Read Online This Heart of Mine by Brenda Novak - Free Book Online

since we’re splitting it,” he said, and watched the salesgirl ring it up.

4
    A noise startled Phoenix. Earlier she’d awakened with a crick in her neck after nodding off at her desk and had stumbled to her bed, where she’d been sleeping ever since. She’d gotten very little rest the past few days; she’d been too busy, too anxious, too worried. Apparently, her exhaustion had overcome all of that. But she was still uneasy enough not to allow herself to sink
too
deeply into unconsciousness. At the back of her mind were those letters from Lori Mansfield’s family and the threats they contained. This was
their
town, they’d said.
Lori’s
town. Phoenix had no idea if Buddy, the brother who’d sent the worst of the letters, would actually “make her sorry,” as he claimed. But this sound...it wasn’t just the dogs, although she could hear them barking from her mother’s trailer.
    She blinked into the darkness as the wooden steps leading to her door creaked again. Was someone looking for a way in? The fact that finding one wouldn’t be hard made her supremely aware of her own vulnerability. She’d opened her windows because it had been so warm in the afternoon and she didn’t have a working air conditioner. Then she’d been too out of it to remember to close them when she went to bed. Buddy could easily cut the screen on the large living room window beside the steps and hoist himself through...
    Her heart in her throat, Phoenix scrambled out of bed and rummaged around until she found the bat she’d brought in from the yard her first night back. It was all she had to defend herself with, but she was determined that she would not let Buddy stop her from being part of Jacob’s life. She’d suffered enough for what had happened to Lori Mansfield. Since she hadn’t done anything wrong, besides make a couple of stupid crank calls to Lori before the accident¸ she’d basically been punished for falling in love with Riley Stinson. Her crush on him was what had given her the supposed “motive.”
    “Who is it?” She hated the tremor in her voice. She needed to sound strong in order to convince Buddy—it had to be him—not to try anything. But he didn’t seem to be breaking in. She heard a thud, as though he’d dropped something on her porch. Then there was another thud and the
tap, tap, tap
of receding footsteps.
    Holy shit! It sounded as if there were
two
people on her porch! What had they left behind? And what would it do to her?
    Wielding the bat with single-minded purpose, she charged down the hall and through the front door, screaming like a banshee. “I’m not going anywhere, you sons of bitches!” she yelled.
    Her mother had had a floodlight installed to discourage teenagers from coming out and throwing beer bottles at her trailer, so Phoenix could see the back of a tall figure dressed in black and wearing a hoodie. She thought he called out, “Shit! Let’s go!” But she couldn’t see anyone with him, and there was no way she could catch him. He ran off the property and sprinted down the road, too far ahead for her to even give chase.
    “Phoenix?”
    The dogs—and possibly her shouting—had awakened her mother.
    “It’s nothing,” she told Lizzie, and squinted into the darkness, trying to make sure that was true. There wasn’t anyone else on the property, was there?
    No one she could see. If there’d been two people, they’d both run off—but they’d left two medium-size boxes outside her door.
    She wondered what mean thing her fellow Whiskey Creek residents had gotten up to as her mother reprimanded the dogs. “Settle down!”
    Using her bat to poke the boxes so she wouldn’t have to get too close, Phoenix pushed them onto the ground. She was convinced they contained a bomb or a snake or something that was just unpleasant, like dog crap—so convinced she almost didn’t want to open them. She knew she wasn’t welcome here, didn’t need any more warnings. But one of the boxes