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And all of it, aside from some of the bottles in the wine cellar and the Ford of course, was for sale.

God, she hated this place.Advertisement

“That’s right,” Double T was confirming. “Not only Carter, but Cassie Kramer and her husband want a sit-down.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Guess we’ll find out.”

“Guess we will. What time?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Four.”

“Works for me. It’ll give me time to pull some things together.” She hung up and felt better. Things were looking up. And the real estate agent had called saying she had an offer on this place. She went to the wine cellar, half a flight down to a climate-controlled room behind thick glass, and pulled out a bottle from Edwina’s selection. A Pinot Gris. Good enough. She had no idea what the wine was worth, only that she was going to carry it upstairs to her bedroom, open the bottle, and sip the wine in the bathtub with its amazing view of Portland. That luxury, she would miss. The rest of it, not at all.

She stripped, put on a robe, and added bubble bath to the tub. Picked up in Paris by Edwina a decade earlier, the soap was mild and non-stinging as if for a child, yet exotic and smelling of lavender. To top off her ritual Nash poured herself a glass of wine and paused to light a candle, as she did every night.

“Mommy misses you,” she whispered, but didn’t cry as the tiny flame flickered.

She slipped into the warm water and closed her eyes. She thought briefly of her child. This was the one time of day when she allowed herself a few minutes to remember her baby’s curly hair, blue, blue eyes, and soft giggle. If she thought hard enough, she could recall the smell of her, the oh so softness of skin. Tears pulled at the back of her eyes but she would no longer cry.

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Five years had passed.

She allowed herself a few minutes of grieving still, but that was all. This was her life now. She cleared her throat. Took another sip of wine. Told herself that things were better, the pain lessening, maybe eventually it would even be tolerable. Finally she opened her eyes to the incredible windows with their spectacular view over trees and rooftops to the winking lights of the city below.

So this was how the other half lived. Or was it the other one percent these days? Didn’t matter. She didn’t like it. Some of the perks were nice, of course, like the in-home gym that was handy for daily workouts, and this soaking tub with its multiple jets to massage out her muscles, tense from a twelve-hour day, but really, who needed all the luxury?

Not Rhonda Nash.

At least not anymore.

Not with the road she’d traveled.

Absurdly, wealth seemed banal to her now; well, the trappings of the very rich at least. Money had failed her. There just wasn’t enough to protect the innocent, to fight illness and death and expect to win. That, she knew now, was a fool’s game.

She would live here for now, but only until she could sell the place and every shiny, expensive thing within its walls. Hopefully this new buyer would take the albatross from her neck. After everything she’d inherited was sold, she planned to move to somewhere a lot more cozy, a lot more homey with a lot less square footage and no amazing city view. Maybe she’d get a cat. Or a dog. Or chickens. More and more people in Portland were keeping chickens these days. Whatever. She smiled a little . . . maybe she should get the chickens now and let them roam over Edwina’s five thousand square feet of opulence, scratching and clucking, pooping and shedding feathers all over the imported rugs.

Edwina’s ultramodern home had been cut into the hillside, a wall of windows three stories high with a panorama of downtown Portland and several of the bridges that crossed the Willamette. She could also see much farther east to Mount Hood rising out of the Cascades. Now, she stared through the glass. The lights of the city winked in the rain and Hood was invisible in the darkness, but not far from the mountain’s peak, in its shadow, was Falls Crossing, the town where Allie and Cassie Kramer had spent their teenage years, where their mother still lived.

And now ex-sheriff effin’ Shane Carter himself wanted an audience. That should prove interesting. Did Cassie have a confession to make and needed dear old stepdad and her estranged hubby to accompany her? Were they her little entourage of bodyguards? The woman, after all, was a mental case. pqdm.com