Forgotten Hearts: Dunblair Ridge Series Book One

by Sloan Archer

  “Maybe we could start there?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Let’s do it”

  He rooted through the bag and held up the supplies as he went over them. “I got a scraper and a scoring tool that’s supposed to buff the paper right off the wall. Some sand paper, too, in case we need it—you can never have too much sandpaper, right? There’s some sponges in the other bag, and a spray chemical that breaks down adhesive. I’ve never removed wall paper before, but I’ve heard from multiple sources that it can be kind of a pain. On the bright side, it’s not too complicated. Oh, and I have a steamer in my truck that’ll help loosen the paper.”

  Vanessa was plainly impressed. “I can’t believe you got all this together for me. Thank you so much! How will I ever repay you?”

  By staying here! “Don’t mention it. What’re friends for?”

  “I feel like I haven’t known you long, and here you are doing all this stuff for me,” she said shyly.

  “What are you talking about? You’ve known me for over twenty years. We just lost each other’s phone numbers for a while.”

  Vanessa grinned. “Well, if you put it that way . . .”

  “I was also thinking that we could make a couple trips out to the dump to get rid of the larger stuff you’re clearing out.”

  “Sounds good! And thank you!”

  “Vanessa?”

  “Yah?”

  “You don’t have to keep thanking me.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said with a chuckle.

  As they worked, they filled each other in on what had happened in their lives since they’d parted as children. Since they were together as friends, the conversation flowed easily, with no need to conceal embarrassing events or to embellish accomplishments. Vanessa started out by discussing how she and her mother had moved around a lot after her summer in Dunblair Ridge.

  “And I mean a lot,” she said. “Motels, trailers, apartments . . . We slept in the car occasionally, too, and at my mother’s boyfriends’ houses.”

  Cash’s heart ached for her, though she was only stating the facts and not fishing for sympathy—her pride would never allow such a thing. “Must’ve been hard going to school like that.”

  “It was, but I managed.” She provided him a sly smile. “And it made for an excellent admissions essay for college.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Dartmouth. Full scholarship.”

  “Wow. Impressive.”

  “A scholarship was the only way I’d be able to afford college, so I had to make sure I’d get one. I was kind of a geek in high school,” she said and Cash gave her a look like he couldn’t envision such a thing. She went on to tell him about her college years, which she’d spent the majority of in the library studying, since she’d had to keep her grades up.

  Cash kept toiling as she spoke—removing that nasty old wallpaper was no easy task—but he met her eyes periodically and nodded, so that she’d know he was listening.

  “I went to New York after college, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with four other girls, and got an entry-level job in finance.”

  “That must’ve been fun each morning, trying to fight your way into the bathroom,” he commented.

  She rolled her eyes, as if to say, Was it ever. “I was so excited to move into my first grown-up apartment a few years later that I didn’t care that it was the size of a shoebox or that I had to wash my dishes in the bathtub because the kitchen sink was so small. I was just happy to have my own space. It was the first time in my entire life that I was truly my own.” She described the studio in further detail, which was about three hundred square feet, located above a pizzeria, and made everything in her home, including her hair, smell like garlic.

  “At least you kept the vampires away,” he joked and she stuck her tongue out at him teasingly.

  She told him how hard it had been to break into finance as a female, and the long hours it had required. “I thought it would get better as I climbed up the ranks, but I’ve pretty much spent the last few years of my life working around the clock—money doesn’t care if you’re tired. A lot of times, neither do the clients.” She laughed. “But I loved every minute of it . . . Well, most minutes.”

  “Sounds a lot like journalism. A story is going to break regardless of how long it’s been since you’ve slept,” he said.

  Vanessa peered over at him and said, “I want to hear all about your journalism days. Donna told me that you’ve won some fancy-pants awards?”

  Cash shrugged. He’d have to remember to thank Donna later for bragging on his behalf, undoubtedly as an attempt to grease the wheels of romance between him and Vanessa. Donna prided herself on being the town’s matchmaker. “I’ve won a couple,” he said modestly. “But I want to hear the rest of your story before I get into my own.”

  Vanessa shrugged. “There really isn’t much else to tell. That’s been it for these last years: work, work, work. Living in New York. Occasionally having to deal with the drama my crazy mother creates. And you know about the Greg situation, so no need to get into that.”

  She was gazing at him expectantly, so he began by telling her about how much he’d wanted to leave Dunblair Ridge as a kid—how he’d longed for the city with an intensity he had never known. He also told her about the tension it had created between him and his father. “We fought tooth and nail about it! I think we even fought about it on the day I left to start classes at Northwestern.” He shook his head and chuckled softly.

  “The funny thing is, I wanted to live in the city until I actually did.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t like it . . . How can I put it?” Cash thought for a moment. “I think that being raised out here in the middle of nowhere got me accustomed to a certain type of environment. I think the city noise was what bothered me most of all. I remember the first time I heard my next-door neighbor in the bathroom. I just couldn’t believe that I could eavesdrop on something that I’d considered so private—it was like he was in the same room as me.”

  Vanessa nodded. “Sounds like New York apartments.”

  “This guy next door, he was the worst! It got to the point where I had his morning schedule memorized. He’d go into the bathroom, cough up one of his lungs for a good ten minutes—I don’t know what that guy was smoking, but whatever it was must’ve been laced with furballs—sit on toilet making, uh, toilet noises for another fifteen, and then shower. The crazy thing was that he’d yell, ‘Hot-hot-hot!’ as soon as he got in. Every morning. I wanted to bang on the wall, ask him why he never learned. Then, to add insult to injury, he’d launch into a series of boy band ballads. And, no, he was not a good singer—well, I guess he would be a good singer to a person who enjoys the sound of cats having their tails stepped on.”

  Vanessa cracked up. “I lived next door to a kid who had a clarinet. It was like he was butchering geese over there.”

  “Oh, so you know what I’m talking about! But it wasn’t just the noise that bugged me, it was the lack of space. Everything is so cramped in the city, and I’d been brought up with plenty of room to roam. In Baltimore, I lived in an apartment that was at street level, so I felt as if my privacy was always being invaded. People were always glancing into my window as they walked past. I think they did it innocently enough—humans are just inherently nosey. Still, I couldn’t help feeling violated.”

  “You could’ve always gotten curtains,” Vanessa said. She groaned as her scraper became wedged under a bubble in the wallpaper. “You weren’t kidding. This stuff does not want to come off.”

  “Here, try this,” Cash said, handing her the scoring tool. “And I did get curtains, but keeping them shut all the time made it feel like I was living in a mushroom den.”

  “Good point. And this does help a lot,” she said, waggling the tool. “So, is that where you were doing your journalism out of, Baltimore?”

  He nodded. “That was my home base, but I frequently tra
velled internationally.”

  “Exciting.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” he said, not quite scowling but close to it. “It was also dangerous a lot of the time.” He went on to depict how stressful and terrifying it was being out in the field, how he’d watched the reporter standing next to him die from a stray bullet in a warzone in the Middle East. He told her how it had taken him months after retirement to get to a point where he could sleep through the night, and how he still sometimes had nightmares about the things he’d seen.

  She remained quiet while she ruminated, which made him feel nervous and vulnerable. Vanessa was the first person he’d told about the nightmares. He hadn’t even discussed them with Jared, and he knew most of Cash’s deepest secrets. “I’m sorry,” she quietly said.

  “I also wrote some pretty awful puff pieces back when I was paying my dues,” he said, hoping to lighten the mood.

  Vanessa arched a brow. “Oh yah? Let’s hear it.”

  He was glad to change the subject. He avoided reflecting on the perils of his warzone days as much as possible. “It was my first paying job as a photojournalist. I was so proud even though it was at a hokey, small fry newspaper miles out of the city. I covered a lot of feel-good events, like food festivals and the birth of new animals at the zoo—it was pretty corny stuff.”

  “Aw, I think it sounds sweet.”

  “I also covered local scandals. The most embarrassing one I did was a sensationalist exposé on the local councilmen who were doing nothing to fix the town’s pothole epidemic. Nothing, I tell you!” He brought a fist down on the table dramatically. He shook his head, laughed. “I still cringe when I think about it. You can tell that I was taking myself way too seriously. I threw around the word ‘egregious’ a lot.”

  Vanessa sniggered and said, “If it makes you feel better, I wore fake glasses when I first started working in finance because I thought it made me look smarter. The lenses were plastic.”

  “You nerd,” he teased, and then he concluded his backstory by revealing that the ranch was under water because of his father’s debts. “But I’m doing my best to stay afloat.”

  “You know what I find crazy about all of this?” Vanessa said. “We were both on the East Coast for years—just down the way from each other—and yet our paths never crossed.”

  “Like the proverbial two passing ships in the night.”

  “You skimmed over something, though, Cash.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I told you about Greg, but you haven’t mentioned any of your ex-girlfriends.”

  Cash shrugged. “I guess I’ve never been in a relationship that was serious enough to mention.”

  Vanessa balled up a strip of wallpaper and deposited into the empty Home Depot bag that they’d repurposed to hold their garbage. “Never?” She seemed dubious.

  “As I said last night, I haven’t met the right one.”

  “Still, there must have been one or two special ladies?”

  “Well, I did know one many years ago, when I was about ten,” he said and she blushed.

  She opened her mouth, as if to offer a witty comeback, and then closed it. Whatever she was thinking would remain unsaid.

  “I used to travel all the time for work, remember,” Cash pointed out. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been committed to women who I’ve had strong feelings for, but nothing has ever stuck.”

  “Why not, do you think?”

  “Why does it usually not work out?” he asked rhetorically. “It was the usual. One of us was more invested than the other. Or, I’d get called away for work and the distance would kill us fast. Or, they didn’t want to date someone with such a dangerous occupation and would eventually give me a ‘me or the job’ ultimatum—which was funny, since it was usually the dangerous occupation that had made them interested in me in the first place. Or we argued a lot . . . Take your pick.”

  “And what about now—are you ready to settle down?”

  “Absolutely. I want a wife and kids, the whole nine.” Cash added some wallpaper to the trash bag. They were really making progress, and being distracted by their chatting had made time fly by. When he checked the time on his cell, he saw that they’d been toiling for a few hours. “But don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to settle for just anyone. I’ve waited this long, so when I do finally get married, she’ll have to be perfect.”

  Vanessa made an incredulous huh sound.

  Quickly, Cash clarified, “Perfect for me, I mean, not perfect in general. Lord knows I’m plenty flawed myself, so I can hardly expect any wife of mine to be flawless.”

  “Oh, well, that’s better,” she smiled.

  “You getting hungry?”

  “Sure, I could eat. What are you thinking?”

  “You like barbeque?”

  She gave him a look that told him that she loved barbeque as much as she loved chocolate.

  “There’s this little hole-in-the-wall barbeque shack on the outskirts of town, Bowdie’s. I was thinking we could load up some things for the dump and then hit it up on the way back. Old man Bowdie makes the best ribs in town—dare I even say in all of Montana. Locals only.”

  Vanessa wiggled her eyebrows. “But I’m not a local. Think they’ll still let me eat?”

  Not yet, you’re not, Cash thought. But I’m hoping I can change that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Vanessa had been warned by Cash that he might not be around much during the days that followed because of ranch obligations, yet he’d showed regularly to offer assistance. He never said as much, but she suspected that he’d tailored his schedule so that he could continue helping her. He’d been working all morning around the ranch and then going to her place later in the afternoon, where they’d toil away on renovations until long after sundown. Never once had he complained, though she knew he must’ve been worn-out.

  They completed many tasks that Vanessa could have easily done herself, like the tedious taping of wall corners in preparation of painting, but she appreciated the extra pair of hands as well as the company—which, despite her reluctance to open up her heart again, she was finding increasingly appealing. She felt fortunate to have been reunited with Cash, and not only because he’d been helping her fix up Jeanie’s house. He made her life better just by being in it.

  She couldn’t think of a time when a man ever had been so generous toward her without expecting anything in return. She also couldn’t help thinking how ridiculous this was, given that she’d planned on marrying Greg, who would have balked at doing even a quarter of the things Cash had done for her without blinking an eye. She wondered if this was a reflection on Greg as a mate and a human being, or if Cash was special, a rare unicorn of a man.

  Maybe it was a little bit of both.

  The interactions Vanessa had with Cash felt natural—far more natural than any exchange she’d had with Greg in the latter part of their relationship—and they chatted openly and freely. When they did fall into occasional spells of silence, it was comfortable. They’d gotten into a friendly groove much like the one they’d had as children, and they teased each other the way old friends do, with good-natured banter aplenty . . . And more than a little flirting.

  Vanessa found that she missed Cash when he wasn’t around in a way that she’d never missed Greg. When she heard or saw something funny, she’d make a mental note to tell him about it when she later saw him. As much as her sentimentality chagrined her, seeing him was the highlight of her afternoon.

  When Cash was absent, the stillness of the farm was almost deafening to Vanessa’s city girl ears. It was worst late at night, when it was easy for her imagination to get the better of her and every creak and groan of the ancient house became a madman’s hunt through the halls in search of her. It wasn’t a good feeling when half the doors didn’t have locks, including Jeanie’s old bedroom, where Vanessa now slept after much scouring. One night, she’d gotten herself worked up into such a frenzy that she’d pushed a piece of furni
ture in front of the door. She felt like a total fool after she’d awakened the next morning and it occurred to her that the door opened outward into the hallway, so all the madman would’ve needed to do to get in was climb over the dresser.

  Vanessa understood the silliness of her paranoia; where she’d come from was considerably more dangerous than Montana. She suspected that if one were to add up all the violent incidents that had taken place in Dunblair Ridge during the last ten years, it probably still wouldn’t match the crime statistics of a single day in New York. The town was so safe that many of her country neighbors left their keys dangling in the ignitions of their cars when they parked in the driveway for the night, at least according to Cash.

  Barring the dresser incident, Vanessa herself had become less guarded. She often kept her windows open to air out the house while she popped into town for supplies. She’d also left her laptop sitting on the table while she’d used the restroom at a coffee shop downtown, which she never would have done in the city. Not in a million years. She’d been reminding herself not to get into the “bad” habit of trusting strangers, though she’d ponder the sort of lifestyle she’d become accustomed to if having faith in humanity was considered a vice.

  On the mornings Vanessa worked around the house on her own, she focused mainly on cleaning and organizing. She considered the task an archeological dig of sorts, the unearthing of mysterious and ancient artifacts beneath objects of modern insignificance. Her excavations were done in layers: beginning at the top, naturally, and working her way down, with anyone’s guess as to what would be discovered at the bottom.

  Vanessa had gotten a fair idea of the magnitude of Jeanie’s hoarding during her first cursory walk through the house, but she still hadn’t been fully prepared for the effort it would require to get the property in sellable shape. Once she finished a single task, it seemed ten more would follow. She’d finally get a closet cleaned out only to discover that a suitcase hidden at the way back was jam-packed with a mishmash of items: a baseball mitt mixed with a set of old hair rollers mixed with a bag of tangled necklaces . . . Which she’d then have to spend an hour or two going through. She’d also found important documents—a copy of the deed to the house being one of them—sandwiched between a jumble of papers she’d previously dismissed as trash: expired coupons, faded road maps, bills for a phone line that no longer existed.