Heart of Glass

by Nicole Jacquelyn

  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 © 2018 by Nicole Jacquelyn

  Excerpt from Unbreak My Heart © 2016 by Nicole Jacquelyn

  Cover design by FaceOut.

  Cover photography © Jasmina007/Getty Images.

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jacquelyn, Nicole, author.

  Title: Heart of glass / Nicole Jacquelyn.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Forever, 2018. | Series: Fostering love ; 3

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018004253| ISBN 9781538711859 (paperback) | ISBN 9781549169113 (audio download) | ISBN 9781538711842 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Romance / Contemporary.

  Classification: LCC PS3610.A35684 H43 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004253

  ISBNs: 9781538711859 (paperback), 9781538711842 (ebook)

  E3-20180419-DA-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  An Excerpt From UNBREAK MY HEART

  Also by Nicole Jacquelyn

  Acclaim for Nicole Jacquelyn and Her Novels

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  This one is for Clint,

  for giving me the happily ever after I didn’t think existed outside of romance novels.

  Acknowledgments

  My Acknowledgments are always long and unruly, but I’m going to try to keep these short and sweet.

  Thank you to my fella and our kiddos for being so great when mama had to write.

  Thank you to my parents and Kristi for pitching in to keep my house running when I couldn’t. Who knew that newborns were so much work?

  Thank you to my agent and my editors, who were patient and understanding and have continuously cheered me on.

  Thank you to Nikki for being my sounding board and giving me a swift kick in the ass when I needed it.

  Thank you to Donna, as always, for being the first blogger to tell the world about my work.

  Thank you to the readers. Without you, I wouldn’t get to do what I love.

  Prologue

  Henry

  I was never meant to be a dad. The thought ran continuously through my head as I stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. Hell, it had been running through there for months, but lately the words were like a hammer repeatedly slamming into my brain. I could barely think of anything else.

  “Why don’t you wait until Monday to run your mysterious errand?” my roommate asked, interrupting my inner demon as we walked out of work. “We’re gonna head to the beach.”

  “Can’t,” I replied with a shrug.

  Beach Fridays were a pretty common thing with the guys I hung out with. We usually got off work early on Friday, which gave us a few extra hours to enjoy the weekend. Traffic in San Diego sucked during the late afternoon, but if we knocked off early enough we’d just make it out to Imperial Beach before most people started their commute home.

  I wasn’t really going to miss anything that wouldn’t happen again the next week.

  “Well, if you get done with your mysterious errand soon, let me know,” Rocklin joked over his shoulder as he walked toward his truck.

  I waved him off as I pulled my truck keys from inside my pocket. There was a reason I wasn’t broadcasting my plans to the entire fucking platoon. I didn’t need my command all up in my shit over something that was a non-issue. I was headed over to legal now, before everyone over there got off work for the day. There was a good chance that they’d left early, too, but I was holding out hope that someone was there who could help me.

  I tapped my fingers on the knee of my cammies as I waited in the uncomfortable chairs in the front part of the legal building. The place was mostly cleared out for the weekend, but thankfully it looked like someone was left in the back that I could talk to. I wasn’t sure when I’d get another chance to meet with someone before I left for yet another training exercise next week, and the thought of leaving without getting everything squared away made me anxious as hell.

  Leaning my head against the wall, I closed my eyes. Behind them, I pictured the little bald baby I’d seen just weeks ago. Morgan’s baby.

  Well, my baby, too, if I decided to think of her in biological terms.

  My stomach rolled.

  I didn’t want to think of her that way.

  When Morgan had let me know she was pregnant, I’d panicked and replied as if an abortion was the foregone conclusion. Almost two years later, I was still surprised that she hadn’t punched me in the balls. Instead, she’d calmly told me that she was keeping the baby but she hadn’t expected anything from me.

  Relief had hit me first. Overwhelming, giddy, relief.

  Then I’d questioned myself. Was I really that type of guy? Could I just walk away from my flesh and blood? I’d been raised in a family that took in kids that weren’t even theirs. They prized family above all else, and there were so many times over the course of my life when I’d been part of a discussion about deadbeat dads and how horrible they were.

  So, instead of running in the opposite direction, I’d tried to be present. I hadn’t said a word to my family, preferring not to listen to their opinions and suffocating interference, but I’d kept in touch with Morgan as she’d carried the baby. Any relationship between us had been impossible at that point, but I’d still checked in just to make sure she was okay. I had no interest in going to doctor appointments, and when she’d revealed that she was having a girl, I’d felt nothing—but I’d still kept trying.

  I didn’t want to be the kind of man my parents made scathing comments about. I didn’t want Morgan’s daughter to grow up thinking there was something wrong with her or some shit like that and
end up being a stripper with daddy issues.

  Okay, I knew that last one was a sweeping generalization, but I couldn’t help it. That was where my mind went. So, I’d tried.

  I’d visited and I’d called and I’d made myself available for whatever Morgan needed, but eventually we’d both seen the writing on the wall. It just wasn’t there. That feeling, the one I knew I was supposed to have, the one every parent had, even the shitty parents? I didn’t feel it.

  I wasn’t curious about the baby. I didn’t wonder if she was okay or worry about her. I didn’t feel anything for her at all, beyond the normal concern over a tiny human. Would I jump in front of a bus for her? Sure. But I’d do that for any kid.

  That’s what she was to me—just a random kid.

  There was something wrong with me, I was sure of that fact, but it wasn’t something I could fix or change. I’d tried. Jesus. I’d been trying for a year to feel anything for her, and it didn’t matter what I did or what awful scenario I pictured in my head trying to force some sort of reaction, I just didn’t feel anything.

  I tried to convince myself that I could fake it. I could just pretend to feel something until I actually did. No one would know. But after stopping by their place for her first birthday and watching this kid who looked like me eat her cake, and still feeling nothing beyond a little amusement and boredom, I knew pretending wasn’t going to be an option.

  There was something broken inside of me. Something I’d never realized I’d needed until that blank feeling was staring me right in the face, mocking my inability to connect.

  “Harris?” a voice called from between two cubicles.

  I stood up and slid my hand absently down the front of my uniform blouse, smoothing out the wrinkles as I walked forward.

  “You’re wanting to change the beneficiary for your death benefits?” the guy asked, glancing down at the papers he was holding as I followed him into the bowels of the legal department.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  I couldn’t be her parent. I couldn’t be the dad that taught her how to ride a bike or a surfboard. I wouldn’t be there to scare her prom date, and I’d never bandage her knees after a hard fall at the playground.

  But I could help from afar. I could make sure Morgan had the cash she needed to make sure the baby didn’t go without. I could help in that way. And if something happened to me, I could make sure that they were taken care of. It was the least I could do.

  And if someday the time came when Morgan and baby Etta received death benefits from me, I knew with absolute certainty that my family would find them.

  They wouldn’t be able to stay away.

  Chapter 1

  Trevor

  Even months after his death, my little brother was still the first person I thought about when I woke up in the morning and my last thought before falling asleep at night. He was everywhere I looked, in every conversation I had even when his name wasn’t mentioned. It was ironic, really, that he took up so much headspace when in the last few years before his death I could go days without thinking about him at all.

  Henry had always been like that. He showed up at the least opportune moments, like the night I’d finally asked Kristen Preston out my junior year of high school and he’d plopped down beside us in the movie theater like I’d invited him along. When I should have been thinking about him and talking to him, we’d both been too busy to catch up, and now that he was gone and I’d do anything to erase that fact from my mind, he was all I could think about.

  I missed him like hell. I was also so angry with him that I wanted to punch something.

  I wondered if other siblings, ones who’d been born into the same family by accident of birth, felt the same way toward each other as I did toward Henry. Did they get so angry that they wanted to shake sense into their little brothers, or was it easier to give up on someone they’d never had to fight for to begin with? When he’d come into our lives, Henry’s placement had been temporary. It was months before we’d known that he might stay forever. As a boy who had watched numerous other children move in and out of our house, knowing that Henry would stay had been difficult for me. I’d had to make a conscious choice to think of him as family. Once that shift had been made, though, I’d known that nothing would ever sever that bond. Even after all of the things I’d found out about Henry after his death, I still felt myself fighting for the memory I had of him, searching for the answers that would show that his decisions in life had made any type of sense.

  “Mom?” I called out as I pushed the door open without knocking. “You home?”

  “I’m back here,” she yelled back from somewhere in the bowels of the house I’d grown up in.

  I followed the sound of her voice down the hallway and found her seated at the long table in her craft room, gluing little sheets of paper on to a scrapbook page.

  “Hey, Trev,” she said, lifting her head to smile at me. “Everything okay?”

  Guilt hit me hard and fast. A few months ago, a random visit wouldn’t have garnered that type of question, but my mom seemed to have aged by years in less than a few months. Losing Henry, a boy she’d raised as her own since he was only two, had been a blow she hadn’t recovered from, but the revelation that he’d abandoned his own child seemed to have completely broken her.

  “Just wanted to see you,” I said, smiling back. I stepped into the room and looked over the scrapbook she was making. It was covered in photos of my cousin Kate and foster brother Shane’s kids. It had been a few years, but I still couldn’t believe that my foster brother and cousin had fallen in love. The page Mom was working on had snapshots of their four oldest running through a sprinkler. “Lookin’ good.”

  “Thanks,” she said, picking up a glue stick. “I swear, I can’t keep up with the pictures. These are from last year.”

  I pulled up a chair from the side of the little room and spun it around, stretching out my long legs as I sat down beside her. My mom was so petite that I always felt like a giant when I was near her. From the time I was thirteen I’d been taller than she was, and we’d gotten a lot of speculating looks when she’d taken me into town for school clothes or other random shit, the small pale white woman bossing around the dark-skinned black kid who dwarfed her.

  She’d never let those looks bother her, so I hadn’t, either—at least not out loud. I’d just raised my chin a little and walked a step closer, making sure that any comments directed toward her would have to go through me first. When I was a kid, it had worked. People had backed off a bit, unwilling to cause problems. As I’d gotten older, though, it seemed to have become harder for the population just to accept shit as none of their business. I never knew if it had been the change in my appearance or the social changes that had risen up around us, forcing people to take a second look and choose which side they wanted to be on. As if there were fucking sides to begin with.

  “Dad should be home in a little bit,” Mom said, pulling my attention away from how her delicate hands placed small letters in an arch across the top of the page. “We’re grilling burgers if you want to stay.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “I actually wanted to talk to you guys.”

  “About what?” She looked at me curiously.

  “I think it’s time I head down to California,” I said quietly, watching her eyes flicker in barely disguised pain. “It’s been a few months and we’ve all cooled off—”

  “You know I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she cut me off, her hands gone motionless on the table.

  “Someone’s gotta go down there, Mom.”

  “I should go,” she replied stubbornly.

  “No,” I said with a swift shake of my head. I couldn’t imagine my mom going very far from home to begin with, but I refused to imagine her going to California to see Henry’s kid and getting shot down by the kid’s mother, or, even worse, being manipulated in order to have a relationship with the baby. It would completely devastate her.

  “Trevor,” she sa
id in warning, her back straightening away from her chair back. “I know you worry, son, but you have no idea how to handle situations like this. Birth mothers are—”

  “Birth mothers?”

  “Yes,” she said patiently, reaching out to pat my knee. “They’re protective.”

  “And adoptive mothers aren’t?” I argued, clenching my jaw.

  Mom laughed. “Please,” she joked. “I’d fight a mountain lion for my sons.”

  “Then what are you—”

  She stopped my sentence with a raised hand. “I should have said ‘mothers,’ okay?” she said with a small smile. “I meant all mothers. They’re protective. And if you go down there, being abrasive and throwing your weight around, she’s not going to want anything to do with us.”

  “When am I ever abrasive?” I argued.

  “You mean other than right now?” she asked drily.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go down there, Ma,” I said softly, unsure how to describe my reservations without insulting her.

  “Agreed,” my dad said from the doorway behind us. “You know how I feel about it, El.”

  “I’m not some piece of china,” Mom said in exasperation, glaring at her husband.

  “You don’t know the woman—”

  “I know her name. I know that she knew my boy—quite well if they had a child together. I know she’s raising that child without the help of my son, and has apparently been doing that since before he died!” I followed my mom as she rose indignantly to her feet.

  “Trevor can go down and introduce himself,” my dad said, his eyes tightening at the corners and his voice deepening. “And you can be pissed all you want. I wanna meet Henry’s child as much as you do, but you are my priority, sweetheart.”

  The worry in my dad’s eyes must have hit a switch inside my mom, because one second she was standing rigidly in the middle of the room preparing for battle, and the next she’d softened and was walking slowly toward my dad, wrapping her arms around his middle as he stood with his arms braced on each side of the door frame.