A Silent Heart Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cancer.

  Chord E.

  Chord A.

  Chord D.

  Chord G.

  Chord C.

  Chord E minor.

  Chord A minor.

  Chord D7.

  Chord A7.

  About the Author.

  Author’s Note.

  Sneak Peek of: ‘Heart Beat’.

  A ‘Love at First Sight’ Romance Novella

  Copyright Notice

  This ebook may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means, without explicit permission from Eli Constant Books (Eli Constant, Eli Grace, & Eliza Grace). Eli Grace (ECB) asserts her right to hold the copyright of this work entitled ‘A Silent Heart’.

  This is a work of fiction. Any locations, characters, and entities are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously; they should not be construed as real in any capacity. Similarities to actual persons, living or deceased, and organizations or locales, are purely coincidental.

  A Silent Heart

  1st Edition

  *Digital Edition*

  Copyright © 2017 Eli Grace (ECB)

  Cover Design © 2017 Wilde Book Designs

  All rights reserved.

  A ‘Love at First Sight’ Romance Novella

  Eli Constant writing as

  Eli Grace

  Laurie used to dream about being the little mermaid, about losing her voice and finding her Prince. Well, she’s got the lost voice thing down, but her Prince is nowhere to be found. Until Tanner comes along and shows her what being a part of his world can be like―both beneath the sheets and on the streets. Instant love. Mild heat. A satisfying, fast read.

  Table of Contents

  Cancer.

  Chord E.

  Chord A.

  Chord D.

  Chord G.

  Chord C.

  Chord E minor.

  Chord A minor.

  Chord D7.

  Chord A7.

  About the Author.

  Author’s Note.

  Sneak Peek of: ‘Heart Beat’.

  Cancer.

  It’d been a year since the cancer took my voice.

  Now I sat in the back of the church, closing my eyes each time the choir stood to sing. Their voices floated to me and I knew, rationally, that it was beautiful. Ethereal and bright and reaching toward heaven… that place I wasn’t even sure I believed in anymore.

  I rubbed the back of my head, at the base of the skull where the shallowest of impressions gave away where the tumor had been, that golf-ball sized lump that had squeezed against nerves in such a fashion that I’d begun to have trouble breathing and forming my words. Vocal cord paralysis, the doctors called it. They’d removed the tumor and the margins had been clean. My breathing had eased…

  But I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t sing. It was as if with that one small lump of cancerous flesh, I’d lost my identity. I pulled my hand from beneath the dark golden strands of my hair, not caring that I left behind knots in the usually-glossy locks. I hadn’t bothered drying it today, applying the little oils that kept it so silky. I hadn’t cared enough about looking good so that I could sit and watch people sing joyfully when I could not utter a singular syllable.

  The most ironic thing was that I once dreamed about being the Little Mermaid. It was my favorite childhood movie. I liked how she had to win over the Prince without her voice, without one of her best features and talents. It was the thing that got me into singing, into proudly standing at the front of the choir. And now, here I was, voiceless and stumbling around on a pair of legs that physically were fine, but emotionally felt like a flipper on dry land.

  “Laurie, are you ready?” My mom’s voice floated to me, pushed through the fog that seemed to always hang around my head nowadays. It dulled my sense of hearing and that was good. Good because not hearing made it less painful that I could not add to the noise, the cacophony of sound that was life. Utterly amazing, beautiful, loud life.

  Blinking, I looked around and realized that the church was emptying out, fast and hard, like a dam being lowered to lessen the water in a lake. That was how it always was, as if people were only stuffed into the building by force of conscience and fear of the afterlife and, as soon as duty was done, they filtered out as fast as their legs would carry them. I wondered if they thought God would be satisfied. I wouldn’t be if I was him… or her… or it.

  “Laurie?” Mom questioned again, her amber eyes, so like my own, crinkling at the edges, adding to the already-existing wrinkles of age. She’d laughed so much when my father was alive, so much so that the memories of happiness were painted across her face as a constant reminder. I often wanted to ask if that bothered her, but I didn’t, because maybe she lived inside her own type of silence.

  I nodded quickly, fighting the tears that wanted to fall from my eyes like the people filing out of the church. I stood slowly, smoothing out the pale pink skirt that I hated, but wore more often than any other piece of clothing in my closet. I’d been wearing it the night Ross had asked me to marry him. Ross had taken my diagnosis harder than anyone else. He’d walked around in a daze, imagining a world in which he didn’t have a sick fiancé. He found comfort in the arms of a co-worker.

  And then he’d left me a month after we found out I was sick, because it was ‘too hard’.

  I don’t know why I wore the damn skirt. I should have trashed it a long time ago.

  I still had our picture in my wallet too. In it, he was stood behind me, his arms thrown around my shoulders. Even in the wrinkled, cracked photo, Ross’s smile was like daylight. And I hated him for that. I also still loved him and I didn’t blame him for running away from me. If I could have run from the cancer, I would have been right behind him.

  He’d tried to call some months ago, after hearing I was cancer free.

  I’d ignored his calls, despite my mother’s urgings to do otherwise. Everyone makes mistakes, my darling. Everyone deserves a second chance. It was hard to believe she’d urge me back to a man who’d abandoned me in my greatest hour of need. Then again, she’d been more fond of Ross than even I. Had he been some years older… Yes, my mother would have made a move. I was sure of it. And that was almost funny in a way.

  Mom drove slowly home. I lived with her now. Even if I’d stayed in Dallas, I couldn’t have afforded the apartment Tom and I’d rented shortly before our engagement. I missed it there though. It had skylights, bathing the rooms in warmth at all hours of the day. Mom’s house was large, but the architect hadn’t been particularly enamored with windows. It was a three thousand square foot house and there were exactly six windows. Two large bay windows at the front, which only brought in early morning sunlight, one large, seamless window at the back of the house overlooking a pond that was so algae-infested that it didn’t even look like water―it looked like a field of emerald grass that you could walk across, only if you did, you’d sink into murky wetness―and three windows upstairs, one in each bedroom.

  It was so dim, all the time, no matter how many artificial lights I turned on. Mom would comment that I was wasting power, but I needed the brightness. I needed to see it, needed to hear the electricity pulsing through the house.

  There were other things I missed about Dallas, of course, like teaching music at the local elementary school and working with a local acapella group but I try not to think about that. I try not to dwell on it. Besides, what good is a music teacher that can’t speak, let alone sing?

  When we got home, Mom asked me to sit with her and have lunch. I shook my head, raising my hand, fisting my fingers but keeping my thumb out, and flicked beneath my chin with my still-extended thumb to sign ‘not’. I shaped my hand like a
‘c’ open to the sky, placed it against my upper chest between my breasts, and ran it slowly downward a few inches to sign ‘hungry’. Mom frowned at me. She wasn’t picking up sign as fast as I was; she still held too firmly to the hope that the speech therapy would work, that the stimulation therapy to the nerves would work, and that the cancer would stay gone and I wouldn’t need chemo, which would be the first course of action if it made a reappearance.

  It’d been a year since the cancer took my voice. I was too tired to hope.

  Chord E.

  “How does that feel, Laurie?” Shana, my speech therapist, looked at me with concerned, muddy green eyes. Some days, they were striking, with golden flecks that seemed to float within the algae-hued pools. Today though, they were plain and ordinary. I’d begun to think that her eyes were linked to my feelings. When I was optimistic, they became emeralds. When I was down, the sparkle died. “Laurie, you okay?” Shana pushed a strand of her dark brown hair behind her ear.

  The electrodes at the back of my neck made me jump in reaction. The impulses almost felt like they sparked against my skin. Little fingers of lightening popping like firecrackers.

  I raised my hand, palm toward the ground, and I tilted it back and forth like a see-saw. ‘So-so’.

  “I’m going to turn it up a little higher, okay?” Shana adjusted the TENS unit on the table, angling it more toward her and away from me. Sometimes, seeing the machine intimidated me. I really didn’t like seeing her dial up the power. It was stupid, irrational, but I couldn’t help how I felt. I wasn’t some machine that could lower the levels on my emotions. TENS units were available for home use, but vocal cords are delicate, my situation was delicate, and a therapist was needed. Even if that were not the case, from a physical standpoint, I would still prefer to have someone else in control. I felt that way about a lot nowadays.

  Shana was waiting for me to nod, so I nodded. And the lightening intensified, a storm gathering power.

  I was always so glad when therapy was over. Walking out of the building felt like coming to life again. Striding toward my car, I tilted my head up to the sky and let the bright overhead sun warm my skin.

  I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe if I had been, I would have had time to get out of the way. As it was, though, I was unprepared, unaware, when the elderly woman in the Cadillac backed into me.

  You’d think she’d be creeping along―she was only pulling out of a parking spot―but for some reason she’d gassed it, zipping backward and straight into my body.

  And it hurt―not in the way it hurt not to be able to speak, to sing. It hurt in the good old-fashioned ‘I just took a beating’ way.

  I was on the ground when she tumbled out of her car, apologies and cries flowing from her mouth like a blanket off the needles of the experienced knitter I felt she must be, if the grandmotherly look of her face was any proof.

  “Sweetie, oh my god. Oh my god. Are you okay? I didn’t see you and I was trying to back out slowly, but I have problems with my knee and it gave out on me.” She had a phone out now, the oversized kind with large numbers for those with poor vision and poor coordination. “I’m calling 911. I can’t believe this.”

  I wanted to say something, say that I was okay, just a little stunned. Of course, that would be a lie, but even the ability to lie was beyond me now.

  “Honey, what’s your name? They want to know your name?” Her concerned, merle-grey spotted eyes tightened at the corners when I didn’t respond.

  I started crying then. I couldn’t even say my damn name.

  “I don’t think she can speak. Maybe shock. I can’t believe this.” The woman was mumbling into the phone, her words becoming increasingly more frantic with every word. My soundless sobbing shifted to a sort of hysterical silent laugh, imagining how messy her knit 1 purl two would be if she tried to work magic with yarn right now.

  When she hung up with the dispatcher, the woman fell to her knees beside me, her face grimaced and I knew it must hurt. An elderly woman with a bad knee, and she’d thought nothing of dropping down to the hard pavement.

  Of course, she was also the reason I was injured and on the ground, so she probably felt she should do whatever she could to comfort me. I lifted my right arm, because the left felt like hell, and I covered my tear-streaked face with my hand. The insane need to laugh had died fast, suiciding in my throat, somewhere between the stomach and the damaged bits of my body.

  The woman was speaking again, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to hear. No, I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream. I don’t know how long I lay there, my hand over my face, lost to time and the world.

  “Miss, can you look at me?” A brooding, rich voice filtered through my self-pity. There was something about the sound that was haunted, like wraiths worked about his words, keeping each syllable shadowed.

  I lowered my hand, squinting as the still-bright sun assaulted my eyes. I’d love the warmth only a short while ago, I’d gotten lost in it… and that wandering had led to me being hit.

  The woman who’d hit me, who’d continued to babble and dance her fingers above my body, never touching, until the sirens had sounded in the near distance, had finally moved away. I’d known she’d been there of course, despite my covered face. I’d had to tune her out though, had to tune everything out, to try to control my manic emotions.

  Focusing on the face above me, I found chiseled features and honey-tan skin. Wide-set, nearly lavender eyes sat above a nose that had been broken once too often, leaving it slightly deformed in a becoming way. He had a slighter build than I preferred in men, but I could tell he was firmly muscled beneath the uniform.

  “Miss, my name is Silas. I’m here to take care of you. Can you tell me where it hurts?” The EMT named Silas gently shifted my body, testing out my finger and arms and ankles. I thought maybe him touching me would send a thrill through me, bring parts of me alive that had stayed dormant since Ross’s departure. But no such luck, not even that little benefit to make this situation easier to handle.

  Finally, after he asked me once more what my name was, I pointed behind him at my purse that had fallen from my shoulder and come to rest beneath the shadows of the Cadillac’s trunk. Looking where I pointed, he nodded and leaned forward to get the dark brown leather satchel. It took him a moment to dig out my wallet, flip it open, and find my name.

  “Laurie Laurence.” He smiled, the way people smile when they’re trying to be kind or console you. “That’s a nice name.”

  Frowning, I shook my head. I wanted to sign that I didn’t like the name, that I thought it was too sing-songy, but he wouldn’t understand. There wasn’t anyone in Lexington that would understand, at least not that I’d met. I missed Dallas sometimes, missed the way Texans were, even in the big city. But Mom had insisted I move here for treatment and after finding myself newly-single, I hadn’t had the heart to fight against her. Lexington was lovely, but I often found it lacking.

  “You don’t like your name?” Silas said, continuing to check over my body. I shook my head once more. Finally, his fingers pushing and prodding, he found the places that had begun to ache, like a slow, dull drum beat beneath my skin.

  Wincing, I pushed his hand away from the right side of my hip, the area that had taken the most impact. “That hurt?” He moved his hand back, playing his fingers gently across the same area, so gently that this time it didn’t hurt. I nodded. “Hey, Tanner, I think the injuries are pretty minor. Deep tissue bruising, maybe some muscular trauma.”

  Another man appeared then, pulling one of those collapsible stretchers I’d only seen in movies, the kind that can be pushed against the back of an ambulance to lower the wheels and slide it into the interior of the rescue vehicle. It was bright yellow, a riotous sort of color, and I hated it as much as the sun that had kidnapped me, made me daydream, and then let me get hit by an old woman in a Cadillac.

  The second man was as handsome as Silas, but in a different way. Where Silas seemed to carry shadows, this was
all sunshine, fluorescent bulbs, warmth to rival the rays I’d been enjoying before the old lady hit me.

  He was large built with shoulders almost too broad for his frame. And he seemed taller than average, although lying on my back didn’t make me the best judge of that. His skin was fair, the way redheads are fair save for the golden-brown of freckles that come to life in the summer, spreading across their skin to give them the appearance of walking warmth. I studied him closer, letting my gaze rove away from those shoulders and that skin, to find black hair instead of ginger crowning a wide, smiling face. A dimple in his chin beneath a large, full mouth was barely visible thanks to his short-groomed beard. And his eyes, although not as exotic as his partner’s lilac ones, were every bit as breathtaking.

  An ocean of navy blue swirled about by silver, glistening specks.

  I wanted to say ‘hi’ more desperately than I had in months. I wanted him to hear my voice, to hear me.

  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

  I watched as the two men spoke to one another, only half-listening to their words and not really caring to understand. Either I was broken or I wasn’t broken. Broken more, I should say. I lived in a state of brokenness now, it was my default.

  But then something amazing happened, something marvelous. The second EMT moved his hands, dancing them through the air in a slow waltz.

  “Hi, Silas says your name’s Laurie. I’m Tanner.” He finger spelled my name and his. “The woman who hit you,” he signed woman with his hand a little sideways, his fingers a little bent. Not exactly right, but close enough for me to understand. He thought I couldn’t hear, thought that’s why I couldn’t speak.

  “I think she can hear, Tanner.” The EMT named Silas said. “She seemed to know what I was saying about her name and stuff.”

  Tanner looked away from me and I hated that. I wanted him to look back, wanted his hands to move through the air again in their dance meant only for me, for my eyes, for my heart. Then his eyes found mine once more and a tightness that had sprung to life in my chest eased as quickly as it had arrived.