Chapter 2
TWO
This, too, shall pass. It might pass like a kidney stone, but it’ll still pass.
—Holly’s secret thoughts
HOLLY
I passed Denver, better known as Sinclair Windsor, coming out of the lawyer’s office.
I wasn’t surprised to see him there.
He and my dad were good friends.
It was understandable that my dad would leave him something.
However, I was very surprised when I got into the lawyer’s office to be told that not only had my dad left the land and the house I was living in to someone else, but he also had stipulations for how I would spend the money that I would be given for his life insurance.
“He wants me to pay all of my school loans off with it?” I asked, numb from what I’d just been told.
“As much as the inheritance will allow,” Trent Sheperd explained.
I swallowed hard. “And the land? Who does that go to?”
I didn’t know what I expected, but hearing “Sinclair Windsor” was not it.
Honestly, I never imagined a life where that land would not be mine.
That was all I ever dreamed of—farming that land and living off of it like the last four generations of Cains had done for hundreds of years—minus one generation that had to sell it to live. Which my mother had helped my father buy back.
And now, that was all out of sight for me.
“Will he let me stay in the house at least?” I asked quietly.
I mean, that was my one and only home.
I…
“That’s something you’ll have to take up with him,” he sighed. “Georgina…”
“Holly,” I corrected him.
He frowned. “Holly?”
“My friends, they call me Holly. I hate Georgina.”
Hate wasn’t a strong enough word.
I loathed it.
Georgina was my mom’s name. My mom had walked out on us when I was young and hadn’t looked back.
I’d stuck with the name for years, because that was what my dad wanted, but eventually started going by Holly when I started college.
It was much nicer to not be known as “that Hollywood starlet that left’s kid.” Which is what happened when anyone heard the name “Georgina Cain.”
My dad had stayed, raised me, and had loved me until his last breath.
“Holly then.” He nodded once as if committing it to memory. “I’m sorry this didn’t go the way you expected it. I told your father that he needed to talk to you about this, and I’m sorry that you were blindsided with it.”
I swallowed hard.
“It’s okay.”
And it was.
It wasn’t his fault that my dad had been bamboozled by the big, bad motorcycle club president.
Was that what he was doing this entire time? Worming his way into my dad’s life so he could buy his land?
I knew that he wanted the water rights to it.
He’d been paying a leasing fee for those since I was around sixteen.
Had he somehow manipulated my father into giving him the land instead of letting me have it?
That was the only thing that made sense here.
I stood up and gathered my things.
A letter from my dad that I refused to open right now and some paperwork telling me about the life insurance policy that would be paying out soon.
“Have a good day, Mr. Sheperd,” I said quietly.
It wasn’t his fault that things hadn’t fallen my way.
He had said he’d tried to be the voice of reason…
I walked out of the lawyer’s office and into the gray, gloomy day and started marching down the street toward my car.
At least that would stay mine.
I’d bought that under my own name when I was sixteen.
I was halfway to my car when I noticed my neighbor—the rat bastard—leaning against the lamp post a few spots down from my car.
With him was his wife, who was leaning into him.
Or, his ex-wife.
I’d heard they’d gotten divorced not too long ago.
Didn’t surprise me.
If he was a snake that would steal from a dying man, why wouldn’t he divorce his beautiful, stay-at-home-mom wife? Did he not like the way she cleaned his kitchen? Did he hate how she prepared his meals? Washed his clothes? Reared his kids?
“Please, Denver?”
Sinclair, better known as Denver to his motorcycle club brothers, shook his head and gruffly said, “I’m sorry, Julie, but I’m not interested in trying again.”
“Why not?”
“You chose the wrong option,” he pointed out. “You had your chance. You had so many chances that it wasn’t funny. But, inevitably, you chose you. I can’t fix that anymore. We’re already divorced.”
“I’ll give you the money back if you give me another chance,” Juliana begged.
I wondered what money she was talking about.
I’d heard through the grapevine that Juliana had cleaned him out.
My first initial thought was “good.”
But watching this now, hearing what I was hearing, maybe there was something more to this story…
“It’s not about the money, Julie,” Denver grumbled. “It’s about the fact that you threw away fifteen fuckin’ years of our life because you were bored and wanted a vacation.”
Huh.
I hadn’t expected him to say that.
“I’m sorry. You’ll never know how sorry,” Juliana apologized, practically hanging off of him as she pleaded her case.
“Seriously, you’ll never know how sorry.
I was wrong. I didn’t realize that you put in that much work.
My girlfriend and I were talking last night, and she opened my eyes.
I wasn’t bored. I was sad and lonely. I confused the two. ”
“Then you should’ve unconfused them before you took such drastic measures,” he pointed out.
“Then fucked me over so hard. I’m not joking when I say that you broke me, Julie.
No woman will ever fuck me over like you did.
Not even you. I’m not interested in you that way any longer.
Whatever love that I had for you walked out the door when you did. ”
“That can’t be true.” Juliana looked crushed. “You’re not dating. You don’t have anyone else. And who else is going to handle your lifestyle? Who better to raise your kids with you than their own mother?”
“Handle my lifestyle?” he snorted.
“Your secrets, Denver.”
His eyes went luminescent as he leaned forward and got in her face. “You share a single fuckin’ one of those secrets, Juliana, and I’ll burn you alive.”
Juliana reared back. “You’d hurt me?”
Denver’s smile was fierce. “In a heartbeat. You threaten my club or my kids? You’re a dead woman.”
I halted in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering if I should move or stay.
In the end, that choice was taken from me when Sinclair’s eyes turned my way.
They were blazing.
Those blazing eyes softened the moment they met mine. “Hey, Georgie.”
I swallowed hard. “Hey.”
“Sorry to block your truck,” he said. “We’ll move.”
He caught his ex-wife’s arm and started to guide her out of the way, but Juliana yanked her arm away as if he’d burned her. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
Denver snorted and turned his back on his wife and me, then started walking toward his truck that was just down the road from where I was parked.
He got in said truck and started it up with a powerful, throaty roar and pulled out into traffic without another word.
When he was out of sight, I looked at Juliana, who was crying.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She sniffled. “I made a huge mistake.”
I blinked. “What?”
She gestured toward where Sinclair’s taillights had disappeared and said, “I kept seeing my friends go out and have fun. Go on lavish vacations and have great times. And I was full of envy for them. I had such a fear of missing out that I broke my own marriage apart to have this elusive feeling. But even now, with him no longer my husband, I still can’t do it.
The dating scene is crazy. No one wants to touch me with a ten-foot pole because I used to belong to Denver, the president of the Dixie Wardens MC.
I have to meet people all the way out in Tooths Landing.
And that’s an hour and a half one way. And all they want to do is party and have fun.
Which isn’t really conducive with my work life seeing as I have to have a minimum-wage job to barely make ends meet.
I had to start driving for Uber Eats to help supplement my income.
He gave me a lump sum when we divorced, but stupidly I put it all into a high-yield money market account to prepare for my future and I can’t touch it.
It’s a mess. I had no idea what it all would entail.
But I miss my old life. I miss my kids. My husband.
” She looked super forlorn. “He’s going to move on eventually, and it’ll break me. ”
Sinclair would move on.
He was a beautiful, sexy beast of a man. He was hard around the edges, but soft when it came to his family and friends. He was tattooed, a biker, and a cowboy. When you saw that man in a pair of chaps and jeans…my god.
He’d fueled my every teenage fantasy.
He was older than me, sure, but I swear to all that was holy, that didn’t matter to me then, and it didn’t matter to me now.
Even mad as hell at him, if he crooked his finger at me, I’d have a really hard time saying no to him.
Any sane woman would.
All that messy, copper-colored hair, paired with his warm honey eyes, and fantastic jaw. Sometimes he’d have a beard. But when he deigned to shave, he’d have these perfect little dimples that all three of his kids shared.
“I’m sorry, Juliana.”
I mean, what else could I say?
It sounded like she’d fucked herself over.
Her life—raising kids and living on the farm? That was my dream.
I wanted exactly the life that she had.
And she’d just given it away.
It was terrible, but it was also a decision that she’d made without thinking it through all the way.
I watched something come over her then. Watched her transform from this broken woman to an angry one that had a new plan in mind.
And apparently that plan had to do with me.
“I heard Denver got your dad’s land.”
And there was that anger all over again.
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound calm.
“You know that he’s wanted that forever, right?”
I swallowed. “Yep.”
“You know that he worked his magic and made it happen. Cheated you out of it, right?” she asked.
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it any more than I had.
If I did, I’d break down on the street in the middle of the damn town and cry my eyes out.
I was tired of people seeing me cry.
“He is a bad person, Georgina.”
I winced at the use of the name that I hated.
The name that I shared with the woman I hated most in this world.
You’re not good enough to share my name. Lorena will do.
Georgina Lorena Cain.
Georgina, after my mother. Lorena, after my father’s mother.
Those nasty words that my mother had said to me a few days before she’d gone back to California for movie deals and better shopping.
“He might be a bad person,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to deal with this anymore. Maybe it’s a good thing.”
And really, maybe it was.
As I drove through town to my house fifteen minutes later, I thought about everything that’d happened. Thought about what my future looked like for me.
At least I had some money coming off of the loans that I owed…
I arrived at my house and went inside, taking it all in.
The house had been released to me only recently.
I’d been forced to rent a short-term rental in town to have somewhere to sleep.
Which fucking sucked even more, because now I was having to pay for it on my credit card that was already leaning toward maxed out.
I needed a job.
Pronto.
I stepped over the creaky board in the middle of the living room and took a look around.
The place looked even more sad than usual.
I hadn’t lived here in years.
Dad had let it go downhill even more than it had been when I’d lived here.
At one point, it’d been a pretty grand place.
Mom had helped Dad pay for the three-story monstrosity before she’d left.
About four years after she’d disappeared from our lives, a fire had broken out in the barn, and it’d spread to the house. The whole left side of the house was uninhabitable, so we’d moved to the parts of the house that were.
Only, the failing structure on the one side had affected the structure on the other.
The house was on its last legs, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it all fell down one day.
I eyed the couch that Dad had to buy used after the fire.
Everything inside the house was used.
Dishes. Towels. Furniture.
I spread out the towel that had always rested on the couch arm.
That was where Dad had liked to eat his food every night when he got done working. Or, in the later years, it was where he’d made his permanent home.
The cancer hadn’t been kind to Dad.
Prostate cancer was usually survivable for a long time.
Dad’s form had been that kind at first. The “good” kind. But something had changed, and that “good” had gone to ‘bad’ in the blink of an eye.
It’d spread to his bones and organs, and once it was there…
And wouldn’t it just figure that, after surviving cancer for years, Dad died of a home invasion?
And for what? A measly few bucks?
There wasn’t anything to this place. They could’ve looked at the outside of our house and seen that there was nothing inside to steal.
Getting that call while I’d been out with friends…
The sound of a snowmobile pulling up outside had me freezing.
I turned to look out the dirty windows to see Denver wearing his winter rancher’s garb—thick Carhartt overalls.
Winter boots that were meant to work. A worn-out Carhartt jacket that looked like it’d been well used and loved for years upon years.
And a beanie that came down low over his head, mostly covering his eyebrows.
But those honey-colored eyes met mine through the dirty windowpane and he started up the steps.
I went to the door and met him there.
There wasn’t much difference between the outside of the house and the inside, so I didn’t bother to invite him inside. I just stood in the doorway with my arms crossed tightly over my chest.
“Are you going to make me leave?” I asked.
He looked at the house around me, noted the falling-off screen door. The missing board on the front porch that should’ve been replaced years ago. The peeling paint. The charred boards that met the uncharred ones.
He didn’t miss a thing when he said, “Yeah. You’re going to have to leave.”
Those words were the final nails in the “I hate Sinclair Windsor” coffin.
Especially when he listened to me beg and held his ground.