The Owner of His Heart

CHAPTER FOUR





INSIDE HER cozy apartment in Squirrel Hill, Layla was also cursing herself. Honor was always being touted as such a great quality to have in movies and books, but in real life, it only caused you more trouble than it was worth. For instance, if she hadn’t felt compelled to pay back her father’s debts along with her student loans, she might have a bigger nest egg of her own by now. And if she weren’t so honorable, she definitely wouldn’t be in the position of having to meet with Nathan Sinclair, a man who didn’t even try to hide how much he despised her for reasons she still couldn’t remember.

Moving to Pittsburgh in order to unearth the mystery of her last year here had been a gift to herself for being so good and honorable all these years. For once, she was putting herself first. She had even started saving money toward hiring a private investigator. But then she’d had her run-in with Nathan Sinclair, and her honor hadn’t let her back down and walk away with a simple apology for her father’s deceit. Oh no, her honor demanded she not only pay him back the money her father had taken from his family, but that she also do so as quickly as humanly possible.

She sold her car and started taking the bus everywhere. She’d also picked up extra hours by signing up for the center’s mobile physical therapy service, which involved visiting clients all over the city. The extra hours wouldn’t have been so bad if she still had a car. But as it was, bussing everywhere meant she often didn’t crawl into bed until eleven at night, only to wake up again at five am for her regular shift at the center.

Layla had never been a complainer and wouldn’t have minded the lack of sleep, except for two things: one, by her calculations, she would have to work at this rate for eight more months to pay Nathan Sinclair back, and two, he kept showing up in her dreams.

She only got six hours of sleep a night, but for some reason, an embarrassing number of those hours were taken up with images of the man she disliked most in the world doing things to her, in a large window seat of all places…sexual things, so graphic in nature she’d often wake up from them with a hot face and an aching leftover desire between her legs.

The morning of her check appointment with Nathan Sinclair had been no different. She woke up from a scorching hot dream, dripping wet, and with no time to pull out her vibrator, because it had taken her braying alarm clock fifteen minutes to actually break into her sex dream and wake her up.

“Girl, please take a day off,” Peggy, the grandmotherly receptionist at the St. Mary’s Physical Therapy Center said when Layla dragged into work that morning. “I’m getting tired just looking at you.”

Layla tried to rub some of the sticky sleepiness out her eyes. “I’ll be fine after a cup of coffee. A really large one.”

“You know what’s even better than coffee, I hear.” Peggy leaned in and whispered like it was a state secret, “Sleep.”

Layla gave her a tired smile. “I’m fine, Miss Peggy. But I really appreciate your concern. You’re kind to fuss over me.”

“You know what’s even better than an old black lady fussing over you?” This time Peggy cupped a hand around her mouth to whisper even louder, “A good-looking man fussing under you.”

Layla burst out laughing. “Peggy, you need to stop.”

“No, you need to stop. Literally. Go find yourself a nice man and start spending your weekends with him as opposed to all these busted up people.”

Layla waved her off and continued into the center after a little more small talk. She wished she had the time and energy to date. She could use some non medically-mandated company.

Growing up, she dreamed of meeting a nice guy and starting a family. But first there had been all the physical therapy after the fall that had not only robbed her of her memory, but also broken just about every bone in her body outside of her spinal cord. Then she’d gone back to school and managed to get both her bachelor’s and PT masters in five years, after which she’d worked hard to pay back her student loans in record time. The next thing she knew, she was twenty-eight, and had never had a real boyfriend to speak of—that she remembered. Obviously, she’d become desperate if she was dreaming about Nathan Sinclair every night. He just might have been the most arrogant, horrible man she had ever met—

This last thought stopped her in her tracks. What if the dream wasn’t a fantasy, she wondered, but a memory of something that had actually happened? Her father had once mentioned “her boyfriend in Pittsburgh” who hadn’t wanted her after she fell, who hadn’t even visited her at the hospital. She could see someone like Nathan Sinclair pulling a cruel move like that. And that would also explain why she had been at his family’s mansion when she’d fallen.

So far, finding out anything about her accident had been like pulling teeth. The Pittsburgh hospital had transferred her records to the hospital in New Orleans. And the hospital in New Orleans wanted a large check and either an in-person signature or a notarized document to prove she was who she said she was in order to release them to her. Meanwhile a media search at the central library hadn’t turned up so much as a mention of her fall, even though it happened at such a high profile location.


The more she tried to find answers, the more she realized she was dealing with a very powerful family. They had not only paid her father off, but had also buried the story so deep, if she wanted answers, she’d have to go through Nathan to get them. Nathan who really didn’t like her for reasons still unknown.

On her lunch break, she googled him to see if he had also gone to Carnegie Mellon. But his online biography said he’d gone to Yale for both his bachelor’s and master’s after a few gap years spent in Pittsburgh.

Again, she couldn’t see how their paths would have ever crossed. She pushed back from the computer with the now familiar feeling of frustration. Why did this have to be so hard? It would have made it much easier if Nathan Sinclair had answered her questions as opposed to just glaring at her the entire time she was in his office for some crime she couldn’t remember committing.

Still, her instincts were telling her that she needed to apologize to him. For what? She had no idea. But part of her deep need to pay him back stemmed from a vague guilt that had been clawing at her stomach ever since he said he didn’t like her for reasons other than her father’s blackmail scheme.

Maybe, she thought, she should dial up her usual niceness a notch or two when she saw him next. You can catch more flies with honey, as the old proverb said. But Nathan Sinclair wasn’t like most of the other human beings she had come in contact with since her accident. He didn’t exactly exude sweetness or even seem to appreciate that quality in others. Look at the way he surrounded himself with black and grey furniture and walls of hard tinted glass. Even his assistant was a block of ice. Layla supposed one would have to be to work with Nathan Sinclair day in and day out.

No, being as nice as possible would definitely not work with that man.

“Do you know anything about Nathan Sinclair?” she asked Carol, one of her co-workers, a tough physical therapist who often played bad cop to her good cop with the more difficult patients. Carol had been born and raised in “The Burgh” as the locals called it. And though Layla had only been living in the city for a few months, she had already noticed how small-town it could be. Everybody who had been born there seemed to know a little something about everybody else who had grown up there. So she figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

That afternoon they were on therapy pool duty, calling out exercises to the ten senior citizens recovering from various surgeries with aquatic movement.

“Nathan Sinclair, the rich steel guy?” Carol asked, frowning.

“Yeah, him.”

Carol shrugged. “Not much. He’s rich, hot as hell. But I think he only dates, like, blond super models. People keep wondering when he’ll ever settle down.”

Layla could have guessed he was a playboy who didn’t want to settle down just by looking at him, so she pressed for more information. “Do you know if he ever went to Carnegie Mellon? Maybe he was there for a semester and dropped out?”

Carol’s forehead crinkled, “No, if he’d gone to a Pittsburgh school, we’d all know it. You know how we like to represent. But there’s some other weird factoid about him that I’m trying to remember—” She broke off to yell at a senior citizen leaning against the far wall. “No slacking, Mrs. Peterson! That hip isn’t going to recover by itself.”

After Mrs. Peterson was back in line, doing flutter kicks with the rest of the patients, Layla said, “Good job, Mrs. Peterson. Way to come back!”

That’s when Carol snapped her fingers. “Oh, wait. He didn’t go to Carnegie Mellon. But you know what, his brother Andrew did.”

By the time she got off work, the tired fog that had been dogging Layla all day had disappeared. His brother had gone to Carnegie Mellon, too. Finally, a break in the case, she thought as she made her way into the employee locker room…something she could hang on to and research further. She was so excited about this new information, it took her a moment to notice something off in the locker room.

As she got closer to her own locker, she saw it no longer matched the others. Hers now had words spray-painted down the front of it in red. Words that chilled her to her very bones: “LEAVE, BITCH.”