his life making beautiful, wealthy women more beautiful to have it known that he was a wife beater.
So maybe the end was in sight. Her lawyer said Dean couldn’t change his mind now, that the papers his attorney had sent were almost as good as the court’s seal on the settlement.
But she realized, now that she had won, that she didn’t care much about the money. She cared most about the painful places the whole mess had left, and worse, the realization that she hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the man all those years. That she had taken it and taken it, and blamed herself for not being good enough.
That she had been drawn in by charm, flattery and all the oiliness of a snake.
Ugh. She’d give all that money back if she could just erase the last eight years from her life.
She pulled into her parking garage at last and into her numbered slot. Like many high-rises in Miami, this one had been built so that the parking garage was beneath the apartments, at ground level, putting the living units well above the reach of a storm surge in hurricane season. She often thought that if they hadn’t had to put the building on stilts, there would have been no garage at all. This address wasn’t exactly A-list.
But it was good enough, she reminded herself. She sat for a few minutes in her car, enjoying the quiet after work, the sense that soon it would all be over and Dean would be firmly in her past. The sense that she was about to reach a point where she could finally shed the emotional bruises and stop living in fear.
God, it was going to be a relief. Increasingly, she dreamed of leaving Miami permanently. The more miles she could put between her and Dean, the better. She didn’t want to hear his name ever again, even by accident. Heck, she wouldn’t turn on her TV because she might run across one of the commercials for his practice.
Nor did she have any ties holding her here. All the friends she thought she had made during her marriage had turned their backs on her. Maybe she made them uncomfortable in some way, because she suspected many of their marriages were like hers. Women who had married wealthy men who had turned out to think of them as possessions.
“You pay for that money,” she whispered, facing up to her mistake yet again. Even when you honestly believed you loved the guy, you wound up paying for the luxury…sometimes with your body, sometimes with your soul. She’d paid with a little of both.
At last she sighed and climbed out of her car, thinking of crawling into bed and just forgetting everything for a few hours. All the stress, all the worry, even some of the self-loathing she still felt.
Oh, she’d been stupid and naive to begin with, but later, as the emotional abuse mounted, her excuses had grown thinner. She didn’t like herself for that.
She was walking toward the elevator when a voice called out, “Mrs. Devereaux?”
At once a shudder of distaste ran down her spine. Thinking it was one of the security guards, she turned. “I prefer Ms. Scanlon now.”
The man stood only a foot away, dressed Miami casual, smiling. “I thought I recognized you. My sister-in-law goes to see your husband. Anyway, you dropped something when you got out of the car.”
She looked at the hand he held out, trying to see what it was, caught a blur from the corner of her eye, then the world exploded in blackness and stars as her head seemed to split open.
I’m going to die.
And then she thought nothing at all.
Coming home from roundup at a local ranch in Conard County, Hank Jackson expected to unload his gear, step into the cool quiet of his house, and maybe have a shot of bourbon to ease the pain he lived with constantly.
It seemed that no matter how well the docs put smashed bones back together, the bones always remembered the insult. Then they couldn’t make up their minds if they hated activity or inactivity more.
Regardless, more than a week on the range of riding, camping, roping and herding had left his body feeling a little older than its thirty-four years, and he was looking for a hot bath and a shot, not necessarily in that order.
Except as he was tugging his saddle out of the back of his pickup, he noticed the house next door. He owned that place, too, a decision made on the spur of the moment because he preferred being busy to having too much time on his hands to think, and that house would keep an entire crew of repairmen busy for quite a while.
But since he had left nine days ago, things had changed, signaled by curtains in the windows.
Crap. He froze, saddle still resting on the truck bed, and looked again. He should never have let Ben Patterson persuade him to list the place for rent a few weeks ago. There was still a ton of work that needed to be done, as he’d told Ben. Then he’d allowed himself to be talked into listing it because it would propel him to get the work done faster.
Hell.
He’d never expected that anyone would take it in that condition, not even at the ridiculously low rent.
Sighing, he shifted his weight onto the hip that hurt marginally less and tried to decide if he could ignore his new tenant until tomorrow. Or was he honor-bound to get the heck over there right now and tell him all about the things that weren’t working right and a few things that might not be safe?
Ben might not have remembered all the details. And what if there was a family in there?
Cussing under his breath, he left his saddle and headed next door, leaving his own grassy yard behind for the weedy patch of dirt that belonged to the other house. Yet another thing he’d been planning to take care of this week or next.
Climbing the two steps to the small, covered porch elicited another cuss word that only he could hear. The doorbell didn’t work, so he rapped sharply on the front door, a solid oak door in dire need of painting. Oh, hell, why kid himself? It needed a blow-torch first, and looking at it he was quite certain some of the underlying layers of paint were lead-based. He’d better not find any kids living here, because, if he did, Ben would get more than a few choice words.
His first knock went unanswered. He rapped again, more loudly, saw one of the new curtains twitch, and finally the front door opened a crack.
He found himself looking into one blue eye through that crack.
“Yes?” said a quiet, tense voice.
“Hank Jackson,” he said. “I’m your landlord.”
“Oh.” Then, “Oh! The agent mentioned you.”
And the door didn’t open even a hair wider. “Lady, I don’t know if Ben bothered to tell you, but there are some things about this house that aren’t safe.”
“I know that.”
“But do you know them all? Just tell me you don’t have any kids.”
“No. No kids.”
This wasn’t getting them very far. Part of him just wanted to turn around, walk away, find that hot bath and that shot of bourbon. But in
