KEPT: A Small Town Second Chance Romance Novella (Reckless Falls Book 0) Read online

  I slowed down, taking the curve gently so as not to jar her. She muttered something in protest, her eyelids fluttering, and I slowed down even more. There were all of these stories about new parents driving endless miles to make sure their babies could fall asleep. For the first time, I understood the impulse.

  I shot past the turn for the realtor’s and headed out on the straightaway that led south out of town. In the rearview mirror, I could see the lake appearing behind me, unfurling like a ribbon of blue. It was choppy this morning, the stiff breeze raising little glinting peaks on the surface. A few stalwart boaters clung to the last remnants of the season and dotted the lake with white. The water would still be warm, especially since this summer had been so hot.

  I drove for fifteen miles, passing the occasional farm and the silent wind turbines that rose like giants out of the ground. I took little backroad bridges, crisscrossing Reckless Creek over and over again. And still, Aria slept on.

  Finally I looked at my gas gauge and grunted.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  She didn’t move.

  “Aria?” I said, a little louder.

  She was dead to the world.

  I stared ahead and tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I couldn’t drive her around forever, I was going to run out of gas on these country roads. And she was going to wake up with one hell of a neck cramp on top of all the other shit she had been dealing with.

  She needed to be in her house, curled up in bed and preferably sleeping for like the next week or something.

  I took the next turn and began the slow circle back to the realtor’s office.

  By the time we made the turn into that parking lot, she had been asleep for more than an hour. Her eyelids fluttered as she dreamed and one of her long, elegant fingers tapped her knee in a staccato rhythm. Her lips were parted and her breath came in short, regular bursts.

  I threw the Jeep into park and then leaned back, trying to figure out what the fuck to do next.

  “Aria?” I said again, shaking her. She rocked from side to side and then I had to reach my hand out to catch her lolling head. She fell to the to the side until her head rested on my shoulder.

  She sighed so contentedly that felt like it rearranged my cell structure.

  I sat there in the driver’s seat for a second, dithering about what the fuck to do next. Should I prod her awake and help her walk to her car? Or should I carry her there like an over-tired child?

  The latter was the more tempting option, the idea of holding her body in my arms was far more alluring than anything I'd felt in a while. But there was also the small consideration that I had only just become reacquainted with her yesterday. How would she react? Would she be grateful? Or would she slap me across the face?

  I looked over at her. The way her body curved made the risk of getting slapped worth it. And besides, I couldn’t leave her here as tired as she was. Driving tired was almost as bad as driving drunk.

  I decided to try one more time. Slipping out from the driver’s seat, I walked around and opened her door. “Aria?” I said, shaking her a little more firmly.

  She awoke with a start, her whole body stiffening and her arms shot up to protect her head. She blinked up at me, confused.

  “Hey,” I said cautiously. The way she awakened made my stomach turn. “We’re here at the realtor’s. Your car is over there.”

  “Oh,” she said, stretching. Some of the stiffness went out of her limbs. She gave a huge yawn that she tried to hide behind her hand and failed. “I fell asleep.”

  “You did,” I nodded.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  I stepped back, feeling my heart hammering in my chest. My hand shook with an old, forgotten tremor. “It’s fine,” I grunted, turning away. “I appreciated the quiet.”

  She shot me a hurt look, then her mouth twisted and her lips pressed into a thin line. “Well, thanks for the ride. See you back at my house,” she said, emphasizing the word "my” with a snotty little lip curl.

  “I’ll be at my place if you need me again,” I told her, throwing that emphasis right back at her. She wrinkled her nose and then without another word she got up and went to her car.

  Without another moment's hesitation, I turned on my heel and headed back to mine. My heart was doing a strange tap-dance and I felt my cock stir. I slammed the heel of my hand into the steering wheel.

  What I just felt was far too dangerous for an addict like me. I needed to be careful, but yet I had a feeling there was no way I was going to be able to be careful with Aria Jane.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Aria Jane

  I opened the door to the great house and threw my car keys on the huge, farmhouse style dining room table. Leaning against it, I took deep steadying breaths. A simple two-word phrase kept banging around in my head like echoes in a canyon.

  I’m home.

  My fingers curled to grab hold of the smooth tabletop. The wood was warm under my hands and the swirls in the grain reminded me of Thanksgivings spent around this very table.

  In seven years I had done my level best to push down these memories that came cropping up out of nowhere. My parents, and all those hard feelings…. I had run from them, denied them, refused to acknowledge they were there…but here they were, right now. The regret, the anger… The sadness. Were my parents as sad as I was about how things had turned out?

  I wrinkled my nose. Of course they weren’t. They’d never contacted me, not in seven long years. It wasn’t like I was fucking hiding. The fact that my hair was a different color didn’t make me a different fucking person. I was still their daughter and they could have found me easily. If they wanted to.

  Clearly they hadn’t wanted to. My parents never did anything they didn’t want to do. They preferred that the things they didn’t plan for stayed well out of sight.

  Like me.

  They were probably happy that I was gone.

  I took a deep breath and found myself reaching for my phone. Reaching for the distraction. The past seven years had been one long search for distraction.

  The text messages from Killian were becoming increasingly belligerent. I deleted all of them but not before a few words jumped out at me. Words like contract, breach and lawyer. And the word bitch at least fifty different times.

  I pressed down on the table, trying like hell to push back the memories of Killian’s twisted face as I called him out on all his years of being unfaithful.

  I managed to push down his face, but two other faces swam up in its place.

  My parents. Gayle and Glenn Dolan.

  When I was a kid, I figured they were old already. There was no getting around it. Theirs were the only gray heads at the playground. And when they bothered to take me, they preferred to sit on the bench and watch, rather than engage in a raucous game of tag like the other parents in the square. Most people, when they saw us together, assumed I was out with my grandparents, that the people I called mom and dad had had already raised their family and had moved on to the next generation.

  I swallowed hard and pushed myself away from the table, consciously moving away from the memories that surrounded it. But they came flooding back anyway.

  Those people who thought that my parents were done with raising kids, well, in a way, they were right.

  My sister Violet was fifteen years old when she sat in the back of her friend’s car. Fifteen years, nine months and two weeks old to be exact. Three months shy of sixteen, the youngest in her grade. Her friends were all driving already, inexperienced sixteen-year-olds on the road, flush with power.

  They were on their way to a movie, heading through the back roads to one of the big chain multiplexes. That was the problem with being a young teenager in Reckless Falls. The town was not made for you. It was made for tourists trying to get away from things like malls and movies and concerts. The town did not look fondly on entertaining bands of roving teenagers. So my sister did what all the kids around here do. She left, pilin
g into the car with far too many other passengers, making the twenty-minute drive to the next biggest town.

  From what I know, my sister had been really excited to go that night. My parents had relented, allowing her to go see an R-rated movie and she was feeling very grown-up.

  No one expected that she had grown up to be as old as she ever would get.

  The inexperienced driver at the wheel certainly didn't expect the drunk driver crossing into their lane as they rounded the bend.

  Violet Marie Dolan was fifteen years, nine months and fourteen days old when she died.

  One year and three months later, I was born.

  I was my parents’ second chance. And they were never shy about letting me know that I was there for them to have a do-over.

  Growing up in my dead sister’s shadow, I spent most of my childhood wondering if I was allowed to be my own person. It certainly seemed like my lot in life was to inhabit the space my sister used to occupy. Paging through old, dusty albums, I studied her face until it was more familiar than my own. I could see that the two of us were almost identical twins with a sixteen-year gap between us. But looking at her picture was like looking into a funhouse mirror. She had my face, but her nose was smaller, her mouth not nearly as wide. I looked like a copy of a copy, distorted and smudged, very clearly a bad rendition of the real thing.

  And besides being beautiful, Violet was good too. Good in way I could never hope to live up to. "Violet would never do something like this," my parents would sigh when I brought home a bad report card. It was always a reminder of the standards I could never live up to. Frozen in time at fifteen years, nine months and fourteen days, Violet became a saint, a martyr, perpetually placed on a pedestal that seemed to grow higher and higher every year.

  Violet was my goalpost, the measure I needed to live up to. Every one of my accomplishments was measured against my dead sister's development. Did I walk at fifteen months? Violet walked at twelve. Did I start talking in full sentences at twenty months? I was showing off, since Violet didn't speak until two-and-a-half. Was I a good musician? It wasn't really important because Violet was better. Was I strong, tall, or beautiful? Violet was all these things and more.

  The only thing I shared willingly with my sister was my love of music. Music filled up all of the empty, worm-eaten places inside of me, the parts of me that fizzled and boiled away with longing for something else. But while Violet enjoyed happy, upbeat tunes, carefree and vibrant like her, I preferred the darker, edgier kind. The kind of raucous noise that drowned out the sounds of my parents yelling and banging on my bedroom door, demanding that I turn it down and go back to being the version of their daughter they still held in their head.

  I lived with Violet’s short life as my yardstick, measuring myself out in hours, months and years against someone who my parents loved more than me. But the closer I got to fifteen years, nine months and fourteen days, the shorter the yardstick became. I couldn't see past that measurement. My life was laid out in front of me in terms of what Violet had accomplished, but what the hell would it be like for me to surpass her? How could I be fifteen years, nine months and fifteen days? I couldn't imagine myself making it past that, much less to my sixteenth birthday.

  I didn't mean to run away. It wasn't intentional. It was just that, with my life so clearly mapped out by Violet on an already beaten path, I now suddenly had to veer off into the woods alone. I left because I needed to strike out on my own, and come out from under Violet’s long shadow, the only way to do that was to leave Reckless Falls.

  The night Xavier and I left, we crashed on a stranger’s floor. A friend of Xavier’s cousin, or so he claimed. It didn’t matter. I was out of Reckless Falls and I was out from under my dead sister’s shadow. I was off her beaten path and striking out on my own. And I needed to mark the occasion somehow.

  Violet and I had the same hair color, a dirty blonde color that bleached out easily in the sun. It was something I shared with her, something my mother always commented on as being a connection with her.

  I didn’t want to be held by the past anymore.

  That night, in a stranger’s dingy bathroom, I began my transformation. I stripped Aria away, piece by piece. I combed the vermillion dye through Aria’s dull-dishwater-blonde locks and rinsed it away to reveal this anonymous beauty. The girl I had always pictured in my head when I thought of myself had no name, no background to hold her down. She was made, not born, springing free of the ashes like a phoenix. A glitter-queen. An anonymous fire-breathing dragon who needed an anonymous name.

  Jane Doe.

  I was so fierce and fabulous in the mirror that I smiled and laughed out loud. I could almost forget everything about what I’d left behind, my worried parents, all the trouble I would be in once they tracked me down. That night, that didn’t matter. Jane didn’t have those problems. And that night, I became Jane. And that night, on the crowded dance floor, I meant Killian Varness and the project we called Wrecked was born. Maybe it was a little on the nose that I called my band that. My life was wrecked when my sister got into a car wreck. Get it? Yeah, it’s a bit much, but I was sixteen, far from home and drunk on the possibility of reinventing myself.

  I’d lived that reinvention for seven years, but now I was back, summoned to my old life by my grandfather’s will.

  My grandfather had done his level best to be both grandfather and grandmother to me and to my parents too. Every Thanksgiving he donned my grandmother’s apron and set about making a feast in her honor. I’d never met her, she’d died of breast cancer before I was born, but the fierceness with which he kept her memory alive made me feel like I’d known her all my life. He’d made this place more of a home to me than my own home haunted by Violet’s ghost.

  I clenched my fists. Yes, this was my home, dammit. He’d left it to me to do what I needed to do with it. It sucked that I’d have to sell it, but my grandfather was a practical man. He’d understand. It was weird that he hadn’t told me about the tenant, but maybe he’d died before he could straighten it out. It was probably had something to do with the will.

  I squared my shoulders a bit. Yes, that was it. All I needed to do was talk to the lawyer.

  I grabbed my phone and scrolled through my email until I found the letter. The contact info was right there. I dialed the number and took a deep breath.

  “Offices of Banner and Banner,” a pert female voice answered.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, hi, this is Aria Dolan calling….”

  “Oh, Miss Dolan, Mr. Banner has been waiting to hear from you. I’ll put you through.”

  I blinked. He’d been waiting for me? Why?

  “Miss Dolan!” a jolly sounding man answered. “I’m glad to hear from you.”

  “Yes, ah,” I cleared my throat again. “Thank you for contacting me.”

  “Of course, of course, your grandfather was a wonderful man, he’ll be missed by many.”

  I blinked back sudden, unexpected tears. “He will,” I said softly, then tried to gather myself. “I’m here at the house now, actually…”

  “Ah, that’s great, I didn’t realize you were in town already….”

  “Yes and,” I interrupted. “And there seems to be a problem.”

  “Oh?” He sounded alarmed. “Is the house in order?”

  “Oh yes, it’s fine, it’s just…um, there’s a tenant?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t sound surprised at all.

  “You know this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…um…how am I supposed to sell the place if there’s a tenant with a lease agreement and everything?”

  “Excuse me? You want to what?”

  “Sell it. I want to put this house on the market as soon as I can.”

  Mr. Banner chuckled. “Oh my dear, I see there is some confusion. The house is part of your grandfather’s estate. We still need to go over the will and divide his estate amongst all of his heirs.”

  “His heirs?” I blinked. “As in plural
?”

  “Well of course. He did leave the house itself to you. But the land, and all the outbuildings, those aren’t yours, no.”

  “They aren’t.”

  He chuckled again. “Well of course not. Your grandfather hated how your family was torn apart. He wanted to bring you together in his death in a way he couldn’t in life. I’ll tell you what, I’ll clear my schedule and we can get this sorted tomorrow. I’ll place a call to the other interested parties and see if they can meet as well.”

  My stomach felt like it was falling down to my shoes. “Other… parties?”

  “Yes, your parents of course.” He chuckled again. “A Dolan family reunion.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Derek

  The sun had barely risen above the eastern ridge when I pulled into the parking area at the bottom of the falls.

  Sitting at a computer all fucking day was a quick way to an early grave, I believed that with all of my heart. Most mornings I tried to counteract all the time I spent at my desk with trail runs at first light. But ever since Miss New York showed up, I hadn’t felt as at home in the woods as I used to. I kept worrying that I’d run into her and those boots that fit her calves like a second skin.

  This morning I had decided to do my morning workout without worrying. I left while the sky was still pink for a hike up the falls.

  The first cascade had dried up to only a trickle, thanks to this summer's drought. But the rocks were still slippery, and difficult to get a hand hold on.

  That was okay, though, because someone, unknown and unnamed, had installed ropes in strategic spots. It was always a crapshoot over whether they would hold, but year after year they stayed, somehow un-frayed in spite of being completely submerged during spring thaw.

  I grabbed a hold of the first rope, wrapping it around my hand twice for good measure and taking one last breath, I began to climb.

  The roar of the water was almost as loud as my pulse in my ears as I climbed, hand over hand, foothold after tenuous foothold, muscles straining. The wall itself was not actually sheer, but it sure as fuck felt like that when you're in the middle, swinging freely over the gully floor, with three more of these climbs to make before reaching the top.