan, distraught at the loss of everything he’d worked for, had taken his own life.

As a child, I’d only known that the Vitellius fascinated me. It was ugly. Graceless. But something about it had tugged at my mind. The Vitellius statue had secrets. I’d hide behind the thick velvet drapes in my father’s office to poke and prod at the statue, asking it in whispers to tell me its secrets. It hadn’t.

Until one day, when the Vitellius had whispered back.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d learned—I knew what a secret was. And then the statue had disappeared. And, in the way of children, I’d forgotten about it. Until it had turned up a year ago, the linchpin of my failed romance.

Forrest had come to Sawyers Bend to find the statue and steal it back. He’d come to get revenge on the Sawyers for ruining his father’s life. In the end, he hadn’t done either. It hadn’t taken Forrest long to figure out that my siblings and I were nothing like our father. And Forrest had ended up buying the little statue at auction, erasing the need to steal it back from my father. The Vitellius was his again.

I’d been the fallout.

Now, Forrest returned, setting the statue of Vitellius on the table in front of me, followed by a spiral-bound notebook open to a blank page. He placed a pen and a small magnifying glass beside it. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?” he asked.

I ignored him, picking up the Vitellius and turning it over so I could get a better look at the bottom of the marble base. I still couldn’t see it, though Forrest had told us it was there. Picking up the small magnifying glass and turning on my phone’s flashlight, I leaned in, squinting, willing my eyes to focus.

There they were: numbers and letters in a long string, engraved by laser. Neat, precise, and so tiny I’d never seen them before. The few people who knew about the string of numbers and letters thought it was an account number, but no one had been able to find the source of the account. According to Forrest, it was supposed to be stuffed full of cash. The promise of all that cash was the reason my father had stolen the Vitellius in the first place. And that cash was the reason I’d knocked on Forrest’s door after all this time.

It was Forrest’s money, but he couldn’t find it without me. It wasn’t an account number engraved on the bottom of the statue. It was a code. And I was the only one who knew how to break it.

Or at least I hoped that was the case. I could be completely off base. It wasn’t like I was an expert, more like a closet math geek who had always loved the lore of secret codes. In high school, they’d fascinated me. By the time I was old enough to do something useful with that fascination, I’d been neck deep in rebellion, wasting my time drinking and chasing boys, my budding intellectual curiosity extinguished.

It had taken me years to come back to myself. Too many wasted years, leaving me in my mid-twenties with a college degree and a roof over my head but not much else. I was getting my shit together, piece by piece. I had a job. I thought I might have a plan for a career. But I was still pretty much a mess. And then I started dreaming of the Vitellius. I didn’t know what it meant, thought it might be my broken heart dreaming of Forrest the only way it could bear.

But it turned out the dreams weren’t about Forrest at all. They were my brain trying to remind me of the past and those stolen moments behind the heavy velvet curtains. The dreams were the Vitellius whispering the secret of the medallions to me one more time.

A few days ago, I woke in the middle of the night, my eyes flying open to stare at my ceiling, seeing everything at once. The numbers were a code, and I would have bet the little I had that I was the only one who knew the key.

Taking a deep breath, I let it out slowly, my mind racing. I’d needed to see those laser-engraved numbers and letters to know. And now that I had, I had a decision to make. A part of me wanted to trust Forrest, but… I’d done a lot of foolish things in my short life, far too many to count, but I wasn’t a fool, and I wouldn’t be one now.

Setting the Vitellius on its base, I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms over my chest. “I know how to find the money,” I said, steeling myself to meet his eyes. I expected to see greed or triumph, even disdain.

I wasn’t expecting blank confusion. He looked like he hadn’t even heard me.

“Forrest,” I said, my tone sharp, snapping awareness back into his eyes. “I said I can find the money.”

This time, he heard me. I expected him to laugh. Smarter people than myself had tried to find Alan Buckley’s lost fortune. My own father had spent years trying to figure it out. An annoyingly familiar voice in my head asked, Who am I to think I can do it?

Instead, Forrest said, “I don’t care about the money.”

“Yeah?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. That had been his story when we found out why he was really in Sawyers Bend—he didn’t care about the money, he just wanted me, blah blah blah. I hadn’t bought it then, and I wasn’t buying it now.

He’d already proven he was a liar. Forrest’s father had hundreds of millions of dollars after he sold his first company, and he’d hidden it all. That could be over a billion by now.

I didn’t care who you were—that was too much money to not care about. I’d grown up in a house that was practically a castle. These days, I was mostly broke, but after the way I grew up, I knew better than anyone that money couldn’t buy happiness. Not even close. But it sure as hell didn’t hurt.

Forrest leveled his hazel eyes on me, no trace of humor in his expression. “Chasing the money cost me enough. I don’t care about it anymore.”

“I do,” I snapped.

No change in his expression.

I tried a different tack. “I’ll find it for you. For a cut.”

At that, he straightened, frozen for a second before the side of his mouth curled up, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “How big a cut?”

And there was the CFO my brothers had hired. After his dumb assertion that he didn’t care about the money, I couldn’t resist poking at him. “If you don’t care about the money, how about I get all of it?”

The side of his mouth quirked higher, light sparking in his eyes. “I don’t think so. You can’t get the money without my statue, and technically, it’s my inheritance.”

“Well,” I said, “since I’m pretty sure the inheritance my father left me is a big fat nothing, maybe the finder’s fee on yours will make a nice nest egg. Fifty percent.”

The grin disappeared from Forrest’s face. “Ten.” So much for not caring about the money.

“Forty-five,” I countered.

“Fifteen.”

I looked down at the Vitellius, then steeled myself for the impact and looked Forrest dead in the eye. My chest ached, a raw wound that stole my breath. Deep inside, I silently screamed, Why? Why did you have to fuck everything up by being such an asshole? And beneath that, the question I couldn’t stop asking: Why couldn’t you love me?

Fucking hell, it hurt to look at him. It took everything I had to hide my heart.

Maybe Forrest was right. Maybe the money wasn’t worth what I’d lose chasing it. My self-respect. My sanity. I’d let this man bring me to my knees. I’d crawled out of a bottle after my father died and my oldest brother came home. I’d spent the last year getting my life together. Was I going to risk all that hard work just to fill my bank account?

The problem: it was only partly about the money. I had room and board covered, but not much more. I was working for my sister during the day and studying when I could, but that would take time to pay off. I was sure the trust my father had left me was empty. It would be five years before I’d find out, but knowing Prentice Sawyer as I had, I couldn’t believe he’d left me a single penny. I wanted a nest egg. Security. I never wanted to ask anyone for anything ever again.

But more than the money, I wanted to solve the puzzle. I needed to solve it. For months, the Vitellius had been haunting me until I finally understood the secret of the statue and the dancing medallions. I could do this. I wanted to solve what no one else could. I wanted to beat my father and walk away laughing, my bank account stuffed full.

Would it be worth it? To be this close to Forrest, to feel this stabbing agony every time I was stupid enough to look him in the eyes? Definitely not for fifteen percent. But maybe…

I shoved my chair back from the kitchen table and stood. “Twenty-five. I have better things to do with my time than negotiate with you. Twenty-five percent, or I’m walking out the door.”