by Sara Jolene
The Architect
Contemporary Clover Lake Grooms Book 1
Sara Jolene
Copyright © 2018 by Sara Jolene
Cover art © 2018 EDH Graphics
Edited by ER Arroyo
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Also by Sara Jolene
About the Author
For Jess
the past is just pieces, you choose how they come together
One
Touching the button on her steering wheel, she answered her phone. “This is Phoebe.”
“Any idea when you’re returning? The Flenderson hearing is next week, and we still have three people we need to debrief.”
“I’m planning on being back in the office on Wednesday, but in the meantime, let’s set up video calls for each of them tomorrow morning.”
“Will do. I’ll email the papers and text you details as soon as I have them.”
“Thank you, Melanie, and I’m sorry I haven’t been back. Things haven’t gone as I expected since arriving.”
She’d spent the last few days trying to balance her anger and her grief. Now, sitting outside Mr. Alexander Utter’s office, she was waiting for the courage to go inside. Jarred would be in there. She could see his truck parked in the spot furthest from the door. She’d have to talk to him; there’d be no avoiding him or the situation.
A tap on her window made her jump. She looked up and groaned.
“Everything alright?” Or at least that’s what it had sounded like. She’d kept the window up. Phoebe stared just over his shoulder, trying not to make eye contact. She nodded even though she was anything but. She hated that he was there. She wasn’t even sure why he was. But he seemed to be everywhere the last few days. She’d had no escape. In the quiet moments she’d had to try and catch her breath, he’d shown up, ensuring that her chest would never fully expand. She was tired of him always circling.
She pulled down her visor and checked her face in the mirror. Whoever had invented waterproof mascara was a genius. She tousled her hair and waved Jarred off as she grabbed her purse and got out of the car. Jessica had brought her a few outfits when she’d driven up for the funeral. The look on Jarred’s face as she got out of the car made her instantly glad she’d not balked at the idea. Her dress was icy blue and hugged all her curves but subtly. The pencil skirt came just over her knees, and though you couldn’t see the movement of her leg muscles, you could tell they were there. She watched him scan her from foot to head. His eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of his head as she slowly stood to full height and stepped away from the car. Phoebe tried not to let the effect she had on him affect her but couldn’t quite stop the smile that twitched at the corners of her mouth. Jarred shut the door behind her and silently followed in her wake.
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. I can’t believe this.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Sullivan, but as you can see, all the paperwork is in order.” Alexander handed Phoebe a stack of papers across his desk, which she snatched from him and clenched in her fist.
“Phoebe, I…”
She held up a hand and let the heat that was boiling her blood add venom to her voice. “You shush. This is your fault. So just…shush.”
“But I…”
She turned on him with daggers in her eyes. “No.”
“But…”
Phoebe took a breath, letting her irritation simmer. Instead of cooling her down, the opposite happened. Every irritation and annoyance she’d ever had with Jarred fuelled the fire within her. She stood from her chair. “She never would have done this if you hadn’t told her. This is your fault. So just sit there and be quiet.” She watched him as he started to open his mouth. Her heart kicked in her chest. Her mouth was getting dry. She knew the signs. Panic was starting to take over. “No. Seriously, Jarred. This isn’t about you! Can’t you see that? I need you to be quiet.”
Phoebe started to read the papers in front of her. Her grandmother had been very thorough. “About six months back, she came in and asked for the changes. As you can see, comparing the two, they’re almost identical, leaving out only one crucial component.”
Phoebe kept her focus on the papers. There had to be a loophole. There always was, and she would find it.
Alexander kept talking. “One person actually, Jarred. In the original, everything had been left to you, but in the latest version, Rosalind left ten percent of the golf course and ten percent of the spa to him.”
Phoebe knew all of that. She could see it plain as day in black in white in front of her. The thing that stung was that, because all the properties, sans the house, were all connected, grouped under the same holding, it meant that Phoebe couldn’t do anything with any of the property without Jarred’s say-so. Which meant the person she had loved most dearly had left her future in the hands of a man who’d hurt her so deeply that almost ten years later she was carrying not scars but barely healed wounds.
Phoebe shook her head as she started to crumple the pages in her hands. She looked up, finally making eye contact with Alexander. “Did she say why?” She was barely holding it together. She wasn’t sure why she needed to know so badly; she knew it wouldn’t change anything.
Alexander shook his head. “Not really. I did ask, though.”
Phoebe saw a small glimmer of hope. Maybe it was something only she’d be able to make sense of. Something referring to one of their many inside jokes. She stared at Alexander, waiting for him to continue.
He shook his head again and shrugged. “She smiled at me and said, ‘Because it’s the way it should be.’”
One Week Prior…
Phoebe was often plagued by fitful dreams of her mother and her clients, both fighting for her attention. Her mother would be trying to get her to remember places she couldn’t recall ever having seen before, while her clients all demanded more and more of her time. At each request, she would watch patches of herself float away on the wind. Most times those images twisted and meshed with memories of her horrifying teenage years to create a combo that meant she was wide awake at four a.m. Which was why, when her phone rang at five in the morning, she was awake.
“Ms. Sullivan?”
“Yes. This is she.” Phoebe’s mouth was dry. Her throat was starting to burn.
“Ma’am, we’re calling to inform you that your grandmother, Rosalind, has been brought in by ambulance. She’s stable, but she’s asking for you.”
Phoebe’s heart fell into a pit in her stomach. It was an odd feeling. One that only happened when one knew something was genuinely wrong. She remembered managing to mutter something like, “Thank you. I’m on my way,” before she hopped out of bed and started throwing things into a bag.
She’d gotten there just in time. By passing all the usual exits she’d normally take to get home, she went straight to Binghamton. Like most people, Phoebe hated hospitals. What separated her from most others was what being in one did to her head. She assumed most folks were nervous, maybe didn’t like to touch things, maybe their hearts even beat a bit faster. Phoebe was different. Reduced to
blubbering, she couldn’t think clearly and therefore couldn’t speak clearly. She was normally very articulate, and she’d been told on more than one occasion that she had a presence, one that brought calm and confidence. Not in a hospital, though.
She stepped out of the elevator on her grandmother’s floor. Distracted, she ran smack into the rock solid back of a man asking an orderly for directions in the hallway. She immediately recognized his voice. It was a voice that often haunted her. In those late night dreams that would stir up all the hurt and shame that had come with her teen years, his voice was the loudest. She closed her eyes, hoping that if she moved around him and kept walking, he wouldn’t realize it was her. “Excuse me,” she whispered as she did just that.
“Phoebe? Phoebe Sullivan?”
Phoebe slowed but didn’t stop. She wasn’t sure she could trust herself. She wasn’t sure what she’d become in front of him. She could hear footsteps gaining on her. She slowed down more. “Phoebe, please wait.” She finally stopped and let him catch up to her. She held her breath. She wouldn’t allow herself to look at him directly. If she didn’t make eye contact, maybe she could remain herself.
He stopped in front of her. She looked up but not at his face. She knew she’d falter if she did. She looked over his shoulder at the exit sign down the hall. “Phoebe. I’m sorry. You probably don’t remember me, Jarred Holton. We went to high school together.” He paused, forcing her to look down. He had stuck a hand out as if she should shake his hand. She said nothing. Her insides were rumbling. How could he think she didn’t remember him?
He pulled his hand away when she didn’t take it. “Anyway, I bought the property up behind the Golf Course at Clover Lake, and I’ve been helping your grandmother with some odd jobs…” He kept talking, but Phoebe’s mind was wandering. Her grandmother had mentioned that she had found a young man to help her around the house, someone who would feed the animals and paint the fence in the spring. She had no idea it had been Jarred, though. Her grandmother hadn’t known their history. There wouldn’t have been a reason for her to hide anything…unless…
“Did you tell her?” Too late, Phoebe realized her mistake. He was still talking, and she’d spoken out loud. She’d had the thought but hadn’t meant to actually verbalize it.
“I’m sorry? Tell who what?”
Phoebe’s mind ran. Should she continue? Should she ask him? Or should she feign ignorance and blame her circumstances? She warred with herself for what seemed like a long time. The old Phoebe would have done the latter, so she continued. She planted her feet and squared her shoulders in preparation. She looked up and made eye contact with him. His eyes were just as damaging as always. Her knees got weak. She almost melted. “I said… Did you tell her?” She paused, letting her words sink in. When she didn’t see the light of recognition come on in his eyes, she explained. Shortly. “My grandmother. Did you tell her? About…us?”
There it was. The light. He took a step back from her. She could tell he had. His eyes had darted from hers to her mouth, then to her feet. He was uneasy. She rolled her eyes as his landed on her chest. Phoebe spun on one heel and walked away from him. She walked fast and straight to her grandmother’s room. She could hear him following behind. She was gradually working on what she’d say when they stopped. How she’d berate him for being callus and naïve, but then she turned into the room.
Phoebe’s breath caught, and she froze at the door. Jarred ended up right beside her. The most virile woman she’d known in her life, the most important person, the person she cared about more than anything or anyone, was lying there, all but shrunken in the only bed in the room. The woman looked a little like her gram but smaller and frail. Sadness overtook her. It buried the irritation she’d been feeling with Jarred. Jarred. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t done anything. Her sadness slowly simmered to a boil, turning to anger. She turned to face him, shooting daggers through him the whole time. She wanted to beat on his chest. To yell and scream at him, but nothing came out, and her hands stayed balled at her sides. Their eyes connected. He started to blur out as tears started to form.
She turned away from Jarred and took a step toward the bed, looking for any sign that the woman in the bed was actually her gram. Then she noticed her necklace. It was the one she’d always worn, a gold clover hanging on a thin gold chain. It was a family heirloom. Passed through the generations as each person took over the property. Gram used to tell her it was a key. Once you wore it, you were the protector of the land. Despite the necklace, she didn’t want to believe it was her, because the most notable issue was that she could feel nothing of Gram’s spirit there. It was almost as if part of her gram had already left them. Phoebe knew then that she was losing her, the only solid in her life. Tears welled and spilled over, running down her cheeks as her grandmother looked up and noticed the two of them in the doorway. Their eyes connected, and a soft smile formed on the older woman’s face before she closed her eyes and said, “Together. The way it should be.”
Two
Phoebe wiped the tears from her cheeks. She was still sitting in the parking lot of Utter’s office, only now the person she wanted to see least in the world had started tapping on her window. She’d escaped the office before the tears had started to fall. Seeing him made her angry. She wished it didn’t, but she couldn’t help it. She fought the urge to flip him off. Normally she could control her anger, but she’d just lost her grandmother and had to deal with all the arrangements and things herself. Plus, Jarred had been there at every turn, being helpful. Telling her stories about her grandmother over the last few months. He’d even offered to help with things around the property. That was the part that bothered her the most. She had to do something with the property. Clover Lake had been in the family for generations, each one of them having done something different with it.
Phoebe waved him off. She didn’t want to see him, and she certainly didn’t want to talk to him. She reached into her bag and fished around until she felt the velvet of the box against her fingers. The hospital had given her all of her grandmother’s things. There hadn’t been much, just a small clear baggie that contained her jewelry. She’d been at home, so she hadn’t had a purse or anything else with her. Phoebe held the box tightly in her hand but didn’t pull it from the bag. She’d been carrying around the necklace since she’d gotten it. She knew that Gram would want to have her wedding rings with her just as much as she knew that the necklace had to stay in the family. It was Phoebe’s now, as was the land that it represented, or most of it anyway.
She sighed deeply and let the box fall back to the bottom of the bag, her anger and frustration with the situation rearing its ugly head once again. She wasn’t like the rest of them. She wasn’t cut out for that life. Now she was being forced into it and not just by her grandmother, but by the one man that had ever been able to drive her crazy. She’d grown up hearing the stories, especially the one of her great-great-great-grandparents, Milo and Lorraine Murphy. They’d built the first cabins as the start of a vacation destination back in the early nineteen hundreds. After that, it had been a children’s summer camp, then in the fifties, her grandmother had told her it was just like something out of the movie Dirty Dancing. Families would come and gather for weeks in the summer. They’d travel from the cities, New York and Philadelphia mostly, and they’d play golf, swim, boat, and drink cocktails late into the night.
Phoebe didn’t remember the lake like that. When she’d been very small, her grandfather had passed away and her grandmother had shut things down. The golf course still ran and did great business, and the spa, her grandmother had rented to the Melbourne twins. Phoebe cringed thinking about it. She hadn’t gotten along with the twins in high school. They’d been very popular whereas Phoebe hadn’t. She had been the studious one that had cared little for partying and boys. Except for one time, and that had been a mistake.
Jarred hated himself for the look on Phoebe’s face. He knew he deserved it. He’d spent a lot of time beating
himself up for being an idiot teenager and not realizing what he had when he had it. Especially since he’d been back at the lake and spending time with Rosalind. They were a lot alike, but Phoebe was more grounded. Rosalind was almost surreal in the way she’d lived her life. Floating instead of walking, whispering or singing instead of talking, she was the most fantastical person he’d ever met. Phoebe had the same quality about her, but it was more subdued. When you were with her, you didn’t realize how amazing the experience was, but the moment it was over and she was gone, you felt the difference.
Tears streamed down her face as she searched around in her bag. He wanted to offer his help. Open her door and take the bag from her. Tell her he’d get her whatever she needed. She wouldn’t have to worry. But he couldn’t, because all this time, the time they’d been apart, living their own lives, Phoebe had been hurting. He knew when the first words had come out of her mouth at the hospital that what had been a seemingly teenage thing to do had carried with her in a way he hadn’t thought about. He’d thought about her a lot. He’d compared every single girl he’d ever been with, every kiss he’d had since, to her. That moment where they’d stopped in the hallway at the hospital, he’d remembered all of that, because that was when he knew she not only remembered him, but she also hated him. It was in her eyes.
She looked up from her search and turned back to face him, obviously not realizing he was still there. She looked at him now the same way she had looked at him that last night under the bleachers. It was the homecoming game his senior year. She was a sophomore. She was quiet. He was not. They’d gone out a few times, and though he was really falling for her, there was a misunderstanding at the game, and he hadn’t bothered to clear it up. At the time, being a stupid teenager, he hadn’t realized the harm something like that could do to a girl. She’d stared at him, everyone’s words swirling around them, creating a vacuum. The hurt in her eyes, the betrayal, he’d never forget. He’d felt stuck in that moment. Like all the air had left his lungs and the world surrounding them. He’d choked and watched as the sadness dimmed the light within her. She’d had this air about her. She was bright and fun. She knew things that he hadn’t had a clue were possible. She made everything seem possible. But then all the hurt he’d caused in a few moments of a teenage lapse in judgment had caused the light in her to burn red hot and teeter out.
