Levi Tucker
Oregon State Penitentiary
2605 State St., Salem, OR 97310
Dear Ms. Grayson,
Due to certain circumstances, my prison sentence is coming to its end sooner than originally scheduled. I’ve been following your career and I’d like to hire you to design the house I intend to have built.
Sincerely,
Levi Tucker
* * *
Dear Mr. Tucker,
How nice that you’re soon to be released from prison. I imagine that’s a great relief. As you can imagine, my work is in very high demand and I doubt I’ll be able to take on a project with such short notice.
Regretfully,
Faith Grayson
* * *
Dear Ms. Grayson,
Whatever your usual fee is, I can double it.
Sincerely,
Levi Tucker
* * *
Dear Mr. Tucker,
To be perfectly frank, I looked you up on Google. My brothers would take a dim view of me agreeing to take this job.
Respectfully,
Faith Grayson
* * *
Dear Ms. Grayson,
Search again. You’ll find I am in the process of being exonerated. Also, what your brothers don’t know won’t hurt anything. I’ll triple your fee.
Sincerely,
Levi Tucker
* * *
Dear Mr. Tucker,
If you need to contact me, be sure to use my personal number, listed at the bottom of this page.
I trust we’ll be in contact upon your release.
Faith
Levi Tucker wasn’t a murderer.
It was a fact that was now officially recognized by the law.
He didn’t know what he had expected upon his release from prison. Relief, maybe. He imagined that was what most men might feel. Instead, the moment the doors to the penitentiary had closed behind him, Levi had felt something else.
A terrible, pure anger that burned through his veins with a kind of white-hot clarity that would have stunned him if it hadn’t felt so inevitable.
The fact of the matter was, Levi Tucker had always known he wasn’t a murderer.
And all the state of Oregon had ever had was a hint of suspicion. Hell, they hadn’t even had a body.
Mostly because Alicia wasn’t dead.
In many ways, that added insult to injury, because he still had to divorce the woman who had set out to make it look as though he had killed her. They were still married. Of course, the moment he’d been able to, he’d filed, and he knew everything was in the process of being sorted out.
He doubted she would contest.
But then, how could he really know?
He had thought he’d known the woman. Hell, he’d married her. And while he’d been well aware that everything hadn’t been perfect, he had not expected his wife to disappear one hot summer night, leaving behind implications of foul play.
Even if the result hadn’t been intentional, she could have resurfaced at any point after she’d disappeared.
When he was being questioned. When he had been arrested.
She hadn’t.
Leaving him to assume that his arrest, disgrace and abject humiliation had been her goal.
It made him wonder now if their relationship had been a long-tail game all the time.
The girl who’d loved him in spite of his family’s reputation in Copper Ridge. The one who’d vowed to stick with him through everything. No matter whether he made his fortune or not. He had, and he’d vowed to Alicia he’d build her a house on top of a hill in Copper Ridge so they could look down on all the people who’d once looked down on them.
But until then he’d enjoyed his time at work, away from the town he’d grown up in. Alicia had gotten more involved in the glamorous side of their new lifestyle, while Levi just wanted things to be simple. His own ranch. His own horses.
Alicia had wanted more.
And apparently, in the end, she had figured she could have it all without him.
Fortunately, it was the money that had ultimately been her undoing. For years prior to her leaving she’d been siphoning it into her own account without him realizing it, but when her funds had run dry she’d gone after the money still in his accounts. And that was when she’d gotten caught.
She’d been living off of his hard-earned money for years.
Five years.
Five hellish years he’d spent locked up as the murderer of a woman. Of his wife.
Not a great situation, all in all.
But he’d survived it. Like he’d survived every damn thing that had come before it.
Money was supposed to protect you.
In the end, he supposed it had, in many ways.
Hell, he might not have been able to walk out of that jail cell and collect his Stetson on his way back to his life if it wasn’t for the fact that he had a good team of lawyers who had gotten his case retried as quickly as possible. Something you would’ve thought would be pretty easy considering his wife had been found alive.
The boy he’d been...
He had no confidence that boy would have been able to get justice.
But the man he was...
The man he was now stood on a vacant plot of land that he owned, near enough to the house he was renting, and waited for the architect to arrive. The one who would design the house he deserved after spending five years behind bars.
There would be no bars in this house. The house that Alicia had wanted so badly. To show everyone in their hometown that he and Alicia were more, were better, than what they’d been born into.
Only, she wasn’t.
Without him, she was nothing. And he would prove that to her.
No, his house would have no bars. Nothing but windows.
Windows with a view of the mountains that overlooked Copper Ridge, Oregon, the town where he had grown up. He’d been bad news back then; his whole family had been.
The kind of guy that fathers warned their daughters about.
A bad seed dropped from a rotten tree.
And he had a feeling that public opinion would not have changed in the years since.
His