“I have a confession to make,” he started.
Matt felt her entire body stiffen. Her uneasy gaze roamed over his face. “You’re not married, are you?”
He speared her with a sardonic look. “Don’t you think the people in this town would be lining up at Belle Maison to tell you if I was married?”
“Good point.” She pressed a kiss to his left pectoral, then folded her hands on his chest and rested her chin on them. “So, what’s the deep, dark secret you want to share?”
Matt stared at her and, for the briefest moment, had an overwhelming urge to come clean about it all. He thought of the wall safe downstairs, hidden behind a framed portrait of his ancestor. He thought about the leather-bound diary that resided inside of it, and how it contained the very thing that had brought her into his life, the very thing that could possibly save her job: the story ofherancestor.
But it was also filled with his aunt Nicolette’s detailed accounts of many of the wrongdoings early members of the Gauthier family had engaged in. Once the floodgates were opened, it would take very little digging for someone to unearth some of the other transgressions the Gauthier men had committed throughout the years. Some were illegal, some just unethical, but all were offenses that would mar his family’s name in this town forever.
The people of Gauthier loved the town’s founding family. Preventing those stories from coming to light wasn’t just for the sake of saving his campaign or his family’s reputation; it was for the sake of all the people living here who needed to believe that the Gauthiers were everything that was good about this small town.
The load of bull he’d just fed himself was hard for Matt to swallow, but it did just enough to stop him from spilling his guts to Tamryn.
Instead, he said, “I explained to you about the outlet mall in Maplesville, and the rift it’s caused between the two communities, right?”
“You and several other people around here,” she said.
He hesitated, then admitted, “I’m the one who brought this area to the developers’ attention.”
Tamryn’s head popped up. “What do you mean?”
“A couple of years ago I ran across an article about this development group who had built outlet malls throughout the southeast. They were looking for another site. There were people on both the pro and con side, but the pros seemed to have the better argument. Tax revenues, jobs, lots of prosperity—all the things I wanted for Gauthier.”
“So how did the outlet mall end up in Maplesville?”
“The developers got a better deal on the land, and there was more of it. They were able to buy huge acreage and, in the couple of years since they moved in, have sold it to other developers. Now there are retail shops and strip malls popping up all around Maplesville, and the shops in Gauthier are feeling the pinch.”
“The pinch? None of the businesses on Main Street seem to be struggling to me.”
“Well, they’re not now. Not with the tourists that have been brought to town because of last year’s revitalization efforts, and the Underground Railroad discovery.”
“So what’s your point?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “The point is, I could have single-handedly ruined this town.”
“But you didn’t. In fact, according to Mya Dubois-Anderson, if not for that outlet mall, the Gauthier Civic Association would have never gotten the revitalization effort off the ground. She said their anger over the outlet mall was the catalyst for all of that.”
“True,” Matt agreed.
“She also pointed out that, if not for a fact-finding mission she and Corey went on because of the revitalization effort, that discovery at the Gauthier Law Firm probably never would have happened.”
“But Mya can’t be sure about that. It’s possible it would have been uncovered in some other way.”
“That secret room had been under everyone’s noses for a century and a half without being uncovered. In the end, the outlet mall was a blessing, Matt. Don’t think about what it could have been—think about how it’s all worked out for the good of Gauthier.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing.” She looked at him with such compassion in her eyes. “Please tell me you haven’t been stressing yourself out over something like this.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do,” she said.
No, she didn’t. She didn’t realize that this was just one notch on a long list of awful things his family had done to this town. She didn’t realize that he was willfully hiding the very information that she was seeking to uncover. There wassomuch she didn’t understand.
“Matt, the people in this community absolutely adore you. I swear, it’s downright nauseating to witness how much they dote on you. Do you really think they would fault you for something like this?”
