Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Cole Haywood was in prison. He’d confessed to a lot, including setting me up to go down for my father’s murder. Officially, my name was cleared. But there was a big fucking difference between clearing my name legally and people believing I was innocent. Most of the locals thought I’d gotten off because I was a Sawyer. Many still thought I’d murdered my father in cold blood.
It was nice to know that my family never thought I did it. Avery had looked me in the eye and said, “I could believe you’d kill Dad. But not like that. You’re way too smart.”
She was right.
If I’d been planning to kill Prentice, I sure as hell wouldn’t have walked into his office after a big argument the whole household had heard, shot him in the middle of the forehead, then tromped around in the dirt outside his office windows, leaving my shoe prints everywhere. I definitely wouldn’t have gone home afterward and put both the shoes and the gun in my own closet. If I’d been that stupid, I would have deserved to get caught.
Instead, I’d argued with my father. Artwork had been disappearing from Heartstone Manor. Most of it didn’t matter, but some pieces were family heirlooms. In my mind, they didn’t belong to Prentice any more than they belonged to me or Griffen. They belonged to the family as a whole, had been passed down through generations, and were meant to continue to be passed to children and grandchildren, not secreted away in the night and sold off.
Prentice had refused to tell me what he was doing—where the money was going, where the art was—and, furious, I’d lost my temper. Generally, I could hold it together, but my father’s knowing smirk always got under my skin. I’d stormed out, pounding my foot into the gas pedal and roaring down the country road that led to town. Unfortunately, I’d passed a number of witnesses. Whoever had killed Prentice had come in right after, unseen by anyone except my now-dead father. And my angry drive had placed me just close enough to the time of death to make it look like I did it.
If I’d killed my father, I would have been a lot more subtle. Slow poisoning, maybe, or a hunting accident. I wouldn’t say the thought had never crossed my mind. Prentice Sawyer could be an evil bastard, and until his final moments, he’d evaded any kind of accountability.
I’d thought so often, if only he were out of the way, but I’d been imagining a heart attack or a car accident, some intervention of fate that could save me from my father.
Fate had indeed intervened, in the form of a killer’s bullet. And until we found out who the killer was, I’d always be presumed guilty.
There were days when I thought it was no more than I deserved—that I should just put my head down and move forward, try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had to make amends to my family, to this town. It was time I put some thought into what kind of man I wanted to be. Not who I’d been, that was for sure.
But that was just more self-pitying bullshit. Maybe I did deserve for everyone to think I was guilty, but the fact was I hadn’t killed my father. Someone else had done that. They might have solved a lot of problems for a lot of people when they did, but that didn’t make it right. I’d paid with a year of my life for something I hadn’t done. Maybe the penance felt good—a balm on my guilt—but I knew my family, the people I owed the most, hadn’t wanted that kind of penance. Suffering under a false accusation wouldn’t ease the pain I’d caused. It wouldn’t make things right, and if I couldn’t truly clear my name, I’d never really be able to move on.
As much as I loved being here in Avery’s taproom with flames merrily crackling in the stone fireplace at one end of the room, the golden light making the wooden beams, walls, and floor glow, the comforting sound of happy people talking, drinking, playing games—I had to figure out what came next. I couldn’t do that with my father’s murder hanging over my head.
The thought had been spinning in my brain for weeks. My siblings weren’t convinced that the killer was still out there. They thought there was a good chance Cole had done it, despite his denials. I was one of the few who believed him when he’d said he was guilty of everything except killing our father.
I knew Cole Haywood—not as well as I thought I did, considering I hadn’t pegged him for setting me up for murder, but better than the rest of them. I thought if Cole had killed Prentice, he would have admitted it when he admitted everything else, if only so he could brag about how he’d outsmarted the wily fox that had been my father.