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Free Falling - ebook
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Free Falling - ebook
First love, second chances, and secrets that come back to haunt.
After seven years away, twenty-four-year-old Free Spalding is back in Pointe Hill, Georgia, on a mission to save her late father’s restaurant from a real estate deal that could destroy everything he spent his life working for.
When it turns out her ex is the one behind the deal, Free is determined to fight him, for the sake of her family and the community she abandoned so many years ago. But just as Free begins to feel at home again, a shocking secret comes to light, challenging everything she thinks she knows about love, family, and forgiveness.
FREE FALLING is a Georgia Romance Writers’ Maggie Award finalist. It is the first full-length, stand-alone novel in the Pointe Hill Series.
| Kategoria: | Romance |
| Język: | Angielski |
| Zabezpieczenie: |
Watermark
|
| ISBN: | 978-0-9995961-1-1 |
| Rozmiar pliku: | 382 KB |
FRAGMENT KSIĄŻKI
I’ve got five minutes, three blocks, and one chance. As I race up Turner Street, my messenger bag bumps against my thigh in time with my breathing. The swell of Friday evening commuters heading in the opposite direction slows my pace, and by the time I make it to the corner of Elm, I’m down to two minutes.
The building, halfway down the block on my left, is just six stories tall, but it juts above the neighboring storefronts like an ugly, glass-encased sore thumb. I skid to a stop in front of the building and look up. Ragged gray clouds float across the mirrored windows, and I feel as if I’m looking into the eye of a brewing storm. I yank open the door and enter the lobby anyway.
The lobby’s air conditioning is on full blast, a balm against the stifling hot days of the Georgia summer. The perspiration on my T-shirt cools in an instant, causing the material to cling to my skin. A chill runs through me, and I can’t tell if it’s from the cold air or because I’ve come all this way to confront C. J. Eubanks, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to the bastard when I see him. If I get to see him at all.
“Hey there, Freedom,” Sam says, smiling down at me from his security perch. Sam’s the building’s chief security guard and a regular at my family’s restaurant. And besides my mother, he’s one of the only people who calls me by my full name.
“Free,” I remind him gently, waving as I try to get by him without engaging in small talk.
“Where you headed in such a hurry this late on a Friday afternoon? You know almost everyone’s gone.” Sam smiles, his deep dimples visible even through his salt-and-pepper beard.
As I backpedal toward the elevators my mind races to come up with a story for Sam and his truth-serum dimples. “We’ve got a big catering order coming up and I need to finalize a few things with the client.” Technically it’s not a lie. We do have a big order coming up, just not for anyone in this building. And if Sam knew this was an unscheduled visit, he’d try to call upstairs, ruining my plan to catch Eubanks off guard.
“You and Agnes are always working so hard. I guess that’s why y’all have the best restaurant in Pointe Hill.” He clears his throat. “How _is_ Agnes by the way?” His smile widens when he asks about my mother. For once I’m grateful for Sam’s interest in her, since it seems to take his mind off me going upstairs.
“She’s great,” I say, arriving at the elevators as one of the doors open.
“Hard-working woman, that Agnes,” Sam says, mostly to himself, before returning his attention to his security monitor.
On the elevator, I press the button for the sixth floor then tuck a loose braid back into my bun. The elevator’s steel panel walls distort my image, but not so much that I can’t see the dusting of flour on the front of my T-shirt. I brush the flour off as best as I can, then tug at the T-shirt to remove some of the wrinkles. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe I should have given it the weekend and tried to make an appointment to see Eubanks on Monday. I contemplate pressing the “L” button to return to the lobby, but then my mom’s words come to me as clearly as the music coming from the elevator’s speakers. “_I don’t know if we can keep going like this. I don’t know if we should_.” And then, “_I’m not signing the lease, Free_.”
Eleven and a half months. She didn’t even make it a year before giving up. I press the button for the sixth floor over and over, as if pressing it can stop my mother’s voice from repeating in my head.
The elevator doors open across from a suite whose door is emblazoned with the CHI logo and the tagline—Chronus Holdings Incorporated: Growing Communities, Shaping Lives. “Shaping lies is more like it,” I mumble as I exit the elevator and step onto carpet so plush, I sink into it as I make my way toward the door.
On the wall next to the suite’s entrance is a poster featuring a mock-up of a high-end strip mall. At the center of the image are a couple of Barbie and Ken lookalikes, and judging by the expressions on their faces and the designer shopping bags in their hands, they’ve achieved nirvana simply by shopping. Everything, from the poster to the carpet to the rich wood paneling on the walls, confirms what I’ve thought about CHI since the developer’s real estate signs started popping up all over town. Money, and not community, is what drives their expansion into Pointe Hill.
I march toward the doors, hoping that at five o’ clock on a Friday evening the CHI gatekeeper is gone for the day, but that C. J. Eubanks is not. When I open the suite’s door, I’m in luck. The chair behind the receptionist desk is empty. But my luck is short-lived. Down the hall, a group of women dressed in pencil skirts and power suits huddle together speaking softly.
I glance down at my black Converses, wipe my sweaty palms on my leggings, and try not to think about how out of place I look. I’m here for a reason, and my fashion sense, or lack of it, isn’t it.
Hoping Eubanks’s office is at this end of the hallway, I turn away from the group.
“Can I help you?”
At the sound of the voice, I stop mid-stride and whip around to see a woman near the reception desk with her head cocked and her hands on her hips. Her hair, up in a bun that puts mine to shame, is so glossy it looks shellacked. Her eyes take me in from head to toe before she offers a tight smile. A smile that quickly fades when I take a step back.
She drops her arms and shakes her head like a schoolteacher reprimanding an unruly student. The bun doesn’t budge.
I take a few more steps back, pressing my messenger bag tightly against my leg.
“Can I help you?” she repeats, louder this time and with none of the clipped politeness of her first inquiry.
We stare at each other until I turn and speed-walk down the hallway, checking the nameplates of each door I pass.
“Excuse me!” She’s yelling, and now her voice sounds more MMA than MBA.
At the last door at the end of the hallway, I finally see his name. I grab the door’s cold metal handle and fling it open, the Bun hot on my heels.
“You can’t go in there” is the last thing I hear before I close the door behind me and lean against it to hold her off.
I turn to address the man I’ve just broken a few trespassing laws to confront, but instead of the cold, hard eyes of a corporate bigwig, I’m greeted by an unoccupied leather chair behind a wide, glass-topped desk. The desk is pristine, empty except for a laptop, a box of tissues, and a stack of papers held down by a large stone paperweight.
The door handle turns behind me, and I move just in time for the Bun to come stumbling in. I’m about to interrogate her about Eubanks when I hear someone clear his throat.
He’s standing in the far corner of the large office looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows. He doesn’t even turn to acknowledge us.
“Mr. Eubanks, I tried—” the Bun begins.
“It’s okay, Melissa,” he says, still facing the window.
That voice.
My body reacts before my mind has a chance to. Even though I’m still sweating from running, the hairs on my arms rise in goose bumps. I swear my heart stalls before it sputters to life again, pounding in my chest, and in my ears, and in my head.
When I hear him say, “Ms. Spalding and I are acquainted,” my mind catches up with my body, and I know.
I haven’t heard that voice in seven years, but I know.
“Oh my God,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. When I open them, he is behind the desk staring at me. His face looks older, the jaw wider, the green eyes impossibly greener. But it’s still his face. It’s Christopher Bellamy, and seven years ago he broke my heart into a million little pieces.The door clicks shut behind me as I stare at him.
Christopher Bellamy is back in Pointe Hill, and I didn’t even warrant so much as a text.
My body is still working faster than my mind. I want to punch him _and_ hug him, crumple into the chair in front of me _and_ turn and run from the room. When my eyes dart to the paperweight on the desk and my fingers twitch at the thought of hurling it at his head, my mind finally takes control and sends a message to my mouth. “_You’re_ C. J. Eubanks?”
The boy I knew as Christopher stands behind his pristine desk in his perfectly tailored pinstripe suit with not a hair on his dark curly head out of place and watches me, his eyes unreadable, his face expressionless. He is ice.
But I’m fire, and I want to burn that blank expression off his face. I open my mouth, ready to spit flames, when he finally speaks.
“Freedom, it’s good to see you.”
He says this so calmly, so matter-of-factly, I glance at the paperweight again and contemplate adding an assault charge to the trespassing charges I’m probably already racking up.
“Seven years. Seven years, and a ‘Freedom, it’s good to see you’ is the best you can do?” I clench my fists so tightly my fingernails bite into my palms. The pain reminds me why I’m there, and I reach into my bag, pull out the papers, and toss them on his desk. “And what the hell is this?”
“I thought you’d want to catch up on old times first, but we can dispense with the niceties if that’s what you’d prefer. This”—he points to the papers—“is business.”
“Business? Don’t tell me you actually buy that bullshit company tagline about growing communities. The commercial district CHI is developing will force half the tenants in that section of the Old Sixth Ward out of business. There’s no way any of us can afford a rent increase, and you know it. You want us all out so you can move new tenants in at what, double what we’re currently paying?”
Christopher folds his arms across his chest. “It’s business, Free. Pointe Hill needs this project. None of this is personal.”
“_All_ of this is personal. That restaurant was my father’s whole life. Dad ran Cecelia’s for twenty years. He is—was…” I pause, still not used to referring to my father in the past tense, “a fixture in this community. Cecelia’s still is. And if you think I’m going to let you take that restaurant away from us without a fight, you’ve got another thing coming.” I wave a hand in his direction. “The suit and tie might fool some people into thinking you’re some upright businessman trying to help the community, but I know better. I fell for your lies once. I won’t make that mistake again.”
If the callback to our past fazes Christopher, he’s an even better liar than I remember, because my comment gets nothing out of him. When he remains silent, I add, “I’m glad Dad’s not here to see what you’re doing.”
“Mr. Spalding would have wanted—”
“Don’t you _dare_ tell me what my father would have wanted. You lost that right when you decided to have a hand in dismantling the thing he spent his life building.”
At last his eyes reflect something other than cold disinterest. “I was sorry to hear about his passing. And I’m sorry he won’t be here to experience Pointe Hill’s progress. Our family’s goal with this project—”
“Our?”
“CHI is my father’s company,” Christopher says, nodding. “We’re headquartered in New York with branches in London and Atlanta. This office in Pointe Hill is the first of many satellite offices we hope to open in smaller cities around the country. Jason has been handling our properties in the southeast while I’ve traveled between New York and London. He recently asked for my help here.”
“Wait, Jason is in Pointe Hill, too?” I ask.
Jason is Christopher’s older brother. They weren’t close when I knew them as teenagers, so I’m surprised Jason would ask him for help now. I’m even more surprised Christopher would give it, especially after everything that happened.
Christopher narrows his eyes. “Apparently, he’s not as averse to this place as I am.”
I shake my head and toss my bag on the chair in front of me. Jason’s back in Pointe Hill, and I didn’t know about that either.
“Jason was never great at keeping in touch,” Christopher says as if reading my mind. “And I’ve never had a good reason to come back.”
His features harden when he says this, and that look reminds me I’m not talking to the Christopher I once knew, but to C. J. Eubanks.
“So, screwing me over once wasn’t enough. You come back to finish the job? That’s rich, even for you.”
His skin colors under the collar of his white dress shirt, and in one fluid motion he walks over to his desk and presses the intercom. “Melissa, you can call it a night.” He disconnects the call without waiting for an answer, and loosens his tie, his eyes trained on me the entire time. “You really want to go there, Free? Wanna talk about screwing people over? Then let’s talk. How about we start by you telling me why, if you cared so much about me, you slept with Jason.”
The building, halfway down the block on my left, is just six stories tall, but it juts above the neighboring storefronts like an ugly, glass-encased sore thumb. I skid to a stop in front of the building and look up. Ragged gray clouds float across the mirrored windows, and I feel as if I’m looking into the eye of a brewing storm. I yank open the door and enter the lobby anyway.
The lobby’s air conditioning is on full blast, a balm against the stifling hot days of the Georgia summer. The perspiration on my T-shirt cools in an instant, causing the material to cling to my skin. A chill runs through me, and I can’t tell if it’s from the cold air or because I’ve come all this way to confront C. J. Eubanks, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to the bastard when I see him. If I get to see him at all.
“Hey there, Freedom,” Sam says, smiling down at me from his security perch. Sam’s the building’s chief security guard and a regular at my family’s restaurant. And besides my mother, he’s one of the only people who calls me by my full name.
“Free,” I remind him gently, waving as I try to get by him without engaging in small talk.
“Where you headed in such a hurry this late on a Friday afternoon? You know almost everyone’s gone.” Sam smiles, his deep dimples visible even through his salt-and-pepper beard.
As I backpedal toward the elevators my mind races to come up with a story for Sam and his truth-serum dimples. “We’ve got a big catering order coming up and I need to finalize a few things with the client.” Technically it’s not a lie. We do have a big order coming up, just not for anyone in this building. And if Sam knew this was an unscheduled visit, he’d try to call upstairs, ruining my plan to catch Eubanks off guard.
“You and Agnes are always working so hard. I guess that’s why y’all have the best restaurant in Pointe Hill.” He clears his throat. “How _is_ Agnes by the way?” His smile widens when he asks about my mother. For once I’m grateful for Sam’s interest in her, since it seems to take his mind off me going upstairs.
“She’s great,” I say, arriving at the elevators as one of the doors open.
“Hard-working woman, that Agnes,” Sam says, mostly to himself, before returning his attention to his security monitor.
On the elevator, I press the button for the sixth floor then tuck a loose braid back into my bun. The elevator’s steel panel walls distort my image, but not so much that I can’t see the dusting of flour on the front of my T-shirt. I brush the flour off as best as I can, then tug at the T-shirt to remove some of the wrinkles. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe I should have given it the weekend and tried to make an appointment to see Eubanks on Monday. I contemplate pressing the “L” button to return to the lobby, but then my mom’s words come to me as clearly as the music coming from the elevator’s speakers. “_I don’t know if we can keep going like this. I don’t know if we should_.” And then, “_I’m not signing the lease, Free_.”
Eleven and a half months. She didn’t even make it a year before giving up. I press the button for the sixth floor over and over, as if pressing it can stop my mother’s voice from repeating in my head.
The elevator doors open across from a suite whose door is emblazoned with the CHI logo and the tagline—Chronus Holdings Incorporated: Growing Communities, Shaping Lives. “Shaping lies is more like it,” I mumble as I exit the elevator and step onto carpet so plush, I sink into it as I make my way toward the door.
On the wall next to the suite’s entrance is a poster featuring a mock-up of a high-end strip mall. At the center of the image are a couple of Barbie and Ken lookalikes, and judging by the expressions on their faces and the designer shopping bags in their hands, they’ve achieved nirvana simply by shopping. Everything, from the poster to the carpet to the rich wood paneling on the walls, confirms what I’ve thought about CHI since the developer’s real estate signs started popping up all over town. Money, and not community, is what drives their expansion into Pointe Hill.
I march toward the doors, hoping that at five o’ clock on a Friday evening the CHI gatekeeper is gone for the day, but that C. J. Eubanks is not. When I open the suite’s door, I’m in luck. The chair behind the receptionist desk is empty. But my luck is short-lived. Down the hall, a group of women dressed in pencil skirts and power suits huddle together speaking softly.
I glance down at my black Converses, wipe my sweaty palms on my leggings, and try not to think about how out of place I look. I’m here for a reason, and my fashion sense, or lack of it, isn’t it.
Hoping Eubanks’s office is at this end of the hallway, I turn away from the group.
“Can I help you?”
At the sound of the voice, I stop mid-stride and whip around to see a woman near the reception desk with her head cocked and her hands on her hips. Her hair, up in a bun that puts mine to shame, is so glossy it looks shellacked. Her eyes take me in from head to toe before she offers a tight smile. A smile that quickly fades when I take a step back.
She drops her arms and shakes her head like a schoolteacher reprimanding an unruly student. The bun doesn’t budge.
I take a few more steps back, pressing my messenger bag tightly against my leg.
“Can I help you?” she repeats, louder this time and with none of the clipped politeness of her first inquiry.
We stare at each other until I turn and speed-walk down the hallway, checking the nameplates of each door I pass.
“Excuse me!” She’s yelling, and now her voice sounds more MMA than MBA.
At the last door at the end of the hallway, I finally see his name. I grab the door’s cold metal handle and fling it open, the Bun hot on my heels.
“You can’t go in there” is the last thing I hear before I close the door behind me and lean against it to hold her off.
I turn to address the man I’ve just broken a few trespassing laws to confront, but instead of the cold, hard eyes of a corporate bigwig, I’m greeted by an unoccupied leather chair behind a wide, glass-topped desk. The desk is pristine, empty except for a laptop, a box of tissues, and a stack of papers held down by a large stone paperweight.
The door handle turns behind me, and I move just in time for the Bun to come stumbling in. I’m about to interrogate her about Eubanks when I hear someone clear his throat.
He’s standing in the far corner of the large office looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows. He doesn’t even turn to acknowledge us.
“Mr. Eubanks, I tried—” the Bun begins.
“It’s okay, Melissa,” he says, still facing the window.
That voice.
My body reacts before my mind has a chance to. Even though I’m still sweating from running, the hairs on my arms rise in goose bumps. I swear my heart stalls before it sputters to life again, pounding in my chest, and in my ears, and in my head.
When I hear him say, “Ms. Spalding and I are acquainted,” my mind catches up with my body, and I know.
I haven’t heard that voice in seven years, but I know.
“Oh my God,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. When I open them, he is behind the desk staring at me. His face looks older, the jaw wider, the green eyes impossibly greener. But it’s still his face. It’s Christopher Bellamy, and seven years ago he broke my heart into a million little pieces.The door clicks shut behind me as I stare at him.
Christopher Bellamy is back in Pointe Hill, and I didn’t even warrant so much as a text.
My body is still working faster than my mind. I want to punch him _and_ hug him, crumple into the chair in front of me _and_ turn and run from the room. When my eyes dart to the paperweight on the desk and my fingers twitch at the thought of hurling it at his head, my mind finally takes control and sends a message to my mouth. “_You’re_ C. J. Eubanks?”
The boy I knew as Christopher stands behind his pristine desk in his perfectly tailored pinstripe suit with not a hair on his dark curly head out of place and watches me, his eyes unreadable, his face expressionless. He is ice.
But I’m fire, and I want to burn that blank expression off his face. I open my mouth, ready to spit flames, when he finally speaks.
“Freedom, it’s good to see you.”
He says this so calmly, so matter-of-factly, I glance at the paperweight again and contemplate adding an assault charge to the trespassing charges I’m probably already racking up.
“Seven years. Seven years, and a ‘Freedom, it’s good to see you’ is the best you can do?” I clench my fists so tightly my fingernails bite into my palms. The pain reminds me why I’m there, and I reach into my bag, pull out the papers, and toss them on his desk. “And what the hell is this?”
“I thought you’d want to catch up on old times first, but we can dispense with the niceties if that’s what you’d prefer. This”—he points to the papers—“is business.”
“Business? Don’t tell me you actually buy that bullshit company tagline about growing communities. The commercial district CHI is developing will force half the tenants in that section of the Old Sixth Ward out of business. There’s no way any of us can afford a rent increase, and you know it. You want us all out so you can move new tenants in at what, double what we’re currently paying?”
Christopher folds his arms across his chest. “It’s business, Free. Pointe Hill needs this project. None of this is personal.”
“_All_ of this is personal. That restaurant was my father’s whole life. Dad ran Cecelia’s for twenty years. He is—was…” I pause, still not used to referring to my father in the past tense, “a fixture in this community. Cecelia’s still is. And if you think I’m going to let you take that restaurant away from us without a fight, you’ve got another thing coming.” I wave a hand in his direction. “The suit and tie might fool some people into thinking you’re some upright businessman trying to help the community, but I know better. I fell for your lies once. I won’t make that mistake again.”
If the callback to our past fazes Christopher, he’s an even better liar than I remember, because my comment gets nothing out of him. When he remains silent, I add, “I’m glad Dad’s not here to see what you’re doing.”
“Mr. Spalding would have wanted—”
“Don’t you _dare_ tell me what my father would have wanted. You lost that right when you decided to have a hand in dismantling the thing he spent his life building.”
At last his eyes reflect something other than cold disinterest. “I was sorry to hear about his passing. And I’m sorry he won’t be here to experience Pointe Hill’s progress. Our family’s goal with this project—”
“Our?”
“CHI is my father’s company,” Christopher says, nodding. “We’re headquartered in New York with branches in London and Atlanta. This office in Pointe Hill is the first of many satellite offices we hope to open in smaller cities around the country. Jason has been handling our properties in the southeast while I’ve traveled between New York and London. He recently asked for my help here.”
“Wait, Jason is in Pointe Hill, too?” I ask.
Jason is Christopher’s older brother. They weren’t close when I knew them as teenagers, so I’m surprised Jason would ask him for help now. I’m even more surprised Christopher would give it, especially after everything that happened.
Christopher narrows his eyes. “Apparently, he’s not as averse to this place as I am.”
I shake my head and toss my bag on the chair in front of me. Jason’s back in Pointe Hill, and I didn’t know about that either.
“Jason was never great at keeping in touch,” Christopher says as if reading my mind. “And I’ve never had a good reason to come back.”
His features harden when he says this, and that look reminds me I’m not talking to the Christopher I once knew, but to C. J. Eubanks.
“So, screwing me over once wasn’t enough. You come back to finish the job? That’s rich, even for you.”
His skin colors under the collar of his white dress shirt, and in one fluid motion he walks over to his desk and presses the intercom. “Melissa, you can call it a night.” He disconnects the call without waiting for an answer, and loosens his tie, his eyes trained on me the entire time. “You really want to go there, Free? Wanna talk about screwing people over? Then let’s talk. How about we start by you telling me why, if you cared so much about me, you slept with Jason.”
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