Starting Over (Second Time Lucky Book 1)

by Kat Catesby

  Kat Catesby

  Starting Over

  Second Time Lucky #1

  First published by Kat Catesby Publications 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Kat Catesby

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Kat Catesby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  Cover art by Rocking Book Covers

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Starting Over

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also by Kat Catesby

  Starting Over

  The one that got away, Mason Fox, the love of my life, has just broken my heart… again.

  He’s also the reason I’m homeless, jobless, and the target of his ex-wife’s vendetta.

  Losing everything should be enough to stop me from thinking about the firefighter who stole my heart when he left town. Sadly, this isn’t the case.

  He fled to L.A., cut me out of his life, and his family has ruined me. So why can’t I move on?

  With my life in ruins and nothing left to lose, I fly across the country to find the man who crushed my heart, twice. I’m not sure if he deserves another chance but I need him to face up to his family so that I can rebuild my life. When he learns the truth about everything that’s happened to me, will he step up and stand by my side as we face down the challenges standing between us and our Happily Ever After?

  Or are our differences too great to overcome?

  If you like your second chance romances to be achy in all the right places, with a sprinkling of steam so hot this alpha firefighter almost can’t handle the heat, then you’ll love this older man, younger woman romance from best-selling author, Kat Catesby.

  Prologue

  Mason

  I stare at my phone, the screen lit up from the message I’ve just received. My thumb hovers nervously over the name I’ve missed more than I care to admit.

  Kelsey.

  She’s not reached out to me in months.

  I picture her in my mind’s eye; her chocolate eyes tinged with the sadness I put there, her usual wide smile replaced with the pinching of her pouty lips that indicates she’s in some sort of pain.

  There’s a reason Kelsey Harper hasn’t contacted me in months and that’s because I broke her beautiful heart.

  Being the angel that she is, Kelsey made it easy for me to walk away. She tried to eradicate any of the guilt I deserved to feel and never once said a bad word to anyone about the whole thing.

  She simply disappeared from my life and pretended the heartache didn’t exist.

  Kelsey is the sort of kind-hearted woman who always puts others before herself, which is why she’s messaging me in the first place, no matter what it costs her emotionally. She’s put her heartbreak aside to help her friend find out the truth. She’s causing herself pain in the hope of alleviating someone else’s.

  The someone else in question is her best friend Lucy, and Lucy currently has Max, one of my best firefighters, in knots over some stunt his crazy ex pulled.

  Guess we have that shit in common.

  My bitter ex-wife is the reason Kelsey and I are no longer together – it wasn’t the age gap; it was Helen’s constant put-downs.

  Pervert.

  Predator.

  Sexual Freak.

  “What kind of man fucks a girl young enough to be his kid? She’s a fucking child.”

  I can still hear Helen’s grating voice as clear as fucking day.

  For the record; I’m a forty-year-old man – although my exhausted and beaten down expression would probably suggest older – and Kelsey is a beautiful twenty-six-year-old woman. Unless I fathered a kid at fourteen, there’s no way I’m old enough to be her dad. And while it’s not a small age gap, it’s by no means the biggest.

  Still, the damage was done. Helen knew all the buttons to push to make me feel ashamed of my decision to date Kelsey and ultimately, I let that kill the relationship.

  Guess my ex-wife’s nickname isn’t ‘Hel’ for nothing; that bitch has been dragging me through the fiery underworld for years. She’s a bitter harpy who blames me for everything that was wrong with our marriage…namely the fact that we were childless.

  We tried – fuck knows we tried – but it never happened for us and Helen blamed me. It must’ve been my low sperm count, and while yes, it was a little lower than average, the count was by no means dire. I had swimmers, they just never made it to the promised land.

  In hindsight, it was a blessing in disguise because the idea of a miniature Helen running around scares me to death…and I run into burning buildings for a fucking living.

  Helen’s problem with me dating anyone is her fear of me knocking them up. Of successfully making a baby with another woman. Because then she’d have to face the truth that our infertility problems were at least partly her fault – just a bad combination of my sperm and her hostile vagina – and then she’d have to confront the truth that some of the blame for our marriage imploding lays with her.

  Perfect little Helen can’t have that.

  Helen hated Kelsey for the simple fact that Kelsey is a younger woman who could potentially get pregnant with my child. She just latched onto the age thing and dug her claws in until we all bled.

  I miss Kelsey so fucking much.

  That’s why I’m sat scrolling through CCTV footage of our firehouse to prove that Max wasn’t fucking his bitch of an ex behind Lucy’s back. Because I need Max’s head in the game. Because I’m fed up with the psycho women of the world fucking things up for the rest of us. And because Kelsey asked.

  …Perhaps mostly because Kelsey asked and I know how hard it would have been for her to do so.

  I’m pleased to see footage that proves Max is telling the truth – not that I doubted him. It makes me feel a little smug knowing that I can help him stick the proverbial finger to his crazy ex, Shelby.

  Never liked that woman.

  I’m also pleased that nothing slipped past my radar; I take pride in knowing everything that happens under my roof. I’m the fire chief after all, and this station is mine.

  At least for now...

  Chapter One

  Kelsey

  This is one long-ass day I won’t be sorry to see the back of.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket as I stumble through my apartment door, grocery bags precariously squash
ed under my arms and hanging off my wrists. The perils of single life: no one to help you with the grocery shopping.

  I collapse against the kitchen island, one bag toppling over, sending the contents rolling in different directions. Yet I can’t find it in me to be irritated by it; I’ve no emotional energy left.

  Pulling my phone from my thick winter coat pocket, I see Lucy’s name. Today is not the day to ignore her texts, even if all I want to do is curl up on my modest sofa with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and eat myself into an ice cream coma – I don’t even care that the outside temperature is below freezing and so not ice cream weather. Stressful days call for serious solutions and there’s nothing more serious than a tub of Ben and Jerry’s.

  Lucy: Things are good with me and Max…really good *winking emoji* *eggplant emoji*.

  I sigh heavily. It’s not that I’m not happy for my best friend of forever – Lord knows she deserves a happily-ever-after filled with epic sex after her marathon dry spell – it’s just that it serves to remind me that I don’t have mine.

  My happily ever after.

  The man I love more than anything.

  Because the shit thing is, I already know who he is. He’s the man who broke my heart six months ago.

  Mason Fox.

  During Lucy’s crisis today – her man’s crazy ex framed a situation to make it look like he was cheating – I had to reach out to the man who still holds my heart captive.

  Mason is the swoon-worthy, panty-melting fire chief of the Aspen Fire Department and nothing goes on in his firehouse that he doesn’t know about. So, I swallowed my pain and I reached out to him to find out the truth about Max and his bitch of an ex, Shelby.

  As predicted, Shelby was full of shit and by the looks of Lucy’s message, she and Max have reconciled.

  At least that evens the score to one apiece in the battle of the crazy-bitch-exes versus the good girls. The psychos gained a point when they permanently drove Mason and me apart.

  Kelsey: Glad to hear it, Cupcake. Have fun *winking emoji*

  Lucy and I have known each other for so long that I don’t remember how the cupcake nickname came about, especially as I’m the cupcake obsessed one. But the name stuck and I frequently use it.

  Stuffing my phone back into the pocket of my jeans, I put the last of the groceries away before flopping down on my small pale grey and blush pink sofa. The material is super soft and shimmery and is my most favorite place to curl up with a blanket.

  Yes, I’m a grown woman who loves cupcakes, the color pink, things that sparkle and if you throw in a unicorn, I’ll probably love you forever. If anyone has a problem with this, they’re not my kind of person anyway.

  I’ve always been older than my years so I refuse to deny myself the things I enjoy for the sake of someone else’s opinion. Case and point; the tub of ice cream I’m currently prying open like a starved wild animal. If someone dared to mention how I’m eating chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips and swirls of caramel before my dinner or that I haven’t worked out in about a week, I’d use my feral claws to scratch their eyes out.

  …Yeah, it’s been that kind of day.

  I miss Mason so damn much.

  Part of me wishes I never messaged him, that I could keep pretending that he doesn’t exist and that I don’t have to drive past his firehouse daily.

  Of course, I’m able to do this without looking longingly at the building for even the tiniest glimpse of him *note the sarcasm*.

  But today Lucy’s needs outweighed my own, so I pulled up my big girl pants and sucked it up. Took one for the team. And every other shitty motivational saying that’s used to make us feel better about the crappy decisions we’ve had to make.

  Lucy and Max still had a shot at happiness so it was worth pouring salt on my very raw heart for them…because Mason and I already had our shot and we crashed and burned.

  Thanks to his ex-wife, Helen.

  The woman is the devil personified and I still wonder, all these months later, how Mason was ever married to the self-centered witch.

  As much as I want to blame her entirely for denying me the future I finally thought I’d be lucky enough to have, we gave her power over us. Or specifically, Mason did.

  I didn’t like living with her bullshit, but I’d have done it for a life with Mason. Mason, on the other hand, had a hard time dealing with her and he let it get to him until our relationship became more stress than pleasure, which was her plan all along. I never understood why he wasn’t firmer with her – it’s not like they had children to fight custody over. From my understanding, the division of assets is pretty straight forward, even if Helen is dragging her feet on the divorce.

  Then I realized that in her own messed up way, she still wants Mason and he was trying to be kind to her feelings, even though she was the polar fucking opposite to us. In the end, it cost us our relationship.

  I let him dump me without causing a scene or getting angry. I could’ve fought harder for him, but what was the point? He wasn’t fighting for us and had already let her make him feel ashamed for dating a woman fourteen years his junior. As there’s nothing I can do about my age, there was no use in fighting his decision. I can’t magically make the stigma disappear; all I could do was hope that he’d find a way to live with it with me.

  It didn’t work out that way. So I left with my dignity intact.

  And now, six months on, it still hurts.

  Helen played the society-moral-high-ground card and my heart got crushed because of something so stupidly arbitrary.

  Still, I can’t bring myself to hate Mason for ending us. He comes from a pretty conservative family – the wealthy upstanding kind that holds local fundraisers for the Aspen elite. The type of events I’d never in a million years be invited to. The only way the Fox family notices me is if they visit the Mayor and I fetch them a drink, as per the requirements of my PA role.

  They would not see me as suitable wife material for their hero son – especially not when he has the ‘perfect’ wife on paper. Helen Fox is everything they want in a daughter-in-law and they’ve made no secret about the fact that they don’t want the divorce finalized and that they hope/demand their son reconciles with her…because they have no idea their son has moved on.

  That’s another bone of contention; in all our months of dating, we never went public. Mason wanted to keep us quiet until his divorce was finalized, to the point that I couldn’t even tell Lucy. She found out today when she asked why I had Fire Chief, Mason Fox’s number and I finally confessed the truth. Lucy saw through me straight away and asked the question I’ve spent months avoiding…do I still love him?

  Yes. Yes, I do.

  …And it fucking sucks.

  Loving someone you can’t be with is the universe’s way of inflicting cruel, slow, and painful torture. Exactly how long do the powers that be expect me to bleed over this?

  Fucking forever judging from the heart palpitations I had when I saw the little icon telling me he was replying to my message.

  I’m so goddamn pathetic.

  Which means there’s only one thing left to do…

  Eat more ice cream.

  Possibly consume a bottle of wine.

  Refuse to get out of bed tomorrow.

  Ignore the person who’s interrupting this plan by knocking on my door.

  Fuck. Off.

  I grudgingly pull myself up off the sofa and with the same level of enthusiasm I have for an appointment with my gynecologist, I drag my feet to the door and open it…

  My jaw hits the ground at the same time as my precious tub of ice cream because standing before me in all his salt and pepper, dark-haired, gorgeous glory is Mason.

  His lips quirk in the slightest of smiles at my startled expression and it makes my insides squirm; I’m well aware of the power of those lips and even more aware of what I’ve been missing these past six months.

  I’ll give you a clue: I’ve been missing a lot.

  Without say
ing a word, he takes a step inside my apartment, bends down without breaking eye contact, and picks up my now forgotten about ice cream.

  Let the fucker melt on the floor, I have bigger things to think about.

  Mason’s hazel eyes sparkle with mischief as he tries to hand the tub to my frozen-in-shock body. When I don’t respond and just continue staring at him, he walks past me and deposits it on my small kitchen island. With his long stride and the fact my apartment is cutely compact, he doesn’t have to walk far.

  Mason is the perfect example of ‘hate to see you leave but love to watch you go’. The man has solidly muscular thighs and ass, and the dirty little part of my mind all too readily remembers the power behind that part of his body…

  …The man has skill and stamina and can fuck for hours.

  His smirk broadens when he catches sight of the blush creeping across my cheeks.

  “Hey, Kels. You staring at my ass again?”

  “We haven’t spoken in six months and that’s the first thing you say?” I’m not accusatory, just temporarily shocked he called me out on my perusal of his body so easily after everything that’s happened.

  “We haven’t seen each other in six months and staring at my ass is one of the first things you do?” He arches his brow at me, teasing me and enjoying the blush that’s growing deeper and hotter by the second.

  “Touché. Not that it isn’t a fantastic sight, but why are you here, Mason?”

  “You heard from Lucy?” he asks, his tone shifting ever so slightly as he looks nervously from me to the window and back again. I don’t have much of a view from any of my windows, but it does let in a generous amount of light, making the place feel more spacious than it is.

  “I have. She and Max are fine. Thank you for your help with that.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Don’t dance around the subject, Mason. You’re not here to talk about Lucy and Max. There’s something on your mind so you may as well get to it.”