Page 5 of Homecoming Heartbreaker

“A nurse I am not,” Mack said, yanking Molly back to their conversation, “but spending some time together will give us a chance to catch up.”

Molly gestured to the ornate doors behind her. “I need to get back to work and I’m sure you want to see Jameson. I’d appreciate it if you could take over the search for another nurse for him. Maybe you’ll find someone who’ll stick around.”

Because he, sure as hell, wouldn’t.

Two

In her messy office, Molly heard a rap on her partly open door and wearily lifted her head. Perfect. Just one more person she didn’t want to see...

With her tiny build, waist-long blond hair and bright blue eyes, Beth looked like an angel, but Molly knew her brother’s girlfriend was manipulative, demanding and self-absorbed. She fit into the Haskell clan really, really well.

“What do you want?” Molly asked her, her voice flat. Six months ago Grant demanded she find Beth a job at the resort and she’d handed her CV to Jameson, hoping and praying nothing came of it. Beth’s résumé wasn’t overly impressive but she had, apparently, bookkeeping experience, and Jameson hired her.

The books had been a mess before and Molly knew that Beth had made a bad situation considerably worse.

Before Jameson’s collapse, Molly had expressed her concerns to him and he’d promised to look into the situation. If Molly had her way, she’d fire Beth but the hiring and firing of senior staff started and stopped with Jameson, and she didn’t have the authority.

Great news for Beth; bad news for her.

“I heard that Mack Holloway has arrived.”

Molly just stared at her, hoping to keep her expression bland. “If you’ve stepped in here to make asinine observations, you can just leave.”

“I know that you and Mack had a thing way back when but if you are thinking of confiding in him, I would caution against it.”

Molly rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers, conscious of the headache building behind her eyes. A month or so back, tired of hauling around guilt and remorse—and after discovering her brothers took the money she’d recently given her mother to pay the gas and water bill and lost it playing blackjack—she’d, once again, told her family she was done and that they were on their own.

On hearing that she’d no longer fund their irresponsible lifestyle, her mom cried and told her she was unkind and a bad daughter. Vincent informed her that she could spare the cash; she was single, was being paid a mint and she owed them. Grant put his hand through the wall of the living room.

And when they calmed down, they did what they always did; they resorted to blackmail. If she didn’t do as they asked, they’d tell Jameson she stole two thousand dollars from him when she was a teenager. They’d also imply that she hadn’t stopped stealing from him, that she was more like their father than he ever imagined.

Jameson fired her accountant father for embezzling more than a hundred thousand dollars from him to fund his blackjack habit and charged him with theft. With her dad out on bail, Jameson gave them two weeks to vacate their house and the day the movers arrived, her dad dropped to the floor. Her last memory of her father was watching him leave Moonlight Ridge in an ambulance.

After his death, and despite the scandal, Jameson allowed the Haskell family to remain in their house on the grounds. It had been a wonderfully kind, magnanimous gesture but her mother and siblings never saw it that way. After her dad’s death, Molly vividly recalled many conversations between Jameson and Vivi: him asking for her to exert some control over her rebellious older brothers, her blaming Jameson for her husband’s death on the stress of being fired and facing prison.

After a series of incidents involving her brothers—skinny-dipping in the lake, playing their music far too loud, their harassing some VIP guests—Jameson insisted they leave the property. Despite being thirteen, Molly fully understood why Jameson didn’t want any of the Haskells around. She couldn’t blame him; she never wanted to be around her family, either.

Weeks ago, knowing that there was only one way to end this cycle of blackmail—and tired of living with her family’s threats, with her burning secret, with the heavy guilt—Molly resolved to find the courage to tell finally Jameson the truth. She had the money to pay Jameson back, with interest, and if he fired her, well, she’d reluctantly accept his decision.

Being canned and being cut out of his life was no less than she deserved.

But Jameson collapsed before she could confess.

Now, because Jameson had to avoid stress at all costs, her confession would have to wait. She’d also considered moving Beth to another position within the resort but that meant hiring another bookkeeper and she didn’t have the authority to do that.

No, the best course of action was to let Beth continue in her role, keeping her on a short leash and scrutinizing her work. And she’d keep funding her family until Jameson was stronger and could handle stress better.

Molly stared at Beth, not bothering to conceal her loathing. “You do realize that this is blackmail, right?”

Beth shrugged. “You shouldn’t have threatened to stop helping your family.”

Molly slapped her hand on her desk, her temper bubbling. “My brothers are older than me and haven’t held down a job, ever. My mother has never held down a job for more than three months. Why should I help them?”

“Because Jameson pays you a ridiculously inflated salary and you can afford it,” Beth replied, looking nonchalant.

“Jameson pays you a good salary, too!” Molly pointed out.

“They are your family and my money is mine.”

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