by Dani Wyatt
Let Go
By
Dani Wyatt
Copyright © 2019
by Dani Wyatt
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,
events and incidents are either the products
of the author’s imagination
or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
www.daniwyatt.com
Cover Credit PopKitty
Editing Nicci Haydon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Let Go
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
KEEPING HER CLOSE
OTHER TITLES BY DANI WYATT
About Dani
Thank You.
A NOTE TO MY READERS:
I appreciate every one of you.
Dedicated to those that believe
love can happen in an instant.
For DB. You make me believe
Everyday.
Stalkers welcome.
Sordid fun and other dirty shenanigans
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WYATT’S WENCHES
1
Lachlan
“I don’t give a shit what you say. She’s the one crying.” An irrational fury spins inside of me as I tug my ball cap down, adjust my sunglasses and drop my duffel on the floor next to my feet, gritting my teeth in an effort to not throat punch the guy sitting in the restaurant booth in front of me.
I’m not known for my temper.
I’m known.
That’s for sure.
Too well known.
I tear my eyes from the space where the auburn-haired angel just disappeared down the back hall of the restaurant. Half of me wants to tear a ragged hole in the back wall and pin her down, but I keep that urge under control for now.
From the moment I saw her, my dick was hard and my heart felt alive. It wasn’t just lust either, it was like I needed to claim her. Confusion and desire race through me but the compulsion to find out who she is and make sure she’s okay is irrevocable.
When I left the bus station earlier today, walking down the main street of this small town, something drew my eye through the window of a local tavern. A customer sitting at a booth adjacent to the window was ranting at a waitress. Throwing his arms around and pointing at the plate in front of him.
When I looked at the angel standing there taking his rage, it was like the earth shifted under my feet.
I saw wide eyes like a spring doe and auburn waves running down over one shoulder as she bit into her lip fear tensing forehead. Her face was completely fresh with a natural pink on her cheeks and lips that looked stained with a fine Cabernet.
She was stunning. Heart stopping. I’d use the word beautiful but it’s not enough. It implies Photoshopped faces in magazines and a certain acceptable symmetry.
No, this girl was more.
She was fire and candy but with a wisdom way beyond her years in wild green eyes that told me more about her than I knew about most people in my life.
And I wondered, do her eyes speak to everyone like that? Or just me?
I needed it to be just me.
One look at her face and there was a click inside of me. I couldn’t stand for anyone to hurt her. For a split second, an image of a wolf and his mate flashed through my mind. Clear as if it was happening right in front of me. Only they weren’t wolves, they were us. The two of us. Together. I shook my head, but it stayed there in an outline, like when you look at the sun.
I was sure I was losing it.
I’m having a breakdown. Walking out on my life, now having visions. Voices are next, I’m sure of it.
After I’d looked at her through the window, I stormed into the restaurant.
Out of the corner of my eye I see what I’m guessing is the owner or manager stomping toward me through empty tables. “Hey, get out! You can’t come in here and harass the customers.” He puffs up his chest and squares off with me and I look down at him with fire in my eyes.
He takes a half step back, which is a smart move.
“The steak is raw! My drink is watered down!” The customer starts up again behind me and I spin around and slap my hand on the wooden tabletop, making the plates and glasses jump.
“I said, I don’t give a shit. You are going to fucking apologize, you’re going to mean it, and you’re going to make sure she knows you mean it. She didn’t cook your fucking food. She didn’t make your drink. Why the hell were you yelling at her?”
I glance toward the back hallway hoping she’ll reappear. My fingertips twitch and there’s a pull toward where she disappeared that I can’t explain.
The manager takes a deep breath and I nod toward the hall. “Go get her.” Then I turn to the customer who looks like he finally realizes this is not a game he’s going to win. “When she comes out, you’re going to apologize. If you have a beef about your shitty steak and Martini, you take it up with him.” I jerk my head toward the manager. “Not some poor girl who is just trying to do her job and has zero responsibility for the fucked up mess in front of you. We clear, gentlemen?”
I shoot a glance at them both through my sunglasses. The manager looks like he’s about to say something, but his common sense must get the better of him because they both give me a reluctant nod. I rap my knuckles on the tabletop and bite into my bottom lip, giving the manager a look of impatience.
With a final huff, he turns and heads down the hall as I step back, kick my duffel back along with me and take a seat at an empty table to wait. The wolf image spins around in my head again and I realize my heart beat feels like a hammer against my sternum. But it’s not just the wolves. It’s the other vision I had along with it.
A vision of me.
And her.
Naked, covered in sweat, fucking like we never mean to stop.
Fuck. What is wrong with me?
It’s clear the customer and manager don’t recognize me, and I thank fuck for that. Because today I’m not Lachlan Marcus. I’m just a guy. I want to be just a guy.
Something in me snapped this morning in my investors meeting. They were fighting about return on investment. How much they could cut wages and eliminate benefits for employees of one of my restaurant chains so they could pad their own already bloated bottom line.
Just how meaningless so much of my life had become rained down on me like shrapnel and I had to leave. I had to get away. Without a word, I walked out and didn’t look back.
The only person I contacted was Beverly, my assistant, who is one of the only people in this world I still trust. Told her no details, just not to expect any contact from me for a while. Couldn’t tell her how long it would be, only to cancel everything on my schedule for at least a week and I’d be in touch.
Her response? No problem. Consider it done.
And that’s why I trust her.
Then, I got on a bus.
A bus, for Christ sake. Not a private jet. Not a limousine. A fucking bus.
Bought a
ticket to Chaplain, Maine, because it was the next out-of-state bus leaving the station from New York.
After I bought my ticket, I searched up some info about the little town. Population 4380. Best known for one of the original white wedding chapels in the country. Same day weddings, no waiting period and the original building still stands.
As I looked at the photo online of the small white church-style building, a tightness gathered in my gut. A familiar sensation I couldn’t quite place that left me with an odd feeling of déjà vu. I’ve never thought much about marriage.
No particular reason, just I’ve been so engrossed in the other aspects of my life it hasn’t been a priority. Besides, in my business, being who I am, I have to say I have a jaded attitude toward relationships. I’ve kept myself nearly a monk. For most guys in my situation, they could have as many women in a day as they could handle, but me?
Nah. It’s never been an appeal. If I meet the right one someday, so be it. But it’s hard as hell to trust anybody. I’m just not sure how anyone could love me. Not the image of me or the bank accounts that come with me.
In the hour or so I had before the bus left, I went to a thrift store just a block from the station. Bought an old duffel bag, filled it with jeans, shirts, ball caps and anything I could find that screamed average. Then, I went into a barber shop.
An old guy was sitting there reading the paper, barely looking up when I walked in. Not sure if he knew who I was or not. If he did, he didn’t make a fuss and seemed more than pleased to lop off my long hair and give me a sturdy, very average short cut, which felt strangely right for a change.
Long hair had become my trademark.
And I’m tired of being a trademark.
2
Teah
I’m not sure what just happened.
All I know is I just walked out on my job. My boss. The one guy who gave me a chance when I showed up in Chaplain, Maine with a backpack and a desperate need for a shower.
I barely even gave him an explanation as I ran upstairs to the room my boss rented to me, packed up and practically sprinted out the back door of the restaurant have twenty-six dollars to my name. No credit cards. No friends.
And no way am I calling my parents. No way am I listening to the ‘I told you so’ speech.
My backpack pulls on my shoulders as I make my way down the alley behind the restaurant.
It’s not my situation that has me feeling like I’m walking through a fog. My head is spinning, for sure, but it’s not because I’m dirt poor and homeless. It’s that guy.
God, who was that guy?
He stormed into the restaurant when the customer started going off on me and when I looked at him it felt like someone snatched all the air from the room. He was wearing a ball cap and sunglasses, like some horrible spy character, along with a worn denim shirt with one sleeve rolled up above the elbow and the other one-half way down his forearm.
I wanted to see his eyes. I could feel them behind the glasses, like we knew each other somehow. He felt familiar and shocking at the same time. Besides, he was beyond enormous. He towered over my boss who towers over me.
But, oh my God.
When he walked up to the booth, something wild shot through me. Built the way he was, like a football player on steriods, and with some animal rage surrounding him, I felt disoriented. Hot and cold at the same time.
A raw chemical reaction blossomed inside of me. Something I’ve never felt before near anyone else. For anyone else.
But there’s something else. The reason it felt like I had to get out of there. I got this vision of two wolves, running together. It’s hard to explain, but somehow I knew that the wolves weren’t wolves at all, they were us.
That man, and me, and all I could think was that it was my brain trying to warn me; giving me a memory, twisted around in my head to make it make some sort of sense, but telling me that he was someone from my past, someone from that time back when my parents followed this lunatic who drew me into his circle. Claiming he had visions of the future. I had always had visions too, and until that time, I felt like a freak. Even as a child. He used me to further his own egomaniacal agenda and in the end, it blew up and almost took me from my parents.
It’s been ages since I had any sort of vision, but this one today...a wolf. Danger.
I panicked.
Not only that, but there was another image, an image that makes me blush and sends heat between my legs. There was this flash of us. Naked. He was on top of me, I was looking into these wild blue eyes and I felt like I belonged to him.
What is happening to me?
Part of me says it can’t be true. I couldn’t know him. Why would I?
I grew up on the road with my parents and led an unconventional life. No TV. No cell phones. I was homeschooled, and when we did have a home, it was a cabin built from straw bales in a sort of commune. Well, not exactly a commune. It wasn’t all free love and peace signs.
More paranoia and conspiracy theories. That’s what I remember most. I try to forget the early years when we lived in that other group A crazy, but charismatic leader my parents followed until the shit storm hit.
My memories of that day when it all blew apart still hit me in my dreams and moments in time that make me wonder if I’ll ever be able to be normal. Live in the outside world.
But that’s why I had to try.
I learned how to fire a weapon before riding a bike. I was taught the outside world is asleep and there’s a reckoning coming and we have to be prepared. I know how to make soup out of tree bark and which mushrooms will kill you and which will cure you.
It was fun, I guess, in the way that kids think any adventure is fun. My parents weren’t exactly loving and kind, but they cared about my safety.
But when I turned twenty-one my compulsion to see what else was out in the world became unbearable. So, I ended up here in Chaplain, trying to see what it was like to live in the world.
Enter my job at Stephenson’s Tavern. The owner, Thomas Stephenson, was the only one who would take a chance on me when I showed up in this town. No work experience. No résumé. No identification. No social security number. He even let me rent a room from him above the restaurant.
Now? Everything I own is on my back once again and I have nowhere to sleep. It makes no sense that I ran out like that, but it also felt like survival. Like I had no other choice.
With all the hardcore survivalist training I went through, not having a roof to sleep under isn’t really a problem. But that was preparation for the end of the world. Scavenging materials and staying alive after the apocalypse. That was based on the assumption that laws and society would no longer be functioning, and anarchy would be the order of the day. Not this, not homelessness in the middle of an average small town where it still takes money to get what you need.
My stomach flutters and twists, thinking of my predicament, sure, but also whatever the effect that’s been left over from the stranger that tried to come to my rescue in the restaurant. For a moment, I contemplate going back, apologizing and begging for my job.
I decide to forge ahead toward the state park. Oddly enough, I feel more at ease in this moment than I was there at the restaurant trying to live a more conventional life.
I admit, I wasn’t very good at being a waitress. In fact, I sucked at it, and what happened with me running away crying was most likely a relief for my boss that he didn’t have to fire me.
When I’d landed in town, before I got the job and a place to stay, I stayed in an abandoned cabin on the state parkland just on the outside of town. I’m headed back that way, only it’s four months later and the weather is not as friendly.
At the moment, my options are limited so I will my legs to carry me forward and hope that in the morning, I’ll figure out some sort of new plan.
It takes me a good couple hours before I see the cluster of small cabins in the distance. The sun is all but down and there’s a freezing drizzle starting to sting my
face.
I set my jaw and speed my steps toward the farthest most cabin, where I managed to jimmy the lock open that first time months ago.
But to my horror, when I get close, I see every cabin’s windows and doors are now secured with fitted wooden covers. Probably the close of the season here but it doesn’t look good for me.
I dig through my backpack and pull out my eight-inch bowie knife; a birthday gift from my father on my eleventh birthday, but the covers on the doors are fitted tight and locked in place. I try to use leverage on a window as well, but the well-made covers don’t give an inch.
It’s dark, my hair is soaked and I’m starting to shiver. The drizzle has turned to a full-on rain and the temperature is hovering right at freezing, so the precipitation is sticking to everything and freezing in place.
Great.
I huddle on the small porch under the overhang and pull out a silver survival blanket that’s rolled up in my pack, then tug it around me. I just have to pray I’ll make it to first light.
3
Lachlan
IT TOOK EVERYTHING I had not to slam my fist down the throat of the manager of the restaurant. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that it wasn’t actually his fault.
After sitting there waiting for nearly twenty minutes, I stomped down the back hallway to find him on the phone, the waitress nowhere in sight.
A few threats later, he finally told me she left. Not just left, she ran.
He’d tried to get her to come out and receive the apology I’d made sure was waiting for her, but instead she packed up and left.
What the fuck?
He didn’t know where she was, didn’t understand what had just happened—that much was obvious—so I stormed out and went on a frantic search in the streets and alleys of the small Main Street area trying to find her.
My search was futile. She’s gone. Like a vapor in warm air, I drew her in then she disappeared.
I found a shitty little used car lot and bought a beat up 1970’s Ford pick-up for cash. And for a handful of extra notes, he didn’t ask for my I.D. when I filled out the title transfer paperwork.
