One Little Letter: A Bad Boy, Second Chance Romance (Office Escapades Book 1)

by Robin Edwards

Stepping out of the rental car, the first person I locked eyes with was Mai, the girl who had sent me a Valentine’s card in school. I walked over to her and embraced her, “I never thanked you for that card, and I never thanked you for making me realize who I am. I hid it, I hid for so long, and I was awful to you. I’m on the right path now, Mai”.

  She kissed me on the cheek and said, “Call me if it doesn’t work out.” We laughed, and I promised her I would. Life would have been so different if I had just opened Mai’s card myself and mustered up an ounce of bravery.

  Holding Florrie’s hand, I rang the doorbell of my parents’ house. My dad answered, his salt and pepper hair was thinning, and he didn’t seem to stand as tall as he used to. He embraced each of my children and ushered Florrie and me in. I saw his gaze drop to our intertwined hands and noticed a smile creep across his face.

  In the living room, my mother was pouring glasses of milk for the kids, fussing about them, loving the energy they brought into the home. “Mom, dad, can you sit down for a second?” I asked.

  Dad sat down, the smile on his face had grown wider, and “Don’t make me sit for too long, I have a good feeling about this” he laughed.

  “Who is your friend, Katie?” my mother asked, a hint of a smile in her voice to.

  For the first time in over a decade, my parents and I were civil, relaxed and happy to be in one another’s company.

  “This is Florrie,” I told them, and “I’m leaving Robbie to be with Florrie.”

  “YAHOO!” my dad exclaimed, jumping out of his seat, rushing over to us. “Great to meet you, Florrie!” he said, hugging her tightly, his eyes closed.

  He turned to me and said, “I knew it, I knew it all along, but I couldn’t say it. I should have. I wanted to”, tears filling up in his eyes, “I wouldn’t take back anything because we wouldn’t have these little scamps, but I’m sorry I didn’t help you.”

  I fell into his arms, sobbing. “You did everything you could, you made everything so easy. I messed up. I cared too much, and I shouldn’t have. I should only have cared about what my family thought of me, and nothing more”, I told him.

  I couldn’t blame my family. They created a safe, open environment for me, and I rebelled. My mother, holding Florrie’s hand, turned to me and said, “Let’s get it back on track now, Katie. We’ve wasted too many years”.

  Sitting down in my parents’ house with my children and the love of my life, I acknowledged that all I went through, all I loved and all I lost had been worth it if this was the outcome. There were years I wouldn’t get back, but dwelling on the past wouldn’t help.

  I squeezed Florrie’s hand and whispered, “thank you,” in her ear.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For getting me here, for bringing me home,” I told her.

  Inhaling the room and the people in it, I caught me dad’s eye. He winked at me and smiled. I didn’t realize how much I had missed that smile, and how thankful I was to have it back in my life again.

  The End

  I wanted to thank you for taking the time in reading Rescuing Her Heart. We hoped you enjoyed reading this happily ever after story.

  It brought me great joy to write this as I love writing stories that entertain readers and draws them into another world with characters you love and hate. They say great books are those that evoke emotion out of you and I hope that’s what it has done for you.

  Thank you once again, and I’ll see you in the next one.

  Hidden Mistress

  A Lesbian, Suspense Romance

  By Elle Crosby

  © Copyright 2016-2017 by Elle Crosby

  and Second Chances Press

  All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. Names and persons in this eBook are entirely fictional. They bear no resemblance to anyone living or dead. To protect the privacy of certain individuals the names and identifying details have been changed. This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  The sleepy little town of Bushwick New Hampshire sat right outside of another small, but comparatively huge town called Hanover. To the residents of Bushwick, the town was a quiet and safe place where doors were always unlocked, and neighbors still borrowed cups of sugar. However, to Julie Ophelia, the city always seemed a little bit eerie and full of secrets. Her viewpoint probably had something to do with the fact that she was the town’s coroner, so anything gruesome came, literally, across her desk.

  Julie didn’t always live in a state of perpetual gothic mentality and grew up just down the street from where she lives playing in the creek at the edge town with a false sense of reality as everyone else. Her upbringing was what could be considered typical having two brothers, a dad that worked construction in Hanover, and a stay at home mom who liked to try her hand at baking every once in a while. Her best friend, Kaitlyn Brown, grew up two doors down and Julie can remember playing in the preschool sandbox with her before Julie even knew what a best friend was. Kait, as Julie called her, was now her assistant which made things easier on Julie since Kait could understand why she looked at the world differently.

  No one knew what happened behind closed doors in Bushwick, but from the looks of the bodies being sent in recently, Julie could tell something was stirring, and it made her lock her doors at night. There was no breaking news or headlines on the front page of the Bushwick Times since anything outside of a heart attack was kept quiet by the Sheriff’s office to maintain the town's happiness and flow like it always had. Sheriff Bartlett had known Julie all her life, and his family occasionally would come over for Christmas Eve supper at Julie’s parents’ home.

  He usually avoided Julie, not wanting to argue over the last six bodies that landed in the morgue and would send his assistant, Lydia Thompson, with any information Julie might need for an autopsy.

  Growing up Julie, Kait, and Lydia all went to school together, but Julie and Kait were the All-American girls who played softball and lacrosse and always spoke kindly to the senior citizens in town. Lydia was different and had a pretty big stigma to carry around since her father left when she was a baby, and her mother had been struggling with alcoholism as long as Lydia could remember. Though Julie didn’t spend any time with Lydia growing up, she remembers her as an angry girl, usually alone, or getting in trouble for smoking out back.

  As far as their relationship now, nearly fifteen years after graduation from high school, they didn’t get along and tried to go through Kait to avoid any snide remarks between them, something Julie never quite understood since she barely spoke to Lydia since she got back from college. Julie didn’t know what happened, but something definitely went down in Lydia’s life while she was gone, and it turned her even angrier as an adult then she was as a kid.

  Julie and Kait spent most of their time together since, after high school, Julie came out as gay, and the town snubbed her for several years. Things quieted down after Julie became the coroner and no one pays any attention to her love life anymore, mostly because she is single and focuses on her work. Kait has a boyfriend, Tommy Headley, who she has dated since she was twenty, and after thirteen years of an up and down love affair, Tommy finally popped the question to Kait last summer, though she has been oddly slow in setting a date.

  The leaves on the trees in Bushwick were already vibrant shades of red and yellow even though they were only three days into October. Julie hated October as if her life wasn’t an endless scene from a horror movie; October just made everything seem a little creepier, and Kait
was obsessed with the holiday.

  Julie, however, had been too involved in the current mystery bodies she had received to notice anything else, and Kait kept pushing that Julie was more concerned with her dead bodies then she was people with a heartbeat. Julie ignored Kait and had been spending extra hours at the morgue trying to figure out just what happened to the four people brought back to her in pieces.

  All of the bodies had been identified, but none of the victims lived within three hundred miles of Bushwick and the way they died stumped Julie. The first of the four victims arrived at the morgue back in June; her body was covered in carvings as if she were a piece of art. The words didn’t make sense and, just like the next three girls, she had lived a modest and reasonable lifestyle with no real hidden secrets popping out. The strangest part of it all was that the girls had died from a heart embolism, something completely separate from their outer injuries and the mutilation had occurred after the victim was deceased. This was the part Julie liked the most, the fact that she was part of the detection and she got to see all of the files on the victims.

  Every night Julie, Kait, and Tommy would have a drink at the bar down the street and decompress from their day. Nothing seemed to bother Kait, and Tommy had taken over running the local bank when his father, the bank owner, decided it was time for him to retire. Tommy’s days were filled with someone fetching his coffee and bank tellers sucking up to him every time he turned the corner, a job that seemed more of a nightmare than Julies. But Tommy was comfortable, and Kait liked the idea that one day she could quit the morgue and raise a few children that would end up as clueless as the rest of the town.

  After drinks, like clockwork, Julie would walk back to her small Victorian style house on the breezy neighborhood streets right outside of downtown. In the summer she would ride her bike to work, and in the winter, unless conditions were unbearable, Julie would walk to work to give her a chance to clear her mind before and after a day at the morgue. Lydia’s house was right outside the town, and Julie put her head down as she walked passed hoping not to overhear the common arguments between Lydia and her mother, who she still took care of and lived with.

  Sometimes, when Julie would work late, she would go around the block to avoid Lydia’s house altogether. Julie never liked to see anyone upset, and the last time she stopped to console a crying Lydia outside of her house, Lydia had screamed at Julie and ran inside. Lydia’s house was the dark spot on the walk with its run down shutters, dirt stained siding, and a mound of junk in the front yard, yet the town left them alone knowing Lydia had been taking care of things her entire life.

  Recently, though, Lydia’s house had been quiet, and she had stayed away from the morgue, looking away when she did have to come down, and a body was sitting out. She never seemed to have an issue with Gore before, but since the bodies were found on the outskirts of town, Lydia seemed to get squeamish every time she walked through the doors. Julie found it odd at first but just chalked it up to the fact that Lydia was a weird person anyways.

  The nights had begun to get chilly, and the endless clouds made the nights darker than usual in Bushwick. With the recent events and the pending holiday season, Julie was beginning to feel uncomfortable as she walked home, always feeling like someone was behind her. Either way, Julie knew she needed to figure out what happened to these girls even if it meant a hundred more late night walks back to her house.

  Julie was just glad that the horror hadn't traveled into her small town, even if she felt like it was everywhere. Halloween was in the air for everyone in the city except Julie, who felt like Halloween was just another creepy day in her always disturbing life.

  Chapter One

  The phone rang before the sun breached the horizon and Julie jumped out of bed to answer it, knowing there could only be one reason for a call that early; another body had come into the morgue. Julie had started to get used to these calls at odd hours, but her knees were still wobbly from the extra shots she had taken at Murphy's Pub last night with Kait and Tommy, causing her to stumble across the room. She threw piles of clothes around searching for her phone and finally found it, answering the call breathlessly.

  “Yes, hello,” Julie said trying to keep her breathing under control.

  “Julie.” The voice of Sheriff Bartlett was quiet but divisive on the other end. “There is another body. I don’t have to tell you this is all secret information. Just get dressed and meet me at your office.”

  Before Julie could say anything, the Sheriff had hung up the phone, and an eerie feeling crawled over her skin like a shadow creeping through the streets. Another victim had been found and Julie, for the first time in her career, wasn’t sure if her stomach was steady enough for an early morning murder. She shook the thought from her mind and pulled a clean pair of scrubs from the drier. She usually changed at work to avoid walking home with human splatter all over her but she needed to get there quickly and finding clean clothes in the mess of her house wasn’t something she had the strength for.

  Julie was usually a relatively exact person but ever since June this case had taken up her life, and all she did at home was throw her clothes off and fall into bed. She rushed through the house, grabbed her coffee mug, threw on a jacket, and began peddling the three blocks to work on her bicycle. Everything was quiet in the neighborhood, and even the city looked more like The Town That Dreaded Sundown than the average hopping little town she had grown accustomed to.

  She pulled her bike up to the side of the building and trotted in through the side doors. The morgue was cluttered with people, mostly investigators, and evidence collectors. Julie wandered towards her office looking over through the glass walls that encased the preparation room where she caught a slight glimpse of the victim’s face before they pulled the sheet back over her. It was strange that they were doing so much work here since usually all the other evidence was collected at the scene.

  Just as Julie was turning her head back towards the office, the Sheriff stepped in front of her, causing her to jump from the surprise. He pulled his head back slightly taking a good look at Julie’s face since jumpiness wasn’t usually a trait that she showed. Sheriff Bartlett forced a smile and put his hand on Julie’s back, leading her to her office. He shut the door behind them, and Julie walked to her desk and set her bag on the floor.

  “A little jumpy this morning?” Bartlett asked. “It’s okay Julie, these murders have made us all take a second look over our shoulder when we are walking home for dinner. Here is the deal. The victim has been identified as 24 years old, Marissa Hagerty. Marissa was a graduate student, no children, no boyfriend, lived alone in her apartment about thirty miles outside of this town.”

  Julie’s head snapped up, and the look on her face caused the Sheriff to stop speaking and wait for her response. Julie cleared her throat and replied:

  “Sheriff, I know you probably have noticed, but these victims place of origin are getting closer and closer to our town.”

  “Yes,” the Sheriff said without delay. “We are keeping a close monitor on it. This victim was found in the library by Officer Brown who was called there for a possible break-in. By the time he got there, the body was dumped, and the assailant was nowhere to be found. It’s strange; it is as they disappear into thin air. Luckily Kait happened to be walking home from her fiancé’s house and was able to keep the situation hidden from any other onlookers.”

  “Oh,” Julie said with sympathy. “Is she okay?”

  “She seems to be fine,” Sheriff Bartlett replied. “In fact, I offered her the day off, but she insisted she was okay. I was going to send Lydia to help for the day, but she was ill today, and Kait gave off the impression that that wouldn’t be the best idea.”

  Julie snorted and rolled her eyes. The Sheriff looked carefully at Julie slightly surprised by her disposition towards Lydia. He took a deep breath reminiscent of Julie’s dad’s motions right before a lecture.

  “Julie,” he began. “Cut Lydia a little slack. She
is not as bad as she seems. Anyways, I’ll get all these people out so you can get to work. I’d like your report by this afternoon.”

  Julie shook her head in understanding and watched as Sheriff Bartlett walked out of the office and began ushering people to the door. She flipped over the folder on her desk and read the information on the latest victim. There was nothing more than what the Sheriff had told her but she couldn’t help but wonder why all these bodies ended up in town and why the killer seemed to be getting closer and closer to ground zero.

  After the last detective left Julie grabbed her iPod, popped her earphones in, and shut herself in the room with the victim. She combed the victim over thoroughly but found only the same etchings in the victim's skin as all of the other girls, and all were made post mortem. Julie pulled her scalpel out and prepared to make the first incision, understanding that this victim most likely died from the same embolism that all the other girls had. As the knife touched the victim's skin, a hand fell on Julie’s shoulder, and she jumped back from the body and whirled around.

  “Gosh,” Kait said smiling. “This stuff is really getting to you.”

  “God Kait,” Julie said pulling the earbuds from her ears. “I could have stabbed you.”

  “And what?” Kait chuckled. “Given me a half inch wound?”

  “Well,” Julie said wiping her hands and lifting her face shield. “I am glad you are feeling okay. I was worried last night would've scared you.”

  “Nah,” Kait said glancing down at the body. “I work in a scary movie every day; it takes a lot to scare me.”

  “Good,” Julie replied preparing to continue. “Murphey’s tonight? I'm going to need a drink after this one.”

  “Sure thing boss,” Kait said as she walked out of the room and to her desk by the front doors.