Blame It On Your Heart (Big Timber)

  Blame It On Your Heart

  Jami Alden

  Copyright © 2013 Jami Alden

  Jami@jamialden.com

  http://www.jamialden.com

  http://www.facebook.com/JamiAldenBooks

  http://www.twitter.com/jamialden

  There was a time when Ellie Tanner wanted nothing more than a simple life in Big Timber with the love of her life, Damon Decker. But after Damon broke her heart and crushed her dreams, Elle couldn't get out of town fast enough. Twelve years later, Ellie is back, and life is nothing like she'd once imagined At age 30, she is widowed, broke, and a single parent to a 5 year old son. Humiliated after discovering that her "Wizard of Wall Street" husband had swindled his clients out of billions of dollars, Ellie is forced to move back in with her mother until she can get her life back on track. When she'd forced to work closely with Damon, Ellie tries to ignore the powerful attraction still simmering between them. But it doesn't take long before she finds herself once again under Damon's spell. .

  There was a time when Damon believed Ellie wanted the same things he did - to get married and raise a family in Big Timber. But her move to New York and marriage to a Wall Street high flyer proved that the life Ellie really wanted was nothing Damon could ever give her. As far as he's concerned, Ellie Tanner did him a favor when she dumped him cold all those years ago. Then Ellie shows up back in town, looking more beautiful than ever, sending Damon's blood - and his heart - racing. But he learned the hard way not to count on a future with Ellie. While he may not be able to keep his hands off her, this time he knows better than to let himself fall for her all over again. Until he's forced to admit that when it comes to it comes to loving Ellie, he doesn't have a choice.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  `

  Chapter 1

  "Are we there yet?"

  Ellie felt her shoulders hunch and her muscles tense at the softly whined question coming from the back seat of her 2002 Honda Accord.

  "We only have a couple more hours," she replied, trying to keep the sharpness out of her tone. She could hardly blame Anthony for getting antsy. Like most five year olds, he was the kind of kid who got out of bed running and didn't stop until he fell into bed that night.

  After two days in a row spending ten hours in the car, she was ready to climb the walls herself.

  "A couple! That's like two! That's too long! I want to be done driving now!"

  The last was punctuated with a rough kick to the back of her seat.

  "Anthony Christopher Tanner I have told you several times not to kick the back of my seat," she said through clenched teeth. "I know you're tired of being in the car. I'm tired of being in the car too. But complaining about it isn't going to make the time go any faster. Why don't you take a nap? By the time you wake up, we'll be there."

  "I wanna watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua again."

  "You've already watched it three times today." And four times yesterday, she thought, wincing at the thought of having to suffer through the audio track for the umpteenth time in the last three days. It wouldn't be an issue if Anthony would wear the headphones that connected wirelessly to the portable DVD player. But after a round of severe ear infections two winters ago that required Anthony to have drainage tubes surgically implanted in his eardrums, he now hated having anything over or in his ears.

  Which meant that the tinny soundtrack to whatever DVD he chose would assault her ears from the back seat. She was afraid any more exposure to Drew Barrymore's saccharine rendition voice over work was going to send her into an epileptic seizure. "Why don't you look out the window?"

  "It's boring," he huffed.

  Ellie glanced back in the rearview mirror. Through her irritation a little smile tugged at her lips as she took him in. Arms folded, mouth pulled in a tight pout, his little brow furrowed, he looked so adorably fierce it made her heart squeeze in her chest.

  "You're right, it is boring," she sighed. It was true. Though their ultimate destination was surrounded by mountains so stunning several Hollywood films had been shot in the vicinity, this stretch of Interstate 90 that took them through the plains of eastern Montana was as boring in its own way as the flat farm lands and endless cornfields of northern Indiana.

  Bracing herself, she hit play on the DVD controls one more time.

  She winced at the first bars of the opening credits and tried to console herself with the fact that if nothing else, Anthony would be quiet for the last hundred miles or so. And that as soon as she pulled into her mother's driveway, she was going to take the damn movie out of the DVD player and stomp it into a thousand or so pieces.

  "Are we there yet?" Anthony said again nearly two hours later as the movie came blissfully to an end.

  "Very close. This is our exit right here." She guided the station wagon off the highway and felt her stomach tighten as the familiar terrain and landmarks came into view.

  Big Timber, Montana, her home from the time she was eleven years old until she was eighteen was light years away from where she'd spent the last twelve years. She'd visited several times over the years, and she'd always appreciated how different it was from her life in Manhattan. Here the only thing likely to get in the way of your view was a mountain. And unlike the city which hummed with noise no matter how well you insulated your walls, the quiet here was like nothing she'd ever experienced.

  She'd missed that quiet in the city. It was one of the things she'd most looked forward to whenever she came home to visit her mother and sister.

  Maybe if it was quiet, she'd finally be able to sleep again.

  And while she'd always anticipated her visits, especially after Anthony was born, now as she drove toward McLeod Street, the main artery that comprised Big Timber's downtown business district, her breath caught in her chest, her stomach twisted with anxiety.

  Because this time, she and Anthony weren't just coming for their annual two week summer visit.

  This time they were staying in Big Timber for good.

  "There's the park!" Anthony piped from the back seat. "Do you think the pool's open? Can we go?"

  "I'm sure it's open. It's the middle of July." And eighty-seven degrees, she noted from the display on her dashboard. "Let's get settled in and go see Nana at the restaurant and then maybe we can squeeze in a swim before dinner."

  "Yay! First I'm going in the shallow pool. Then I want to go down the big red slide. Then I'm going in the fountain..."

  Ellie felt some of her tension ease at Anthony's exuberance. While for the first four years of his life Anthony had taken swimming lessons and had access to the pool at one of the most expensive sports clubs in New York, to him, nothing could beat the Big Timber community center pool with its slides and fountains and dozens of other things that never would have made it past the uptight parents Ellie used to associate with.

  Building off his enthusiasm, she started listing off all the fun things they would get to do now that they were living in small town rural Montana. "See that hill?" she said, pointing to the slope across the field from the pool complex. "In the winter that's one of the best sledding hills in town. One time I made it from the top halfway across the baseball diamond."

  She turned down another street, away from the par.

  "And
there's the school!" Anthony crowed as they drove past. "Is that where I'll go to kinnergarten?"

  "Maybe," she replied. But if she was lucky they'd be long gone by the time school started at the end of August.

  "Maybe I'll have the same kinnergarten teacher as you, Mommy."

  "I didn't go to kindergarten here, remember? I didn't move here until I was eleven."

  "And Aunt Molly was nine."

  "That's right."

  For several minutes, there was only silence in the back seat. Then, in a small, soft voice, he asked, "Do you think the kids will like me at this school, Mommy?"

  Ellie's hands tightened on the steering wheel. "Of course they will."

  "Because at my old school, all the kids stopped liking me."

  She blinked against the sting of tears. "That's not true. Nobody stopped liking you."

  "Yes it is. Grayson told me. He said nobody liked us anymore because Daddy took their money."

  She felt like a red hot poker was stabbing her in the heart, as once again she mentally railed at Troy and the nightmare he'd thrown them into. From the day the FBI knocked on her door nearly a year ago, stunning her with the news that her husband, a very successful investment manager, had essentially been running a Ponzi scheme with his clients’ money, she'd desperately tried to shield Anthony from the scandal that ensued.

  But between the massive press storm and the well-deserved ire of his clients—many of whom had been close personal friends—it had been impossible for Anthony to remain ignorant.

  "Daddy did a really bad thing that made a lot of people angry. But that doesn't mean you're a bad person."

  "Grayson says we're a-a-moral money grubbers."

  Ellie felt a headache take root at the base of her skull as she imagined Grayson's mother, Bibi Montgomery, uttering those words to Grayson across the table in their Upper West Side penthouse. She'd said a lot worse about both Troy and Ellie to anyone who would listen. Not that Ellie could blame her, since Troy had lost an estimated quarter of a billion dollars of the Montgomerys’ fortune. "Grayson's five, and he doesn't know everything," she said tiredly.

  "I still miss him," he said in a small voice that stabbed at her heart.

  "I know you do. It's hard to lose a friend." While she wasn't terribly fond of Grayson's mother, he and Anthony had been attached at the hip from the day they met at the prestigious Westside Montessori two years ago. It killed her that her little boy had to lose his best friend because his dad was a criminal.

  But it hammered home her reasons for coming back to Big Timber. After over a decade in Manhattan, first as a student scraping together rent, then as the wife of a wealthy financier whose social calendar was always overflowing, she, like Anthony, found herself friendless.

  Not to mention penniless, since all of their joint assets had been seized by the government and were being slowly parsed out to repay the billion or so dollars Troy had mismanaged. And while as a girl she'd imagined what it would be like to be famous, to see her face on the cover of magazines, in her dreams it had been because she was a famous actress (not that she'd ever set foot on a stage) or a model (no matter that at five three she was inches too short).

  Not because the press had implied that she knew all along what her husband was up to but didn't care, as long as it kept up their lavish lifestyle.

  If her husband had been in front of her, she would have strangled him.

  Too bad he was already dead, forever denying her the opportunity.

  She parked in the driveway of the two story Victorian that had been her home from the ages of eleven to eighteen. She got out and opened Anthony's door on her way to the trunk. While Anthony unbuckled his seat belt and leaped out of his booster with a whoop of excitement and bounded up the front steps, Ellie popped the back hatch of the station wagon.

  Inside were three over-stuffed duffel bags and two cardboard boxes. After seven years of marriage to Troy, seven years spent decorating their five thousand square foot penthouse, accumulating enough clothes and to fill a walk in closet twice the size of her childhood bedroom, buying so many toys for Anthony they could have stocked an FAO Schwartz and not felt the sting, this was all they had left.

  She hefted a duffel bag over her shoulder and told herself not to be bitter. It didn't serve any purpose.

  And she wasn't. Not about the stuff anyway. Though she really wished she could have kept just that one pair of Christian Louboutin platform pumps, instead of having to sell them with the rest on eBay.

  But three hundred dollars was three hundred dollars. Two years ago that would have been a typical dinner out. Now it determined whether or not she'd be able to get both gas and groceries for the week.

  Of course, she's not worried about anything like that. She's probably still premium gas and organic milk at twice the cost. Ellie tried to shove the thoughts away, reminding herself again how wallowing in bitterness served no purpose.

  Yet even with her mother's wise words echoing in her head, Ellie couldn't banish the images of her from her mind.

  Her husband's mistress. The mother of his other child, a three-year-old girl. He'd had another child, another family, and Ellie hadn't had a clue until Troy was killed in a car accident last March on his way back from the Hamptons.

  She probably would have remained ignorant forever if Troy hadn't delivered the one two punch of not only maintaining an entirely separate family, but also making Vera the sole beneficiary of his five million dollar life insurance policy. Combined with the house he'd bought—in her name—in Palm Beach, Vera and her daughter were worth a respectable ten or so million dollars.

  And while Vera and her daughter were set for life thanks to Troy, Ellie was unloading all of their worldly goods from the back of a used station wagon and hauling them up the stairs to a bedroom that had a twin bed and a poster from the 2000 version of Charlie's Angels on the wall.

  Not exactly how she'd imagined her life at twenty-nine, she thought as she deposited the duffel on the front stoop and bent to retrieve the spare key from the potted plant that sat to the left of the front door. Penniless, jobless, homeless, and moving back in with mom.

  She might as well get a big L tattooed on her forehead.

  It's not forever. Just until things settle down and you get back on your feet.

  Sarah's words echoed in her head and Ellie clung to them, though the truth was she didn't really believe them.

  Her heart clutched a little at the thought of her friend. She'd met Sarah her first day of class at Cooper Union, and they'd been best friends ever since. And there wasn't a day since that Ellie didn't thank God for that. Sarah, born and bred on New York's Upper West Side had taken one look at the wide-eyed bumpkin from the boondocks of Montana and had taken Ellie under her wing.

  In the years since, her friendship had been unwavering, even in the face of the scandal. Through it all, Sarah had been the one person who didn't turn her back on Ellie.

  It probably helped that Sarah's husband Leo, the CEO of a successful chain of boutique luxury hotels, was wise enough to refuse Troy's multiple offers to manage his investment portfolio.

  "I don't like to mix friends and money," Leo demurred in his soft Belgian accent.

  If only their other friends had been so wise, Ellie mused. Maybe she would have retained more allies.

  But probably not. Aside from Sarah, Ellie hadn't formed any close friendships. After she met and married Troy, her social circle had narrowed to include Troy's friends, colleagues, and clients. Their wives tended to be reserved, even calculating. In the six years she and Troy were married, Ellie never got over the feeling that these women were constantly evaluating her, trying to decipher if she was of any value to them, social or otherwise.

  Even if Troy's malfeasance hadn't cost them millions, they weren't likely to stick by her with the stench of scandal clinging to her.

  Your own fault, she scolded herself as she pushed open the front door. You let Troy take over your life and you didn't even fight it.
Hell, probably the only reason you even stayed in touch with Sarah was because she married someone he knew.

  And it wasn't even like he was trying to control her, or isolate her from her friends. At that time in her life, it was so easy to get swept up in his charisma, his big, almost over the top personality. And, okay, the money. Having him court her, take her on extravagant trips and lavish gifts on her made it easier to forget the life she so desperately needed to leave behind. It muted the memories of the only other person who had ever made her feel so adored.

  "I'm going outside," Anthony hollered from the other end of the house, thankfully jarring her from her thoughts before she could go down that rat hole.

  Don't even go there, she cautioned herself.

  "Okay. But make sure you stay in the back yard, away from the street." Though she always had somewhat mixed feelings about coming home, she loved that Anthony could go outside on his own and she didn't have to worry about him getting snatched by a pedophile or run over by a crazy cabbie. Here she could watch him out the window as he roamed around her mother's back yard - average size for any suburban lawn. But compared to their patch of turf on their rooftop deck in New York, it seemed immense.

  As she opened the door to her childhood bedroom, breathing in the faint vanilla scent that hung in the air even though she had long since stopped wearing the scent, she felt the familiar push-pull sensation she got whenever she came home.

  So much she loved about this place, this house, this town.

  Yet she'd fled it like the hounds of hell were on her heels. And nothing but the most dire of circumstances could have compelled her to come back for the foreseeable future.

  Suck it up. After everything you've gone through, facing the curious citizens of Big Timber is the least of your worries.

  Oh, please, it's only one citizen in particular who's got your panties in a twist.

  Bad analogy, as her brain immediately zeroed in on long ago memory. Ellie, stretched in the back seat of her old Jeep Cherokee, her denim skirt pushed up around her waist, her legs bent and parted to give access to the big, masculine hand reaching up to grasp the scrap of satin and lace. That hand had her panties in a twist more times than she could count.