Chapter 3
Jack strode down Starr’s Fall’s Main Street, his heart pounding with fury as he reflexively clenched and unclenched his fists. It was so obvious what that woman had done back there. She’d gone and badmouthed him to everyone in this town, and all because she’d been rude to him .
All right, he might have been a little rude to her, but she’d been downright annoying, and she’d deserved that review. Mostly. Maybe.
Jack let out a long breath, doing his best to get his heart rate to slow.
God help him, he didn’t need another heart attack three months after the first one.
And he certainly didn’t need people like Jenna Miller—he’d learned her name when he’d searched the store up online—making his life even more miserable than it already was.
Why had he moved here again? For the rest and relaxation, a chance to recover after losing not just his health, but his business, his life, his whole purpose?
And the trouble was, that wasn’t an exaggeration, which had been a major part of the problem.
Jack let out another long, low breath as he came to a stop in front of his car.
Jenna Miller had nailed that—it was this year’s Porsche Spyder, definitely a boy-toy kind of car, but he’d needed the pick-me-up after his endless hospital stay, and hell, he could afford it.
Why not? Although, it had to be said, when parked between a battered sedan and a rusty pickup truck, his flashy convertible was looking a little showy and ridiculous…
but so what? He wouldn’t apologize for having made money. A lot of money.
Even if it had nearly killed him.
With a groan, he pressed the key fob, causing the beep of the Porsche unlocking to echo up and down the empty street, its headlights flashing.
He slid inside, resting his hands on the leather steering wheel as he took a few more deep breaths.
His heart rate was beginning to slow, but now his stomach hurt, both because he was hungry—the food options in Starr’s Fall were severely limited—and because he suspected his damned ulcer was flaring up. Again.
Just another symptom of the high-stress life he’d reveled in for nearly twenty years.
All gone, in one literally heart-stopping second, when he’d collapsed in the middle of the most important business meeting of his life, with the biggest and riskiest company he’d ever invested in about to go public.
He’d reaped a multimillion-dollar profit, not that he’d been able to enjoy that moment of triumph.
He’d been in Beth Israel Hospital, getting a stent put in and fighting for his life.
Sighing, Jack pressed the ignition, and the Porsche roared to life.
He wasn’t going to waste another second of his time fuming over Jenna Miller.
She’d looked like some kind of crazy cat lady, with her patched overalls and sleeveless plaid shirt, her hair in two long auburn braids like she was sixteen instead of probably pushing forty.
Not that she’d looked middle-aged; there had been something youthful about her golden-green eyes, the spattering of freckles across her cheek and nose.
And even the overalls hadn’t been able to hide her curvy but athletic figure.
Jeez , why was he thinking like this? About that woman? Clearly it had been a while since romance or anything like it had been a possibility in his life, if he was checking out women like Jenna Miller.
Jack pulled away in the car with a pleasingly loud roar, an effective screw you to the good people of Starr’s Fall who had already decided to kick him to the curb, although unfortunately he didn’t really have anywhere to go besides home.
He’d just bought a three-million-dollar property on Bantam Lake, a few miles outside of town.
But from now on he wouldn’t be going into Starr’s Fall; judging from what Jenna Miller had said, Litchfield was more his vibe. Even if it was half an hour away.
But that didn’t solve his problem now , which was that he was hungry.
He wasn’t about to drive all the way to Litchfield, but he did remember passing a pizza place on the edge of town.
Pizza was definitely something he wasn’t supposed to eat; his doctor had given him a strict diet to deal with the effects of the ulcer and the heart attack, and Jack had not liked the look of it.
It involved a lot of leafy greens and not nearly enough to disguise them with.
Besides, he’d been so good for the last three months, sticking to the boring diet, filtering out every temptation and enjoyment in life. One slice of pizza wasn’t going to kill him. Hopefully.
He pulled into the strip mall outside of Starr’s Fall, noting the two empty storefronts as well as the pizza place, which was a hole-in-the-wall joint with bright halogen lighting and a depressing lack of atmosphere. Hopefully he wouldn’t get food poisoning.
“Wow,” the guy behind the counter greeted him as Jack strode into the place. “Nice ride.”
“Thanks,” Jack said shortly. “I’ll take…” He scanned the offerings and then, feeling reckless, said, “One large pepperoni pizza.”
“Spicy or extra spicy?”
“Spicy, please.” He didn’t have a death wish, despite how much this day had sucked.
After his unpleasant encounter at Miller’s Mercantile, he’d visited his mother—always a painful occasion—and then gone for a gentle hike—as per the doctor’s orders—and ended up getting blisters from his new hiking boots.
He’d had to hobble his way to The Starr Light, where he’d been hoping for a decent meal.
Instead his day had gone from bad to worse.
Well, maybe the pizza would make it better.
“You on vacation?” the pizza guy asked.
It was a valid assumption, Jack knew, but it still irritated him. “No,” he replied, trying for a reasonable tone. “I live here.”
The guy’s eyes widened. He wore a greasy baseball cap backward and sported a very patchy beard that mostly hid his pimples.
He scratched his cheek thoughtfully as he gazed at Jack, who stared levelly back.
“New here?” he finally asked, and Jack just nodded.
He really wasn’t in the mood for some kind of heart-to-heart.
Fortunately, the guy decided to finally make his pizza—this was clearly a one-man operation—and Jack retreated to the window, sliding out his phone to check for messages.
Nothing. He’d been in Starr’s Fall for three days and no one had checked in once.
No one had checked in after his first week in the hospital, either.
He’d run a company with over a hundred employees and not one of them had bothered to ask how he was, whether he was settling in, or if his health was okay.
Not that Jack had actually expected them to; he knew what Wall Street was like.
A couple of years ago, Michael Banner—someone he’d worked very closely with and would have, at least in a matter of speaking, called a friend—had discovered Buddhism and retired early, cashing in his stocks and moving to Bermuda.
Jack hadn’t sent him a single text to ask how he was.
Such a notion hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Banner had been out of the game; he’d become instantly irrelevant.
You didn’t stay on top in the finance world by chasing after has-beens, not even if they’d been your friends.
Especially not if they’d been your friends.
Better to create a little distance, show people you absolutely were not about to try to find yourself or join an ashram.
Jack started to swipe to check his NYSE app, but then he stopped himself. No point going down that route. His heart couldn’t take it, in more ways than one.
“Hey, mister? Your pizza’s ready.”
“Thanks.” Jack swiped his credit card—he didn’t even bother whipping out his platinum this time—before taking the box and heading outside.
It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the air soft and dusky, the sky a twilit violet with the first stars starting to glimmer on a horizon fringed darkly with evergreens.
For a second, he imagined himself in the Hamptons—like Jenna Miller had so nastily joked—at the beachfront mansion he’d once rented with a bunch of friends.
He couldn’t remember much about that trip, to be honest. It had been whiskey-soaked and drug-fueled, although he’d kept himself from the latter.
Unlike a lot of the guys on Wall Street, he’d never dabbled in the hard stuff.
It hadn’t mattered in the end, though. He’d still had to call time at just forty-two years of age, in the prime of his career.
Three months on, it remained a bitter pill he continued to choke on.
The drive back to his sprawling house on the lake took ten minutes, and Jack felt his mood plummet with each one.
What did he have to look forward to? Eating a pizza alone that would probably cause him heartburn, if not something worse, and then a couple hours of mindless TV when he’d never been one for television, anyway. There had never been enough time .
But that frantic, busy-busy buzz of life that had kept him constantly on his toes, blood pressure soaring, excitement always fizzing as he looked to close the next deal…
it was all gone. Some guys, like his former friend Michael, had been glad to re-evaluate their priorities.
Slow down and savor whatever it was they wanted to savor.
Jack, however, did not appreciate the opportunity.
He just wanted his old life back, in every aspect, even the stress and accompanying ulcer. He’d thrived on it, all of it.
Out here in the boonies, there was nothing to thrive on. There was nothing, period.