Hearts On Fire (Heart's Revenge Book 2) Read online

  I don’t say anything.

  Aidan exhales, bowing his head. He looks exhausted. “Okay, Essie. Okay.” He turns and he walks away.

  As he fades into a grey shadow, weaving between the headstones, I finally see the beautiful, simple bunch of wildflowers he’s laid at Vaughn’s grave. Across the other side of the cemetery, where his parents and his brother are also buried, I see three more bunches of the same flowers.

  Chapter Eight

  Aidan

  That wasn’t the first time I’ve been to Vaughn’s grave. I’ve been there on a bunch of times before—only when I’ve been visiting my parents—but I’ve always felt a little weird about it. I mean, I never met the guy. I don’t know much about him, other than what I’ve gleaned from Arturo and the information his brief research pulled up. Vaughn had a couple of misdemeanors on his rap sheet for drug possession, as well as an incident of drunk and disorderly. He was charged with that four days after his parents were killed, though, so that’s kind of understandable.

  It probably is odd to go visit the grave of someone you know so little about, but the truth is that I feel connected with him somehow. Maybe that’s crazy. Maybe I should be minding my own business and walking out of the eastern cemetery exit instead of purposefully passing the highly polished marble headstone that I paid for out of my own pocket, but I feel like I owe him in a way. He took such good care of his sister for so many years on his own. And then she was just cut free, no one out there to watch over her, and it seemed so inordinately cruel this had all happened to her. To him. To me and my family, too. I could have forgotten all about Essie Floyd. I could have walked away and never even thought about her again, but that wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.

  So, yes. I knew it was Vaughn’s birthday today. It didn’t take me long to figure out why Essie was so upset this morning, or why she dashed out of my apartment in such a hurry once again. And yes, I came here knowing it would cause a scene. The time for the tiptoeing and pretending was over, though. It was time for everything to be out in the open, even if she didn’t want it. I knew she was going to be angry. I had no idea she was going to lash out so spectacularly, though. No idea whatsoever. I was completely oblivious to the fact that Alex had been siphoning company money into offshore accounts. Essie’s right: it doesn’t matter that Alex is dead and the deed took place so long ago. If the government and the Trading Standards regulatory board find out about what happened, they’ll freeze the Callahan Corporation’s business activities until further notice as they conduct an investigation. Something like that would be the end of the GFS acquisition. Months worth of work down the drain, and the expansion of the Callahan Corporation put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Hell, I might even be lucky to come through the other side of an investigation like that with the company still in tact at all.

  I knew Essie was still damaged after Vaughn’s death, but I had no real comprehension of how deep her pain runs. Now, it’s all too clear, though. She’s been hurting enough to dedicate years of her life to finding something that would annihilate the Callahan name, ergo me. She’s been hurting enough to specifically seek out information that would destroy everything my father worked for, and everything I have subsequently been nurturing ever since he died. Perhaps I should’ve known. Perhaps I should’ve expected it right away, but five years is a long time to be plotting something like that. Five years is a long time to be patient, to wait. Five years is a long time to sustain the sort of emotion required to carry out such a vengeful plan.

  She’s been planning this all along. I’ve not without my own deceit, I’ll admit, but my omission of the truth felt like a kindness, like I was saving her the stinging pain of having to dredge it all up again. Looks like I was a fool, after all.

  I wanted to hold her in my arms, to tell her everything was going to be okay, but she didn’t want that. No. From the look on her face, Essie wanted to gauge my fucking eyes out.

  Walking away seemed like the right thing to do. And if she hates me as much as she appears to, then what the fuck have I been doing, allowing myself to fall piece by piece for this girl?

  Would I care if the business got dissolved? Of course I would. I’ve put so much energy into this thing since I got back from Hawaii, so I’d be less than happy to watch it all crash and burn. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, though. It would be just fine. I could move back to Hawaii and pick up right where I left off, I’m sure. I wouldn’t need any money. I wouldn’t need things. I would, however, be feeling pretty fucking responsible for all of the Callahan Corporation employees who were suddenly out of work and struggling to feed their families through no fault of their own.

  That’s why I don’t call Essie. That’s why I stay away. I have to figure out exactly what she found that could jeopardize the company, and then I have to figure out if the situation is salvageable. I love the girl. I really do. Which is why my heart feels like a diving weight in my chest as I meet with Sam Preacher, my private investigator.

  Preacher’s an old friend of my dad’s. They were in Vietnam together, though my father never talked about those days, and Preacher still doesn’t now. He was a Chicago PD detective for thirty years before he finally retired and set up his P.I. company. Alex hired him once when he suspected his girlfriend at the time was having an affair. She was, too. At the time, I didn’t blame her.

  Anyway. Preacher’s a man of integrity, someone you can trust. Someone who means what they say and can be relied upon to follow through with their commitments. He’s also a chameleon, an everyman. You can just as easily picture him in the front pew at church as you can at a tailgate party before the football game. Now we’re in my office, me sitting behind my desk, him in one of the chairs in front of me, and he’s leaning back, hands folded across his stomach. Despite his discretion, his integrity, the fact that he never seems to judge or have a personal opinion about what it is you’re asking of him, I still feel awkward as I try to explain what I want him to do.

  “I knew your brother was a bit of a sly fox, Aidan, but I never thought he’d be skimming money from your dad. What an asshole.” Preacher scratches at the three-day-old white scruff on his neck, frowning. “I’m not the best with numbers, y’know. I can’t say as I’d know what I was looking for to be honest.”

  I have a thumping headache banging away behind my eyes and my skull feels like its about to split apart at the seams. I press my fingertips into my temples, groaning. “I know. I can’t put seven years’ worth of spreadsheets in front of my accounts department, though. They’ll want to know what’s going on, and when they find the inconsistencies, whatever they are, all hell will break loose.”

  Preacher grunts. “Had a high turn over in your accounts team lately?”

  “No.”

  “Then seems to me these guys must already know about the inconsistencies if they were working here when Alex was running the show, right? They’d have to.”

  I’ve thought about this. He’s probably right. There must have been at least one or two people who were complicit with Alex. He’d never have been able to shift large sums of money from our business accounts without someone being aware of it. “I know. I can’t risk heading down to Accounts and pointing fingers, though. That will only blow up in my face.”

  Preacher nods. “Okay. Well, I can have some outside people look at it. I’ll just give them the numbers. They’ll never know exactly what they’re looking at. It might take a while, though.”

  “I don’t really have a while, Sam. The sooner, the better if you can swing it.”

  He shrugs with one shoulder, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “I can try.” Standing, he collects his beaten leather jacket from over the chair he was sitting in and stretches before pulling it on. “Anything else you want me to look into, while you got me here?” he asks.

  There’s a tone in his voice I recognize well—a chastising one that reminds me of my father. “No. I’m good,” I tell him.

  “It’s just that I’
ve been coming here once a week for the past few years now and we’ve been discussing a certain young lady. Now this has gone down, does that mean I shouldn’t be checking in on her anymore?” Sam stands there, hands resting on the back of the chair, bushy gray eyebrows raised, obviously waiting for me to answer him, and I can do nothing but stare back at him blankly with my hands gripped tightly together underneath the table where he can’t see.

  Eventually I have to say something. “I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know what the right move is here. I don’t know what I should want.”

  He stands up tall and sighs. “Well, you’ll figure it out, kiddo. There’s no right and wrong here. My wife tried to physically strangle the life out of me when we first met, and we were married twenty-seven years before she died. So. You know. Love is imperfect. You just have to know what level of crazy you’re willing to accept from someone you share a bed with. Let me know when you’ve made up your mind, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Chapter Nine

  Essie

  My heart hurts. I didn’t think that it could break any further, but surprise! It has. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise, though. I knew even after that first night with Aidan that I was playing a dangerous game. No way in hell was this ending well for anyone concerned. I thought it was going to be okay that my own feelings were a secondary concern in this whole affair, but now that I’m here, in pain, bruised emotionally and torn apart from the inside out, I’ve suddenly realized that maybe I should have cared more about my own heart. Should have been more careful with it.

  When you’re in the midst of something, though, when you’re caught up in it, it’s easy to tell yourself all manner of things and to find yourself getting behind the most preposterous of ideas. With some distance and a heartbreaking fight to put things into perspective, I’m beginning to suspect what an idiot I’ve been. If I’d had any sense, I would have stayed far, far away from Aidan Callahan. I should have done this whole thing remotely, never even gotten close enough to him to see how beautiful and sweet he is in person. He would have remained the faceless name I was gunning after, like he had been for so long, but no. I had to meet him, to figure him out, to know him before I destroyed him.

  After Vaughn died, my heart broke, shattered into a thousand pieces. I barely managed to glue it back together, and even after I did it’s still been cracked and covered in a spider web of fractures that have repeatedly threatened to shatter all over again at any given moment. My cobbled together heart has gotten me by until this point, but now it feels as though the broken, injured thing I keep in my chest has not only broken again, it’s been ground into dust. There’s no repairing it now.

  I went and did the unimaginable. I fell in love with him, and now I’m so conflicted that it feels like I don’t even know which way is up anymore. I want to curl up in his arms. I want the feel of his skin against mine. I want us to be so close that the tips of our noses touch, that I can see every single eyelash when I look at his face. I don’t know what happened when I saw him at Vaughn’s grave. I lost it. I completely lost any and all sense of control. The last time I felt like that, I thought that maybe I was going to do something stupid. Something that couldn’t be taken back. I hadn’t because I’d had Max, Vaughn’s best friend, but if he’d simply walked away after Vaughn’s funeral and left me to my own devices then god knows what I would have done.

  I don’t want to be that scared again. I definitely don’t want to ever feel like I’ve sunk into a dark, black, bottomless pit of despair that I’ll never be able to climb back out of again, either. So I do something I probably shouldn’t and I call him. I call Max. He’s the only person who understands me and what I’m capable of. He saw me at my very worst, and he helped me anyway. He never closed the door in my face.

  He left the police force in Chicago not long after I moved out of his place. We both promised we’d stay in touch, and for the first year or so we were pretty good about keeping that promise. Life happens, though. Things get in the way. He moved to Capshaw, an unincorporated township a few hours south of Chicago, where his extended family have been farming for generations.

  “I always felt lucky that I didn’t grow up on that farm,” he’d said to me the last time I saw him in person. “Not like some of my cousins. Thought I had it better being raised in an urban area, but it’s just too much. I can’t take it. I want a quieter way of life. I’ve seen too much shit here. I don’t want to be caught up in the hustle and bustle anymore. I became a cop because I wanted to make a difference, and I’ve been waiting all this time for that to kick in, for my contribution to start meaning something, but people are still fucking around, hurting and killing each other, and it’s always the innocent victims who end up paying the highest price. It’s messed up. I’m so done.”

  I had nodded as he told me this, though at the time I was thinking that he was giving in too easily. That was arrogant of me—I realize that now. How the hell could I know what nightmares he’d seen as a cop? And Chicago…Chicago reminded him of Vaughn, too. I was never the only one who was hurting. He just wanted to get away, wanted something simpler, and I didn’t understand it at the time. I sure as hell do now, though.

  Which is why I find myself on a train heading north toward a farm I’ve never visited and a friend I haven’t seen in a very long time. Max didn’t mind, of course. When I called and asked if I could come and stay with him for a couple of days, he said yes, of course, and was trying to talk me into getting myself organized and coming right away. Maybe he could tell something was wrong by the tone of my voice, and maybe not, but either way I knew immediately that I was welcome.

  My mind is still spinning after that confrontation with Aidan at the cemetery. Three days later and it still feels surreal, like it was a dream, like it didn’t actually happen, can’t possibly have happened. Except it did.

  I said some horrible things to Aidan. I hit him. More than once. And all he did was stand there and take it and tell me that he was falling in love with me. No one has ever uttered those words to me before. I keep replaying it over in my head, again and again, and I keep thinking that if I was a normal person, someone who could let themselves be loved, that instead of being one of the worst days of my life, that might have been one of the best. I’m clearly way too fucked up to have any sort of normal relationship, though. Hearing him tell me how he feels sent me over the edge. How is that in any way normal?

  The view out of the train’s window turns from city high rises to suburbia, and then into a rural landscape that seems alien and unfamiliar to me. I don’t see the trees and the wide-open spaces, though. I don’t see the distorted image of my own face reflected back at me in the window glass as the miles speed by, one after the other. I only see that desolate look on Aidan Callahan’s face as I let him turn around and walk away.

  ***

  It comes as a shock to me that I can’t remember the last time I left the city. There was once when I was barely ten, when the foster family Vaughn and I were living with at the time drove us out of state to see some of their relatives in Virginia for Christmas. That was the first real Christmas I can remember, when everything felt like it was perfect and running around outside with a bunch of kids I’d just met felt liberating, as though I wasn’t Essie the orphan. I was just a normal kid with her family enjoying the holidays. Those foster parents hadn’t lasted very long, of course. They were on the outs, ready for a divorce, and figured picking up a couple of kids in need might give them some purpose, a reason to stay together. We hadn’t been enough in the end. They’d still hated each other, and in turn they’d ended up resenting me and Vaughn, too, so they ditched us back at the shelter and went their separate ways, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief as they did so.

  Irrespective of what went down afterwards with those guys, I guess I hoped by going to stay in Capshaw, I’d feel the same way I did when I was with them at Christmas. Like maybe I was just a regular woman, taking a vacation to see with a friend and nothing mo
re. Sadly, I still feel like Essie, the stonehearted bitch, running from her problems, though, and that really, really sucks.

  Capshaw is quieter than the grave. The sheer vastness of the place is absolutely mindboggling. It’s taken me a few days to adjust, but I’m happy for the simplicity, happy for the long hours that stretch ahead of me, and happy to be far from work and Aidan and anything else that might cause me to feel like the world is ending. Max and I have fallen into a steady, quiet kind of rhythm, some sort of symbiotic relationship that’s comfortable in its simple domesticity. He gets up early and works with his cousins out in the fields. I make coffee, I do the dishes from our supper the night before, and I read. I wonder if I could adjust to a life out here, if I could be content living some place like this, knowing what to expect, knowing exactly what each day was going to hold? Perhaps I could.

  Max’s cousins are older than he is but not by much. They have wives. Children. They work long hours and go home hungry, go to bed early, just to wake up the next morning and do it all again. There’s a small town about twelve miles away where you can go get a beer, see a movie, and that’s about it. There’s a church and a library.

  Max has been very considerate, not pressing for information. I’ve never wanted to come up here and stay with him before, no matter how many times he’s offered to have me. He holds his tongue and accepts that I have my reasons, which is what I need. He doesn’t ask what I do to fill my days. The truth is, I don’t do much and I like it that way. My mind keeps boomeranging all over the place, frantic, uncertain as to what my next move should be, and that’s enough activity for me.