Sunshine and Sins (Maple Valley #2)

Prologue

They called it the dock like it was ordinary.

As if it were just planks and pilings, not a ledger where the town’s sins were written down in water.

The boards were gray as bone and slick with old winters.

The river lay flat and black beside us, a closed eye that didn’t miss anything.

Trucks idled in a neat line, their exhaust turning to ghosts that drifted over the November dark night.

Our house, the Bellerose mansion, with the bulletproof windows and floors that never held warmth, sat high on the bluff above the trees. But when my father wanted to teach, he took us down here where voices carried, then disappeared.

“Family first,” Dad said, soft and satisfied, like blessing bread. “Eyes open. Mouthclosed.”

He wore the late fall like it was a suit he’d ordered custom with dark wool, neat gloves, and a hat that didn’t dare muss his hair.

Men bent toward him the way grass leans before a storm, without ever deciding to.

I wrapped both hands around the strap of Mom’s cooler, old and plaid, the one she used to pack with lemonade and lemon tarts.

Tonight, it held cash tied in rubber bands so tight the edges bit.

I knew it was weird of me to take the cooler to hold the cash but it felt like a piece of her was with me, keeping me safe, even if she couldn’t keep herself safe.

Olivier, my brother, stood a step behind me.

Twenty. Taller. A jaw that belonged to our father and a look that said he’d already swallowed the lesson and found it tasted like power.

He finished high school and went straight into the “family business,” without ever calling it that.

I loved him dearly, but I was slowly watching him turn into a man I no longer respected, our father.

Headlights slid over the dock. A truck door thumped shut.

Nico came toward us with a grin that had gotten him everything he didn’t deserve since he turned fifteen.

He’d been my boyfriend for a while now. When I saw Nico, I remembered hot July nights, lake water, kissing on the back steps while the house slept.

It had been easy to forget things on those nights, like gravity and consequences and who, exactly, my father was. In daylight, forgetting got harder.

“Mr. Bellerose,” Nico said respectfully. He kept his chin up and his eyes lowered, like he’d practiced in a mirror. “I brought what you asked.”

Dad didn’t bother to look at him. He looked at me. “Bring it,” he said, and the training started there, do what’s asked and don’t ask why.

I stepped forward. The river breathed up cold and my knees wanted to shiver.

I told them there was no time to show weakness now.

The handoff was quiet, the choreography learned by watching for years.

No names. No counting you could see. Weight slid from my palms to another man’s hands, and I watched as the stacks vanished into a duffel that wouldn’t exist by morning.

I set the cooler down and tried hard not to think about lemon peel sticking to my teeth, sugar hissing under a torch, my mother’s laugh when she’d say, “Even pretty things have spines, bébé,” and pressed a thistle into my palm.

I didn’t think about the card where she’d written her recipe in looping blue ink.

I kept that card in a cookbook tucked behind the flour in the mansion’s kitchen, as if paper could still make heat.

“Again,” Dad said.

We repeated the steps with the next truck. Nico hovered near me, eager without touching while learning how to be useful. “You okay, Harm?” he whispered.

“Dandy,” I said. “Freezing at the river with other people’s mistakes. Dream night.”

He laughed like we were flirting. “It’s not mistakes. It’s business.”

“It’s both,” I said, and Dad’s mouth twitched at the edge like he’d almost smiled, which meant I’d almost been careless.

On the last run, the driver was new and too talkative. “We’re square,” he said. “You won’t hear my name again.”

“You’re right,” my father answered, and the driver laughed like he’d heard a joke. He was probably trying not to piss himself.

When it was over, we climbed back up toward gravel. Olivier fell in beside Dad, the loyal heir. Nico matched my pace like he belonged there. “Come out after school tomorrow,” he said, low. “Your dad’s cool with me being around.”

“Is he?” I said flatly.

“He says I show potential.”

“In what?” I asked. I wanted him to say it aloud so he could hear himself.

“Opportunity,” he said after a beat because he’d learned that word tasted better than the others.

“Right.”

He gave me a look like I was being dramatic for effect.

Maybe I was. Or maybe I could see the end of the road he’d just started down, and it looked like a shut door.

The mansion glowed in the bare trees, as if light could make it kind.

Inside, the marble entryway held its own echo.

The portraits on the wall watched like they were waiting to be pleased.

Olivier opened the kitchen door and turned on the pendant light, as if he owned the sun.

“Useful,” Dad told me, removing his gloves finger by finger like a ritual. “Steady hands.”

“I’m not cargo,” I said. It slid out before I could stop it.

He studied me for the kind of second that lasts a year.

Then he smiled the way a person smiles when their teeth are a tool.

“No. You’re a Bellerose.” Dad went for the cabinet with the flour where I kept the cookbook.

He lifted it by the cracked spine, slid the recipe card out an inch so I could see my mother’s handwriting catch the light, then tucked it back with a gentle tap.

“Your mother forgot who we are,” he said mildly.

“People die when they forget.” I thought I had hidden the card well, but you can’t hide from Marcel Bellerose.

“She died because somebody wanted to hurt you,” I said. “Not because she forgot.”

He touched the edge of my shoulder. A small, calculated gesture that read as affection if you didn’t know its postscript.

“Roles,” he said. “I speak so you don’t have to.

I carry so you don’t. Eyes open. Mouth closed.

” He kissed the top of my head like a blessing that didn’t bless, then told Olivier to bring Nico by tomorrow.

“If he keeps showing up, he may as well be useful,” Dad said and I watched Nico’s eyes light like a match. Mine went cold. If Nico was going to be my father’s gofer we were done. I already made that clear to him and he clearly made his choice.

Morning came blue and sunny. The mansion’s heat clicked on and off but never reached the corners, like the house had agreed to be warm only in theory. Olivier drove me to school with the radio low and his jaw tight.

“Don’t start,” he said when I hadn’t said anything yet.

“I didn’t.”

“You don’t have to. Your face says you’re leaving,” he pinched his lips.

“I am,” I confirmed. “After graduation. It’s not a secret.”

“You’re seventeen,” he said as if it was news to me.

“I’ll be eighteen, an official adult,” I reminded, and watched the town pass. My eyes roamed over the gray river, the mills, Main Street with its pretty store windows, tall trees, people walking down the street like they didn’t have a care in the world.

We pulled into the lot at school. This was senior year. I said goodbye to my brother and smacked the car door shut. It pissed me off he was working for our father after he was the reason our mother was killed.

Olivier muttered, “Bye to you too.”

I just huffed as I entered the building.

My brother was a lost cause and now he was sucking Nico into his sphere.

I walked through the halls like I didn’t give a damn.

People knew their places. I kept moving until Nico found me at my locker, the grin already softened at the edges to apologize for my mood.

“Hey, Princess,” he said. He looked good and I hated that it mattered. “I’ll swing by after school. Your dad wants me to. . .”

“No,” I said.

His blink was slow, confused. “No…?”

“You aren’t coming by,” I said. “You shouldn’t be working for my father. I won’t change my mind, Nico.”

He laughed softly, the kind of laugh that works on girls who don’t know him yet. “This is temporary. I’m helping until something real shows.”

“This is something real,” I said. “Working for Marcel Bellerose is as real as it gets.”

“Harm. . .”

“It’s Harmony,” I corrected because I hated that nickname. “We’re done.” The hallway noise went muffled, the way it does right before a fire alarm. A freshman tripped three lockers down. A teacher told someone to tie their shoelace. It was all very ordinary while my lungs forgot how to breathe.

Nico’s jaw flexed. “Because of him?”

“Because of me,” I said. “I’m not dating my father’s employee.”

He stared at me, and something small and mean clicked into place behind his eyes. “You think you’re better than us.”

“I’m trying to be different from you,” I said and left.

I pushed through the doors at the end of the hall into the cold and crossed to the bleachers.

Metal bit through my jeans. The field lay bare.

My breath made ghosts and I liked the way the cool air made everything simple, move or don’t move; breathe or don’t.

Footsteps clanged a level down. Eric Thorne dropped onto the bench with the economy of a boy who knew how to take a hit and keep going.

Captain of the hockey team, hands big enough to hold a life if someone would let him.

He kept them tucked in his jacket like he was afraid of what they’d grab.

“Why are you sitting out here in the cold?” he asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I replied.

“You look like I feel,” he said, not unkind, not looking at me.

“Cold?” I rebutted because I didn’t have something better. As I watched him carefully, I noticed he seemed tense, maybe annoyed.

“I’m warmed up. I just dumped my boyfriend,” I blurted for some unknown to me reason.