A Jar of Hearts Read Free Page A

past two years she had seen all that hope erode from her.
    She had never seen or met the man who had changed Anne’s life. All she had learned was that the day he had died, he had killed Anne’s will to live as well. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even Nicholas Bradley, the man who had once dreamed of making Anne his wife.
    She crossed her arms against her chest as she looked out into the roaring waves, remembering exactly when Phillip Mullen had asked her to help Anne.
    “I’ll make it worth your while if you go with her to San Diego,” he had said. “I know you have your daughter to think about and so I will offer you this. I’ll pay all the expenses you will need to put her into a good school. Choose whichever you prefer and let my accountant deal with the expenses.”
    Her heart had jumped. A good school for Ashley? This would mean a private school with the best teachers. No graffiti stained public schools where kids peddled the halls with drugs and weapons in their pockets. No more fear of her child being attacked or kidnapped on her walk home from school. They would be living in a better house and she would be able to afford better clothes for Ashley. She was eight now and growing conscious of the kind of clothes she wore. Moving to San Diego would help her give her daughter all those things she couldn’t afford before.
    The ocean waves crashed against the shoreline, reeling her to the days when she was just a teenager. She had dreams of making a better life for herself and her Mexican immigrant parents. After leaving school, the Mullen job was only supposed to be tentative. She had plans to save her wages and go to college. She wanted to be anything but a maid. She had wanted to wear those fancy formal pencil skirts and matching jackets to a day job. She used to have fantasies of driving through the morning traffic in a beautiful car and to an office in a modern high rise building.
    However, one day turned to another, and soon she had spent fifteen years in the Mullen house. When she had met Troy Donner, she had thought things would turn around for her. But Troy ran the moment he discovered she was pregnant. He moved on to another girl and didn’t want anything to do with her child.
    Now, at thirty four, she was a single mother, trying to bear it all on her own. But Ashley had been worth all her pain. So what if she could never love again. So what if she still was the poor, life-battering Julia Medina. She had her daughter, and she was determined to make certain that Ashley would never endure the same struggles as she had done.
     
     
     

     
     
     
    He stared at himself in the mirror. James Connelly. He repeated the name quietly. He was still the same man with the same feelings, but with a different identity. How could anyone erase a past just like that?
    He lathered his cheeks with shaving foam and then glided a shaver down his jaw. His past was gone. There was no Irvines, no Bobby and no history of all those hits he had made as an assassin under the name of Ricky Prescott. The murders were gone, and in its place, he now had a fresh new hit list as James Connelly.
    His shaver nipped a bit of his skin and he winced. He dabbed at the small wound with his finger, trying to wash away the blood oozing out of it. But it wasn’t the cut that hurt. It was the wound in his heart he was trying to block away in his memory that pained him more.
    Anne…
    He washed off the foam from his face and then dabbed it dry with a towel. She had been wrong for him from the start. He saw the rationality now. If she had known about his past, she would never have fallen in love with him. She was better suited to someone like Nicholas Bradley. He would take care of her and give her the life he would never be able to provide to her.
    The last time he had stood outside her house, he had seen Nicholas strolling up her pathway and to her door like he belonged there. Perhaps Mark Dane was right. This was his chance