For the first time in a long time, I felt completely loved.
On the way out to the car, I muttered, “I hate that I have to go into Play It Again.”
Justin asked, “Do you want to quit, Rascal?”
“I don’t know. I was pissed at Kathy for a while, but I actually like working there. I don’t want to be there forever, but it’s okay for now.”
“We can talk about it if you decide you want to leave.”
Jesus. How had I ever doubted this man? “We better hit the road. Meet you at the house?”
Devon tugged on my sleeve. “Can I ride with Justin, mom?”
I looked at Justin to see if he even wanted my son along for the ride. Before I could ask, he said, “Yeah, c’mon, kiddo.” Justin gave me a quick kiss before grabbing Devon’s hand.
Glancing at Sarah, I asked, “Do you want to go with Justin, too?”
“No.” After hugging my sweet daughter, I turned around to face my parents’ house where they all stood around the door. I waved at them before Sarah and I got into the old van and I turned the key in the ignition.
Once on the road, the two of us were quiet for a good part of the way, maintaining a steady distance from Justin’s truck. Silly Devon kept rolling down the window to stick out his hand to wave, making Sarah and me laugh, and I wondered if Justin was regretting allowing him along for the ride.
“Hey, mom?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“I heard you tell Aunt Megan you think you’re the world’s worst mother.”
Oh, Jesus. A shiver shot up my spine. Sarah was supposed to have been playing with her cousins in the basement out of earshot. But she’d heard it just the same, and I’d discovered today that the truth really had set me free. I wasn’t about to lie to my child, not now. “Yes, I said that.”
“But you’re not, mom. You love me, and you’re helping me. Isn’t that what the best parents do for their kids?”
The tears that had never left all day became so overwhelming at that point that I couldn’t see to drive anymore, so I pulled over to the side of the road. Then I placed my hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Yes, baby girl, I do love you. I’d do anything for you. And I’m so sorry for what’s happened. I—I never wanted anything to ever happen to you.”
“But, mom, why do you feel so guilty? It’s not your fault.”
Her words sunk down into my bones: It’s not your fault. And yet I had been feeling like it had been entirely my fault, that I had somehow been negligent. Sarah’s words washed over me, atoning me of a good portion of the guilt I’d been holding onto over the past year.
Unbuckling my seatbelt, I leaned over enough that I could hug my daughter. “Just know that I love you with all that I am and, if I can help it, I will never let anything happen to you again.”
“Don’t promise that, mom. Just promise you’ll always love me.”
“Yes, yes, absolutely. You’re a part of me. You’ll always be a part of me. When you hurt, I hurt. I only want what’s best for you.”
As I held my firstborn, still crying, I realized that my parents were the same—they only wanted what was best for me. I got over this new outpouring of tears and adjusted in my seat, ready to get back on the road when I spied Justin’s truck coming toward us down the highway. After he pulled a U, he parked behind the car and then hopped out of the truck, dashing up to the driver’s side of the van, and I rolled down the window.
“Everything okay?” My knight in shining armor asked.
“Great, actually.”
Justin smiled back at me, stroking my cheek with his finger. “Then what say we get our family home?”
Damn, I loved the sound of that. I nodded, re-buckling myself as I looked at Sarah again and winked. My daughter actually grinned back, and in that instant I saw the beautiful baby I’d once held in my arms, the sweet toddler, the young lady, and the woman Sarah would someday become.
Together, we had made it. And from this point forward, as a family, life would be better. Deep down, I knew it.
THE END
* * *
Thank you for reading! I hope you loved meeting Randi and Justin. The next book in the Small Town Secrets series is Love and Romance. When steamy romance author Elizabeth loses the guy she calls her “pretend boyfriend,” what happens when her good-looking best friend steps in to pick up the pieces?
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Excerpt from Love and Romance
“Dude, just a second.” Holding up a finger, Ridley whips his cell phone out of his back pocket. Oh, yes, those faded blue jeans hug his ass, and just how nicely they do so is more apparent when he’s pulling something out of a pocket. The ring tone that plays is either Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” or something super nasty like Mӧtley Crüe’s “Ten Seconds to Love.” He brings the phone up to his ear after swiping the green Answer button on the screen and says, “Yeah, babe?” His full lips almost touch the phone but not quite, almost as though the phone screen is her lips and he is teasing her.
“I need you. Now.”
The corner of his mouth turns up in half a smile. God, he is so cocky that it’s almost a turnoff. “At your service.” He blinks, the long dark lashes that frame his blue eyes almost touching the inside lens of the sunglasses. He ends the call, sliding the phone back in his pocket, and saunters over to his Harley before turning back to his friend. “Sorry, man, but duty calls. The girlfriend needs me. Bad.” Smirking, he slides a helmet over his dark blond hair, pulling the strap snugly over his chin, avoiding the hair from the sexy goatee that he’s growing out.
* * *
I shook my head, trying to listen to what Ridley really said. I’d always imagined that kind of at your service response when I called, but, truthfully, I could usually sense the exasperation in his voice. I was pretty sure that the words in his head were bad timing, bitch, but who could resist a no-strings-attached booty call? Certainly not Ridley.
Still, I needed him and I needed him right this second. “Look…can you come or not?”
I could hear the smile in his voice, damn him. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, little Lizzie.” Oh, God, I hated when he called me that—and he knew it. But now was not the time to quibble. “I’ll be there in a sec. What are we doing this time?”
I suppose now is as good a time as any to let you know what was going on. I was an English instructor at Winchester Community College. It wasn’t a bad gig, especially since I couldn’t get a tenured position at a university to save my soul. Believe me, I tried when I’d first earned my fancy MFA in Creative Writing. I should have listened to my advisor back in my undergrad days when she’d told me an MFA was one of those dime-a-dozen degrees, and I’d be lucky to get a job teaching contemporary poetry at a soup kitchen in exchange for a slice of bread. At the time, though, I’d been sure the coursework would make me a much better writer than I’d been when I’d started and that the degree would pay for itself.
But five years after getting said degree, I was working my ass off paying through the nose for student loans that seemed to never dwindle in size. In all fairness, the community college was paying the bills and I had decent benefits, but I wanted more. Much more. That’s where the MFA really did come in handy. After spending a good ten years—spanning part of high school, college, grad school, and life thereafter—trying to break into the world of fiction publishing, I found it damned near impossible. Why? Because it’s not how good you are, it’s who you know (or who you blow). Sure, I’d had a modicum of success publishing poetry (but, sorry, a copy of the journal your poem appears in won’t pay the bills—hell, it won’t even buy a goddamned cup of coffee—but, in all fairness, it is nice to see your name in print
) and also a few academic articles, but my heart wasn’t in either.
That’s because I had stories swirling in my head, stories that had to be told. Big stories.
Oh, and did I mention? They were what mild-mannered audiences might consider naughty.
That’s where Ridley came into play, so to speak. For some reason, I was compelled to write steamy scenes, but I often wondered how believable they were. I was also afraid they’d start to sound the same—you know, limited by my imagination (or lack thereof, because I didn’t get out much). I was lamenting my nonexistent sex life one night and had gone downtown to have a drink in a local bar—and there appeared Ridley like manna from heaven.
And he was actually hitting on me. Me. Little ol’ me.
Well, not so little. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to sound like one of those women who bitches about her weight when there’s really nothing to complain about, but I’ve always been large breasted. And maybe not so small, considering I carry an extra ten (okay, okay, ten-ish) pounds around as well. I’m not heavy, but I’m self-conscious, and I’ve often imagined that my additional padding is unattractive.
It couldn’t be that I don’t click with men because I seem standoffish or shy or too cerebral for a chat over a beer. Of course not. Don’t be absurd.
That night when I met Ridley, though, I’d been feeling particularly sorry for myself and decided to give in to the pity party that had been brewing inside. I was going to have a couple drinks, damn it, and no one was going to stop me. I was on the second one when Ridley sat on the stool next to me.
Oh, my God.
Instantly, I felt his eyes on me. That was weird because guys just didn’t check me out as a rule. Sure, they’d steal a glance at my boobs, but that was it. They stopped there. As soon as I told a man what I did for a living, I became intimidating.
Not that night, though—not with a little liquor in me. I’m afraid I was probably a little more forward than usual, too. So Ridley sat next to me, his arms were full of tattoos, and you should know right now that tattoos make me weak in the knees. The more, the merrier. I have no idea why, but human skin as a canvas really does it for me, and that’s something I didn’t admit to most people.
As for Ridley, well…I didn’t know at the time that several of his were prison tats.
I’m book smart, okay? Not always street smart. But I can be trained.
So he hit on me, or I hit on him, or it was a combination—I’m not sure now. But one thing led to another and he came to my place.
Let me preface this by saying I hadn’t been with a man in a long time.
A very. Long. Time.
So we fucked all night long. My God, he was just what I needed. Although it would have explained his insane libido, he had not just gotten out of prison. We just had some crazy chemistry that night.
Or maybe it was just the alcohol.
Yeah, it was most definitely the alcohol, because the next morning was awkward as hell. But he saw my books, the ones with my pseudonym Eliza Brennan—and maybe if that had been all he’d seen, I could have just pretended that she was my favorite author. But no…I also had a six-foot banner on the desk next to them, one I’d used at a book signing the week before and hadn’t stuck back in the closet yet. Oh, and all the bookmarks I’d signed so I could mail them off. Those were also a dead giveaway. In all fairness, though, I didn’t have many visitors, so I hadn’t prepared for him. By that point, the ice had not only been broken, it had shattered, so I made us a little breakfast, and he’d brought a couple of my books out to the kitchen where he was skimming through them.
Ridley didn’t seem to be the reading type, but he seemed earnest as he flipped through the pages. “Wow. Couple of F-bombs. Nice.” He started laughing but then he pulled the book closer.
Shit. Had to be a sex scene. I turned back to the eggs and moved them around the skillet with the spatula. As I slid the eggs onto a plate, he said, “Holy shit, woman. You write this stuff?”
Biting my lip, I turned around, meeting his eyes, and even though I felt a little embarrassed, the look on his face was priceless. He was actually impressed.
He was also re-invigorated, shall we say. I wrote my books to warm up bored housewives, but apparently they had the same effect on men as well, and he just couldn’t wait. We fucked up against the counter, and then he ate warm eggs standing by the stove.
The thing about Ridley? He made me feel desirable in a way I never had before, and that made my writing better than it had ever been. I think he loved the novelty of it all. We probably never would have seen each other again, but I made him a proposition before he finished the last slice of bacon. I explained to him my dilemma, that of worrying if my sex scenes were fresh and interesting—or even believable at times—and he promised to help out. At first, it was exciting. Now, I can even admit that I called him once or twice with the excuse that I needed inspiration, when really all I’d needed was a good fucking. And Ridley wasn’t too bad at it, not at first anyway, not to mention he had a rock-hard body. He was very easy on the eyes and awesome to curl up next to.
After a few months, though, the shine wore off the apple. I’m pretty sure it’s fair to say that was for both of us. Sometimes, it seemed like Ridley felt put out by my calls, but he always came through. And I can admit that, while I really liked the way Ridley made me feel, he was about as intellectually stimulating as the doorknob to my bedroom. He wasn’t exactly a nice guy, either. But he was hot as hell—and we had an arrangement.
So when he asked, “What are we doing this time?” I tried to come up with an easy answer. Ridley didn’t need a detailed plot nor, like an actor, did he need a sense of motivation. All I needed to tell him was when, where, and how.
So I did. “Just get your ass over here and start fucking me the second you come in the door. I need it hard and I need it fast.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Through the phone, I could hear him moving as though he were hustling over to my apartment on foot. “Condom?”
I hated that stupid question, because it was particularly inane. I had never not had him wear a condom—he’d been in prison, after all, and I had no clue where his dick had been—but sometimes he would pretend he wasn’t wearing one, just to add to the fantasy. I kept him well-stocked in prophylactics and anything else my writing fantasies required, and I also honored his request that we didn’t do any M/M/F threesomes—or any M/F/M ones, for that matter, although he’d mentioned with a sly grin on his face that he’d be happy to take care of an additional woman any time I liked.
Nice try, pal.
“Not at first—but you’ll need one eventually.” I didn’t want to get him all excited, but today’s fantasy might involve a little oral. I hadn’t quite worked that out in my head yet, but I had a little time before he arrived to make my final decision. So, after we hung up, I sat at my desk and continued writing the scene while waiting for my pretend boyfriend to arrive and sweep me off my feet.
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More by Jade C. Jamison
Want to spent more time in Winchester? You can read LOVE AND ROMANCE, the next story in the Small Town Secrets series.
You can also get other perspectives of Winchester from the Nicki Sosebee series as she spreads her wings as an investigative reporter—all while enjoying her love life. Check out NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS.
If, instead, you prefer rock stars from small towns, the Tangled Web series will satisfy your craving. The series begins with TANGLED WEB.
If a fake engagement story is your thing, you’
ll love CHARADE, the first installment in the Pretense and Promises series.
About the Author
1. Imagine 2. Play some music 3. Write 4. Blow readers away 5. Repeat
Jade C. Jamison is a steamy romance author, heavy metal fangirl, wife and mom, coffee connoisseur, cat lover, and vegan foodie—not necessarily in that order. She loves life and believes we learn our wisest lessons when reading, especially if it’s fiction. Her heroines are fierce, her heroes all but broken, both seeking redemption together. Whether in a small Colorado town or big city, she strives to take her readers’ breath away...one story at a time.
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Join Jade’s newsletter to stay up to date with new releases, get freebies, learn about sales, and more!
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For a list of all of Jade’s books, click here!
Love and Sorrow (Small Town Secrets Book 5) Page 27
