Pasties and Poor Decisions

By Molly Harper

Anastasia Villiers has hit rock bottom. And that rock is named Espoir Island.

Abandoned by her disgraced investment banker husband who liquidated all of their assets and fled the country, Anastasia is left with nothing—except for Fishscale House, a broken-down Queen Anne in the Michigan hometown she swore she’d left for good.

If Ana quickly renovates and flips the dilapidated building, she can get back to Manhattan and salvage her life. The problem? The only person on the island with historical renovation cred is Ned Fitzroy—Ana’s first love—who insists she help him with the labor herself. As Ana gets reacquainted with Ned, and her hometown, she realizes home may be just what she’s always wanted.

*previously published in the I LOVED YOU FIRST anthology*

• Language: English
• Publisher: NYLA
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641971867

Molly Harper

Molly Harper is the author of two popular series of paranormal romance, the Half-Moon Hollow series and the Naked Werewolf series. She also writes the Bluegrass ebook series of contemporary romance. A former humor columnist and newspaper reporter, she lives in Michigan with her family, where she is currently working on the next Southern Eclectic novel. Visit her on the web at MollyHarper.com.

Book preview

1

Anastasia Villiers, socialite and minor reality television star, had hit rock bottom. And that rock was named Espoir Island.

Anastasia pressed her forehead against the cold window glass of the Woeful Lady, Espoir’s principal ferry to the mainland.

It would be at least another hour of rough, choppy water before Espoir came into view. More than twenty years before, back when she was still Ana Gustavsson, she’d ridden away from that sight on this same rusted, battered passenger boat, promising herself that she’d never see either again. And here she was, right back where she started, with almost nothing.

Her home was a tiny spit of rocks in Lake Superior and technically part of Michigan, though Canada and the States had a brief skirmish over the right not to claim it during the 1880s. Originally called Sans Espoir, meaning without hope by the French settlers, they declared it unlivable after a few decades, and it was established as a treatment colony for leprosy patients. Blessed with little more than rocky shores, thick forests and isolation, modern tourists who summered on Espoir couldn’t rent houses on the more glamorous Mackinac Island or even Sault Ste. Marie. And after one summer, they rarely came back. Anastasia certainly hadn’t planned on coming back.

Ana Gustavsson had been an unremarkable student with little discernible talent and few ambitions beyond moving to a big city for some other kind of life. She supposed that she’d done just that. She just hadn’t planned for what would come after, which had been a near-fatal error on her part.

She should have seen it coming. After all, she’d seen this sort of thing play out multiple times amongst her social circle. Her husband, Sebastian Villiers, was a self-styled titan of industry. And titans played fast and loose with trivial things like taxes and trade regulations. Amongst her friends (or, at least the people who had called themselves her friends up until three days ago), raids from federal authorities were just an inconvenience that came up every once in a while—like your facialist getting the flu. And sure, occasionally, that meant fleeing the country for a spur of the moment vacation to Switzerland or one of the islands where extradition didn’t exist, until the matter could be cleared up. (It didn’t count as being a fugitive if you flew a private jet.) Then again, her friends’ husbands were usually loyal enough to take their wives with them when they made their escape to consequence-free paradise.

But Bash hadn’t done that.

Bash had always assured her that he had contingency plans in place, that there were routes planned and resources stashed away for an emergency like say, federal authorities attempting to arrest him for an impressive array of white-collar crimes. Anastasia just always assumed that she was included in those plans. She’d come home from an impromptu Tuesday brunch to find federal agents raiding her Broome Street penthouse, a penthouse she’d been given fifteen minutes to pack what personal items they didn’t consider evidence and vacate. Their homes in Miami, the Hamptons, Napa, the apartment on the Upper West Side Bash thought she didn’t know about, they were all being similarly seized and searched. Frantic phone calls to an embarrassing number of the contacts in her phone left her feeling even more alone and adrift. Bash’s number was out of service. His trusted legal team only responded to tell her that while her husband was their client, she was not and should not expect any help from them. Her personal banker pretended not to know who she was.

For the rest of her life, she would remember that moment when she was on her knees in her custom walk-in closet, cell phone pressed to her ear. She was shoving random clothes into a Louis Vuitton duffel bag, while a sympathetic secretary informed Anastasia that Mr. Villiers very recently sold his partnership in the investment firm his family founded. Recently, as in that very morning.

It was their driver, poor Mark Bingley, who met her outside their building to tell her that he’d dropped Bash and a Pilates instructor named Wren at a private airfield, bound for the Caymans that morning. And there had been a lot of luggage involved.

That was when the weasel-faced process server approached Ana on the sidewalk and handed her divorce papers. All of this had been recorded by ever-helpful paparazzi, and Anastasia could only hope that Bash hadn’t been the ones to tip them off, just to give him more time to get away.

For two days, she’d survived on caffeine, panic, and the cash she just happened to have in the handbag she chose that fateful morning. All of her credit cards were cancelled. She only managed to get her plane ticket because Bash hadn’t thought to change the login for their American Airlines account. While the credit cards were defunct, they had built up just enough reward points to cover a coach seat to the Upper Peninsula. She’d crashed on her hair colorist’s couch, for God’s sake, contemplating what life choices led to a person’s list of acquaintances who would help her out in a crisis being limited to the person who put in her fucking highlights.

Anastasia hadn’t even had time to process the emotions involved in her marriage and world falling apart. She couldn’t even think about how she felt about her husband’s betrayal or how stupidly naive she’d been. The only thing she’d been able to feel through the shock was the overwhelming humiliation. Wren—just Wren, no last name, though she was too damn young to make or understand the Cher comparison—had been her Pilates instructor first. Anastasia had been the one to talk Bash into taking sessions because he was always complaining about his weight, but he didn’t like lifting or running. She’d been so stupidly pleased when he’d taken to the sessions, even scheduled extra solo lessons with Wren during the week.

Honestly. She should have known something was up.

Anastasia felt the windowpane warm beneath her forehead and leaned away, sliding a navy U M baseball cap over her long blond hair. She angled it over a delicate oval face, as if it could shield her. The last thing she wanted was to be recognized by the dozen or so Espoir Island commuters sitting inside the ferry to avoid the frigid winds. She was still Gustavsson enough to try to find the bright side in all this. In the words of her mother, if your roof leaked, it meant you had a roof. At least she wasn’t going to jail like those poor actresses who had paid their children’s way into college. She had watched the media coverage for weeks, perplexed as to why so many people had seemed so surprised by those stories, the collective moral outrage.

The elite had access to special privileges because they were the elite. They had the money and the connections to make things happen. It was the way things worked. It was the way things had always worked. It was why she had worked so damn hard to become a member of the elite in the first place, clawing her way up from discount shoe store clerk to personal shopper to Mrs. Sebastian Villiers.

Ana’s mother had also spouted wisdom about heights and pride and busting her proverbial ass combining the two.

In the distance, Espoir Island splayed up from the gray froth like an old woman on her back, trapped forever in the I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! position. The waterfront businesses sagged along the shoreline, comfortable as a faded housecoat is welcoming. Graying clapboard houses sprouted from the rocky cliffs like chin hairs. The island’s primary tourist attraction,