Stolen Hearts (Hearts 1)

And they really didn’t love me staying in the pool house.

“I’m fine,” I said with what I hoped was a smile. I could see across the room Winston and Perry, Caroline’s sons, tracking this conversation. And more eyes were not what I needed. “I just need some air.”

They were one hundred percent pitying me and barely hiding it.

I was one hundred percent freaking out and barely hiding it.

The front doors were still open, people walking in and out, and the big veranda would be just as crowded as this ballroom, so I followed a server out the door and through a wood-panelled study full of men in tuxedos.

I didn’t look at their faces. In this world, this place, they all looked the same. White, slightly saggy, watery-eyes behind glasses that assessed my worth as I went running past.

In my desperation, I got turned around inside the sprawling mansion and found myself in the small sitting room being used as a bar for the catering staff. The same room where Caroline had changed my life forever – god, was that . . . Christmas? How had my life changed so dramatically in a few months?

“You have to listen to me,” Caroline said, sitting next to me on the little settee facing the icy window. The white twinkle lights reflected in her eyes. “This is serious. And this is hard. But you’re not a little girl anymore.”

“I know,” I said. I’d turned 20 in the spring. And now that Dad was dead, I was Zilla’s legal guardian. Frankly, I hadn’t been a little girl since Mom died. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like a little girl.

“Your father . . .” Caroline took a deep breath. “There’s no money, Poppy.”

“For what?” I asked.

“There’s no money for you. For school. For Zilla. You need to sell the house to pay off what he owed.”

“Okay,” I felt the ground shifting under my feet. “The life insurance—”

“He cashed it out a year ago.”

“My college fund?”

“Gone. The money from your mother’s estate. All gone. There’s nothing, Poppy.”

“How will I pay for Zilla—”

“You’re going to need to drop out of school, and we need to figure something out.”

“You all right, miss?” a server asked while trying to get by me with a tray of empty glasses from the kitchen.

“Bad place to stop,” a guy said, lifting his tray of full glasses over my head as he went by.

“I just need . . . fresh air.”

“The front—”

“And privacy.”

The server nodded once, her no-nonsense ponytail swishing over her dark vest. “Follow me,” she said.

Maybe I could get a job as a server with this catering company. She probably made good money. I didn’t have any experience serving appetizers on trays, and probably way too much experience eating them. But I could learn. Probably.

We were through the kitchen and down another hall, and finally she pushed open a door to a small brick patio with a few chairs around what looked like a fire pit. I could see the swimming pool beyond. The pool house where I’d been staying since Christmas like some very unwanted guest. The gazebo. Tennis courts. The manicured lawns slipped down over the hills to the shadowed tree line. Fresh air abounded. The sounds of the party were muffled.

I could almost pretend I was far away from it all.

“You should be okay out here,” the server said in her neat vest and bow tie. I loved bow ties. Honestly, I was made to be a catering server.

“Thank you so much!” I said, showing way too much enthusiasm for the kindness she’d shown me, but there’d been a real lack of kindness – big or small, in my life in the last year so I always got a little messy around it.

“It’s just where the servers smoke, nothing to get excited about,” she said with lots of side eye.

The server vanished through the open doorway, and I walked out into the grass, past the edge of the light thrown from the lantern fixture over the door. In the distance was the thick tree line that separated the Constantine land from my parent’s old house. When Zilla found out what Dad had done, she burned the house down. That’s when we knew the medication wasn’t enough. That’s when Belhaven happened. When everything changed. What was left of the house after the fire and the willow tree had been bulldozed, the pond filled, the land sold to the Constantine’s.

I could run around to the front of the house and get a key from the valet. Any key. Any car. And I could drive away.

Except, you idiot, you don’t know how to drive.

I could run. Just . . . run. Even as I thought it, I was slipping out of my shoes. The grass cold and damp and real beneath my feet. That was how bad I wanted to escape – my body was committed to action before I’d fully finished the thought. God. I wanted to RUN.