Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 2

Chapter 2 A Second Life

Nora watched Mandy take the watch and walk out, and she laughed at her on the inside. What an idiot. A second life didn’t come with a second brain.
“You don’t even know how I saved him. Taking the watch won’t get you anywhere. He’ll never believe you.”
Adrian was paranoid down to the bone. He would never accept a stranger’s claim on the strength of one pocket watch and repay a debt without digging first.
At the door, Mandy stopped. She turned around, came back to the bed, and stood over Nora looking down at her. “You’re going to walk me through exactly how you saved Ace. Every detail.”
Nora refused on purpose. “No. Ace told me that’s between him and me. Nobody else gets to know.”
Adrian really had said that to her, word for word.
Mandy pulled out her phone. “Then I’ll call Dad right now and have your grandmother’s treatment stopped.”
“Don’t!” Nora let the fear show on her face and glared at Mandy, then gave in like she had run out of road. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”
Her grandmother was the only family member who had ever loved her honestly, and her condition required a very specific medication that only her father’s company cultivated.
Mandy sat down on the edge of the bed, pleased with herself, and listened closely while Nora described how she had pulled Adrian out of the dark three nights ago.
Mandy was afraid she would lose the details, so she recorded the whole thing and planned to play it back until she had every word right.
Nora drove the instructions home more than once. “Keep butterscotch candy on you. When he asks why you saved him, tell him you just wanted him alive.”
Mandy studied her, half convinced. “And that’s enough? He’ll buy it?”
Nora picked up the hairpin from the nightstand and smiled at her. “Of course not. There’s one more piece, and it’s the part that matters.”
Her eyes went cold as she raised her hand, and the pin came down fast and clean.
“Ah!” Mandy clamped both hands over her calf and screamed as the blood ran through her fingers.
Nora took a tissue and wiped the pin down slowly. “The wound on the calf. The butterscotch, that one line, the watch, and this. You need all four or none of it works.”
Call that cut a down payment. She still owes me for the first time I died.
Because that is exactly what she did. This idiot is the reason I died.
She still remembered Mandy standing there while the fire caught, gloating at her through the smoke. “I’m the one who stopped Grandma’s medication. She didn’t die sick, I killed her! Somebody handed me 100 thousand dollars and I did it!
“Oh, and that short-lived mother of yours? She didn’t hang herself over depression either. I don’t think I need to spell out who did it.”
Mandy looked at Nora’s calf and found nothing there but a scrape, while her own leg had a gash four inches long, and the unfairness of it brought her to tears. “You’re not even hurt. You did that on purpose!”
“You’re right. I did.”
Nora admitted it without blinking, and her gaze iced over. “Take something of mine, even something I don’t want, and you pay for it.”
“You…” Mandy opened her mouth to scream at her, then looked up into those cold eyes and felt the chill crawl down her spine, and whatever she meant to say died in her throat.
A knock came at the door and the housekeeper pushed it open. “There’s an important guest downstairs. Your father wants both of you down there right now.”
Adrian had come. He was here to find whoever had pulled him out of that storm.
Mandy heard it and her whole face lit up. Starting today she was rewriting the miserable ending she had lived once already.
This time around, she would be the wife of the richest man in the country, and Nora could take the dead husband, the bankrupt family, and the hostess bar.
Mandy lifted her chin and warned her, “I saved Ace. Open your mouth and think about what happens to your grandmother. And stay upstairs.”
“I don’t want your broke Ace, and you can stop threatening me, or else.” Nora’s stare stayed flat and her voice dropped. “Next time I won’t stop at your leg.”
Adrian had no patience for gold diggers, so from this moment forward Nora intended to become exactly the kind of woman he could not stand.
The look in Nora’s eyes rattled Mandy, but she reminded herself that she was the only one who had come back, that she had gotten to Adrian first this time, and that Nora’s charmed life belonged to her now.
She went downstairs in a very good mood.
*****
Nora had saved Adrian three nights earlier during a downpour, and she had come out of that rain with a fever.
The storm had been thick enough that neither of them ever got a clear look at the other, and a cold had wrecked her voice for days before it. She felt perfectly safe letting Mandy step into the rescuer role and claim the debt.
Once Adrian found the rescuer he was looking for, Nora’s whole future rearranged itself, and that thought settled her enough to sit up, swallow her fever pills, and lie back down to sleep.
A few minutes later the knocking started again.
“Miss Sinclair, your father wants you downstairs.”
Nora frowned. “Has the guest left?”
“No. Mr. Pierce’s still here.”
Nora still had no interest in seeing Adrian. “Tell him I’m not feeling well and I’d rather stay up here.”
The housekeeper hesitated. “Your sister said the same thing, but he insists. He says if you won’t come down, he’ll bring the guest up here to see you.”
Adrian trusted nothing on faith. Without laying eyes on Nora, he would never take one pocket watch as proof that Mandy had been the one who saved him.
There was no getting out of it, so Nora dragged herself up, changed, and put on a little makeup.
Nora stopped at the top of the stairs and looked down into the sitting room.
Adrian sat on the sofa making polite, distant conversation with Victor Sinclair, and Mandy had planted herself off to the side with her eyes glued to him.
Adrian felt someone watching and raised his head.
Nora came down the curved staircase one step at a time in a scarlet dress, her hair falling in loose waves, four inches of heel under her.
She was beautiful in a way that filled a room, striking and bold and entirely unbothered by who was looking.
One glance was all it took, and he could not look away.