Things Made Right
Page 1
Suncoast Society
Things Made Right
Loren is interested in Ross from the first night she meets him. But despite what her roommate’s brother says, Loren doesn’t think Ross has the slightest interest in her.
Ross is more than interested in Loren. Unfortunately, he’s not sure she can handle the real him, his darker side.
Until the night her world is ripped apart at the seams, and Ross can’t fix it despite desperately wishing he could. The only thing he can do is help Loren through it the best he can, and spend the rest of their lives together showing her how he feels.
Now it’s thirty years later, and the past comes calling. Loren doesn’t know all the facts, but she knows Ross is the center of her world. She’ll do anything and everything in her power to shield him. Because even though some things can’t be fixed, Ross made them right. And Loren will face the past alone, if necessary, to save their future.
Genre: BDSM, Contemporary
Length: 31,413 words
THINGS MADE RIGHT
Suncoast Society
Tymber Dalton
SIREN SENSATIONS
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Siren Sensations
THINGS MADE RIGHT
Copyright © 2015 by Tymber Dalton
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-014-5
First E-book Publication: February 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
If you have purchased this copy of Things Made Right by Tymber Dalton from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.
Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.
This is Tymber Dalton’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Tymber Dalton’s right to earn a living from her work.
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www.SirenPublishing.com
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DEDICATION
To Hubby, for everything.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is Ross and Loren’s story and picks up shortly after the closing of A Very Kinky Valentine’s Day and the events of the final chapter in that book.
We first met Ross and Loren as secondary characters in Cardinal’s Rule, and they’ve appeared in various books from that point on. I honestly didn’t know much about them in the beginning. They’d never “told” me their story. I naturally assumed they were very boring, average people without any notable backstory to report.
It was while writing the final chapter of A Very Kinky Valentine’s Day that Loren finally let some of their secrets slip. Only then did I understand exactly why those two characters had kept their past hidden from me for so long.
Thus a glimpse at how the brain of a “pantster” kind of writer works. (That would be me. Outlines? We don’ need no stinkin’ outlines…)
While the books in the Suncoast Society series are standalone works which may be read independently of each other, the recommended reading order to avoid spoilers is as follows:
1. Safe Harbor
2. Cardinal’s Rule
3. Domme by Default
4. The Reluctant Dom
5. The Denim Dom
6. Pinch Me
7. Broken Toy
8. A Clean Sweep
9. A Roll of the Dice
10. His Canvas
11. A Lovely Shade of Ouch
12. Crafty Bastards
13. A Merry Little Kinkmas
14. Sapiosexual
15. A Very Kinky Valentine’s Day
16. Things Made Right
If you’ve read no other books in the series, it is highly recommended you at least read Safe Harbor before reading this one. There are some events in there involving Sully, Mac, and Clarisse that are referenced in this book, and it might not make sense if you haven’t read that book first.
Some of the characters who appear in this book appear in other books in the Suncoast Society series. All titles are available from Siren-BookStrand.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author's Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
About the Author
THINGS MADE RIGHT
Suncoast Society
TYMBER DALTON
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
Now…
Sully patiently waited for Loren to compose her thoughts and get to her point. It had surprised him when she’d called him that morning and asked if she could talk with him.
It’d surprised him even more when she’d asked if she could drive up to Pinellas and meet with him to talk in person.
And surprised him still yet that Ross not only didn’t know about this talk, but that she preferred Sully didn’t tell him.
Or anyone else.
Including Sully’s wife Clarisse, one of Loren’s closest friends.
The waitress had taken their drink orders and left them alone. They’d met at a small restaurant in Tarpon Springs, right on the sponge docks on Dodecanese, that overlooked the water. Loren fidgeted with her silverware, the napkin, the salt and pepper shakers, the little doohickey holding the packets of sugar and
artificial sweeteners.
Still, he waited.
“How’s Clarisse doing?” she asked.
Sully struggled not to ask her to get to the point. He knew Clarisse had just talked to Loren on the phone two days earlier, and they’d likely texted.
“She’s six months pregnant and in the cranky phase,” he said, trying to keep his tone light. “I’m beginning to suspect she has more switch in her than she thinks she does. She’s keeping poor Mac running. Being on doctor-ordered bed rest has thrown her for a loop.”
The twin girls Clarisse was carrying appeared healthy, but she’d had a scare with premature contractions and was now on bed rest and medications to prevent her from going into premature labor.
“Ross is out of town,” she finally said, her gaze fixed on a point on the table about halfway across it.
“Okay,” he finally said when she wasn’t forthcoming with more information than that.
Sully knew Ross practiced a very specialized subset of intellectual property and technology law, including copyright, patent, and trademark cases. Sometimes, he had to travel out of town for litigation.
Finally, her hazel gaze settled on him. “I need to talk with you about something…disturbing. I have to get your take on it before I decide what I need to do.”
He tensed, forcing himself not to react, to maintain a casual, yet curious tone. “What’s it regarding?”
“Something that happened.” Her gaze returned to the table.
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“A crime.” Her gaze darted up to his before skittering away again.
Sully didn’t like where this was going because he suspected he knew exactly where it was going. “Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind?”
“Because I need to know a couple of things before I decide what I should do with this.”
Sully fought the urge to impatiently drum his fingers on the table. The waitress reappeared with their drinks but they hadn’t even looked at their menus yet.
“We’re going to need a couple more minutes,” he told the waitress before she left them alone again.
He opened his menu even though his appetite had deserted him. “Loren, I love you as a friend, but I am going to be honest here and tell you that you’re starting to concern me.”
“As a former cop, aren’t you required to report things that happened…even years ago?”
He froze. “Why are you asking me that?”
She sipped her iced tea. He didn’t miss how her hand trembled, the ice cubes clinking against the glass. “Answer my question.”
“First, you answer mine,” he said. “What kind of crime are we talking about?”
She wouldn’t meet his gaze.
His jaw clenched. “Loren, hypothetically speaking, what kind of crime are we talking about?”
“Murder,” she whispered.
Sully reached out and slowly stirred his iced tea with his straw even though he hadn’t added any sugar to it. Somehow, he’d always wondered if this day would come. That maybe he’d overlooked something, some telling detail. Or maybe Clarisse had said something, let it slip accidentally to one of her friends. Maybe guilt building inside Clarisse had driven her to confide in someone else.
Before he went any farther, Sully needed to know exactly what Loren knew, who she’d told.
Why she was even stirring this shitpot now.
“How long ago are we talking?” he quietly asked, more to stall than anything.
He knew the date.
It was forever etched in his brain, along with the details.
Loren’s hands dropped to her lap. “Over thirty years ago,” she quietly said.
Sully froze, an icy flood of relief and shock washing over him, short-circuiting the really bad adrenaline jolt that had just started pumping through his veins.
Now he honestly had no clue what she was talking about.
He nodded toward her menu to buy himself some time to recover from the near miss. “We need to be ready when the waitress returns,” he said, hoping his own voice didn’t tremble from the force of his relief.
* * * *
Once their orders were in, Sully leaned in and reached across the table to gently clasp Loren’s hand in his.
“I’m your friend,” he said. “If you ask me to keep your secret, I will. But I will also be brutally honest with my opinion. I won’t sugar-coat something just to make you feel better. Understand?”
Silent tears slipped down her cheeks and fell to the table as she nodded. He realized today she wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was totally unlike her.
“What happened?” he asked.
He had to struggle to hear her pained whisper. “He was only trying to make things right,” Loren said. “He never told me the details about what happened. But I know. He told me never to ask him the details, because he never wanted to lie to me, and he didn’t want me to know. But I know.”
Over thirty years ago would have put Ross and Loren in their early twenties, Sully knew. College years.
“He, who?” he asked, although he suspected.
“Ross,” she said.
“I still don’t know what we’re talking about,” Sully said, both confused and relieved.
Loren withdrew her hand from his and reached into her purse. She withdrew a small tablet, turned it on, swiped through a few things, then handed it across the table to Sully.
It was a PDF file, a scan of the front page of an old newspaper.
The bold headline on 1A, just under the fold and directly below the main article about a Middle East US military action overseas, read “Four Students Dead in Tragic Crash.”
The article talked about four frat brothers—including three who were on the Pennsylvania university’s football team—who’d died in a fiery middle-of-the-night car crash when they apparently got drunk and then missed a sharp curve, running their vehicle off a hundred-foot drop. Walter Kessling, Charles Van Hardy, and Lawrence Busch were the players. David Corning was heavily involved in student government at the school. All four seniors lived at the fraternity house.
Loren still cried. “He was only trying to make things right,” she said. “No one else would do anything. After the other girl told me what happened to her, I told Ross.” She nodded at the tablet. “And then…”
Sully took a deep breath. As a cop, he suspected he knew exactly what had happened, what it would take to push the man over the brink like that.
Still, he needed the full story.
He returned the tablet to Loren. “Why are you asking me about something that happened a long time ago? Why is it important now? What’s happened?”
She swiped through to something else and showed him the tablet again. Another story, this one recent, three weeks earlier, posted on a Pennsylvania newspaper’s website.
Football team to honor Adequan Smith and three past fallen teammates with memorial plaque at ceremony before the game this Saturday.
Smith had been an innocent bystander shot and killed during a convenience store robbery only two weeks into the start of the school year. Kessling, Van Hardy, and Busch were the three “fallen” being belatedly honored. Surviving family members of the three young men had been invited to attend the ceremony.
One Melody Van Hardy Axlerod, a younger sister of Charles, was quoted in the article. “It’s about time someone finally honored them, considering the investigation into the accident was botched from the start.”
He read through it before returning the tablet to Loren. “That still doesn’t answer my question. Why is this important now?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Because Melody Axlerod found me on Facebook and contacted me last week. Then she called me yesterday. She lives in Tampa. She wants to meet with me to talk.”
Chapter Two
Then…
Loren Miller’s first year of college had gone well. After not a little begging on her part, her parents had agreed to let her move out of the
dorm and share a small, furnished two-bedroom apartment with her friend, Emily Andrews, for her second year. Loren and Emily had graduated from the same high school just outside of Pittsburgh, and had been good friends their junior and senior years.
Loren, who’d just turned twenty, worked part-time, as a waitress just off campus at a small coffeeshop. They weren’t open late, most of their clientele being nearby office workers, and the employees with seniority usually grabbed the more lucrative morning and lunch shifts.
When she first met Ross Connelly, it was, ironically, a dark and stormy night.
Seriously dark, because the power went off. And seriously stormy, an early spring weather system that dumped massive amounts of rain right on top of them for over twelve hours straight.
During a lull in the weather, Emily’s older brother, Mark, had stopped by to eat dinner, his good friend Ross Connelly in tow.
Then the bottom dropped out of the sky again and the two men were stuck there until nearly midnight.
Not that Loren minded.
She liked Mark well enough, but he was almost like a big brother to her in many ways. She’d spent enough time at Emily’s house during high school she’d come to see him as the big brother she’d never had.
She’d never met Ross before that night, although she’d heard his name mentioned once or twice in passing. Three years older than her and in his final year of pre-law, he was starting to grow into his lanky six one frame, his sandy brown hair a little on the tousled side, his brown eyes sweet and inviting.