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.
Dedication
To my son.
My favorite superhero is Thor—yes, because he has a beard.
My least favorite superhero is Iron Man—mainly because he’s short.
No, that hasn’t changed from yesterday. Yes, you can stop asking me. No, I had no clue that Thor was once a bad guy. No, I won’t mind if you ask me again tomorrow because I love you.
Acknowledgements
Stu Reardon - Model
Golden Czermak - Photographer
Danielle Palmumbo - My awesome content editor
Ink it out Editing & Kellie Montgomery—Editors
My mom - Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Leah, Mindy, Amanda, Kendra, Barbara, Laura, Kathy, Diane—my betas. Y’all are the bomb, and y’all are awesome.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
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
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard (3-8-18)
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
George’s story (March of 2018)
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary (2-8-18)
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care (Rafe and Janie) (4-5-18)
Get out!
He yelled those words at the love of his life twelve years ago, and to this day, Reed Hail regrets them. He’s always been the type of person to speak before he thinks, and apologies have never come easy.
It’s been over a decade since she was his, and he stubbornly thinks that he can keep on living without her.
He couldn’t be more wrong.
The last thing he needs is her vagina anywhere near his exam table. But nobody ever asks him what he wants.
Maybe he should’ve gone into the auto-recovery business after all.
I hate you.
Krisney Shaw would take those words back in a heartbeat if she could. In fact, she would take back everything.
Never meeting him would be the perfect place to start. The memory of Reed Hail haunts her—morning, noon, and night. Then, to add insult to injury, she has to see him being happy while she’s breaking a little more inside every single day.
Reed Hail is her worst nightmare because she’s constantly reminded of exactly what she’s missing—the other half of her soul.
Just when she thinks things can’t get worse, she’s sees his sexy face over the top of her paper gown, and she’s lost all over again.
Don’t ever let me go.
Both Reed and Krisney are determined to avoid each other. They do a great job of it, too… Not.
One ill-timed gynecological exam changes everything. One single second in time shows Reed what he’s missing—literally and figuratively—and suddenly he’s back at square one.
The only problem with being back at square one? He won’t be able to leave her a second time.
Especially since the first time around he didn’t have a child with her to consider.
Prologue
I have no idea what I’m doing.
-Krisney every single day of her life
Krisney
I closed my eyes, prayed that he’d leave, and started counting.
One.
He ran his fingers through my hair.
They were sticky.
Two.
I smelled something that was unmistakable. There was no other thing that it could be, and my stomach rolled as the sticky substance was dragged onto my face.
Three.
I would’ve shuddered, but then that would’ve let him know that I was awake, and that wouldn’t end up well for me.
An eternity later, I got to one hundred, and cried when he walked out the door.
Sometimes it was like that.
There were days when he’d just come and sit, watching me squirm.
Well, at least that’s what it felt like.
I had a feeling he didn’t know that he woke me every time he walked into my room.
There was this sort of sixth sense that I started to have when this all started.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how long it’d been going on.
A while.
I couldn’t remember exactly how long, really.
I had no clue that the next day my life would totally change or that I’d fall head over heels in love with a Hail.
It was only twelve hours later when I met the boy that would change my life.
Though, it’d be another two years before I realized what he meant to me.
Two minutes after that second meeting to make me fall in lov
e with him.
And thirty seconds after that to know that I couldn’t live without him.
Chapter 1
What if I have a child that’s allergic to dogs and I have to get rid of the child?
-Reed to his mother
Reed
14 years ago
The first time I saw her, I nearly fell out of my truck.
I remembered it like it was yesterday.
She was wearing a pale lavender top, short—and when I say short, I mean that if she bent over I'd see her underwear—khaki shorts. A pair of simple black flip flops from Old Navy—the ones that are a dollar on sale every other week—and she had her hair up in a ponytail with the length of the ponytail braided down to her bra strap.
Her long, strawberry blonde hair seemed to shimmer and shine under the street lamp, and I wanted to touch it. Wrap my fingers around the length and bring it up to my nose to smell.
We met because her best friend and my friend wanted to meet. Each of us had tagged along, neither of us realizing that we were about to have our lives changed forever.
“Come on,” Drake said. “It’s time to go.”
I rolled my eyes and walked with my friend out to my truck. And it was my truck, because if it was his, I knew that I wouldn’t get a say so in what time we left.
What if this girl was his soulmate? I didn’t want to have to stay out there until dawn. I wanted to be able to go home at a normal time, because I had a baseball game the next day.
Thinking about how much this was going to suck, I drove slowly, uncaring whether Drake was bitching in the seat next to me.
“Could you drive any slower?” Drake, aka Dilbert as I liked to call him, groaned.
“I can’t get another ticket,” I told him honestly. “I was barely able to pay for the last one. If I get another, I have to go to teen court to get it dismissed and that would fucking blow, because then they’d make me do community service. Then I wouldn’t be able to practice with the elite team on Saturday, and then…”
“I got it,” Drake muttered under his breath.
I grinned.
Drake hated hearing about my practices…mostly because he wasn’t as good as me and couldn’t keep up with me at all.
That wasn’t vanity talking, either.
I played on two club teams. One for baseball, and one for soccer. Lucky enough for me, they split the seasons. Fall and spring it was baseball. Winter and summer, soccer.
When I wasn’t playing games for one, I was practicing for another.
At one point, Drake had been on the baseball team with me, but he quit shortly after his father and mother caught him trying to juice himself—or shoot himself up with steroids—to keep up with me.
Which had upset me, too.
Now we were just friends, and I made it a point to chill and relax with him, since I think the whole reason he tried was because we’d been the best of friends during our younger years, but had grown apart as we got older.
“Okay, she’s going to have her friend there, so if we disappear for a little while, you have to take one for the team.”
I snorted, knowing where he was going with that.
He wanted me to keep the proverbial fat chick entertained while he went for his own entertainment.
“Sure, Drake.” I snorted. “I’ll do that for you.”
He pointed out a few more turns, and not five minutes later, I was pulling off on the side of the road next to a sweet ass yellow Chevy.
We both got out, but instead of going up to the front walk with Drake, I hung back and checked out the yellow Chevy C10 pickup truck.
It was a sixty-eight or nine short bed, and it was in mint condition.
“Her dad moved it out of the garage so he could get the Christmas tree down for her mother,” a soft voice came from beside me.
I would’ve jumped, but my brothers had been trying to scare me since I was young enough not to fall over. I’d trained my body not to react, even when my body was going crazy on the inside.
“It’s August,” I pointed out.
“August fourth,” she agreed.
“Then why is she getting out Christmas?”
“Laryn’s parents put it out at the beginning of August because her mother is a Christmas-aholic,” the girl said.
I finally gave the girl my full attention.
She was not a fat chick.
In fact, she was anything but fat.
She was small and skinny.
Very small.
Like a chihuahua compared to my mastiff.
I was six-foot-three inches and packed solidly with lean muscle.
One day, I’d probably resemble my father more closely than what I did today, but since I worked out often and watched what I ate, I stayed lean.
I looked like a monster next to her.
Also, I’d seen her before, of course. She was my brother’s best friend’s little sister.
She didn’t hang out at the house with her brother, Jay, at all, and it was only on rare occasions that I saw her out and about with her parents.
They hated me, by the way.
Honestly, they were stuck up assholes, and the Hails were too middle class for them.
It probably didn’t help that I played my ‘redneck’ status up when they were around, though.
Seeing her there was still a surprise.
When I saw her around town, she was always presentable. Most assuredly, she wasn’t dressed like that.
She wasn’t in anything overly provocative. All of the girls I knew wore short shorts.
No, she was dressed like a normal teenage girl, I guess.
But when she was with her parents it was all khaki pants and cardigan sweaters.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen as much of her skin revealed as I did right then.
It was her eyes, though, that held me captive. The way the streetlight cast shadows that seemed to play over her features.
“You,” she said then, finally placing how she knew me as well.
“Me,” I agreed.
“What are you doing here?”
Just then Drake and her friend came walking down the driveway. The girl with two bottles of Coke in one hand, and Drake with a Coke in one hand, and a water in the other.
The water was obviously for me.
I didn’t bother drinking my calories. I’d rather eat them.
And he knew that.
“Here you go,” the girl said to her friend.
“Thank you, Larry,” Krisney said to her friend. “Larry, this is…”
“My friend, Reed Hail,” Drake finished for Krisney.
Drake probably hadn’t recognized her yet, but he would.
It was only a matter of time.
It was the eyes, you see.
They were a shade of silvery light blue. Like a wolf’s eyes.
On her, they looked almost eerie.
They were distinctive, that was for sure.
“Nice to meet you,” Laryn aka “Larry” said to me. “I’d offer you a place to sit, but it looks like Christmas exploded inside my house, and every available surface has a box or a Santa on it.”
My lips twitched.
“I’m fine outside.”
And I was.
I was so used to the heat that ninety degrees with zero sunlight was heavenly to me. And when the breeze blew, signaling a pending storm on the way in, it was downright chilly to me.
But I didn’t care.
Not with how Krisney sat next to me on the tailgate of my truck, laughing with her friend about something that’d happened to her cousin.
“He said he was so happy to get underwear from his mom that he waved them around the room with excitement. Apparently, they hadn’t had clean underwear in quite a long time.” She paused. “She also sent him wet wipes, which he said he used about half of to wash a month's worth of grime off of him thirty seconds after opening them.�
��
I snorted.
“My brother said that the remote places are like that sometimes when they’re deployed,” I added my two cents.
“Your brother is in the military?”
I nodded. “Marines.”
Her eyes widened. “I want to go in the Army, too.”
I must’ve looked at her incredulously, because she narrowed her eyes at me.
The halo that the street light was casting on us was bright enough that I saw her left cheek twitch.
“I’m more than capable of being in the Army.”
I bit my lip to keep from saying something like, ‘You’d be eaten alive.’
Instead, I kept my trap shut and continued to pepper her with questions.
“What do you want to do in the Army?”
She shrugged. “Well, I’ve always wanted to be a dental hygienist.”
“Who the hell always wants to be a dental hygienist?” I broke in. “That’s weird.”
“Well, what do you want to be?”
I shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.”
“An OB/GYN?” she teased.
I burst out laughing at that.
“Why would you say that?”
“You look like a guy who would like to play with vaginas for a living,” she countered.
I snickered.
“I guess that wouldn’t be half bad,” I admitted. “I could think of worse careers.”
Our banter only continued after that.
And, six months later, our relationship was still going strong.
Her father hated me.
Her mother hated me more.
And her brother, my brother’s best friend, looked at me like I was no better than dog meat.
But I loved the girl, and I had a feeling that nothing would ever change that.
Oh, how wrong I would be.
Chapter 2
Some people manage stress by yoga, meditation, and long walks. I manage stress by binge eating carbs, swearing, and drinking wine.
-Krisney’s words of wisdom
Krisney
12 years ago
It was the scream that woke me.
The scream of a mother losing her child.
I immediately got up, ran down the hallway, and instantly knew that something was wrong.
There were three police officers standing in our front foyer, and every one of them was looking at my mother with pity on their face.
The Hail You Say Page 1
