Text copyright ©2017 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.
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 (7-27-17)
For the Love of Beard (8-31-17)
Dedication
To my man. Your beard really is an inspiration. <3
Acknowledgements
Golden Czermak aka Furiousfotog—I love everything about this cover and photo.
Jacob Wilson—I loved every single photo you’ve taken, but this one has to be my favorite.
Danielle—As I’m sure you know already, I really wouldn’t know what to do without you. Thank you for making my babies shine.
Asli—You’re the first to get my babies, and it make my heart happy to know that you love them as much as I do.
Kellie Montgomery—thank you for editing my babies.
He’s only a friend.
Those words had haunted him from the moment Jessie James had heard them muttered from the girl who held his heart, and whom he thought had his back.
Fourteen years later, he still feels those words like a brand on his soul.
Lucky for him he has a son to focus on, a full-time job that demands his attention the rest of the day, and not a single moment to spare for a woman who won’t stand up for him when he needs her the most.
He’s only a friend.
The words had slipped out of Ellen’s mouth, and before she could recall them, or better yet, explain them, Jessie is gone from her life for good, taking her heart with him.
She tries to move on, to climb her way out of the pit of despair, but not one single person – regardless of how badly she wants to make it work – can fill the void that was left in his wake.
Time heals all wounds.
Or at least that is how the saying goes.
It’s a crock of crap, though.
Fourteen years pass when Jessie and Ellen see each other again without the influence of the town and bad memories surrounding them, and it’s as if not a single day has passed.
Ellen knows the instant that her eyes see her old love that she’s still just as in love with him today as she was all those years ago.
The problem is that Jessie wants nothing to do with her. Or at least that’s what he keeps telling himself.
Prologue
Love is finding someone to get fat with.
-Fact of life
Jessie
Age seventeen
“Oh, my God, Mom!” Ellen cried out in frustration. “There’s nothing wrong going on here! He’s only a friend.”
Ellen had lied.
My heart skipped a beat as, yet again, the damn girl didn’t claim to have anything going on with me. Ellen wouldn’t acknowledge that we had any type of a relationship.
Am I fucking stupid or something? How was this ever going to work when she wouldn’t even acknowledge that we were more than just friends?
Her mother looked at her like she knew she was lying, but we all knew that she couldn’t prove it.
We hadn’t gone too far, and I was sitting here, on the couch, just like she’d asked me to do.
Don’t touch. Don’t do anything untoward. I’ll be watching.
Sure, I’d had my hands down Ellen’s pants before Marian had walked in here, but she didn’t need to know that.
“I think it’s time for you to go home, Jessie.”
Ellen’s mother’s anger was palpable, and I knew before she said anything that Ellen would never hear the end of it.
You’re going to get a bad reputation. Why would you want to date a boy like that?
Jessie James? Really? You know he’s trouble.
One day you’re going to wind up hurt and pregnant, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
“All right, ma’am.” I stood up. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ellie.”
Ellen stood up, and she waved goodbye. Both of us knew better than to touch in front of her mom or dad. If we did, they started to turn red in the face.
It wasn’t like I was an axe murderer or anything, but they didn’t seem to care.
I was lucky they even let me in their house.
I waved goodbye to Ellen and walked down the hallway to the front door, wondering how long it would be before the next bus arrived at the bus stop.
I’d just gotten to the front door when I heard Ellen’s mom start talking.
“Seriously, there’s no way in hell that kid is only eighteen,” Marian whispered—just not soft enough for me not to hear. “He has a damn beard, Ellen. You can’t do this anymore. Your father was going to talk to you later, but I can’t wait until then. This either ends or we won’t pay for your frivolities anymore. That means no cell phone. No car. No college. No nothing. You’ll have to get a job.”
I froze with my hand on the knob.
Ellen’s dream was always to go to school. Her hope was to go into the medical field and become a doctor, like her brother was in the process of doing.
“Mom, that’s not fair!” Ellen said. “You know how much college means to me. You know!”
I knew, too. I knew.
“Then I won’t go to college,” Ellen snapped. “If that’s the way you want to treat me, then I’ll leave and never come back. This has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the fact that you can’t stand to see me making a decision that you haven’t confirmed as good, first.”
And that was why I couldn’t do this to her anymore. If I had to let her go to let her fly, then I’d do it.
&
nbsp; I dropped my chin to my chest.
I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t ruin another life. Not when I was well on the way to ruining mine and my son’s.
“He has a kid out of wedlock, didn’t graduate high school and is working a minimum wage job. There’s literally nothing you can tell me here that will make this all right. He’ll hold you down. You will end up taking care of his kid, you’ll drop out of college, and he’ll get you hooked on drugs.”
“I already told you he’s a friend. Not to mention he’s a welder’s assistant. I never knew you to be a snob.”
My belly sank.
I didn’t deal drugs, even though most of the town thought I did.
It was hard to deny it when your parents did. Hence the reason I was now on my own, with no diploma and working a minimum wage job, when I could be attending college on a football scholarship.
When you had a kid to take care of, and nobody to watch him while you were at school or while you were at work, you had to make certain sacrifices. Unfortunately, school was one of them.
It’d been two years since Linc had come into my life, and not a single day went by that I regretted anything I’d done or given up for him.
I thought I was doing all right. Thought that maybe, after time, Ellen’s family would see me as the man I was, not the man they thought I was.
But I was wrong.
With one final look in the direction of where Ellen had last been standing, I walked down the steps and didn’t look back.
If I hurried, I wouldn’t have to pay the babysitter I’d managed to get for the evening; that extra ten dollars that would’ve killed me to lose.
I walked away, rubbing my chest as if it would somehow help the gaping hole that had suddenly formed where my heart was.
Chapter 1
Don’t piss in your boot because you think it’s funny.
-Things I never thought I would have to tell my kid not to do.
Jessie
“Why the hell are you out here and not in your fucking room doing that?” I asked my sixteen-year-old son, Linc.
Linc looked up from his homework and shrugged.
The problem with Linc doing his homework out here meant that he had the TV blaring, his phone on some stupid YouTube video, and his pencil tapping a million miles an hour while he hummed to some random song that only he could hear.
He was also nearly naked. Had been for the majority of his life.
He ignored me as if I hadn’t said a word.
“Seriously,” I said to him. “What makes you think it’s okay to sit here in your underwear with the fuckin’ front window wide ass open? The people in this neighborhood are not down with that, and I’d rather they not egg our shit to communicate that to us. Not to mention you don’t pay the fuckin’ electric bill, and it’s cold as fuck out.”
Linc snorted.
“They’d have to be able to walk close to our cars and, since most of them are old geezers, I don’t see that happening,” he countered. “What’s gotten up your ass?”
I grunted, walking to the kitchen to grab a beer. It’d been a long fucking day, and I had to go back to work and do it all over again tomorrow.
I was a welder for a pipeline. My job was exhaustingly hard work that I fucking loved. I made a whack and paid my bills, but I had to work long hours to do it. Nearly eighty hours a week.
“Someone called for you today. A woman.”
“What was her name?” I asked, scanning the contents of the refrigerator for something to eat. “Did you eat all the leftover pizza?”
Linc and I had pizza a lot. Anything that was fast, usually something that came out of a box, was one of our go-to menu items seeing as neither one of us really knew how to cook. Lunchables, macaroni and sometimes Hamburger Helper when we were feeling adventurous.
“Ellen?” Linc guessed. “I wrote it down on the pad next to the phone.”
The name ‘Ellen’ wasn’t common, but it was still unlikely that a girl from my past—almost fourteen years ago to be exact—to come back and haunt me some two-thousand odd miles away from where I knew she had moved to all those years ago.
“What did she want?” I asked. “And you never answered me on the pizza.”
“That was gone around three in the morning,” Linc chuckled unrepentantly. “And I wrote it all down on the note.”
I closed the fridge and moved across the small space to the counter next to the landline that I wasn’t sure why we still had, and I stared at the pad of paper with two words on it.
Club party.
“Can I go?”
I looked up to find Linc, the boy who was the spitting image of me, standing at my side.
Already standing at six foot one, he was likely to continue to grow according to his pediatrician who said he’d probably reach my height, if not pass it. He had jet-black hair with a slight wave to it, also exactly like mine.
Hell, he even had a beard, just like me. Though, his was trimmed and neatly kept because the school he was attending informed him if it wasn’t done just so, he’d have to shave it or leave the school.
We had to fight for the beard, so, if he wanted to keep it, he’d damn well follow their rules or I’d make him shave it off myself.
His body mass was the only thing still lagging behind mine. He was much skinnier, but he was definitely on the verge of getting some bulk, just like I’d been at sixteen. He was still in that in-between stage, no longer a boy but not yet a man. You could see the promise of what he would become some day, but he just wasn’t quite there yet.
Me, I was six foot four, two-hundred-fifty pounds of solid muscle, including a six-pack that was honed the hard way—through long days of manual labor on the pipeline. I had a beard that was on the verge of being too bushy, but I’d lost the desire to impress anyone a long fucking time ago.
I was me, and I wasn’t going to change, even though there were some who wished I would.
“I’ll have to ask if it’s kid friendly,” I laughed when my son gave me a face that clearly conveyed what he thought about me lumping him in the kid-friendly category. “And you didn’t mention the time, or why she called to tell me something I already knew.”
“She was supposedly reminding everyone about it since someone complained a few weeks ago that they weren’t reminded. Oh, and I’m not a kid.”
My kid wasn’t a kid. He couldn’t be when he was raised by me.
I’d done my best, but I’d been more like a brother than a parent. We were sixteen years apart in age, and there wasn’t a day that went by where I did the whole parenting thing correctly.
He had to grow up faster than most. By the age of ten, I was leaving him at home for extended periods of time because I’d been switched to a different shift that meant I didn’t get home from work until a little after nine o’clock.
By the age of twelve, he was spending almost the entire night alone, every other day, because my shifts were switched again.
By fifteen, we didn’t even pass each other for the entire day at times.
Now, at sixteen, I had a better paying position. One where I worked days, though they were long and just as tiring—if not more so—as my previous job. I was a supervisor (or manager, whatever) and being the boss was the pits. I had a low tolerance for dealing with people’s bullshit, and there was a lot of that in this job.
The only saving grace was being able to pay all my bills, and slowly drive down the debt I’d accrued over the years. Not to mention I was able to afford a house payment for the first time ever.
“You took me to the last one.”
I grinned. “That’s right. I did.”
“I can’t believe you’re prospecting. I’m so fuckin’ excited.”
I just shook my head.
My kid rolled his eyes at me and went back to the couch. He came back to me with a paper in his hand. “Read this and make sure it looks good.”
I grabbed th
e paper and read it, my heart tightening slightly when I read the words on the paper.
“You think I’m a superhero?” I asked quietly, my eyes flicking up to my son’s, where he was leaning against the wall.
Linc looked at me, really looked at me, and nodded.
“Yeah, Dad. I think you’re a fucking superhero,” he grated out. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now, now would I? My paper was on someone who inspires me to be a better person. That’s you, bitch.”
I grabbed my man-child in a headlock and brought him in close to me, then pressed a kiss to the top of his head before taking him down to the ground and tickling him like I used to do when he was six.
“Get out of here, kid. Let me read. You get your shit picked up outside, or it’ll get stolen.”
My kid left, thankfully putting on his pants before he walked outside to pick up his football gear, leaving me to read a paper that was enough to bring a grown man to tears.
***
I pulled my tired body out of bed, walked stiffly to the bathroom, and clambered into the shower.
Yesterday had been long and tiring, but I loved being a Dixie Wardens’ prospect.
Being called out at three in the morning because another member’s wife was in trouble made me feel like I was actually wanted. Needed. Like I had something to offer the men of the Dixie Wardens.
Sadly, my job didn’t allow me to do that all the time. I couldn’t just take off whenever I felt like it as some of the other brothers could. I had to work from six in the morning until five or six at night, Monday through Friday. If I didn’t, I didn’t have the cash for the house payment or have enough money to buy food after all of my credit card bills were paid, or the loan payments that I’d taken out when I couldn’t afford to put food on my son’s plate, or buy him school clothes for the year.
Not and keep Linc in school. A school where he was finally excelling.
Groaning with the need to fall back in bed, I finished my shower, then went to work. Only to do it all over again the next night.
Chapter 2
When a woman starts laughing during an argument, you should probably shield yourself, because she’s just flipped her psycho switch.
The Beard Made Me Do It (The Dixie Warden Rejects Book 5) Page 1
