by Serena Bell
“You’ve been having all these revelations about what you want to do with your life,” she said. “Well, I have, too. I’m not quitting my job or anything—not after I’ve practically killed myself this summer to keep it—but I definitely need some kind of other outlet. Something creative. So—yeah. Here it is.”
She’d been painting almost every night since the day Jake had rescued Sam from the babysitter’s whack-job ex.
He lifted the pages one by one, examining them in that way he had, as if she’d disappeared from the room, as if the world had dropped away and there was only her work to take in. Drinking it in.
She leaned over so she could see the paintings too, because she was so happy with them.
Jake and Sam. Only not exactly.
A man with a robot leg.
A man and a boy, playing pinecone baseball.
A man and a boy, running, side by side.
Racing. Winning.
Like him and Sam, only bigger. A whole story she was telling the world.
“I haven’t written the words yet,” she said. “But I know exactly how it starts.”
“How does it start?”
“ ‘My daddy lost his leg in the war.’ ”
He made a sound, a sharp exhalation, and she touched his cheek. “Is that okay?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He touched his thumb to the paper, smoothing over the place where Mira had drawn his hand on Sam’s hair. “This is amazing.”
“Thank you.”
“You said you know how it ends?”
“I think I do. I hope I do.”
“Yeah?” he asked, laying the paintings on the coffee table and reaching for her hands, pulling her down on the couch next to him. He touched her hair reverently, as if it were some semiprecious substance instead of ordinary, sometimes flyaway, blond hair. He looked at her and she leaned into him, into his strength, his heat, and rested her head on his shoulder.
“ ‘And then my Daddy came home to live with us.’ ”
“That’s a good ending.”
“I thought so.”
Epilogue
Mira watched with lascivious pleasure as Jake slipped into his wet suit. She knew he’d gone to great lengths to make sure the suit fit as tightly as comfort allowed—to boost his speed—and his taut, well-muscled torso gleamed with the lube he’d used to ensure the suit would come off easily after the swim.
The crowd was cheering like crazy. The Seattle and Bainbridge papers and social media had somehow gotten wind of Jake’s intention to compete, and a larger-than-usual audience had turned out to cheer him on. While he was strapping on his swim leg and changing clothes, people kept approaching him to congratulate him and thank him and tell him how inspiring he was.
Even her father. Mira had to give him credit; from the moment his flight landed, he’d gone out of his way to be considerate to Jake. And Jake, for his part, while not ready to embrace her father as his new best friend, had settled on a tone somewhere between civil and warily friendly. Of course, Sam had helped forge the tentative truce between the men, because he was oblivious to any lingering tension and wanted his dad and his granddad to do everything with him all the time.
“He’s quite an attentive father,” her own father murmured to her at one point, and she decided that was as close as he was going to come to an endorsement, at least for the time being. And the great thing was? She didn’t need more.
She knew Jake wasn’t sure how he felt about all the people clamoring to wish him well and to ask him about his training. He didn’t feel like a hero, not a war hero and not anyone’s role model. She knew he believed that he had a lot to offer, a lot to tell people, good ideas to share, but that he wasn’t crazy about the idea of people viewing him as someone special. Someone to emulate or hold up as an example or point out to their kids.
“I understand,” she’d told him, last night after they’d had bone-melting pre-race sex. Since the research was split on whether sex before a race improved or inhibited performance, they’d decided to err on the side of orgasm. Afterward, limbs intertwined, he’d brought up how uneasy the media attention made him, how uncomfortable it made him that people had turned his competing in the triathlon into a warm-and-fuzzy public interest story. “But I think you have to accept that no matter how you see yourself, there will be some people who choose to look to you as a hero or a role model. You don’t have celebrity status, but you do have a certain public face, and doing things like competing in triathlons is going to mean you have to accept that responsibility.”
The black neoprene emphasized the breadth of Jake’s chest and the narrowness of his hips, and Mira’s stepmother, who was standing beside her holding Sam’s hand, said, “He’s a fine specimen, honey.”
“Amen to that,” Opal said from Mira’s other side. “Does he have any Ranger friends he can introduce me to?”
Mira laughed. “I’ll ask him. He is a fine specimen, isn’t he?”
“What’s a specimen, Mommy?”
“Your father is very handsome. That’s what Grammy means.”
“Specimen means ‘handsome’?”
“In this case, specimen means ‘example.’ ”
“Why can’t I run the race?”
“No kids,” Mira said. “We’ll find a race you can do with Daddy next summer.”
“Will you do it, too?” Sam asked.
“Sure!” Mira said. “As long as it’s after the wedding. I don’t know if I’ll have time to work, plan a wedding, write two books, and train for a triathlon.”
Several weeks ago, Jake had taken Mira out for dinner to a romantic but unpretentious restaurant and, over molten chocolate cake, pulled out a ring box and asked her to marry him. It wasn’t a complete surprise, since he’d been asking her opinion about jewelry every time they passed a store almost since the day of Sam’s asthma attack, but it had made tears brim in her eyes anyway. “Yes,” she’d said. Just that, simply that, because there wasn’t anything else that needed to be said. Later, she’d moaned it in his ear, too, its meaning at that moment highly ambiguous.
In addition to planning a wedding, she’d have her hands full meeting the writing deadlines that were part of her three-book contract for My Daddy’s Leg. By this time next year, she’d hold her published book in her hands—and so would people all over the country.
The swimmers climbed out of the water and Jake peeled himself out of his wet suit, and began swapping legs. He’d told her he was going to lose more time than most competitors, but he was philosophical about it. “You can argue all day long about whether prosthetics give athletes a natural advantage or a disadvantage. I’m just going to train as hard as I can, use the equipment God and John Harwood gave me, and pray.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” Mira had said.
He’d left out the crazy amount of reading and research he’d done. He’d studied about whether to focus on his strongest skill or whether to balance training across the swim-bike-run events. He’d read about how sprint-distance triathlons—like this one—differed in strategy from standard, long-course, and Ironman-length races. He’d read about how to speed through prosthetic changes, how to deal with chafing, how to talk to people who condescended to him, and what to say to people who tried to tell him he had an unfair advantage. He’d spent hours reading tips and strategies for drafting, where and when to sprint, and how to eat the day before the race.
It was more nerve-racking than Mira had expected, watching Jake in his triathlon. She had as much adrenaline as if she were the one actually competing, and no way to dispel it. As she stood beside her parents, Opal, and Jake’s family and watched him remove the waterproof swim leg and strap on the bike leg, she realized that for his sake, she didn’t just want him to finish—which was his stated goal. She wanted him to kick ass.
He’d worked so hard, trained so hard, and done so much research. Some of the soldiers and other amputees he coached and had befriended were there to see him, and though some
of them were ready to—as Jake liked to put it—grab life by the balls, some of them were still waiting for a reason to live. He couldn’t give them a reason—she understood that—but he could give them hope that if they found a reason, their lives would be full, unreduced, and joyful.
The bike portion of the race, which wound twelve and a half miles over the island on hilly terrain, would terminate at the high school track, so Mira helped Jake’s mom and his sister back to their car, then herded Sam and her parents into her own car and drove them to where the final sprint of the race would take place.
Jake had worried that the short-form race would make it hard for him to regain time he lost through leg changes and other logistics related to his amputation. But he’d also said that it would cut down on the amount of pain and chafing he experienced, and that the advantages his running leg gave him were most apparent in short-distance races, where the push-off power of the leg mattered most.
It was a small field of runners, a couple hundred, and Jake arrived at the track sixth. But he lost a lot of ground swapping legs for the last time—not a change he could possibly avoid.
She was cheering so loudly it hurt her throat. Beside her, Sam was jumping up and down, yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” All around them, she heard a chant beginning to rise. “Jake! Jake! Jake! Jake!”
He came out fast, and she could tell from watching him that he wasn’t winded at all. You couldn’t undo years of conditioning and a powerful will to triumph, and when you layered that with months of rigorous but careful training, well, you got Jake. Even so, a 5K gave him very little time to make up lost ground. He passed one runner after another, head down, arms churning, and she cheered and cheered and cheered for him, his parents and his family beside her doing the same.
He wasn’t going to win, or even place in the top five, but he was kicking ass and inspiring the hell out of people, and she could not have been more proud of him.
“Go,” she said to Sam, giving him a little push, and he positioned himself at the spot they’d decided on, so he could run the last fifty yards of the race on the grass of the football field alongside his father. She patted her pocket, where his inhaler was, and then she made herself think only of her guys, and how proud she was of them, and how beautiful they looked, their legs churning as they crossed the finish line, Jake slowing up a bit to let Sam win.
Acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to my husband, who every day and in so many ways supports my writing, and to my children, who have appointed themselves my cheerleaders. Thank you to Amber Belldene, Shelley Ann Clark, Ruthie Knox, Amber Lin, Mary Ann Rivers, Jessica Scott, and Samantha Wayland for reading, loving, and burnishing this book. Thank you also to brainstorming buddies and morale officers Jessica Auerbach, Rachel Grant, Samantha Hunter, Ellen Price, and Charlene Teglia. Many other writer and reader/reviewer friends helped in countless other ways along the way, and I’m deeply grateful.
Thank you to Dan Knowles and Jessica Scott for offering generous amounts of input about army matters; Jess also contributed insights about amputations and prostheses. Any factual errors in the book are strictly my own.
Thank you to my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim of Prospect Agency, and to my editor, Susan Grimshaw, and her team at Loveswept for all your guidance and support, including the fateful words, “How would you feel about writing a secret baby book?” I am so happy you asked, and so happy to have said yes. Thank you also to the talented and tireless Loveswept editorial, art, production, design, promotion, and marketing team, for hard work and acts of faith.
Every book is a collaboration. This book is my most collaborative so far, and I would not have wanted to do it without any one of you. Hugs.
Photo: © Susan Young Photography
SERENA BELL writes stories about how sex messes with your head, why smart people sometimes do stupid things, and how love can make it all better. She wrote her first steamy romance before she was old enough to understand what all the words meant and has been perfecting the art of hiding pages and screens from curious eyes ever since—a skill that’s particularly useful now that she’s the mother of two school-aged children. When she is not eating dark chocolate or banishing writer’s block by chewing ridiculous amounts of bubble gum, she swims, hikes, skis, skates, shoots hoops, paddleboards, kayaks, needlepoints, embroiders, dances, and, of course, reads.
The Editor’s Corner
Most people look forward to summer vacations: warm, sunny days filled with nothing but reading on the agenda. Every year, I can’t wait to lie on the beach, lounge by the pool, or relax at a picnic at the park—always with a good book in my hands. If you’re looking for some hot reads, Loveswept has some great ones this month. But I warn you—it’s going to be a fiery summer.
June brings two scorching reunion stories: Lea Griffith’s Loveswept debut, Too Much, an erotic romance where two lovers who have shared exquisite pain and unforgettable bliss find solace back in each other’s arms; and Serena Bell’s heartwarming Hold On Tight, about a young mother and a battle-scarred veteran who must decide if they can rekindle the sparks they once shared. Speaking of sparks, in Jamie Schmidt’s stylish and sexy book Heat, a martial arts trainer introduces an ER doctor to a passion so intense she wants nothing more than to surrender to his touch. Then the temperature rises with the first book of Tina Leonard’s seductive new Hells Outlaws series, Last of the Red-Hot Cowboys, which brings passion hotter than the Texas sun. And if you’re looking for a classic romance, look no farther than Iris Johansen’s steamy novel Wicked Jake Darcy, where fate brings together a carefree beauty and a charismatic playboy—only to separate them all too soon.
—Happy Romance!
Gina Wachtel
Associate Publisher
Love stories you’ll never forget
By authors you’ll always remember
eOriginal Romance from Random House
www.readloveswept.com
Follow us online for the latest new releases, giveaways, exclusive sneak peeks, and more!
readloveswept
readloveswept
Read on for an excerpt from
Have Mercy
by Shelley Ann Clark
Available from Loveswept
Chapter One
The first time Tom heard Emme’s voice, he dropped a bottle of gin.
Having heard and played with a lot of bands over the years, he’d never seen anything quite as entrancing as Emme. She looked like she’d walked out of a 1960s wet dream, all teased blond hair and dark eyeliner and curves. The bass groove of her first song had Tom ignoring his customers even before she opened her mouth.
Her voice damn near melted his spine. It was big and dark, full of longing so fierce it brought tears to his eyes. Her phrasing was meticulous. He heard desire in that voice, and he longed to give her whatever she wanted. By the time the first song was over, he ached to play in her band. More than that, he halfway wanted to crawl inside her songs and live there.
Once the first song ended, he pulled himself together enough to pay attention to his bar, but he still found himself staring at her every moment he had the chance. His fingers absently shaped chords and played notes against the polished wood of the bar, and he hummed harmonies as he poured drinks for his customers.
At the break, all Tom wanted was a cigarette and a chance to talk to Emme, but the rush never slowed. He did talk to Andy, the bassist and a friend he’d played with a few times.
“She’s good, huh?” Andy grinned. “Told you.”
“I believed you or I wouldn’t have booked you without hearing her first. I trust you.” Tom poured a vodka tonic for a thin brunette as he talked. “But damn.”
“Yeah. She gets that reaction a lot. Writes all the songs, too.”
Tom shook his head in disbelief before he made change for a guy in a non-ironic trucker cap. “I’d love to sit in sometime.”
Andy raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? You may get your chance. They’re going on tour in two mon
ths and there’s no way I can keep my day job and go. They’ll need a bassist. Want me to recommend you?”
“How long?”
“Two months. Mostly through the Southeast. College towns.”
Two months away from the bar. Ouch. Tom opened a Sam Adams for Andy. Three months away from Katie. “I don’t know, man. I’ll have to think about it.”
“It’s a good gig. She pays well. Dave and Guillermo are pretty cool, too.”
For the rest of the set, that was all Tom thought about. That, and how to get a chance to talk to Emme, even though he suspected he’d sound like some high school kid asking the prettiest girl in school to the prom. He was considering bringing her a glass of the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar scotch that had been gathering dust under the bar as a tribute when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket.
COME GET ME, the text message read.
Tom sighed and rubbed his temples. He’d offered to pick up his sister if she ever had too much to drink, but that had been when she was sixteen. She was twenty-five now. She knew he was working.
CALL A CAB, he texted back. He slid his phone back into his pocket and closed out the tab of a couple who were pulling on their coats. They’d barely signed their credit card slip when his jeans vibrated again.
NO MONEY. WILL JUST DRIVE.
Shit. Up onstage, Emme was making magic with the piano. Drink orders had slowed a little and the crowd had thinned as the night grew later, but there were still all the closing duties to complete.
WAIT FOR ME, he texted back. WHERE ARE YOU?
He motioned for the barback to take over. There was nothing else he could do. He shrugged on his jacket and slipped out the back, the music cut off abruptly as the door shut behind him.
Emily Hayes was nothing like Emme.
