Free The Heart of a Hero by Janet Chapman

up in the woodshed out behind the barn.”
    And that explained Julia handing her brother money every week, Nicholas decided as he finally straightened to his feet. He reached down, but instead of taking him up on his offer to help her stand, Julia plopped her entire savings in his outstretched hand, then grasped a wall stud and slowly pulled herself up.
    “Who is Clay?” he asked, tucking the bag inside his jacket.
    “My ex-husband,” she said, avoiding eye contact with him by looking around the workshop. “Nothing else is worth coming back for.” She gave Olivia a sheepish smile. “The balsam pillows are a wasted effort if they’re just going to keep lugging them off.”
    “Or we can make the guests
buy
them in our gift shop,” Olivia said as she headed out the door carrying the soaps. “We might as well get going then, if you’re sure you have everything you want.”
    Julia took one last look around, used her uninjured hand to grab the hatchet driven into the chopping block, and followed. Nicholas closed the door and followed the women with a scowl at the realization that his plan to give Julia his scrap lumber had been thwarted—only for his mood to lighten again when he remembered she still needed a source of pinecones.

Chapter Five

    Julia woke up to a pounding headache from having cried herself to sleep the night before, the rising sun streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows making her roll over and bury her face in her pillow with a groan. She wished she still cussed, because if ever there were a time she needed to have a blistering tirade, it was now.
    She’d never been so humiliated in her life, not even when Clay had started those nasty rumors about her. Despite most everyone believing them—she
was
the daughter of the town drunk, after all—the knowledge that they were lies had still allowed her to hold her head up. But yesterday Nicholas had seen the stark, naked truth about her, and it hadn’t been pretty. She might as well have been wearing a sign that said
Julia Campbell is an utter and complete failure
.
    But really, what should she care what Nicholas thought about her? He was just another too tall, too blue-eyed, too maddeningly gorgeous guy. No, the really sad truth was she’d humiliated herself in front of her boss, and Olivia would have to be crazy to entrust the well-being of her Inglenook guests to someone who couldn’t even keep her personal life out of the ditch.
    For crying out loud, she was thirty years old, and all her worldly possessions were sitting in trash bags in the second bedroom of Nicholas’s apartment. That had been Olivia’s idea, thinking they might as well not move her stuff twice. Julia had quickly agreed, since she really didn’t want any of her coworkers seeing her lugging a bunch of trash bags from her high-priced hotel room to her temporary apartment after Nicholas moved all of his worldly possessions—most likely neatly packed in boxes—to his likely even more maddeningly gorgeous home.
    Yup, she was a failure with a capital
F
.
    No, she was a
walking disaster
.
    Julia rolled over again, threw back the goose-down-filled, seven-hundred-count, Egyptian cotton-encased comforter and sat up with another groan. For as much as she’d love to continue wallowing in self-pity in this luxurious room, she really needed to get up and get going; certain if she just kept moving, the humiliation demons couldn’t bring her down and gobble her up completely.
    Yeah, what did she care what Nicholas thought? She wasn’t interested in catching his interest, partly because men were more trouble than they were worth, but mostly because she didn’t like standing in lines. And Nicholas had a really long line of interested females.
    Heck, just last week, Wanda Beckman had been bragging to anyone who would listen that the director of security had
personally
driven her down the mountain when she had missed the shuttle. But what Wanda had left out of her story was that