by Jess Bryant
Impulsive Saint
All Saints Security Series - 2
Jess Bryant
Blue Lemon Press
Contents
Synopsis
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
Epilogue
Book 3 Coming Soon
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available From Jess Bryant
Call Me, Irresistible
Stay A Little Longer
Should’ve Been Us
Imperfect Saint
Ashtyn Echols just made the most impulsive decision of her life. Maybe it’s a mistake, but it doesn’t feel like one. She can’t get married today. Not when she has her whole life ahead of her and a bucket list of things she wants to do before she ties herself down and becomes the perfect politician’s wife the way her family expects her to.
* * *
For the first time ever, Ashtyn is free. Free of all the expectations and demands. Free to make her own choices, and her own mistakes.
* * *
Tyler St. James has jumped out of airplanes, hiked into a volcano and plans to climb Everest someday soon. His brothers call him impulsive and it’s true. Adventure is his drug of choice which is why getting assigned security detail for the wedding of a Senator’s daughter seems like its destined to be the most boring day of his life… until she runs.
* * *
Putting her on the back of his motorcycle might seem crazy but it’s also the only responsible thing to do. If she wants fun, he’s the man for the job. She can check off a few of her bucket list items and he can keep her safe without her ever knowing he’s hired muscle.
* * *
Only, he never expected to fall for her during an impromptu road trip to Vegas. He never expected her to grow more independent and impossible to resist by the mile. And he never expected her to find out he was being paid to look after her.
* * *
Will the truth mean the end of their adventure, or is the destination just the beginning of their journey together?
For anyone who has ever realized that Mr. Right on paper, wasn’t necessarily the same as
Mr. Right for them.
Impulsive Saint – All Saints Security Series
Copyright ©2021 by Jess Bryant.
* * *
Cover Art: Melissa Gill Designs
Editing: Sara Miller – Pretty Little Book Editing
* * *
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any mention of name brands means the author recognizes the trademarks associated.
1
Ashtyn Echols was making a mistake.
She wasn’t ready to get married. She was only twenty-three years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. She had dreams. She had plans. She had a bucket list for crying out loud!
She wanted to travel, and see the world. She wanted to ride a motorcycle, and go on a road trip. She wanted to get drunk and dance on a bar and sing bad karaoke. She wanted to experience fun, danger, adventure and a hundred other things that she’d never had the chance to do.
She wanted to live!
She was twenty-three years old and she’d never really lived.
She wasn’t ready to get married, settle down and start popping out babies.
Settle. That was the twenty-pound word that felt like it was sitting on her chest. She didn’t want to settle! She had been settled her entire life. She had always been steady, mature, thoughtful and reasonable. But she was so damn tired of always doing the right thing and never stepping out of line.
For once in her life she wanted to stir things up and if she didn’t do it now, she knew she’d never get the chance to find out if she had it in her. But the only possible conclusion, the only way to get what she wanted, was to hurt the people she loved most in the world. She knew it would devastate them all, but she also knew that she couldn’t marry Aaron today.
Marrying Aaron would kill what was left of her spirit. It would kill her and she wasn’t even being dramatic about that. She could see exactly what her life would be like if she went through with this wedding and she knew, without a doubt, how it would end.
If she married Aaron today, she’d spend the rest of her life playing a well-defined role. She’d go from being Senator Echols’ daughter to Mayor Laughlin’s wife. He’d probably knock her up on their honeymoon and she’d spend the next six years popping out babies.
Her days would consist of tending to their children and sipping white wine spritzers with the other bored Stepford moms at the country club. She’d smile on command and appear to be the perfect wife as Aaron worked his way up the political ladder as her father’s protégé. Behind closed doors, she’d start drinking the hard stuff to drown her unhappiness and then she’d start swallowing antidepressants to numb the empty, hollow feeling inside of her. Eventually, it would all be too much and she’d find a way out, no matter the cost.
It wasn’t that Ashtyn had a wild creative streak. She didn’t have to imagine the worst-case scenario. She’d watched it play out before, with her own two eyes.
She’d had a front row seat for the destruction of her family when the gilded cage of political life got to be too much for her mother.
Ashtyn had been the one who came home from school to find her mother passed out on the bathroom floor. At eight years old, she hadn’t understood what was happening. It was only years later that she’d learned the truth.
Her mother had downed a bottle of pills, chased them with a fifth of vodka and waited for death to come, only to have it outrun by the ambulance Ashtyn had called.
That had been the beginning of the end. Not just of her parents’ marriage, but also of Ashtyn’s childhood. It was an end that had spanned five more years. Five years full of hospital trips, psychiatry visits, family therapy sessions and, eventually, divorce proceedings.
By then, Ashtyn had been a teenager and she’d known that divorce was the best possible outcome for her parents. They weren’t happy together, if they ever had been at all. Her mother wouldn’t have tried to kill herself if she was happy. Her father wouldn’t have spent so many hours at his office or out of town, avoiding them, if he’d been happy. Her parents had made each other miserable and parting ways was the only healthy solution to their misery.
And, separately, Ashtyn had watched her parents come back to life.
Her mother had flourished on her own. Delisa Echols had become a world traveler, flitting from one destination to another on a whim, never settling anywhere for long before the urge to go somewhere new struck her again. She wore what she wanted, said what she wanted, and had even let her hair go naturally silver without giving a care to what anyone had to say about it. She even smoked weed, a fact that had horrified her ex-husband and made her teenage daughter laugh when the newspaper found out and splashed it all over the front page of the soc
iety pages. She had become, Ashtyn now realized, the woman she never could have been as a Senator’s wife.
While her mother had been halfway around the world, finding herself, her father had taken over raising Ashtyn. Andrew Echols had recovered from the controversy of his wife’s suicide attempt and subsequent divorce, increased his political power and then, after the appropriate amount of time, remarried. On the second attempt, he’d found someone more suited for him and for life in the political arena. Rebecca Morningstar, Delisa’s former best friend, had stepped in to play the role of the politician’s new wife and step-mother to the daughter who already saw her as family.
They had all moved on with their lives, as happy and normal as any family.
At least, Ashtyn had always thought of her life as normal.
She had forgiven her mother for the suicide attempt. She’d forgiven her for leaving when Ashtyn had been in her most formative years and needed her mother the most. She’d even forgiven her for abandoning her husband and daughter with nothing more than an excuse that it was best for everyone that she go. But Ashtyn had never understood why her mother felt so trapped in her picture-perfect life that she’d thought the only way to escape was death... until now.
Ashtyn had spent her entire life living under the strict regime laid out by her Senator father. She went to all the right schools, got the best grades, and she always earned the highest honors. And more importantly, she had never, not once, challenged the rules that she was meant to live by.
She had grown up privileged and she’d known it, so she’d accepted that a life like hers came with certain pressures and demands.
Of course there had been times she’d felt suffocated by her father and stepmother’s love, which they showed in their need to be part of her daily life and every decision she made. Of course there had been times when she had wished that they would accept she was an adult and could make her own choices. Of course there had been days, and months and sometimes even years, when she’d felt lost inside the picture-perfect persona of the woman they wanted her to be, desperately trying to live up to their impossible standards, certain she was losing another piece of her soul every day that she didn’t stand up for herself.
But it was today, here and now, standing in the back room of a historic chapel in downtown Nashville, in a couture white dress that made her feel claustrophobic, that she truly understood what it must have felt like for her mother
She’d thought she was different. She’d thought she was stronger. Better even. But she wasn’t.
Ashtyn’s throat felt tight. She couldn’t breathe. It felt like the dress was cutting off her air supply. She was sweating, panting, and her vison was starting to blur around the edges.
She knew, logically, that she was having a panic attack. It wasn’t the first she’d suffered through. She’d been having them, ironically enough, ever since she found her mother on the floor of the bathroom when she was eight. But this was definitely the most debilitating episode she’d ever experienced.
She pulled at the top of the dress to get it away from her neck but it didn’t loosen and she found herself coughing and gagging. She stumbled her way to a wastebasket in the corner and fell to her knees. She dry-heaved until she felt lightheaded. It felt like it lasted an eternity, like she’d pass out, die maybe, and that thought was scary but it was only made more terrifying because some small voice inside of her said maybe that was for the best, maybe death would be better than walking down that aisle.
And that was when she knew, with one hundred percent certainty, that she couldn’t marry Aaron.
She couldn’t walk down the same dead-end road her mother had walked already knowing how it would all turn out. Knowing that something inside of her truly believed dying was a better alternative to becoming the perfect politician’s wife. She couldn’t marry Aaron knowing full well that she would regret it, knowing that it could end only in disaster.
For weeks now, as they made last-minute wedding plans, she’d chalked her doubts up to cold feet. Secretly though, she’d known that it was more than that. Cold feet didn’t start the moment Mr. Right put a gigantic diamond on a girl’s finger and if she was being honest with herself, she’d had her doubts even then. Ashtyn couldn’t deny the truth even a moment longer.
She and Aaron weren’t right for each other. She didn’t think they were even in love. Not anymore. Not for a long time. They were both just going through the motions, doing what their families expected of them. But she couldn’t do it anymore. Not to Aaron and not even for Aaron.
She couldn’t get married today.
Almost as soon as she decided that she had to call the whole thing off, the panic attack abated. She sucked in deep breaths of cool air. Her vision returned slowly and when she glanced back at herself in the mirror, she knew that she was making the right choice.
Her skin was splotchy and red. Tears had rolled down her face as she struggled for air, leaving black streaks of mascara across her cheeks. Her veil was crooked and her hair was falling out of the pins the professional stylist had put in only a few hours ago.
She was a mess and looking at herself in that mirror, she knew what she had to do.
A knock sounded on the door of the bridal suite and she jumped, covering her mouth to stifle a shriek. No. No, no, no. It wasn’t time. They couldn’t be here for her already.
She was in no condition to deal with her father, or even her stepmother. They’d both chastise her for ruining her hair and makeup and dismiss her worries as cold feet. They would drag her down that aisle if they had to just to save face in front of all their important guests. Neither of them would understand a world where Ashtyn and Aaron didn’t end up together because that had always been the plan.
The door cracked open hesitantly, “Ash?”
Her breath whooshed out in relief and she pushed to her feet. She grabbed the dainty wrist her best friend had poked through to wave at her. Kelsey tripped a little on her bridesmaid dress as she stumbled into the room. Ashtyn slammed the door behind her and then turned back to find that Kelsey was smoothing her own dress back into place and hadn’t even looked at her yet. She wouldn’t be acting so serene if she had.
“Geez, I nearly fell on my face. I wasn’t going to open the door wide enough for anyone to see in. Calm down.”
“Kelsey.” She ignored her friend’s words, whispering just loud enough to make her friend glance up and as soon as Kelsey’s eyes settled on her they went wide.
“Oh my God. Ash. What happened?” Kelsey looked around the room, searching for the source of whatever had turned her into this chaotic mess of a girl but there was no monster lurking in the shadows. The monster was Ashtyn and it had been hiding inside of her for years. “Who ruined your hair and makeup? Did someone come in here? Was it Aaron? Your dad? Are you okay?”
“Kelsey, stop.” She grabbed her friend’s hands when she reached out for her and held her tight, “I need you to listen to me right now.”
“Okay.” Kelsey was looking more and more unnerved by the second.
“You were right. I can’t do it.”
Kelsey’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head, “I was right? About what?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Aaron…I can’t marry him.”
“Oh shitballs.” Kelsey used her most colorful curse when she started shaking her head, “No. Just no. You told me you were happy with him. I said I only wanted you to be happy and you assured me, repeatedly I might add, that you would be happy being married to him. When I left you earlier, you were fine! You were more than fine. You were happy!”
“See, that’s the thing though, I wasn’t.” Ashtyn admitted, “I was lying. Lying to you and to myself.”
“No.” Kelsey said again, “No. You can’t do this, Ash. You can’t do this just because I don’t like the guy. Please, God, tell me that’s not what this is about. You’re not rethinking things just because I said he was the safe choice, right? Because you know me. I was being dramatic an
d bitchy and… and… exaggerating, obviously.”
The truth was, she couldn’t honestly tell Kelsey that her words hadn’t shaken an already crumbling foundation. Not when Kelsey had told her at least a million times over the years that she and Aaron were a terrible match. Kelsey didn’t like Aaron very much. She thought he was condescending and rude and that he walked funny because he had a stick up his ass. The two of them had never gotten along and Ashtyn had grown accustomed to playing middle-man in their arguments. So no, it shouldn’t have really phased her when her best friend asked her if she was sure she really wanted to get married today or if Aaron was just the safe choice... but it had.
After she’d lied and told Kelsey she was fine and just needed some space and time to prepare herself, the words had played on repeat in her head. Kelsey’s words, her doubts, her warnings, they’d brought up the memories of Delisa’s suicide attempt. They’d made Ashtyn really stop and think about the life that would be waiting for her at the end of that aisle. It had been Kelsey’s words that set her epiphany in motion but they weren’t what had changed her mind about the wedding.
She’d come to that decision all on her own and she knew it was the right one. How could it not be? The panic attack had stopped when she admitted she didn’t want to do this. For the first time in months she didn’t feel nauseous or dizzy. Her gut didn’t roil with anxiety. She had finally listened to her heart and her head, both of which had been screaming at her to not go through with this wedding, and she’d come to the only conclusion that she could.
