 by Ivy Layne.jpg)
Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
Just one Savannah Miles. She’s bossy, annoyingly organized, and the only thing that keeps Heartstone Manor running. Oh, and she hates him. Good reason to keep his distance. But Finn can’t forget the way it felt to kiss her, to hold her in his arms. If she was forbidden then, now she's untouchable. When he looks at Savannah, all he wants to do is touch.
Wicked Heart is a standalone romance with a happy ending. It’s fifth in The Hearts of Sawyers Bend series, featuring the Sawyer family of Sawyers Bend.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
SAVANNAH
He was out there again, skulking around the kitchens of Heartstone Manor in the middle of the night. None of the kids at school would believe it.
Finn Sawyer, the undisputed king of our high school, cooking? For fun? No way.
Watching him bent over a copper saucepan, his dark hair falling in his eyes, I wished with desperate rage that I’d told his secret before he’d told mine.
Now it was too late.
If I said anything now, everyone would think I was lying in revenge.
The more I thought about what he’d done that day at school, the more I wanted to bash him over the head with that copper saucepan. I hated no one on this planet as much as I hated Finn Sawyer.
The day he’d transferred to the local high school, he’d become the bane of my existence. Before that, no one cared that I lived in the big house. I was the daughter of the housekeeper, a townie, just like everyone else. I’d made it clear early on that I barely interacted with the Sawyers, and everyone pretty much forgot I had anything to do with them.
Then Finn got himself expelled from Laurel Country Day, and even his father’s generous donations hadn’t been enough to convince the school to take him back. Setting fire to the headmaster’s office tended to make school administrators cranky. Coming into our rural public high school from an elite prep school like Laurel Country Day should have been hard for Finn. After all, he didn’t know a soul except for me, and by unspoken agreement, Finn and I pretended to be strangers.
It wasn’t an act. Not really. We might have slept under the same roof, but I could count on one hand the number of conversations we’d had. Prentice Sawyer did not encourage chit-chat between the family and staff. I might have been young, but I knew enough about life to understand how it was.
My mother had a good job. She worked her ass off, but Prentice Sawyer paid her well, especially considering she didn’t have to worry about room and board. I love Sawyers Bend, but it’s not exactly bursting with jobs. If I got my mother fired, we’d go from comfortable to desperate in a heartbeat. Which was the only reason I hadn’t bashed Finn with that copper saucepan. Yet.
He flicked the whisk in lazy swoops, his t-shirt stretching across his back as he leaned over the pan and drew in a long breath, savoring the rich scents of vanilla and cream. He was so absorbed that he hadn’t noticed me lurking in the dark hall leading to our small apartment off the kitchens.
This wasn’t the first time Finn had snuck into the kitchens late at night to cook. His relationship with the family chef was an anomaly in Heartstone Manor. He’d pestered Chef Guérard to teach him to cook for years until the chef had agreed to a single lesson if Finn would promise never to bother him again. I don’t know what Chef Guérard saw in Finn, who was only fourteen at the time. It must have been something extraordinary because he never argued about teaching Finn again, even though he knew he’d be fired if Prentice ever found out.
I’d seen Finn during his lessons a few times, barely recognizing him as the boy who ruled our high school with disdain and sullen apathy. With Chef Guérard, he was all intense focus, seeming to absorb the chef’s instructions into his very cells.
That wasn’t the Finn I knew from school. Another kid might have been bullied after transferring from his cush private school to our rural public one. Not Finn. In the perverse way of teenagers, he rose to the top of the social hierarchy powered by the sheer force of his indifference. He slouched around school, sullen and sneering, impervious to anything the other kids might throw at him.
On his third day, two boys in his class jumped him behind the gym, thinking to teach him a lesson about the pecking order. He’d pummeled them both, walked away, and never said a word to anyone. That was all it took. Within two weeks of his transfer, he’d become the bad boy every girl swooned over and every boy wanted to be. Ugh. I tried to pretend he didn’t exist.
Until recently, it had worked out fine. He ignored me. I ignored him. Problem solved. Until today. Today, Finn Sawyer ruined my goddamned life, and, for once, I had something to say about it. Stepping forward, I left the dark of the hall for the dim light of the main kitchen.
“Why did you do it?” I demanded, keeping my voice low so it didn’t carry down the hall and wake my mother.
Finn’s shoulder jerked a fraction of an inch, the only sign that I’d surprised him. Then, with a careless flick, he tossed his hair off his forehead and shrugged.