More Than Anything (Broken Pieces 1)

And it was pretty damned awesome. Harris felt like he had a brother again. No, not again . . . they had never talked just for the sake of it. And he could tell that Grey enjoyed it as much as he did.

He was staring at his phone, waiting for a reply to his last message, and he tried to curtail his excitement when he saw that she was typing something.

Still. You should try. She was right. But he’d rather talk to her and try to figure out why, after four days of silence, she had suddenly decided to text him.

But he knew it would be best not to push it.

Yeah. I should. Goodnight, Tina.

Night, Harris.

And that was it.

Check it out! The text came five days later—this time with a picture attached—while Harris was going through one of the many, many forged financial documents the group of six corrupt employees had fabricated to cover their asses over the course of two years. The Sleazy Six, as Harris—and the rest of the investigative team—had dubbed them, included two personal assistants, two financial managers, an accountant, and one of their property managers. They had succeeded in defrauding the company of nearly $10 million over the last two years and were leasing at least three of their Australian properties to groups affiliated with drugs and gunrunning. It was a mess and was taking longer to fix than Harris had imagined.

Not that he minded. He welcomed the distraction. But the distraction wasn’t proving at all effective when the person he was hoping to be distracted from had been sending him text messages every day for the last five days.

Tonight, it was a picture of Clara in a tiny “Riversend Rockets” football jersey. Apparently, Spencer Carlisle had decided to make the older-versus-younger monthly football game official and had named the teams and ordered jerseys for all the players.

Team mascot!!

Harris smiled fondly at the picture of his niece in the blue-and-white jersey. He’d already received the same picture from both Libby and Greyson but decided not to mention that.

Cute

Number Nine. Like her daddy.

Another fact that Greyson had bragged about.

Naturally.

He didn’t know why she was so determined to stay in contact with him. He thought she’d be happy that he’d left, but while she never mentioned anything of a personal nature, she sent him random pictures every day. Told him how the restaurant was doing, what new marketing strategies she and Daff had cooked up. Yesterday she’d sent him a picture of the sunrise, and his throat had closed up unexpectedly at the familiar view, obviously taken from her swing.

Harris decided not to question this—whatever it was—anymore. He was going to accept it and expect nothing from it. At the same time, he had so many questions. Ones that he knew were best left unasked. How was she? Had she had any more nightmares since he’d left? Did she miss him? Was she happy?

He got up and padded to the hotel window and took a quick, grainy snapshot of the night skyline and sent it to her without any explanation.

Nice view.

It’s okay. Your view from the front porch is better.

No reply. Not for several minutes, and he went back to studying the documents, even though his concentration was shot.

Had his statement been too personal? The unspoken rules of this bizarre little text relationship appeared to be: keep it light and frivolous. Maybe his observation hadn’t been light enough.

Sorry. Got distracted. Somebody wanted to say “hi”! Eek! Nobody in this town seems to realize that I’m crap at small talk.

He grinned at that. That town was perfect for Tina. She needed to be drawn out of her shell, and the curious, friendly, and kind people of Riversend were just the ones to do it.

I think you’ll be an expert at it in no time. You’re THE MJ everybody is going to want to know you.

Dear God! NO! She added a screaming emoji to the message, and he chuckled. Crap! Gotta go. One of our new servers just spilled wine all over the mayor!

He was in the process of typing his response when she followed up with:

Ps. THE MAYOR IS HAVING DINNER AT MY RESTAURANT TONIGHT!! THE!! MAYOR!! Later. She followed the message up with a smoochie face, and Harris wondered if she even realized she had done that. He obsessed over that fucking emoji—work forgotten—for the rest of the night, wondering what, if anything, it meant.

The following Friday at about two a.m., his phone pinged, waking him from a sound sleep. He fumbled for it and was surprised to see Tina’s name on the screen. After that first night, she had been careful about not texting him after midnight, her messages usually coming after nine in the evening his time.

He clicked on the message and stared blankly at the voice note for a long time, his stomach knotting up nervously, before clicking the play button.