Saint & Sinner: A Second Chance Romance Read online

  Saint & Sinner

  Georgia Le Carre

  Saint & Sinner

  Copyright © 2020 by Georgia Le Carre

  The right of Georgia Le Carre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding.

  ISBN: 978-1-910575-98-7

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Quote

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue 1

  Epilogue 2

  Coming Next…

  Sample Chapter 1

  Sample chapter 2

  About the Author

  Also by Georgia Le Carre

  Acknowledgments

  Many, many thanks to:

  Caryl Milton

  Elizabeth Burns

  Nichola Rhead

  Kirstine Moran

  Tracy Gray

  Prologue

  Willow

  (10 years previously)

  “People will understand one day, but not yet. Not yet.”

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjwVrEMjyxY

  -Honor Him-

  The fire filled the windows of the house. It was yellow, orange, and bright red and it was spreading quickly, eating through the house, like a fiery, revengeful monster. Soon the whole house would be up in flames. It was terrible and awesomely beautiful at the same time. Like a saint who turned into a sinner right before your eyes.

  I wished I could stay and stare at the beautiful destruction, but I couldn’t. I had to run and pretend to call for help. Pretend I was asleep in my room. Pretend I didn’t hear anything.

  “Willow,” Caleb called over the crackling, angry noises coming from the suffering house.

  I turned my head and looked into his mesmerizing eyes. Caleb had the most amazing eyes you ever saw. Piercing blue, with long, thick eyelashes that should have belonged to a girl. Staring into their beauty you could never imagine how much he had endured. I let myself drown in those magnificent blue starbursts for a few precious seconds.

  I wished I could stay a bit longer. I wished we were somewhere else. I wished we had been born elsewhere, in different circumstances. But more than anything else in the world I wished I was not seeing the reflection of fire in his eyes.

  “So, it’s done,” I whispered. I could feel the shock and wonder in my eyes. We did it. We actually did it.

  He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “What do we do now?”

  He reached out and took my hand in his. His flesh felt hot and damp. “We stick to the plan.”

  “Are you afraid?” I whispered.

  He shook his head calmly. “No. Are you?”

  “I’m afraid for you,” I confessed.

  “Don’t be. I will be fine. Even if they come for me they can’t do anything other than send me to a juvenile detention center. I’m tough, I can survive that no problem. Just stick to the plan. They will try to trick you. They will try to say I have confessed, but it will all be lies. I will never admit to anything and neither should you, and no matter what they say or threaten to do. Loyalty forever, Willow. This is our secret. Never trust anyone enough to tell them no matter how close you get to them.”

  “I will take this secret to my grave,” I promised solemnly.

  His chin jutted out with determination. “So will I.”

  “If they don’t catch you, can I contact you then?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “It could be a trick. There should never be a connection between us. After your eighteenth birthday if I’m not caught then we will meet at the bridge, but if I’m behind bars, then you can start to write to me wherever they’re holding me.”

  I nodded. All the adrenaline rushing through my blood was making me feel jittery and almost high. As if I’d had a hit of Caleb’s pot. My fingers tingled. “Caleb, you won’t forget me, will you?”

  His eyes flashed. “What kind of stupid question is that? Forget you? I would die for you, Willow. Are you planning to forget me?”

  I shook my head vigorously. “Never. I love you, Caleb. More than I love myself.”

  His face softened. “Then let’s swear it in blood.”

  “Alright,” I agreed.

  He took the knife, red with the other’s blood out of his belt, and wiped it on the grass first, then against his pants. When it was clean he used the sharp point to slice his finger open. Blood seeped out quickly. I held out my hand and he moved the knife towards my flesh, but as the knife touched my skin, he froze.

  I raised my head to look at him. “What is it?”

  The light from the fire licked the side of his face. “I can’t. I can’t cut you, Willow.”

  “Why not?” I whispered.

  “I can’t hurt you.”

  I took the knife from his hand and pricked my finger. Then we touched our bleeding fingers together. “I love you, forever,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “I love you, forever,” I echoed.

  Then he leaned forward and kissed me. It was a hard, desperate kiss. The wind blew against us. And I smelled the smoke and fire in the wind. Then he tore his mouth away, looked at me one last time with desperate eyes, as if he was memorizing me in his mind, and loped away towards the woods. I stood there alone with the burning house and the night stars watching me.

  Tears started to well up my eyes. I had lost so much and now I was being asked to lose him as well. My heart felt as if it was breaking. “I will never forget you, Caleb. Never,” I promised. I hoped the wind would carry my promise to his ears.

  Then I started to run.

  I ran as fast as I could, until my foot caught on something, maybe a root, and I fell backwards. My head hit something so hard, maybe a stone, it made a cracking sound.

  Pain exploded through my skull, then blackness enveloped me as if it was a soft, thick blanket.

  There was no pain.

  There was nothing. Not even Caleb.

  1


  Caleb

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fy7opKu46c

  “You might as well admit it. I know you did it,” the Sheriff of Redburn, said in an almost kind tone.

  We were in the interrogation room that was not much bigger than a broom closet. They had taken away my shoes and clothes as evidence ten hours ago, and I was barefoot and wearing some badly fitting clothes they had given me. I stared at the scarred surface of the wooden table and said nothing. I planned to say nothing at all.

  “You’ve been a trouble-maker all your life, and I’ve always turned the other way, because of your background and because I thought you were a good kid underneath it all, but now you’ve gone and killed a man in cold-blood, and not just any man, a man of God.”

  Calling that monster a man of God was an abomination, but I didn’t raise my head. I didn’t speak. I didn’t even ask for a lawyer. I was sticking to the script. I wouldn’t react. No matter what they said.

  “Why, Caleb? What has he ever done to you? Why did you stab Father Jackson to death and burn down his house?”

  Under the table my fists clenched and slowly unclenched. No reaction. No matter the provocation. They would not trick me.

  Sheriff Winters suddenly slammed his palms on the table. So hard I felt the vibrations run through me. “You killed him because you wanted his niece, didn’t you?”

  I looked up slowly and met his gaze scornfully. Was that the best he could do?

  Instantly, his eyes flashed with triumph and I realized my mistake. I had reacted. Furious with myself, I looked away.

  Like a terrier with a bone he changed his questioning tack. “She’s a pretty girl, that Willow,” he said slyly.

  I said nothing. He would not trick me into responding again.

  “I get why any boy would want her. If I was thirty years younger I would too. But if I was your age and I wanted a fine girl like that, I’d save up to buy her one of them big boxes of chocolates wrapped up with pink bows, turn up on her doorstep, and invite her to Berry Bear for an ice-cream sundae.”

  He stopped suddenly and stared hard at me. I stared back expressionlessly. As if I would ever have taken Willow to Berry Bear. Willow hated crowds.

  He continued. “I certainly wouldn’t have killed her only living relative, the man who was good enough to take her in when she lost her parents in a horrendous car crash, then burn his home and the house she lived in down to the ground. Do you know what’s going to happen to her now, Caleb? They are going to come and take her away. She will have to go and live with total strangers, who might not be very nice to her. Well, that is, after she leaves the hospital.”

  I didn’t even try not to react. “Hospital?” I barked, a cold claw gripping my insides.

  His eyes glittered with the first taste of victory. He knew he got me. “Yes, hospital. While she was running away from the fire you started, she fell and hit her head so badly, she was out cold for hours. My officers tried to question her when she came around, but she drew a blank about the fire … and everything that has happened to her. As a matter of fact, she remembers nothing of the last two years.”

  He paused to let that sink in.

  “Apparently, her last memory is from a couple of days before her parents died. She started crying and asking for her parents. She became hysterical when she was told they died two years ago.”

  Even though I stared at him in disbelief, I could tell, this was no trick. He was telling the truth. Part of me was glad she wouldn’t have to tell a pack of lies to protect me, the other part of me felt horror that she would have to go through all the pain of losing her parents all over again. Only I knew how much she suffered when she first came to this town. She was so inconsolable she was mute. For a long time, nearly a year, we never exchanged a word. Just sat together in silence on the bridge, and watched the water rushing below us.

  Until one day, she turned her pain-filled, big brown eyes in my direction and whispered, “I was in the car. I saw them dying. Papa went first. He tried to speak, but blood came out of his mouth. I was screaming. Mama held my hand and said, ‘don’t cry. I’ll be watching over you. Nothing bad will happen to you’. She lied.” That was the first day she cried. Horrible, racking sobs, that made her whole body shake. The water rushed underneath us as I had held her and told her, her mama had sent me to protect her.

  The Sheriff made a sound, it shook me out of my recollections and brought me back to the bare interrogation room. Suddenly, another thought even more horrifying than that old memory hit me. If she only remembered up to two days before her parents died, then what had happened to her memories of me? Of us? Had her mind erased me too? It seemed too incredible to believe.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “In the hospital, sedated. They will keep her under observation for a few days more.” He shrugged. “Thanks to you she has nowhere to go, anyway.”

  I blinked. We had a plan. It was a good plan, but we didn’t foresee this part.

  “Why don’t you just confess. The law will be much kinder to you if you do.”

  I squared my shoulders. I had to stick to the plan.

  “Look, Einstein, you even left your footprints around the house. And there is a trace of blood on your pants. We’ll DNA the hell out of that and I’ll bet that the results we get back are a positive match so you might as well co-operate now, and the judge will go easier on you.”

  My whole world had just fallen apart, but I looked at him expressionlessly. In my head a little voice was saying again, and again.

  “He doesn’t know. No one will ever know, but you did good, Caleb. You did good.”

  That same voice spoke to me as my mother, who was already drunk at ten in the morning, came to see me.

  “How could you? How could you?” she cried furiously. “Everybody in town is going to hate us now.”

  I let her carry on in that vein. All her ranting and raving mattered not one bit to me. All I wanted was more information about Willow. As if to punish me, Sheriff Winters refused to speak about her anymore.

  “How is Willow?” I asked, when it appeared she had blown off some of that steam.

  She jerked her head violently with surprise that I had spoken. Then her eyes filled with rage again. “She’s in hospital. Why are you asking?”

  I shrugged. “Would you be able to go and see her?”

  Her eyes bulged so hard they almost fell out of her face. “Me? Go and see her in hospital? Are you mad? Have you heard a word I’ve said? We are pariahs in this town now. I can’t go anywhere without people spitting and snarling in my face.”

  “They did that before this,” I reminded dryly.

  She got so mad, her whole face became an ugly red. She forgot the camera in the ceiling, and swung her hand out. Her blows were always easy to avoid, unlike my stepfather’s, and I could have ducked, if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t. I let her hit me. That would be good evidence in court.

  I shouldn’t have bothered.

  Despite my age, and in spite of the five people who testified about the horrible abuse I’d endured at my stepfather’s hands from the time I was a kid, the jury threw the book at me. The people of Redburn were God-fearing folk, and I had done something unforgivable. I’d killed a representative of God. If they didn’t punish me suitably they would burn in hell.

  So, in good conscience, they handed me the maximum they could give to a minor. Twenty fucking years.

  “You’ll be out sooner with good behavior,” my court appointed lawyer mumbled carelessly, before he hurried off to lunch.

  Not that I cared. That voice in my head had just grown stronger.

  “You did good, Caleb. You did good.”

  2

  Caleb

  Twelve years later

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GYt6mzQ3Xo

  I pulled her watch out of the box and nostalgia hit me like a physical punch in the gut.

  The years had done nothing to dull or sully the girlish, bright pink acc
essory. Across the strap was printed, ‘the power puff girls’ and on the face were the three superhero characters.

  My hand closed around it, as heavy waves of emotions washed over me. Longing burned in the pit of my stomach, and fear filled my chest.

  “Is it all there?” the correctional officer asked.

  I tucked the dead watch into my pocket, but didn’t even bother to look into the other bag. It held the possessions I’d brought with me into the prison twelve years earlier. A pair of jeans and a faded grey t-shirt, the edge of its collar stained with ink.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “Sign here, Wolfe,” he said, pushing a clipboard with a form attached to it towards me.

  I did as I was told, but in my heart, I swore it would be the last time anyone told me what to do. I was never coming back here or being at the mercy of such brutes again.