by Claire Kent
Nameless
Claire Kent
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Claire Kent. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks referenced in this work of fiction: Duke University and Cheerios.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Epilogue
One
Before the afternoon of Mac’s funeral, Erin’s longest interaction with Seth Thomas was over a volume of Byron’s poetry.
Erin Marshall had been in middle school when sixteen-year-old Seth showed up in town to live with Mac, who was some sort of distant cousin and the closest surviving relative he had.
According to Mac, Seth was orphaned early and raised by his grandfather, who’d owned a car dealership a few counties away and had left him to the care of a nanny. The small town was predisposed to welcome the boy after his grandfather died, but his sullen, hostile attitude hadn’t won him any friends.
She’d been a hopeless bookworm and spent hours in the library after school. Often she’d look up from where she read in her favorite chair to see Seth scouring the stacks.
He’d always worn the same beat-up Army jacket, and he would read everything from Roman military history to biographies of business tycoons. He never spoke—not to her or anyone else.
That month, she’d been trying to be artsy and poetic, one of her many flights of fancy as a kid, so she decided to read and sigh over Lord Byron, although she didn’t understand much of the poetry.
Seth already had the book off the shelf when she approached with the call numbers written down on a slip of paper.
She’d been painfully shy back then, so when she realized this good-looking teenage boy was holding the book she needed, she’d dropped her eyes and prepared to slink away.
Seth didn’t say a word, but he reached out and put the book in her hands. When she raised her gaze to meet his, he gave her a little half-smile.
It was an unexpected moment of kinship over a book no one had checked out for over thirty years.
Erin might have had a little crush on him after that.
Irrationally, she’d felt betrayed when he stopped coming to the library later that year and then started getting in trouble for reckless driving, drugs, and underage drinking.
Mac did the best he could, but he was a life-long bachelor and was very far out of his depth. Everyone in town was relieved when Seth graduated from high school early and went off to college.
Despite his rocky start, Seth made a success of himself in the fifteen years since—college, law school, associate at a prestigious law firm. He’d made partner a few months ago, after earning a lot of attention from the press when he helped successfully defend a pro basketball player in a trial that made national headlines.
When he came to Mac’s funeral that Saturday afternoon, he wasn’t the same solitary boy who’d haunted the library so long ago.
And that was just fine with Erin.
At twelve, she had been bashful, fed on romantic fantasies, convinced her dreams might one day come true.
She wasn’t anymore.
***
“I thought it was a really nice service,” Erin said, leaning forward from the backseat of the car.
Her father was driving in the long line of vehicles headed from the Methodist church to the cemetery, but he glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “Yeah. Mac would have liked it.”
“It was packed. I can’t believe how many people showed up to pay their respects.” Erin’s older sister, Liz, had always been the outgoing and popular one. Like Erin, she lived in Atlanta now, but they’d both come out to support their widowed father, who’d been friends with the man who died for fifty years.
“Everyone in town loved him,” Erin added, trying to hide how exhausted she was, so her father wouldn’t worry.
She’d been on vacation in the Caribbean with friends and had just flown back to Atlanta the day before. She’d planned to use the weekend to recover before going back to work as a judicial assistant for a superior court judge, but instead she’d driven an hour outside of the city to the small town she’d grown up in to attend the funeral.
She’d known Mac all her life, and she’d loved him too.
“I can’t believe Seth Thomas had the gall to show up,” Liz muttered. “He did nothing but make Mac miserable, and he obviously didn’t want to be family.”
“It would have been pretty rude for Seth not to come, since Mac left him everything.” Erin thought about the handsome, stoic man who’d attended the funeral—a far cry from the boy she remembered and just as far from the charismatic defense attorney she saw around the courthouse on a semi-regular basis. “Maybe he cared about Mac more than it seemed.”
“Mac was really proud of him,” her father said, turning into the cemetery drive in the line of cars. “He blamed himself for not getting through to Seth, and he never stopped talking about how he got that scholarship to college and then got into a top-rated law school and was hired by that fancy law firm.”
“It is pretty impressive, I guess,” Liz admitted.
Erin made a face. “Maybe he wears power suits now, but he’s not really that different than he used to be. He’s just as selfish as he was back then, doing whatever he wants, taking whatever he wants, walking over anyone who gets in his way.”
They parked halfway on the drive and halfway on the grass, like everyone else, and the conversation lagged as they climbed out of the car and headed for the tent set up at the grave.
“You mean with women?” Liz asked, falling in step beside Erin. “If Mary Carlyle’s blog is to be believed, he dates a different gorgeous woman every few weeks.”
When the basketball player’s trial had made the national news, there was a lot of media attention surrounding the sexy, young attorney who’d begun as second chair on the defense team but had taken the lead halfway through and won a brilliant victory in what should have been a losing case. Even now, cable news shows regularly brought Seth on to comment on legal issues.
Liz’s college nemesis, a woman named Mary Carlyle, ran a tabloid-style blog. At Seth’s temporary notoriety, she had leveraged her location in Atlanta to uncover more gossip on him than anyone else. Evidently, the blog’s readership had skyrocketed in the weeks surrounding the trial, and it was still more popular than it had ever been before.
“I don’t care who he dates,” Erin said, answering her sister’s question. “I just mean with his general attitude. They’ve called him the Bulldozer at the courthouse for years because he just plows through people to get what he wants. Even before he became a hotshot, he was like that.”
Erin’s job as judicial assistant was part secretaru, part paralegal, and part law clerk. It wasn’t anywhere close to the career she’d dreamed of in high school and college, but it was sure as hell better than being married to Marcus, her controlling ass of an ex-husband.
“You should see him break down a witness on the stand,” Erin added. “It’s brutal. He’s brutal. It’s like he doesn’t hav
e normal human feelings.”
“It doesn’t seem to be a turn-off to women. Of course, some women like the alpha-male type.”
“Some women haven’t been married to one.”
Liz snorted in amusement. “I wonder what he’s like in bed.”
“Girls, please. I’m right behind you.”
Erin and Liz smiled at their father’s aggrieved voice, but they would have stopped talking anyway since they were approaching the graveside.
The service was brief and traditional, and Erin and Liz lingered afterwards, since their father wanted to speak to some people before he left.
As they waited, Erin’s eyes landed on an isolated figure, wearing an expensive black suit, standing slightly away from everyone else.
Seth Thomas was definitely hot. He had a tall, lean body and medium brown hair that sometimes looked almost auburn. His features were well-chiseled and, on the rare occasions he smiled, it transformed his face in a breathtaking way.
He could control a room merely by the force of his personality. She’d seen him in court, where his charisma was astonishing. Even when he was just walking down the hall, though, he commanded attention. People turned, moved out the way, yielded to his presence.
She wasn’t sure how the boy she remembered from the library had turned into this man.
At the moment, however, he looked different. Quiet. Withdrawn.
No one but her father and the pastor had spoken to him today.
“How often do you see him around?” Liz asked, obviously noticing where Erin’s attention had drifted.
“Now and then.”
“Does he recognize you?”
“He knows I’m Judge Hargrove’s assistant. I don’t think he remembers me from way back when. There’s no reason for him to. I was twelve. He barely knew I existed.”
She still remembered their shared look over Byron—the half-smile he’d given her, the way he’d really seemed to see her—but she was quite sure Seth had no memory of that moment.
Someone should go talk to him. No matter how much folks resented him for the way he’d behaved toward Mac, it didn’t speak well of the town to shun him this way at a funeral.
As if he’d read her mind, her father stepped over just then. “Someone besides me and Pastor Jack needs to talk to him.”
“He’s obviously not looking for company,” Liz said.
“Still. Mac wouldn’t want this. Someone needs to talk to him.” He met Erin’s eyes with an obvious plea.
She felt a reluctant twist in her stomach. She and Seth would nod at each other if their paths happened to cross at work, but she’d never in her life had a real conversation with him.
She still wasn’t comfortable initiating conversations with strangers, and she didn’t even like Seth Thomas.
Her father rarely asked her for anything, though, and Mac had evidently been attached to him.
With a sigh, she said, “Fine. I’ll be the martyr.”
“Just don’t let him make a move on you,” Liz teased. “You always did have a soft spot for the wounded types. It’s the romantic in you.”
“I’m not a romantic.” Erin stiffened, feeling insulted. “Plus, I’m not gorgeous enough for him to be interested in anyway.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re beautiful,” her father objected automatically.
Erin had an average build with very blonde hair and very pale skin, thanks to her mother’s Scandinavian heritage. Even her hazel eyes were lighter than they should be. Liz—who’d been blessed with the ability to get a suntan—used to call her an albino.
When she was younger, Erin had hated her white skin, but now it didn’t bother her. She figured she was pretty enough, but she certainly wasn’t stunning enough to attract the Seth Thomases of the world.
She wouldn’t want him anyway.
“Thanks, Dad. I’ll go talk to him.”
As she walked over, she reminded herself that she wasn’t shy anymore. She didn’t live in daydreams anymore. She didn’t cast herself as the heroine of stories in her mind and then get disappointed when the world couldn’t live up to them.
She’d outgrown all of that.
And she wouldn’t let Seth make her feel like that twelve-year-old girl.
He glanced toward her as she approached and then took off his sunglasses, as if confirming that she was really coming over to talk to him.
He didn’t look away until she stood beside him. Then he shifted his eyes to a large gravestone in the older section of the cemetery, probably more than a hundred years old, on which was engraved an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments beneath the name and dates of a man’s life.
“Checking off the list of your sins?” she asked, relieved when irony—her friend of many years—saved her from an onset of nerves.
His mouth tilted up in an irresistibly dry expression. The same half-smile he’d given her fifteen years ago. “How did you guess? I think I can check off all of them.”
Despite the fact that she didn’t like or respect this man, she had trouble not answering his expression. “I hope you’re missing the sixth.”
He gave an amused huff, still not quite smiling. “Well, some people say I’m just as guilty as the murderers I defend, so I think I can claim the Sixth Commandment vicariously.”
There was nothing at all she could say to that.
She looked back at the grave. “What kind of man would put the Ten Commandments on his gravestone?”
“I guess someone deluded enough to think he managed to keep them.”
This was the only conversation Erin had ever had with Seth, and she suddenly realized why he was able to attract so many desirable women, even with a reputation for womanizing and legal ruthlessness.
The man wasn’t just handsome. He wasn’t just sexy. He didn’t just have a charming way with words and a great body.
He felt deep. Like there were hidden layers and vast depths that his confident surface could barely contain.
She’d felt that depth all those years ago in the library, but she’d convinced herself it was the product of her silly, girlish fantasies.
She was different now, and she knew—very well—that deep men could be bastards just like shallow ones.
“So you’re the sacrificial lamb sent over to be nice to me?”
She turned back to Seth with a little twitch of surprise and was relieved to see his expression was still wry. “Can you blame them? Everyone loved Mac, and they think you didn’t treat him right.”
“I know.”
The mood had shifted, and Seth’s expression was suddenly distant. He stared over to the freshly dug grave where they’d buried the only relative he had.
“Why did you come?” Erin asked, for no good reason.
He shook his head, and she assumed this meant he wasn’t going to answer. She didn’t blame him. It was a rude question, and the two of them shared nothing but an idle conversation.
Finally, he said without warning, “Do you ever feel like you had one chance, and you blew it?”
She was so surprised she answered honestly. “Are you serious? I was in law school at Duke.”
“You were?”
“Yeah. I had almost two years there before I dropped out.”
“What happened?”
“I got married. His job transferred him. And I…I went with him.”
He glanced down at her left hand, and she realized he was checking for a ring. She showed her empty finger. “Happily divorced now. It was a mistake in every way.”
She’d done well in college. She’d been doing well in law school. She’d never wanted to be a trial attorney or do corporate law, so she’d planned on doing legal work for some sort of non-profit with a good cause after she graduated.
She’d fallen in love with Marcus, though—a high-powered business executive—and she’d believed all her romantic dreams were coming true at last.
She’d sacrificed everything for that dream of romance.
She
was never going to be so stupid again.
She’d thought about going back to law school after she got divorced and moved to Atlanta, but it would mean living on loans for years, and she was just too tired and disillusioned to tackle such a mountain.
She wasn’t sad or even angry about it anymore. Life sucked a lot of the time. You lived with it and moved on.
“That was my chance, and I blew it.” She glanced back over at Seth. “What did you blow?”
His eyebrows arched slightly in an expression that was somehow both hot and taunting at once.
She choked on a laugh. “I said ‘what’, not ‘who’—so keep your mind out of the gutter.”
“The gutter is where my mind is most at home.”
She laughed—she couldn’t help it—but a new resonance had entered their conversation. She was suddenly aware that this man was incredibly attractive, power evident in his broad shoulders, his lean length, his square jaw, his blue eyes, his astonishingly sharp mind.
Something inside her wanted it. Wanted him. She felt desire, more visceral than any daydream, tightening in her body.
Ignoring her response, since it was ridiculous, she said, “I asked you a question you never answered.”
Seth thought back. Then shook his head. “There was a reason I didn’t answer the question.”
Erin saw his eyes still resting on Mac’s grave, and she suddenly knew the answer.
Seth had grown up without a real family.
He’d had one chance to get one—Mac had wanted to be that family for him—and he’d blown it.
He’d just blown it.
“I think I’m going to get drunk now,” Seth announced in a matter-of-fact tone.
The wave of pity and understanding for his lost opportunity for family was the only possible reason for Erin’s responding as she did.
She asked, “Do you want any company?”
* * *
“You think your ex always needing to be on top is annoying?” Seth began, three hours later, his voice just slightly slurred. “I was engaged to a woman once who would only have sex on Saturdays. Because of our schedules, we only got together on Saturdays, so I had no idea she had the rule until I’d given her the ring.”
