by Rye Hart
Camillo beamed with pride every time he dropped in on us and heard me bucking up to my mentor.
I was confident my venture would be a success. I’d always wanted to own and operate my own restaurant, and with the skills I’d learned and Camillo’s support, I knew I could do it. People came for miles to our little test restaurant in order to sample the flavors and partake in my latest concoctions and there was always a positive, raving review in the newspaper the next day.
The city loved my food and I knew I would finally achieve the dream I’d set out to achieve when I was eighteen.
Now, it was December twenty-eighth. My birthday. Christmas had come and gone and the massive surprise Camillo had for me was plans to build a restaurant in the heart of the city. I’d squealed and threw my arms around his neck, but what I would later come to find was that he had already built it. He’d found my random sketches and artistic suggestions for what my dream restaurant would one day become and he handed them over to an architect and interior design expert to bring to life. With his promise of forever sparkling on my left hand and my family sitting at one of the restaurant’s V.I.P. tables, it was time for the restaurant to open its doors to the public.
It was time for me to make my debut as Chef Moretti.
Camillo had worked hard to keep the restaurant a secret from me, but he’d worked even harder to promote it. So on opening night, on my birthday, a line of excited customers stretched down the block. I was in the back, prepping for the dinner rush with employees he’d hired behind my back, calling out commands into a kitchen I could now call my own. I was expecting an insane night that would keep me here well into the early morning hours and I smiled from ear to ear as I thought about it.
I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I had my husband to thank for all this. For the restaurant and for encouraging me to continue pursuing my dreams. He was the one that had chased behind Ana for the past year and he was the one that took care of the boys’ schooling issues. I watched as Camillo weaved around chairs, chasing our wild four-year old around while she giggled and cried out for “more playtime.” Camillo swooped her up into his arms and slathered her face with kisses, trying to get her out of sight before people started filing in to sit down.
And all the while, the boys were sitting at the table, doing their school work.
They loved the middle school they had been enrolled in. They were in a great deal of classes together and were quickly making friends in the city. They frequently had friends over to play video games and eat all our food and I took it as an opportunity to try out new snacks and finger foods with their friends. Of course, the boys would eat anything I put in front of them, but the more practice I could gain, the better off I knew I would be.
Life couldn’t have gotten more perfect than this.
The door to the restaurant opened and in poured the people. Men and women of all different races, backgrounds, and social classes were spilling into the seats and the wait staff were quickly taking drink orders. The bar was in full swing as I started grabbing appetizer plates. Then I made my rounds to make sure everyone had everything they needed to make this night a rousing success.
Then, I heard the first ticket order come through and I ripped it from the printing station before I turned toward the kitchen.
“I need two orders of the toasted brioche rounds with the creme fraiche and the caviar on both. And one order of olive straws!”
I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw Camillo beaming, waving at me while the boys cheered me on. I felt tears rise to my eyes as I took a deep breath, listening as the tickets began pouring in from the main room. I ripped them off and continued to call out order after order, then I made my way into the middle of the kitchen and started preparing the massive lamb shanks that were on the menu for tonight.
Yes. Life could not have been more perfect than this.
The End
RYE HART SNEAK PEEKS
SAVING MEL
PROLOGUE
“Are you ready beautiful?”
His hands quickly pulled the flannel from his back, exposing his strong, rippling arms. Veins pulsed in his forearms as he peeled his white undershirt off, and soon I was gazing on the most beautiful body I’d ever seen. His abdomen rippled and the “v” of his muscles pointed the way to what I wanted to see most.
He descended back on my body and I pressed my body into his. I felt my nipples rising toward him, raking against the swell of the hair on his chest as his lips trailed downward. He covered my neck with kisses and sucked patches of skin between his teeth. I was moaning and arching into him. Begging him for more.
His tongue lapped at my nipples, pulling groans from my throat as my hands wrapped up in his black tresses. His hair was thick and his breath was hot, and I could feel him grinding into me as he traveled down. His hands parted my legs at the knees and the rush of cool air shivered my skin.
But then, I felt his lips descend on my wet folds.
I rose my hips to meet his lips, offering myself to him on a silver platter. I felt him grin against my skin, his tongue prodding my folds while his fingers massaged my thighs. He licked a thick stripe up my slit, gathering my arousal upon his tongue. I looked down at him and saw him staring back at me as the glittering gold of his eyes turned devious.
His gaze only heated me with a white-hot pleasure that I wanted to explore.
I pressed him back into my body and his tongue found my clit. He sucked and flicked as my hips rolled into his face. I could feel my body coating his cheeks with my fluids as they poured out of me and onto the bed. The electricity surging through my veins as his fingertips embedded their prints into my skin was nothing short of fantastical. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and my hair was a tangled mess of knots. I writhed underneath him as his tongue explored my depths, then I lifted my eyes to look down once more.
His face was buried between my legs just as his arms wrapped around my thighs, pulling me closer to him as he drank me down.
My heels dug into the sinewy muscles of his back. My toes began to curl and my back began to arch. I bowed like a tightened violin as my fingernails scraped across his scalp, and soon my legs were quaking with delight.
“Yes. Please don’t stop. This feels—so good—yes.”
His name rolled effortlessly off my tongue as he rode my climax out with me. His tongue pressed deep, massaging the whole of my pussy while his beard tickled my thighs. I dropped to the bed and heaved for air as tears of joy prickled the backs of my eyes.
I felt like I was floating on clouds.
CHAPTER 1
EVAN
“Uncle Evan sing song?”
“What song would you like me to sing, Liam?”
“Alphabet!”
“You want the alphabet song as your bedtime song?” I asked.
“Yeah!”
“Okay. Let me go put your sister down, then I’ll come back and sing you the alphabet song,” I said.
“Okay. Kisses for Hawy?”
“Let me go get her, and you can give Hadley some kisses,” I said.
With my nanny out sick, it was just me and the kids. I thought this situation would’ve gotten easier by now, but it hadn’t even started feeling normal. Going from living a secluded life in the woods to becoming a legal guardian for two very young kids had been bumpy.
I loved my niece and nephew – but these last three years of my life had become a deep-fried pile of bullshit, served up and ready for me on a silver fucking platter.
It seemed that with every passing day, it was getting harder and harder to choke down.
“Come here, Hadley-bear,” I said. “Brother wants to give you a kiss.”
Scooping the seven-month-old up in my arms, she started babbling and blowing bubbles. Every single time I looked at her I saw my sister-in-law.
“Hawy! Hawy!”
“Ready to give your sister kisses?” I asked.
I bent the sleepy little girl down towa
rd Liam, and he pressed a kiss right against her cheek. The sight melted my heart ten times over, and I knew the question that was coming.
“Sleep with Hawy?” Liam asked.
“No, no. Hadley needs her own bed to sleep in. But in the morning after breakfast, we’ll all pile in front of the fireplace. How does that sound?” I asked.
“Fire! Yeah!” Liam exclaimed. “Alphabet song?”
“Let me put Hadley to sleep—”
“Alphabet song!”
Tears were rising in Liam’s eyes, and the last thing I wanted to do was rile him up. Hadley was nestling into my chest and yawning against my shirt. I knew I needed to get her down to bed before she got too tired, or I’d really be in for a ride. Hadley was a wonderful little baby until she became overtired, and then she was hell on wheels.
She was just like her father in that sense. And just like that, the thought of my brother threw me back to that night. The police came knocking down my damn door with their pitiful glances and urgent messages, and I’d been too high on painkillers to even register what the fuck they were saying.
“Alphabet! Alphabet! Alphabet!”
“Okay. But just once,” I said.
“A, B, C, D, E, F, G… H, I, J, K—”
“‘Elenemo pee’!”
“Q, R, S, T, U, V—”
“‘Double doo lex, I, and bees’!”
“Now I know my ABC’s, next time won’t you sing with me?”
Liam clapped his hands while I cradled Hadley close to my chest. I pressed a kiss to his forehead as he hunkered down underneath his blanket, then I started out of his room and down the hallway.
The night my brother and sister-in-law died in that damn car accident had changed my world forever. It not only dropped two kids in my lap, but it also shined a light onto the sad reality of my addiction. In high school, I injured my back playing football. My fucking tackles didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and I got sacked.
But when the guy from the other team hit me, he twisted my torso a little too much.
I came down on the side of my back and hit a damn rock, because the school apparently didn’t check for shit like that. I cracked ribs and ripped muscle to the point that it took three damn surgeries before I was even remotely back to normal.
Back then, though, I was resilient. Back then, I prided myself on not having to take painkillers. The girls in my high school fucking ate up my story, and I slayed more pussy than I ever had up to that point. And they were all on top so they wouldn’t ‘hurt me.’ It was the life.
“Okay, Hadley. It’s time for bed.”
I slipped the tiny girl into her crib before I placed a kiss on her forehead. She was sleeping soundly, with her eyes closed and her lips slightly parted. While she was awake, she looked just like my sister-in-law, but asleep, she was a spitting image of my brother. A stab of pain hit me square in the chest, and for a second, it hurt to breathe.
“Uncle Evan?”
Whipping my head up, I looked over at the doorframe of Hadley’s room. The little boy I’d just bedded down was rubbing his eyes and dragging a blanket behind him. I tucked Hadley in before I left the room, then I shut the door behind me before I turned my sights back to him.
“Liam, what are you doing up?”
“Water?” he asked.
“No more water. You’ve already had a glass. If you have any more, you’ll pee straight through your diaper.”
“But… water.”
His lip began to tremble, and I scooped the two-year old up into my arms. I needed to get his tantrum away from Hadley before he woke her, and I knew it was coming. The tears would start before his legs started to kick, and then he’d escalate to screaming if I still didn’t give him what he wanted.
“Water,” he said, sniffling.
“Not this late,” I said.
“Water, Uncle Evan!” he exclaimed.
“Sorry, buddy, no more water.”
The crying struck up just as I got him into his room, and I shut the door behind me to mute it. I slid the boy back into bed just as his legs started flailing, and I did what I could to tuck him back in. Liam’s cries echoed off the corners of the room, and I prayed they didn’t wake Hadley. These were the times I was still out of my element, still in uncharted waters. Every time I thought I had it down with these kids, something changed, and I didn’t know how to react. I felt the stress of the moment overwhelming my body, and my hands began to shake.
It was times like these that I could still taste those pills on my tongue.
“I want water!”
“Nope.”
“Water!”
“This is not how we get things we want, Liam. You know this,” I said.
“Water! Water! Water!”
I heard Hadley’s cry coming from her room. I groaned and looked up at the ceiling, wondering how in the world I was going to get Liam to calm down without losing my shit. I got up from his bed and walked toward the door, letting him simply throw his tantrum while I went and checked on the baby.
And still, my hands were shaking.
My addiction to painkillers hadn’t been instant. In fact, it hadn’t really grabbed me by the throat until I’d gotten my I.T. company off the ground. I started the company with just myself and my right-hand man, Ted. I was the creative mind, while Ted was the coder, and together we tackled the world of technology. What started out as a basic security firm had blossomed into a corporation that designed security software for smart-homes. Over the course of a few years, we grew exponentially, and when the stress of it all became too much, and my long work hours in front of the desk resulted in throbbing pain, I started drinking more than I should have. I quickly realized that I couldn’t keep that up, if I didn’t want it to be obvious. Showing up to the office smelling like a distillery wasn’t exactly practical. Remembering how good painkillers made me feel after my injury, I sought them out again as a way to deal with the stress of my daily life.
It was easy at first. I went into the doctor complaining about my old back injury, and he wrote me a prescription without so much as a second thought. After that, I just had to come up with lie after lie to get the refills. I slept the wrong way, or I overdid it at the gym; whatever would get the doc to sign the script. And if he hesitated, I’d find another doctor. I was balls-deep in my addiction before I knew what was happening. Ted, however, hadn’t been as easily fooled; nor had my former fiancée. Eventually, our relationship was the price I had to pay for my habit.
“Come here, sweet girl. What’s going on?”
I picked Hadley up and held her close to my chest. Already, I could hear Liam winding down, effectively tuckering himself out with his tantrum. I bounced Hadley in my arms while she nestled against my chest, tears flowing down her face. She was now over-tired and pissed, so I started singing her the song I always did whenever she kicked up like this.
“You are my Hadley, my only Hadley. You make me happy when skies are gray. You never know, Hadley, how much I love you. Please don’t take my Hadley away.”
Repeatedly, I sang the song and, the more I sang it, the more she settled down. After pacing with her for a few minutes, she was finally snoozing against my chest. I laid her back down and covered her with her blanket, making sure she wouldn’t get cold tonight. Winter was setting in, and the snow would start dumping soon, which meant I needed to keep the kids warm and bundled at all times.
I peeked into Liam’s room one last time before I shut the door, smiling at the sleeping boy whose leg was hanging off the bed.
I quietly made my way out to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I had an open beer waiting for me.
Hell yes.
I couldn’t wait to feel it pour down my throat. My hands were shaking, and I was taking deep breaths, trying to quell the stress levels rising in my body. A body filled with toxic memoirs of the past.
How can a man like me be fit to parent?
I can’t even fucking care for myself?
/> Then, as I grabbed the beer and brought it to my lips, my mind rushed back to another moment of torment, in the conference room of the tech company I built from the ground up. It was the same scene I had repeating in my head thousands of times over, like a broken record.
A tiny part of me was ready to move on, to leave the past where it belonged and accept the teachings, but that part was crushed by the fuming alpha inside that refused to give in. He didn’t believe in forgive and forget. He preferred to hold a grudge, even if it would eat him up like a fucking parasite, from the inside out.
That day felt like just yesterday. Ted actively started a smear campaign against me to edge me out of the company. He exposed my addiction to painkillers to the board and used my fiancée against me. All sorts of things came out that day. The fact that Ted and my fiancée were sleeping together, the fact that I was addicted to painkillers, the fact that the company’s earnings were down fifteen percent from last year.
Ted took it upon himself to spin the reason for the company’s lack of growth to my addiction. What he failed to make note of was the fact I designed the company’s structure specifically so it did not need me to survive, by appointing qualified people into the most critical roles. Ultimately it didn’t serve me well, because Ted knew he didn’t need me to grow the company and he was convincing enough to the rest of the stakeholders who were more concerned about their own pockets than getting to the bottom of the loss of revenue.
I watched my bitch of a conniving fiancée cry fake tears of fear for my health or safety or whatever the fuck she was spewing that day.
They made such a convincing argument that the board voted to have me removed.
They tossed me out on my ass and gave me a package of ten million dollars. It was a joke. Ten million dollars to the man who started and grew a fucking four hundred million dollar I.T. company from nothing. It made me fucking sick. I was done with the world after that. I went home, burned all my fiancée’s shit, sold the penthouse condo right out from under her fucking feet, and never looked back.
