Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Maybe she had. Either way, we were going to find out.
I leaned forward, picked up the small statue of Emperor Vitellius, and turned it in my hands before I set it down in front of Sterling. “I guess this means we’re going to Willow Springs to see if we can talk our way inside a safe deposit box.”
“I guess we are,” Sterling said. “And we’re going to come back with a big-ass pile of money.”
She stuck out her hand, offering to touch me for the first time in a year. I took her hand in mine, savoring the brief contact. I hadn’t lied—I didn’t care about the money; I could always make more money. But there was only one Sterling, and I’d go to the ends of the earth to touch her again.
Willow Springs was just the beginning.
Chapter Three
FORREST
Iwasn’t invited to pick Sterling up at Heartstone Manor, the family estate she’d banned me from a year before. Instead, she knocked on my door at eight a.m. sharp, just as she’d told me she would. I opened it to find a Sterling I wasn’t expecting.
She stood at my door in a navy linen sheath dress, her golden hair tamed into a sedate, gleaming twist, one sleek lock falling to curve around her cheek. Her makeup was artful and sophisticated, dramatic in a daytime-appropriate way, but the whole effect was not the Sterling I knew. This Sterling was polished, elegant, and bland. She was all image, her costume a wall between me and the woman I knew she hid inside.
“Ready?” she asked me, a challenge in her blue eyes.
I nodded. “I’m ready.”
“You can drive,” she said. “I don’t want to pay for gas.”
Most people wouldn’t get it—the heiress to the Sawyer fortune worrying about paying for gas. But I did. When her father had been alive, Sterling had a limitless credit card, the monthly bill covered by Prentice. Then Prentice was dead, and Sterling’s oldest brother, Griffen, took over.
Unlike Prentice, Griffen Sawyer did not believe in parenting with a blank check. As far as I could tell, Griffen was the closest thing to a real parent Sterling had since her stepmother died when she was seven. Griffen had come back to Sawyers Bend to find his little sister at the bottom of a bottle. He’d given her an ultimatum: get your shit together or get out.
I didn’t know Griffen Sawyer well, but I worked with his brothers, Royal and Tenn, and they talked about him often. I knew enough that I’d bet there was no way Griffen Sawyer would have thrown his baby sister out on the street. But Sterling hadn’t known it, and between her two options, she chose to get her shit together.
Once she cut back on drinking, she got a job at the inn, taking over for an employee who was out on maternity leave. After my lies were exposed and Sterling dumped me, she hadn’t wanted to see me at work every day. Understandable, though I’d felt her absence every day. Like someone had switched off half the lights, the inn was darker after she quit. She’d gone to work for her sister, Quinn, at Quinn’s backcountry guide business, Sawyer Outdoor Adventures. According to town gossip, Sterling had revamped Quinn’s website, organized her inventory system, started a summer camp program, and was doing some kind of outreach with local businesses to bring in more customers.
I wasn’t surprised. When she’d been at the inn, she’d taken to event planning as if she’d been doing it for years. I thought there wasn’t much Sterling couldn’t do if she put her mind to it. And now she was sitting beside me, headed to Willow Springs, Georgia, determined to get into a safe deposit box we didn’t have the key for.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Sterling kept her eyes pointed firmly out the window, locked on the deep blue sky, the trees a vibrant green under the bright July sun.
Monday morning traffic was light once we were clear of town. I didn’t know what excuse Sterling had given Quinn for missing work. I doubted she’d told her sister she was with me. I’d told Tenn and Royal that I had a last-minute appointment and wouldn’t be in. Not a lie. Just not the whole truth.
“Do you have a plan to open the box?” I asked. If it was even a box we were looking for. We’d assumed the number on my father’s code referred to a safe deposit box, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know much of anything. Not really.
“Yep,” she agreed.
“We don’t have a key,” I reminded her.
“Nope,” she said, a little too quickly.
Was she lying? “Do we have a key?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked my way, bouncing off the second they hit my face as if looking at me scalded her eyeballs. My gut twisted. I hated it, fucking hated that she couldn’t even look at me. If I thought apologizing would do any good, I’d be on my knees. But that was the problem with lying—if you did it enough, people didn’t believe a fucking thing you said, including when you apologized. I’d have to show her she could trust me and hope she was paying enough attention to see. That would be hard when she refused to meet my eyes