Also by Olivia Gaines
Modern Mail Order Brides
Oregon Trails
On A Rainy Night in Georgia
Buckeye and the Babe
The Tennessee Mountain Man
Maple Sundaes & CIder Donuts
Bleu, Grass, Bourbon
Serenity Series
Welcome to Serenity
Holden
Farmer Takes A Wife
Slice of Life
Friends with Benefits
Slivers of Love
The Cost to Play
Thursdays in Savannah
The Blakemore Files
Being Mrs. Blakemore
Shopping with Mrs. Blakemore
Dancing with Mr. Blakemore
Cruising with the Blakemores
Dinner with the Blakemores
Loving the Czar
Being Mr. Blakemore
A Weekend with the Blakemores
The Davonshire Series
Courting Guinevere
Vanity's Pleasure
The Delgado Files
Killers
Becoming the Czar
Yunior
The Men of Endurance
A Walk Through Endurance
A Return to Endurance
A Walk Through Endurance
The Technicians
Blind Hope
Blind Luck
Blind Fate
Blind Copy
The Value of A Man
My Mail Order Wife
A Weekend with the Cromwells
Cutting it Close
The Zelda Diaries
It Happened Last Wednesday
A Frickin' Fantastic Friday
A Tantalizing Tuesday
A Saucy Sunday
My Thursday Throwback
A Marvelous Monday
A Sensual Saturday
Standalone
Santa's Big Helper
A Menu For Loving
North to Alaska
Turning the Page
An Untitled Love
Wyoming Nights
Montana
Blind Date
The Christmas Quilts
Watch for more at Olivia Gaines’s site.
The Tennessee Mountain Man
Olivia Gaines
Davonshire House Publishing
PO Box 9716
Augusta, GA 30916
THIS BOOK IS A WORK of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s vivid imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely a coincidence.
© 2018 Olivia Gaines, Cheryl Aaron Corbin
Copy Editor: Teri Thompson Blackwell
Cover: Nu Class Graphicz
Olivia Gaines Make Up and Photograph by Latasla Gardner Photography
ASIN: B077RJFG3W
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means whatsoever. For information address, Davonshire House Publishing, PO Box 9716, Augusta, GA 30916.
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8
First Davonshire House Publishing February 2018
DEDICATION
For Teri.
Sometimes I get it right on the onset, when I don’t, that is why I have you.
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thank you to the Tuesday Sushi Club, Jessica, and Hildie, for keeping me grounded.
To all the fans, friends and supporters of the dream as well as the Facebook community of writers who keep me focused, inspired and moving forward.
Write On!
Also by Olivia Gaines
THE SLICE OF LIFE SERIES
The Perfect Man
Friends with Benefits
A Letter to My Mother
The Basement of Mr. McGee
A New Mommy for Christmas
The Slivers of Love Series
The Cost to Play
Thursday in Savannah
Girl's Weekend
Beneath the Well of Dawn
Santa’s Big Helper
The Davonshire Series
Courting Guinevere
Loving Words
Vanity's Pleasure
The Blakemore Files
Being Mrs. Blakemore
Shopping with Mrs. Blakemore
Dancing with Mr. Blakemore
Cruising with the Blakemores
Dinner with the Blakemores
Loving the Czar
The Value of a Man Series
My Mail Order Wife
A Weekend with the Cromwell’s
Other Novellas
North to Alaska
The Brute & The Blogger
A Better Night in Vegas
Other Novels
A Menu for Loving
Turning the Page
Contents
Chapter One – Worst Week Ever
Chapter Two – ... And Things Got Worse
Chapter Three – ... This Sh*t is Hard ...
Chapter Four – ... My Name is Khloe Burgess
Chapter Five – ... My Dearest Khloe
Chapter Six – Tennessee Here I Come...Wait, What?
Chapter Seven – Well, Do You?
Chapter Eight – It’s Simple. I Like It.
Chapter Nine – Pa, Sis and a Jethro.
Chapter Ten – Bottoms Up.
Chapter Eleven – The Past is a Present
Chapter Twelve – Sssh! Sssh! ... Don’t Shush Me!
Chapter Thirteen – Easy Like...Sunday Morning
Chapter Fourteen – Well, That’s Just Plain Nasty
Chapter Fifteen – Dinner and Show and a visit from Honey
Chapter Sixteen – Hang on Beau
Chapter Seventeen – Home Sweet Beau
Chapter Eighteen – Khloe, are you okay?
Epilogue
Enjoyed the story? Here are a few book club questions I want you to ponder.
About the Author: Olivia Gaines
Chapter One – Worst Week Ever
Chicago, Illinois
Khloe Burgess sat on her front porch, the smoldering embers crackling behind her while the ache in her head thumped and angry blood pumped into the grey matter. Disbelief overcame any attempt to get on her feet and get moving because honestly, she didn’t know what to say, what to do, or how to even respond to just one more situation that she labeled as the worst week ever. It was only Wednesday. The week wasn’t even over yet.
People walked by, asking if she was okay. The furthest thing from her mind was whether or not she was okay. From where she sat, shit would never be okay again in her life ever. And it was only Wednesday.
The previous Sunday morning, before her shift at Mercy Memorial Hospital in Chicago where she held a glorified position as a Nurse Practitioner, three thugs had chased her during her morning run. Luckily, the idiots were sagging their pants, which hindered their ability to catch up to her to do whatever dastardly deed had entered their small minds. She had escaped one horrific fate only to enter her workplace and be shot at by the wife of Dr. Lombardi, the resident male whore who found it necessary to hump every woman willing to spread her legs. His latest conquest, believing her love affair with the roaming Romeo made her special, then took it upon herself to call his wife. The sad part was that as emboldened as Nurse Vicky believed herself to be, she wasn’t courageous enough to give Nancy Lombardi her real name. Instead, Vicky de
cided to tell Nancy that her name was Khloe Burgess.
The bullet from the gun, held by a shaky Nancy, went into the wall. Dr. Lombardi, in his effort to wrestle the gun away from his enraged wife, ended up with a gut shot. Khloe, ashamed of her own thoughts, wished the shot had hit the man a bit lower. He was a disgusting man, who by any standards wasn’t even good looking, and had an average penis. This she knew for a fact since she’d caught him in the on-call room several times in a state of readiness with different young women. The man, whose first name was Roger, was a menace that walked around all day tugging his penis.
“I need a new life. This one sucks,” Khloe remarked as she applied pressure to the bullet wound in his belly while others prepared Roger Lombardi for surgery.
It wasn’t a normal day at the office. Nothing in her life this week was normal, but tomorrow was her day off. A day away from the hospital with sick people only to spend it with her mother, who made people sick. Especially Khloe, but it was Monday. A new day.
“Morning Mom,” she said cheerfully as she entered the childhood home she and her brother Dorian had grown up in. The house smelled of sour beer and old cigarette smoke trapped in the walls and pissy carpet. The status of the carpet came by way of her mother, who was on another drinking binge.
“Don’t morning me. Don’t say good morning either, cause ain’t a goddamn thing good about it,” Erica Burgess slurred. “Where is that peasy headed brother of yours? He doesn’t even come by anymore to check on his Momma.”
“I’m here, Mom,” she said, getting the woman off the floor. From the way her mother was sprawled on the floor, it appeared as if she’d spent the better part of the night there, soaked in her own waste. “Let’s get you to the shower.”
“I ain’t your damned child!”
“Then stop shitting on yourself like you are, Mom,” Khloe said, reaching for her mother but not moving fast enough to avoid the swing of the woman’s fist, which made contact with her eye.
This was the way it normally went, but usually, Khloe moved fast enough to duck from the wayward swings. “Mom, I’m going to have to put you in a home,” Khloe said. “You can’t be left alone.”
“Then I will live with you,” Erica said.
“Mom, I don’t know why you hate me so much to suggest such a thing,” she said softly, trying again to get her mother on her feet without getting the caked-on fecal matter on her own. “Something has to give. We can’t keep doing this.”
“You may not be able to, but I can. I will drink as long as I can get my hands on a bottle,” Erica said. “Ricky is a son of a bitch who left me with all of this. Two kids. A mortgage and a dog I didn’t even like. You know that fucker bit me?”
“Yes Mom, I do,” Khloe said somberly as she got the thin woman into the stand-up shower. Ricky Burgess left them when Khloe was five and Dorian was eight. Thirty-two years later, her mother was still drinking and blaming the man for not wanting to come home every day to a woman who smelled like pee, Kool Menthols, and another man. The sad part was that he left his children with her as well. For many years she held a cool resentment for the man she called father. The one year turned into five and before she knew it, her childhood had ended. It was time to be an adult and head into the adult world.
On Khloe’s 18th birthday, she had joined the Army and trained as a nurse. Time again flew past and 20 years, seven countries, and two wars later, she returned to Chicago to do good by her community. Too bad the community didn’t want to do good by her.
Tuesday morning, Khloe spotted Paddington Clawfoot, her Rottweiler, walking down the street with the local drug dealer. She whistled for the dog to come to her side but the animal looked at her and continued on with his new master. She was uncertain if the protector she’d raised from a pup to be her bodyguard was stolen or if he too had become tired of her lonely life. The dog had no intention of coming back and she sure as hell wasn’t about to get confrontational with a drug dealer, so she let it be.
Opening her front door, she realized why the dog had left. Her mother was in her house. How the woman managed to consistently get in, even after she’d had the locks changed and a security system installed, befuddled her. Today, Khloe felt like Paddington Clawfoot. She wanted to get the hell out of that house as well.
“Mom, what are you doing here?”
“You said I didn’t need to live alone, so I am going to move in with you,” Erica said with glassy eyes.
“No, you aren’t, Mom,” she said.
“Well, just let me stay tonight until you get off shift,” her mother said. “Your damned dog tried to bite me, so I burned him with a cigarette and kicked his black ass out!”
“He was my dog and you had no right,” Khloe said. “How did you get in my house anyway?’
“Joey let me in,” Erica said with pride.
“Why was Joey in my house?” she asked, concerned, going past her mother to her bedroom to check the jewelry box. Joseph Greenwood, her on again, off again boyfriend, aka Joey Montana, the poker player, had a nasty habit. He gambled. For every hot streak, he had one more that was tepid. Joey would win big and buy expensive baubles and trinkets for Khloe, then hit a low point and come to take it all back.
“I assume you two had some hot loving planned for this morning,” her mother said, standing in the middle of the floor with urine running down her leg.
“Mom! Seriously?”
“What?”
“I can’t with you today. I just can’t,” Khloe said, looking into the jewelry box and spying all the empty slots where her boyfriend had ripped her off. Again. It was a constant cycle of crazy and she wanted off the “Ferris Wheel of Stupid.”
“Don’t tell me what you can and can’t do! I am your mother for Christ’s sake,” she slurred.
“Don’t bring Jesus into this unless you plan to give your wretched soul to him for salvation,” Khloe mumbled. She regretted the words but she would speak to her mother in the morning when she returned from her shift at the hospital. It was just Tuesday. The week had only officially begun.
Wednesday morning, tired, ready to face her mother’s antics, she returned home to find her house in a pile of ashes, and a charred body on a gurney being wheeled out. Everything she owned had been in the house. All of it burned to black soot. No clothes. Not even a pot to piss in or a window to toss it out of was left. She stood as the body rolled past her, unable to cry, robbed of all feeling, even one of relief.
“Miss, you live here?” the Fire Chief asked.
“I did,” she said softly. “What happened?”
“From what I could tell, the fire started in the back bedroom. Looks like a bottle of booze was on the floor, and whoever that was in there fell asleep with a cigarette, it caught a bit of paper on fire and the whole thing went up like kindling,” the Fire Chief said. “Miss, can you identify the woman on the gurney?”
“She was my mother, Erica Burgess,” Khloe said.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he told her.
In some sense of the universe giving her a pass in an effort to ensure her sanity, she too was sorry for the loss. Truthfully, she’d never known the Erica Burgess that a dude named Ricky fell in love with and married. At some point, when her life made sense, she would reach out to the man and find out where it went south. Behaviors, as she was once told by a commanding officer, are formed out of the necessity to protect the mind from damage. Even if the damage done to the body is as great as what is done to the soul.
Her mother had rotted both her body and her soul. Khloe didn’t want to think it, but the idea just kind of showed up in her head. Her mother’s body was filled with enough alcohol to make the woman a piece of kindling. The dull throb in her temples made her want to lie down for the rest of the week.
It was just Wednesday. She sat on what remained of her front porch and looked at the fire engines all shiny and red, with flashing lights. The trucks pulled off, leaving her alone in misery until she got to her feet and drove herself
to the old house that smelled of urine, stale cigarettes and sadness.
Letting herself into the house, she trudged her way to the old bedroom where she often hid in the back closet when her mother’s drunken friends would come calling. Staring at the ceiling, she tried to find the tears, but they just wouldn’t flow. Later.
“Later, I will call Dorian, but right now, I just want to sleep,” she said, closing her eyes and drifting off into one of the more peaceful slumbers she’d had in years.
HARBUCK, TENNESSEE
Beauregard “Beau” Montgomery sat in the back of the church watching one Hannah Bryndle say “I Do” to a mush-mouth, meat-mangler named Marty Manchester. He didn’t know which irritated him more, that the woman dumped him for a tenderfoot named Marty, or that she was marrying the slack-jawed meat processor who short-changed old people on the only meat that could be hunted in these parts.
“Dude, why did you come if you gon’ sit here giving’ em the evil eye?” his cousin Jethro asked.
“I came to wish them well,” Beauregard said.
“Do ya?”
“Do I what?”
“Wish’ em well?” Jethro asked.
“Yep,” he said. “If there are any two people in this world who deserve each other, it’s them two ass wipes.”
“You know what I heard?” Jethro asked, staring at his large cousin. He sat there, his green eyes twinkling, the shock of red hair sticking high on his head like a cowlick on acid, blinking at Beauregard, who sat waiting.
“Jethro, do you expect me to pull it out your head or are you gonna tell me?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jethro said as if remembering the thought that had popped into that head of his. “I heard that she slept with his cousin last week and the two of them, her and the cousin, plan to rob ole Marty blind.”
“Heard that, too,” Beau said.
“You believe it?”
“With those two snakes, you can believe almost anything you hear,” he said, frowning in distaste at the overly loud tongue kissing. His stomach lurched and he got to his feet, making others in the church turn to look at him. He offered a half-hearted wave to the crowd and skedaddled out of the building.
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