by Cora Brent
CARDS OF LOVE: THE HERMIT
CORA BRENT
CONTENTS
Also by Cora Brent
Blurb
Prologue
1. Deirdre
2. Jeremy
3. Deirdre
4. Jeremy
5. Deirdre
6. Jeremy
7. Deirdre
8. Jeremy
9. Deirdre
10. Jeremy
11. Deirdre
12. Jeremy
13. Deirdre
14. Jeremy
Epilogue
Cards of Love
ALSO BY CORA BRENT
AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE
Gentry Boys Box Set Books 1-4
GENTRY BOYS (Books 1-4)
Gentry Boys Series
DRAW
RISK
GAME
FALL
HOLD
CROSS (A Novella)
WALK
EDGE
SNOW (A Christmas Story)
TURN
KEEP (A Novella)
TEST
Worked Up
FIRED
NAILED
Stand Alones
UNRULY
IN THIS LIFE
HICKEY
Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarity to events or situations is also coincidental.
The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.
© 2019 by Cora Brent
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: Lori Jackson at Lori Jackson Design
Created with Vellum
BLURB
THE HERMIT
(A Cards of Love Story)
He was the last person I expected to find out here.
Once he was the golden boy of American boxing.
Now he’s a desert recluse with a bad attitude.
Everyone knows the unthinkable tragedy he suffered.
And why he retreated to an isolated place where the world couldn’t touch him.
He’s not searching for love. He’s not searching for anyone.
I understand.
After a decade of grief I’m still struggling with my own loss and regret.
I’m not searching for love either. I know the potential for pain is too high.
But I know something else too.
There are some cravings that don’t disappear, some desires that can be satisfied without the inevitable agony that love can yield.
And I want to feel every single one of them with him….
The Hermit is just one of the many stories in the Cards of Love Collection. Which card will you choose next?
https://www.cardsofloveromance.com/
PROLOGUE
Jeremy
“I don’t believe you,” I told him and I meant it.
I didn’t believe him at all.
I couldn’t.
Because the words didn’t make a damn bit of sense, even if the speaker was Darius Corbin. Darius was my longtime manager and the closest thing I had to a best friend. He was a man who didn’t lie, who wouldn’t lie, especially not to me. But the things he’d just said weren’t fucking true and that was that.
“I don’t fucking believe you!” I repeated and this time I shouted it because I was even more certain.
He didn’t flinch in the face of my furious doubt. “I’m so sorry, Jeremy.” He never called me that, never called me by my first name. He called me ‘kid’. He called me ‘J’. He only uttered the word ‘Jeremy’ when he was talking about me, not to me. He’d say flowery bullshit like ‘Jeremy Gannon is destined to be the best boxer of his generation’ when he was talking to the press but to me he’d wink and promise, ‘Kid, you’ll be king.’
He reached for me. “Jeremy?” His voice was full of the kind of anguish I’d never heard from him before. Darius was made of steel. Darius never backed down, not ever. And now Darius was crying while he said my name again, his way of declaring that he was serious, that he believed what he said even if I didn’t.
“No.” I recoiled from him, shaking my head. My adrenaline was still on high because I’d be stepping into the ring in an hour. I was undefeated, invincible. Everyone said so. Darius said so. My family was proud, so proud.
My family…
They were coming. My oldest brother Kevin had his pilot’s license and I’d paid to rent a plane large enough to carry the entire family from Tulsa here to Vegas in time for the fight. My parents, my brothers, my cousins and their parents. Seventeen Gannons should be out there by now, occupying their ringside seats and waiting for the fight to start. They were out there waiting for me.
And Casey too.
Casey was supposed to be traveling with them. Despite everything that had happened between us she’d insisted on coming along and there was no way I could argue. We’d known each other all our lives and she was an honorary member of the family.
“I don’t understand,” I said, the first hollow twinges of incalculable grief already beginning to gnaw away at my insides.
Darius explained it to me. An engine problem, or so they thought. My brother’s frantic broadcast over a rugged section of eastern Arizona. Some campers out in the wilderness saw the small plane crash to the earth from three miles away and called authorities. The media was already picking up the story. There were no survivors.
This time I believed him. And I screamed as I put my hand through the nearest wall.
There were days that followed. The rest of the world didn’t stop turning just because mine did. Everyone I loved was gone. And all the bullshit that had seemed so important – the training, the championships, the publicity – none of it was worth more than a handful of dust now.
Darius was sympathetic. But he was also a businessman and I was the product. Through the years of blood and sweat and pain he’d taken a surly seventeen-year-old boy out of a third rate gym in Tulsa and molded him into a world class champion.
“Take some time to grieve,” he said to me on the afternoon I buried my entire family. “No one expects you to be back in the ring tomorrow.”
We were still in the cemetery, the last of the lingering mourners. I looked up in time to see a photographer snap a picture of me as I stood ten yards from a row of flower-adorned caskets. The face of the tabloid photographer was triumphant before he ducked behind a marble statue of an angel. In the four years since I’d catapulted into the limelight I’d grown used to getting attention whether I wanted it or not. But being shadowed at a mass funeral was something else, far worse than being followed around at the mall. Fucking parasites, all of them.
To hell with this. All of it.
I’d had enough. No more cameras, no more fights, no more interviews. I was done. I’d make the announcement today.
Darius assumed it was the grief talking and he tried to argue. “Kid, I can’t even guess how much you’re hurting. But fighting is who you are. You can’t just walk away.”
Oh, but I could. I was doing it right now, exiting the iron gates of the cemetery and leaving Darius behind with the caskets that contained only fragments and mementoes. The plane had incinerated upon crashing. There just hadn’t been anything to bury.
Now that I was moving I planned to keep going, to keep retreating until I found some remote corner where it was possible to stay disconnected from people and from cameras and from questions and f
rom feelings. I thought I heard Darius call my name again but I didn’t even turn around. He was wrong about me.
I could absolutely walk away.
I could walk away from the whole fucking world...
Chapter One
DEIRDRE
My eyeballs were scorched. Seared. Overcooked.
I’d never been the most scientific person but if such a condition as Charred Eyeballs existed then I was definitely a casualty. I could feel a brand new collection of crow’s feet making themselves right at home as I squinted into the relentless glare of the sunshine. I should have expected this.
After all, I was in the middle of the desert.
Due to all my research I was confident that I knew everything about this place. The topography, the annual rainfall, the average monthly temperature. And yet I still managed to be unprepared. Somewhere along the interminable route through middle America I’d misplaced my sunglasses and had yet to acquire a replacement.
My car rolled over a hilly segment of asphalt and I had to pump the brakes thanks to a slow moving Cadillac straight ahead. It had Michigan plates and was packed with white-haired passengers. Every ten seconds or so the vehicle’s brake lights would appear and twice the right signal began to flash before the driver thought better of turning off toward the side of the road that promised nothing but sand and cacti. It seemed I wasn’t the only confused tourist around here. But I expected to reach my destination at any moment. At least I hoped I would. I didn’t like the idea of following the crawling Cadillac into oblivion.
Despite my suffering eyeballs and a persistent backache, courtesy of the recent cross country drive, I was excited. The feeling of anticipation that had been building for days reached a crescendo yesterday when I finally crossed the state line. This was exactly where I had wanted to be and now I was here.
Sure enough, thirty seconds later I rounded a bend in the road and saw the collection of warped but charming wooden buildings that the realtor had described when I picked up my keys yesterday. This was the only commerce in the immediate area. The parking lot was an informal swath of gravel stretching across the strip of conjoined structures that comprised the tiny town of Prickly Flats.
I came to a stop in front of a crudely painted sign that advertised: Burgers. Souvenirs. Museum. With a snort of amusement over the multi-purpose label I cut the engine and hopped out of the old Toyota I’d purchased on my own after college and was still reliable enough to take all the way from Pennsylvania to this dusty landscape deep in the heart of Arizona.
Somehow I wasn’t expecting the blast of heat that hit me the second I stepped from the vehicle. This would take some getting used to. All my twenty-eight years had been spent in the breezy greenery of cooler climates on the other side of the country.
“But check out that view,” I muttered to myself, letting out a low whistle as I drank in the incomparable spectacle of the legendary Superstition Mountains. I’d spent so many hours studying the area I felt like every rocky crest of the strange landscape already belonged to me. It was awe inspiring. Beautiful and treacherous, remote and forbidding as the name implied. Over countless decades how many other people had gazed upon this vista and how many of them had traveled here in search of something they couldn’t quite define?
I lingered there beside my car, preoccupied with the scenery. I couldn’t explain why but I suddenly felt like I wasn’t alone. There was a distinct echo in my head as if someone had shouted my name and now it reverberated over the cragged peaks of the rocky brown hills in the distance.
DEIRDRE! DEIRDRE! DEIRDRE!
Of course no one had screamed my name at all. No one was even there.
And I didn’t answer to the name Deirdre anyway, hadn’t for years.
Other than my Toyota there were two other vehicles parked in the gravel lot, both pickup trucks. The one closest to where I stood appeared to be in its final stages of life with cracked mirrors, peeling orange paint and an overall vibe of neglect. Perhaps there were times when this little tourist trap off the Old West Highway saw more activity but in the middle of a September weekday it looked to be virtually deserted.
My eyes landed on the entrance to Burgers/Souvenirs/Museum just as it swung open. A man emerged and a jolt of recognition shot through me. He took two steps out the door and raised his head, pausing as we locked eyes. His were green, a shade of striking emerald brilliance, so unusual that my first thought was that they had to be colored contacts. A second later I changed my mind because a man who looked like he hadn’t bothered to shave in six months probably didn’t take pains to adjust the color of his eyes. His clothes must have been dark at one time but now they’d faded to a muted grey, his dull cotton shirt adorned with indecipherable lettering, ripped in two places and barely able to contain the muscles coiling beneath it. His ruggedly dangerous brand of sex appeal would send a lot of women to their knees but those would be the same women who salivated over Sons of Anarchy characters. I didn’t know how to be one of those women. I already understood more about dangerous men than I ever wanted to.
Still, I was only human. Staring at ripped muscles and a strikingly handsome square-jawed face would be enough to get any sex-starved libido humming.
My initial feeling of familiarity receded. No, I’d never met this man before. He was a complete stranger. I couldn’t explain why I’d thought otherwise.
The man stared for another few seconds, perhaps appraising me the same way I’d done to him. I wondered what he saw. A woman hurtling towards age thirty who wore thick tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup, who carelessly rolled her chestnut colored hair into a sloppy ponytail and covered her figure with cargo pants and oversized men’s t-shirts, a woman who looked as unremarkable as the gritty sand beneath his feet.
At this point we’d been staring at each other for a few seconds longer than conventional politeness allowed so I felt obliged to clear my throat and say something.
“I can’t believe this heat,” I said, fanning myself with my hand and internally congratulating myself on sounding like an idiot. “It’s really something else.”
The man shook his head and some light brown hair flopped into his eyes.
“This is nothing,” he said. “It’s barely a hundred out. You should have been here a month ago.”
I was trying to think of something else to say but there was no need. The man had already tired of the conversation. He turned his back to me and started walking toward the decrepit pickup truck, his boots crunching on the sand. It was only then I realized he was carrying a box. I didn’t know how I’d missed seeing it before. It was a sizeable box and it appeared to be full of canned goods and bottles and smaller wrapped parcels. The thing had to be heavy yet he chucked it into the bed of the pickup truck as effortlessly as if it contained only tissue paper.
Once he was satisfied that his box was securely in place he turned and faced me. If he was surprised to find that I was still standing there and ogling him like a slack-jawed fool he didn’t let on. He merely leaned against his truck and examined me for a moment.
Then he said something I never would have expected him to say.
“I saw you.”
“What?” I must have heard him wrong.
His expression was stoic, unreadable. “I said I saw you.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. But in case this encounter was about to take a turn for the creepy I took an uneasy step away, toward the door of the Burgers/Souvenirs/Museum building. It was my best bet if I needed to run for help.
Yet I wasn’t really afraid. The man didn’t come off as hostile or threatening. He wasn’t leering or checking out my rack. If anything his tone and his posture seemed detached, disinterested. His green-eyed gaze had shifted and was roaming over the crooked mountains in the distance, his expression completely neutral.
“You ought to get some window shades,” he said, his deep voice betraying a country twinge. “I’m not the only man who might be wandering around in the desert after dark.
Keep that in mind.”
Then he opened the driver’s side door, ducked inside and drove away before I had a chance to comprehend what had just happened. When I did I felt the burn of embarrassment stinging my cheeks.
Now I knew what he meant, what he’d probably seen.
Yesterday I’d pushed through the last fourteen hour leg of road travel, only stopping twice for bathroom breaks. The sky was dimming by the time I met up with the realtor to retrieve the keys to the house. She was dressed with expensive care and tapped her very long turquoise fingernails on the hood of my car as I signed the paperwork. Her offer to follow me out to the house to help unload my car was politely declined. There wasn’t much to unload anyway. The boxy little house I’d leased for the next year was furnished and I hadn’t packed very much. I’d never been in the habit of acquiring extra possessions. Everything I needed to bring with me to the other side of the country fit easily into three large suitcases and half a dozen boxes that were mostly filled with books.
After I claimed the keys I followed the last rays of sunlight out to a dirt road at the base of an ominous looking mountain range that knew how to keep secrets. I couldn’t see any neighbors although I’d been told there were homes here and there. I’d never been so isolated before but I didn’t mind. The remote setting suited my task. And my temperament. I’d spent years deliberately removing the splinters of human intimacy, burying myself in academia and in research, in times long gone in the company of people long dead. And this was my reward. A one year grant to pursue a dream project with no tedious student hours, no faculty meetings.
