the house. “How was the rest of your day?”
“Fine.” Sabrina unzipped her boots and dropped them in a tangle by the front door, grateful to feel the blood rushing back into her toes. She wriggled them a few times to speed the process. All she wanted to do was get clean in a nice, hot bath.
Her mother had other ideas. “Anything interesting happen?”
Besides the fact that it was now a known fact she’d checked out the town’s mayor? “Not really.” Sabrina rolled her neck, letting the ache ease from her shoulders. She was used to sitting in front of a computer all day; standing on her feet, reaching and pulling on the coffee machines worked a whole different set of muscles and she felt the burn. She knew her mother had missed her and just wanted to bond, but she just wasn’t up for it. Not smelling like old tea and dried sugar. “Can we talk later? I need to change.”
“Of course, sweetheart.” Her mother stepped forward to give her a quick hug, but stopped short, her nose wrinkling. “What is that smell?”
“Mrs. Thompson’s tea.” She headed up the stairs, already untucking her shirt. The blood was rushing back into her feet now and the throb worsened with each step. She winced. Apparently, heels weren’t meant to be worn for standing eight hours straight.
Sabrina stripped off her dirty clothes and dropped them in the hamper of her old bedroom. Nothing had changed since she’d left nine years earlier. The same white wainscoting and camel-colored walls. The same white bedspread and bright blue accent chair. The same green topiary on the oak nightstand. She’d even found her old red cowboy boots in the closet.
Of course she’d tried them on. Just to see if they still fit. They did. That was the great thing about shoes. Almost a decade later and they still fit the same way. Her old prom dress? Not so much.
Clad in only her underwear, she pulled her ratty old terry-cloth robe out of the closet. Her chic black silk one with gold embroidery hung beside it, but Sabrina was chilled. Summer temperatures had yet to arrive in Wheaton and her coastal blood was no longer used to the cooler days and nights. She wrapped the old robe tightly around her. It still fit, too. Though nothing else in town did.
Sabrina sank down to the end of her bed and fished her cell phone out of her purse. Time for her weekly call to the Vancouver newspaper. Though she had little hope that this time would be different, that her editor would tell her everything was fixed and that she was to haul her ass back to the city immediately, she called anyway.
Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. She’d written a short article on Jackson James, son of a wealthy developer. She hadn’t wanted to. Although she did interview local celebrities, she didn’t think Jackson qualified, but Jackson’s father was an advertiser—a big advertiser—and her editor had insisted.
Only Big Daddy hadn’t liked it when her article painted his son in a less than golden light. Please, his son was a wannabe playboy with rocks between his ears and Big Daddy’s insistence otherwise was an embarrassment. The whole thing should have just blown over, like other articles she’d written, showcasing her subject in an unflattering light, interest died down quickly and everyone got on with their lives. Except that wasn’t good enough for Big Daddy.
He believed that she’d sullied the family’s good name with innuendos and half truths and he wanted her to pay with her job. Since the paper wanted to keep him happy, a compromise was reached. His dollars were in and she was out.
Sabrina pushed the disappointment away. Just a few more months and either the paper would see the light or Big Daddy would finally ease up. They had to.
The phone rang a couple of times before her editor’s voice mail picked up. She left a message. The same message she always did. Just checking in. Let me know when things change. Call my cell phone.
Her stomach hurt. The first couple of months after her firing, her editor had been quick to take her calls. But lately, she was lucky to get a return phone call. And when she did, the information was always the same. A terse response that there was nothing new to report. She was beginning to worry there never would be.
She pulled her robe around her more tightly. If she didn’t get her job back, then what? Stay here? Shilling coffee and covering small-town politics for the rest of her life? Her parents would be thrilled, but she would not. She was meant for more than this.
She’d only been away for fourteen days and already she craved the late-night clubs, restaurants on every corner, and constant change and movement. People in the city tried new things, new looks, new music.
Residents in Wheaton seemed to have been caught in a time warp. But not the same one. There was no overarching style that permeated the town, so it didn’t look like a throwback to any specific era. Instead, people remained trapped in whatever look had been current at the time of their high school graduation. Sabrina was pretty sure she saw an old classmate wearing the same Ugg boots she’d worn all through high school. Her own mother was still known to rock the big pageant hair of the ’80s for special events. Mrs. Thompson had been wearing the same baby-blue sweater set she’d worn when she was Sabrina’s third-grade teacher.
Sabrina pushed herself off the bed and padded down the hall to the guest washroom that had been hers when she was growing up. Not much had changed in Wheaton since she’d been gone and not much had changed in the bathroom, either, including the potpourri her mother favored. She considered throwing it away, but the dried petals would no doubt flutter all over the tile and then she’d be on her hands and knees picking them up one by one.
Instead, she turned on the faucet, adjusted the temperature until she was happy and let the tub fill up. When the water neared the top she twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head, slipped off her robe and underwear, and slid beneath the surface, a sigh sliding out from her lips. This might be the one thing she’d missed. In the city, her apartment bathrooms had either a shower alone or an old tub that even she, at five feet four and a half inches, couldn’t fit in comfortably.
Sabrina stretched, letting the water sluice over her and feeling her muscles unkink. She still needed to figure out how to convince Noah Barnes that she only wanted to interview him, not make a federal case. But apparently the Barnes family was still holding on to old grudges.
Wasn’t there a statute of limitations on these things? It was nine years ago, for God’s sake. She shoved down the bubble of guilt that tried to rise. One more reason to get out of here. No one in Vancouver made her feel guilty or as though she’d done something wrong when all she’d done was report the truth.
The whole thing had started out so innocently. Sabrina had been taking journalism classes at the University of British Columbia and trying to find a way to finagle an internship at the Vancouver Tribune, the city’s broadsheet. But a university freshman with a few articles written for her local hometown paper the previous year was hardly the kind of student they were looking to groom.
Until Kyle, an early-round draft pick in the NHL’s draft, had injured his back at practice and herniated a disc. He’d been sent for surgery and then permitted to go home for recuperation and physiotherapy. Except Kyle had never come back.
Normally, an early-round player who crapped out before ever playing a game at the pro level wouldn’t do more than cause a brief mention on one of the morning talk shows. But Kyle had been drafted to Vancouver and he was a B.C. boy, so fans were interested. And Sabrina knew she could get the inside scoop.
Though she and Kyle hadn’t kept in touch after their breakup, she knew he’d agree to her interview and he had, willingly. No arm-twisting required. She’d flown home, expecting
