Page 2 of Best Laid Plans

Luna's eyes shifted. "You're that friend."

Yeah, the one who carried Valen's body out of the debris of the Black Hawk so his family could say goodbye to him.

"Yes."

"We appreciate what you did for Valen, but it doesn't change what I said about Nova. She's part of our family here in Savannah Lace. Think of her as my Valen."

She left then, and my jaw tightened.

How had Nova managed to hoodwink a woman like Nina Davenport? And Luna Steele? From what I could see, Luna was a tough cookie. I'd heard of her. She was the rebel of the family—did her own thing and did it damn well. Her loyalty to a woman like Nova surprised me. But then I'd believed Nova to be a woman she wasn't—kind, sweet, generous, loving, and mine. If someone had told me she was a thief, I wouldn't have believed it—not until I saw the evidence myself. I had not been able to put her behind bars then, but this time, I'd ruin her.

Chapter 2

Nova

My hands shook as I sat on the floor in the bathroom, my forehead leaning against the toilet I'd just heaved my breakfast into.

I knew he was coming. I managed the Savannah Lace office. I knew everything that happened here. But I wasn't prepared for the hate. He still believed that I stole from him. After all these years, I had hoped that he'd have thought it through and known I was innocent. A part of me had imagined him getting on his knees, apologizing, and professing his undying love for me. So, yeah, I needed to stop reading romance novels, because that shit didn't happen in real life.

The last time I saw Anson was in a jail cell in Sentinel, Georgia. The worst night of my life—and that was saying something, since I lost my mama and memaw within months of one another, leaving me an orphan and all alone.

That was the night I did what I never thought I'd do. I reached out to my birth father.

Emmett Bodine wasn't happy when I called him, asking for his help. That was the one call Deputy Sheriff Peter Fontaine had allowed me before he shoved me into a cell with Raymond Carre. I'd made that call after talking to Anson and finding out that, not only did he know I'd been arrested, but he'd been the one to have me charged with a crime I didn't commit.

I woke the morning after my eighteenth birthday, having spent my first night with the man I loved. By that evening, I was arrested.

Anson came to see me in jail and tore into me, not letting me speak. He shattered my heart and broke me apart, blindly believing whatever lies his sister and her best friend had fed him. Alma and Bailey were the Mean Teen Queens of Sentinel High, and they couldn't stand that Anson had dumped Bailey to be with me—the daughter of Eileen King, an African American former prostitute who worked as a cleaner. I was a mixed-race girl without a father's name on my birth certificate, and they hated me for it.

Mama had told me who my bio father was before she died.

Emmett Bodine may have been a shit husband (he had been sleeping with my mother) and father (he refused to have anything to do with me), but when I called him that night, he delivered. He could've ignored me, but he hadn't. But for him, I don't know what would've happened to me.

Albeit, without grace, Emmett had gotten me out of Sentinel and to Savannah, and had given me a new lease on life. I'd taken it, gotten a bachelor's degree in business administration, and built a fulfilling life.

After Emmett died, my half-brother, Trevor Bodine, came looking for me. Surprisingly, we became friends. I got even closer with his then-girlfriend and now fiancée, Katya James, an ER doctor at Savannah General. We decided to keep our sibling relationship a secret. Trev's mother had recently had a heart attack, and stress was bad for her—finding out that her husband had an illegitimate child would be the definition of stressful.

Trevor and Katya knew my story—they were the only ones who did. According to my half-brother, Anson Larue was known to be militantly honest, a novelty for a real estate developer. He was also known to be ruthless, cold, and hard as nails. He believed I'd dodged a bullet. I agreed. Anson was in my past.

But the truth was that not a day went by that I didn't think about him.

A few months ago, when I saw the announcement on the high school Facebook group (I was a lurker not a liker) about Anson Larue and Bailey Hyatt's engagement, it hurt. Even after seven years, I was wounded to see him moving on. I had tried to get past Anson; I dated, went out with men, and even managed to have sex with a few, but I had trouble maintaining a relationship.

I didn't trust men. The man I lost my virginity to had abandoned me during my time of need, and had asked his best buddy, Pete Fontaine, to throw me in jail with a drunk sex offender as punishment.

I had been eighteen—foolishly in love, waiting for my knight in shining armor, who remarkably turned out to be my father. To my surprise and that of Sentinel's Deputy Sheriff, Emmett had placed a phone call to the Governor of Georgia, who'd moved the bureaucratic machinery to get me out of the Sheriff's jail alive. For a while then, I didn't think I would. It was no wonder that my faith in humanity was low.

"You okay, honey?" Luna kneeled next to me, her hand on my shoulder.

My eyes filled with tears. God, I hated crying about Anson. I'd done so much of that already.

"No," I admitted. "I'm not okay. But I will be. I just need to regroup."

Luna sat cross-legged in front of me, the closed porcelain toilet between us.

"I'm guessing there's some history here?" Luna asked softly.

"Good guess," I gave her a watery chuckle.

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