Text copyright ©2019 Lani Lynn Vale
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
Since you know how much I dislike writing my dedications, I’ve decided to tell you what’s on my mind right this very moment.
Random thought of the day, I wish sugar didn’t make you fat. I’ve been thinking about glazed donuts all morning, and I’ve done nothing but contemplate how one would taste. If I went at five in the morning, they’d still be warm. I wouldn’t be able to stop at just one, either. I’d have to eat at least three. And then I’d have to get a cup of milk to go with it…and yeah. Diets suck.
Happy reading!
Acknowledgements
Chris Silk- Model
Golden Czermak- Photographer
Danielle Palumbo- My awesome content editor.
Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Cover Me Darling- Cover Artist
My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Kendra, Diane, Leah, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
What’s Next
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:
The Freebirds
Boomtown
Highway Don’t Care
Another One Bites the Dust
Last Day of My Life
Texas Tornado
I Don’t Dance
The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC
Lights To My Siren
Halligan To My Axe
Kevlar To My Vest
Keys To My Cuffs
Life To My Flight
Charge To My Line
Counter To My Intelligence
Right To My Wrong
Code 11- KPD SWAT
Center Mass
Double Tap
Bang Switch
Execution Style
Charlie Foxtrot
Kill Shot
Coup De Grace
The Uncertain Saints
Whiskey Neat
Jack & Coke
Vodka On The Rocks
Bad Apple
Dirty Mother
Rusty Nail
The Kilgore Fire Series
Shock Advised
Flash Point
Oxygen Deprived
Controlled Burn
Put Out
I Like Big Dragons Series
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie
Dragons Need Love, Too
Oh, My Dragon
The Dixie Warden Rejects
Beard Mode
Fear the Beard
Son of a Beard
I’m Only Here for the Beard
The Beard Made Me Do It
Beard Up
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch (10-16-18)
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom Guardians MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
F Bomb
Blurb
Zee + Annmarie and Tan + Jubilee.
Forever. No exceptions.
They were to have the picture-perfect life together. Everything was all planned out.
Jubilee was to marry Eitan, and Ezekiel was to marry Annmarie. That’s how it was always supposed to be from the moment that they met. Textbook, right?
Wrong.
Eitan and Annmarie die in a freak accident that never should have happened, leaving the two survivors reeling.
Sixteen years later, Jubilee and Zee can’t even be in the same room with each other before things begin to deteriorate. Too many memories. Too much pain. Not enough forgiveness.
They’re like hellfire and holy water, and neither one of them are willing to admit that they’re wrong.
Then one day things change, and all of a sudden, they’re looking at each other like maybe they aren’t each other’s enemies after all.
Prologue
She’s standing on a line between giving up and seeing how much more she can take.
-Jubilee’s father to Jubilee’s mother
Zee
Age 9
“Give it back!” I screamed at the little girl.
The little devil known as Jubilee waved the hat like it was a red flag, and like the bull that I was acting like, I started to charge.
She squeaked in surprise when she realized her danger and started to run.
Unfortunately, when she did, she tripped.
The hat went one way, and her body went the other.
Later I would be told that Jubilee was lucky that she didn’t fall into the fire like my hat did.
Now? Well now all I saw was my favorite ball cap burning up and a six-year-old girl on the ground laughing to blame for it.
***
Jubilee
Age 9
“Give me that back!” I yelled, mad because, once again, Ezekiel had stolen my candy and then shoved it down his throat because he thought I wouldn’t want it back.
Joke was on him, though.
I did.
And I’d get it back no matter what I had to do.
“You snooze, you lose, Wednesday!” Ezekiel yelled, laughing his butt off over whatever he found so funny about this situation.
I hated. HATED. When he called me Wednesday, after Wednesday Addams off The Addams Family. The girl that looked like a goth when she wasn’t. I wasn’t goth! I was just pale and dark-haired! So I liked black. Whatever!
He was wrong about something else, too. There was nothing funny about this situation. It was tragic.
Who ate a person’s M&Ms when they were literally in their hands? It wasn’t like I had left them unattended.
“Give them back, Zee,” Eitan ordered, looking angry on my behalf.
Really, he was tired of listeni
ng to me and his brother fight, just like my own sister was. Which was why Annmarie was in the other room, just like she always was when Eitan and Ezekiel McGrew came over.
“Sorry,” Zee said as he poured the rest of my M&Ms down his throat.
That’s when I tackled him, then started punching and kicking him with my fists of fury until our parents separated us an entire minute later.
“Getting slow on the uptake, kid,” Gordon McGrew, Zee’s father, said.
Zee glared at his dad, then at me.
“She took me by surprise,” Zee lied.
“Gordon, Ezekiel ate my M&Ms. Can you tell him to give me his candy for repayment?” I batted my eyes at Zee’s dad.
Gordon turned his eyes to Zee.
“That right, boy?” Gordon asked.
Zee shrugged. “She wasn’t eating them.”
Liar.
“Then you get to either give her your candy or pay her back. Your choice.”
Five minutes later, I took every second to relish the taste of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that used to belong to Zee, making sure to moan and groan out my pleasure with each bite.
“So good,” I groaned.
Zee threw the TV remote at my face, and I ducked it.
“Still so good.”
“Die.”
***
Age 13
“Leave her alone, bro,” Eitan said. “She’s going to fucking kill you.”
“She’s not going to do a thing to me because she wants to be out just as much as I do,” Zee said. “And if she goes whining to Daddy, they’re going to know that we snuck out to go to the movies, then she’ll get into trouble.”
I clenched my fists so tightly that the blood left them.
“Come on, Wednesday,” Zee teased. “Take a drink. It’s not going to kill you.”
I pushed the bottle away.
Again.
“I’m not drinking that,” I said. “A, I don’t want a drink. B, you’ve slobbered all over it and I’m not touching anything that’s been anywhere near your mouth.”
“Your sister’s mouth has been near mine, and I saw you hug her the other day,” Zee teased.
I glanced up at the ceiling.
“I really do hate you.”
Eitan pulled me into his arms, and I had to fight the urge to pull away.
Despite Eitan being the sweeter of the two brothers, and also being my boyfriend, I had a hard time hanging out with him when he was near his brother. Because he acted like a completely different person when he was around.
“Whatever, Wednesday.” Zee took a swig and handed the bottle to Annmarie, who took a drink of her own and passed it to Eitan, who followed suit.
My stomach twisted.
But I didn’t break.
I wouldn’t.
Somebody needed to be sober.
And I was only thirteen after all, even if being around these three made me feel like I was much older.
***
Age 15
My feet dragged as I walked down the aisle toward the coffin.
My sister was there, in that wooden box, with the lid closed.
Dead.
That had been at my father’s request. The closed casket.
I’d tried to get him to leave it open, but he hadn’t allowed it.
I looked down at my arm, noticing the spider web of scarring that hadn’t killed me but had killed my twin sister, Annmarie, and Eitan, my boyfriend.
You want to know who else it hadn’t killed? Eitan’s twin brother, Ezekiel.
The boy that didn’t miss a single second letting me know how much he disliked me.
A sniffle had me turning to see my mother staring at me with tears in her eyes. My father had his arm wrapped solidly around my mother’s shoulders, and he was staring at the casket I was now standing in front of.
I stared at the beautiful bouquet of roses that sat atop her coffin lid and felt my heart start to race.
Not because of my newfound heart problem this time, but because I could feel Ezekiel walking up beside me and standing there next to me.
He didn’t say a word, and neither did I.
We didn’t really have to.
Not anymore, anyway.
I knew without him saying what he was thinking.
He didn’t like me. I didn’t like him.
He hated me because Annmarie died, and I hated him because Eitan had.
Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, we’d been standing in the exact right spot.
When the lightning had struck, Ezekiel had done the unthinkable. He’d grabbed me because I was closer to him and had allowed Eitan to grab Annmarie.
That hadn’t worked out nearly as well as they’d planned it.
They were both dead now, weren’t they?
“This is your fault, you know,” Zee whispered, sounding broken.
I turned my head toward him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. In addition, I have no idea why you would think that.”
“The only reason we were all out there was because we were following you,” he growled.
I gave him the side eye. “I have no clue why you were following me. I was going home. If you want to get technical, the only reason we were all standing there in the freakin’ rain was because of you. It didn’t have to actually be done in the rain, under that big pine.”
He scoffed at my words, and it took everything inside of me not to rear back and punch him straight in the face.
That stupid, pretty, looks nothing like Eitan face.
Eitan and Ezekiel McGrew, sons of Gordon McGrew, who was also the president of the Arkansas chapter of the Dixie Wardens MC, were not replicas of him. Well, one was. Eitan. Ezekiel was not. He was fair to Gordon and Eitan’s dark. Ezekiel had blond hair and red scruff when he didn’t shave, whereas Eitan and Gordon were dark-haired.
Zee burned the moment he was in the sunlight whereas Eitan and Gordon would turn a pretty shade of tan.
Zee was the artist and Eitan and Gordon were the brutes.
Which, I supposed, had been part of the problem. Eitan, though I loved him, was much too hard on me and everyone around him. He was firm, unforgiving, and controlling.
That’d been why I’d left. Why I’d decided that maybe Eitan wasn’t the man that I thought he was. There was only so much ‘why can’t you be like your sister’ that I could take before I broke.
“Go to hell, Zee,” I said under my breath.
Leaving the flower I was holding on the coffin, I didn’t look back.
Chapter 1
Everything will be okay in the end. If not, there’s always beer.
-Zee’s secret thoughts
Zee
Sixteen years later
Today was my thirty-fourth birthday, and there were probably about a million people in this world that I could see. Yet I had to see him.
Baron Joy, the firefighter that had stolen my girlfriend of almost three years. The man that Zuri had chosen over me.
See, here’s the thing.
In the beginning, I would’ve let it go.
Did it suck? Yes.
Did it piss me off that she’d cheated instead of just telling me she was upset with how much I worked? Yes.
But, I was an adult. I was able to make grown-up decisions despite being hurt.
Yet, neither one of them had informed me of any involvement.
I’d taken Zuri to a Christmas party with me to the fire station last year. During the gift exchange, I’d planned on asking Zuri to move in with me. Except Baron Joy, also known as BJ by the fire department, had happened.
I hadn’t given much thought to Zuri disappearing the moment we’d arrived. She was a popular woman, and the firefighter wives had loved her to death. She’d gotten along well with all of the women, and even more, she’d fit in despite being new to a town that was so tight-knit that sometimes it was hard to tell your neighbor from your family member.
It was only after an hour or so
of not seeing her that I decided to go look for her. And I’d found her all right. In the part of the station that the local ambulance service used as their living quarters while they were on shift.
There I’d walked in on them not only kissing, hugging, and fucking, but I’d also walked in on a discussion between the two of them that consisted of Baron telling Zuri he loved her, and Zuri saying it back.
From there it’d just been a clusterfuck, which led to now, five months later, and me unable to be in the same room as Baron Joy without me wanting to filet the skin of his face off with my bowie knife.
So, of course, it was no damn surprise that he walked into the same damn bar that I went to every fucking year and drank on my birthday.
Because not only was it my birthday, but it was my dead twin’s birthday.
Needless to say, I’d already been in a shit mood when I’d arrived at my favorite bar in town.
It’d worsened when I saw Jubilee there, doing the same goddamn thing I’d been set on doing.
Sometimes I thought that she did it on purpose, let me see her. Just so she could torture me.
Though, when I thought about it, Jubilee wasn’t that type of person.
If I was an honest man, I’d realize that Jubilee was likely here for the same reason I was—to get drunk and forget about my brother and my past.
Yet, when it came to Jubilee Cope, nothing ever came easy, and I never was able to have a straight head.
I’d been doing my best to ignore Jubilee as she’d done me the same courtesy when they walked in.
If there was one person that knew where I went on this day, it was Zuri.
Zuri, who’d been a kind, decent woman while I was seeing her, had turned into a vindictive cow the moment that I’d kicked her out of my life. It hadn’t been my fault that my father and Silas, the owner of Life Flight in Bear Bottom, had kicked her to the curb, too.
What did she think, that she would keep the job that I got for her?
No.
I had patience, and I could work with people I didn’t like, but I couldn’t work with someone like Zuri. There were limits to everything, and Zuri had surpassed them.
Honestly, it’d been sort of a relief for me to go to Silas and tell him that I was quitting because of Zuri. What I hadn’t expected was for Silas to fire Zuri just so he could keep me on part-time.
It Happens (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 6) Page 1
