Heart to Heart. Kayla Perrin

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      Chapter 1

      The woman’s scream pierced the air. The room was dark, and she was struggling with the man, trying to escape his strong grasp. But the more she jerked and fought to free herself, the rougher he was with her.

      She screamed again, a blood-curdling cry. And then the man slapped her. Slapped her so violently that she fell to the ground.

      “Nooo!”

      Deanna Hart awoke, bolting upright in the bed. Her chest was heaving, and her pulse was racing. And the sheets were damp with her sweat.

      It took no more than a couple of seconds for her to realize that she’d been dreaming. That the last scream came not from the woman in her dreams but from her own lips.

      Deanna drew in a deep breath, the image still fresh in her head. She’d had this dream before. And it was always the same. The man roughing up the woman. The woman being slapped and falling to the ground.

      Every time, that’s when Deanna woke up. As the woman fell to the floor in the dark room.

      Her heart still beating rapidly, Deanna hugged her knees to her chest. She’d been having this dream ever since Brian James had hit her when she tried to end their relationship six months ago.

      Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was just after three in the morning. The house was quiet and still. But she could hear the pounding of her heart in her ears.

      Deanna was at her uncle Dave’s house in Cleveland. She was out of harm’s way. And yet, whenever she had this dream, she felt distinctly unsafe.

      There are thousands of miles between you and Brian, she told herself as she lay back down and snuggled up against her pillows on the opposite side of the bed, where the sheets were still dry. Besides, since that night, you haven’t heard from him. There’s no reason to fear him anymore.

      Her mental pep talk helped ease her mind. He had hit her only once, but it was a truly ugly exchange that Deanna never wanted to experience again in her life.

      We’re better off as friends, Brian. I realize that now.

      You’re breaking up with me?

      We shouldn’t have mixed business with pleasure. Things have become complicated. Let’s finish my album first—

      That was when Brian had violently grabbed and shaken her, and Deanna had been seized with fear. But she wasn’t about letting a man terrorize her, so she had wriggled and pushed against him, struggling to get free of his grip.

      “You think you’re going to walk away from me?” Brian had screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. And as Deanna had continued to tussle with him, he had smacked her. Smacked her so hard that he’d busted her lip and drawn blood.

      Seeing the blood, he had immediately looked horrified. Then he had apologized. Apologized over and over again, as if that would absolve him of what he’d done.

      Deanna now understood how some people suffered post-traumatic stress for long periods of time over one life-altering event, because something about Brian’s attack had left her with a disconcerting feeling. Even though she had cut off all contact with him, had not returned his calls and had not heard from him since April, here she was, away from Los Angeles for four months, and she was still dreaming about the attack.

      Deanna frowned—there was something weird about the dream. Something she couldn’t quite place. And it went beyond the fact that she couldn’t see her own nor Brian’s face. Every time she woke up, there was a sense of something that left her anxious. Because sometimes, she got the odd sensation that she wasn’t even dreaming about her and Brian at all.

      Which didn’t make sense, of course. The nightmares had started only after Brian had assaulted her.

      Deanna closed her eyes, but it took only a short time for her to realize that she wasn’t going to fall back asleep. So she got out of bed, opened up her MacBook and did what she had done practically every day for the past three weeks. She went online to do a search for “Hart” in Georgia.

      Georgia was a big state, and Deanna had been hoping to find a trace of her mother online. Ever since her sister Natalie had gone to Philadelphia to search for their mother and found a clue that pointed to her being in Georgia, Deanna had been extremely hopeful. Natalie had met a woman who had known their mother, and she had been adamant that Miriam Hart, who’d gone by a different name, had been in Philadelphia as recently as a few months earlier. According to this woman, Miriam had headed to Georgia to deal with an issue “once and for all.”

      What that issue was, Deanna had no clue. But during the talks that she’d had with Natalie and their other sister, Callie, they’d come to the conclusion that something bad had happened with their mother and aunt. Auntie Jean had never talked about her parents, nor any other members of their extended family. As kids, neither Deanna nor her sisters had questioned that. Uncle Dave had had plenty of relatives, so they hadn’t paid attention to the fact that Auntie Jean had none. Now, in the wake of their aunt’s death—where no one from her side of the family had even shown up at the funeral—it finally dawned on them that something was odd.

      Of course, Miriam and Jean’s parents could have been deceased, and perhaps they had been the only two children. There were certainly logical explanations as to why Auntie Jean had never been in touch with extended family members.

      She went back to deal with something once and for all….

      Those were the words that gave Deanna pause. The words that had all of the sisters both hopeful and concerned.

      Callie, the eldest sister and always the most rational in her thinking, was adamant that whatever their mother needed to deal with could have been taken care of in three months. Deanna tended to agree.

      So where was she? Why hadn’t she finally come back for them?

      Was her mother still afraid of her old boyfriend, Rodney Cook, the man she had run from twenty-three years ago? Back then, Miriam had agreed to testify against him, but she had fled before doing so, deciding to take her chances on her own while leaving her three daughters with her sister. Did Miriam not know that Rodney was back behind bars? Could she still view him as a threat to her life all these years later?

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