Happily Ever After: A Contemporary Romance Boxed Set

by Piper Rayne

  Through the trees I could see the sun was almost directly above us. It was close to noon and they had to be getting hungry. Working on my room since they finished breakfast, hours had passed without one of them coming back into the house. It had taken me the whole time to deep clean the kitchen and I wanted to make them sandwiches before I started on the living room. They would be home again the following day, so I knew I had a good week to get the place looking the way it should. I wasn’t going to rush it, they deserved more than a fast cleaning job.

  I made lunch and was about to come out to them when the door opened, and seven men walked through with their muddy boots. Shaking my head, I tried not to laugh at them. After I cleaned the floors, that wouldn’t be a thing.

  “Go wash up. I made sandwiches for you all,” I said.

  The chatter was so loud as they all fought over the one bathroom they had. I couldn’t tell who was saying what or what was actually coming out of their mouths, but the sound was better than the silence I was used to. It didn’t take them long to wash and they were all sitting at the table laughing and talking.

  “I’m not used to having things made for me. Thank you,” Thijs said as he lifted his sandwich and took a bite.

  “You’re welcome. How’s it going out there? Is it getting too hot? You can stop if you want. I don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” I repeated for the hundredth time that day.

  “You’re getting a room and the heat is nothing. It’s cool out today and will be for the next few months. Now is the perfect time to get this going. Besides, we will want to see if the one stove we have in here for heat will be enough for all the rooms or if we should add another. Winter is coming whether we want it or not and I need to know everyone will be warm enough,” Akio said.

  “Good point. I didn’t even think of that. It got harder to heat every room when we built the last one and now, adding one more, it might be too much for one old stove,” Bran added.

  “See, I’m already causing problems. Maybe I should go,” I hesitantly said.

  “No. Nobody leaves. If we have to add another heating source, it won’t be that bad. Bran’s right, it should have been done with the last addition. We will get that done next weekend before the cold really settles in. That’s final.” Akio looked me dead in the eyes and I knew enough not to argue back. They seem to make up their minds fast and once they had, they didn’t change easily.

  “Okay,” I said throwing my hands up in surrender. “I give.”

  Lars laughed when I did that and that made the rest of us smile.

  They finished eating and went back to making my room. It was well after dark when they came back into the main part of the house. Covered in sawdust and dirt, I watched to see what their moods would be like. All smiles and still full of energy, I calmed down a little.

  It would be a long time before I could fully relax and an even longer time before I stopped worrying about getting kicked out. Not that they had given me any reason to think they would do that, but for the past several years, I had to live in fear. A fear I was sure nobody else would understand.

  “Sno, can you make dinner while we clean up? Then after, we want to show you your room. We need one more day to complete it, but it’s almost ready. You can take my room again tonight but after that, you should be all set in your own room,” Akio beamed as he talked. It was like adding one more to the family, even though it was extra work, was what made him thrive.

  “Thank you and I will start dinner now.”

  “Good.”

  It was over an hour before they were out of the showers and sitting at the table. The noise was as loud as it had been at lunch and would be something I would have to get used to. Being in solitude the last two years I was at home; I grew to like the quiet. I didn’t want them to know or to think I was too broken, but sometimes their loudness overloaded me, and I wanted to get away to a quiet place. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, but they were always making sound and it was the complete opposite of how I had lived.

  The clanking of silverware hitting plates, slurping from cups, the occasional burp and all the talking started to send me into a tailspin. Fighting it as hard as I could, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Excuse me,” I said getting up and practically running to the bathroom. I turned on the light, shut the door then turned the light back off. Sitting in a ball on the floor of the bathroom with my back against the door, I tried to take deep breaths and relax. It was starting to work when there was a soft knock on the other side.

  “Sno?” Zane asked. “Are you alright?”

  “I will be. Give me a minute please.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right out here if you need me though.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took a few more deep breaths before opening the door. True to his word, Zane was sitting there outside the bathroom waiting for me.

  “Are you okay?’ he asked again when he saw me come out. He was by my side in no time and had his hand on my cheek. A look of worried was on his wrinkled-up face and it made me realize I had to pull myself together fast.

  “Yes. It won’t happen again.”

  “What won’t? I don’t even know what happened. Nobody’s mad. We were all worried about you but thought all of us being out here might not help you, so I came.”

  “It’s a long story and I think I might have been effected by it more than I want to let on even to myself.”

  “When you’re ready to talk, you have a lot of ears ready to listen. None of us will judge you because we all have our own past we are trying to overcome but holding it in longer will only make it harder to let go of it.”

  “It’s something I’ve been struggling with for a long time.”

  “I get that,” he said and hung his head. “I was the same way when I first got here. Telling them about the horrible things my father did to me was hard. Getting it all out though, and understanding it wasn’t my fault, was crucial for me to start healing. I still have a long way to go, but all of us in this house are broken a little. Together we will fix each other. That includes you now too.”

  “I haven’t had anyone for the past two years. Talking to you guys isn’t the easiest because of it.”

  “I know. I can see that with you. I recognize the signs of abuse, neglect and pure isolation.”

  “What happened to you?” I whispered.

  “It’s a long story and I will tell you, but not tonight. Tonight I need to help you get through dinner and then we will worry about the rest.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good.” He held out his hand and I took it. We went back with the others and finished our meal without any more breakdowns.

  When we were done and the dishes cleaned up, they took me to see what would soon be my room. It was perfect with its smaller frame and wood features. They even had a frame for a bed up with a canopy topper. A built-in dresser was on the wall opposite the bed and they even built a small nightstand to put a lamp on. They left it up to me to paint it whatever color I wanted and, while they had an old blanket on the bed, they said I could go get fabric and make a new one that I wanted.

  “Do you like it?” Akio asked. “Tomorrow we will open this area up to the main house, add a door and then close this part off so you aren’t getting any unexpected visitors.”

  “I love it.” And I did. They took me in, a stranger, and made me family without thinking about it or knowing all about me. The bunch of misfits I had stumbled into, was now my family and for the first time in years, I felt like I had a home.

  18

  One week later

  * * *

  Still having my guard up, I hadn’t told them everything I’d been through yet. It wasn’t like I hadn’t planned on it but telling them all the horrible things I had to get through before I found my only way out wasn’t something that was easy to bring up.

  I was learning a lot about my new roommates though. Slowly, one by one, they started to open up to me. The stories they told made me feel
like I wasn’t so alone after all. Some of them weren’t even that far off from my own story, but being men, they seemed to take their defeats a lot different than I had.

  Akio was the first to open up to me. It was the day he helped me hang the curtains and move the bed where I wanted it. He froze in the middle of helping me lay a rug over the coarse wood floor. When he began to speak, there was a tone in his voice, sad and maybe even a little distant, that I hadn’t heard before. He told me the story about having to run away from an abusive mother and how leaving her to save himself almost broke him. He said she came home with two men one night after another one of her binge episodes and wanted him to join them in the room. He was only fifteen when that happened. He ran when they turned their backs to follow his mom to her room and he never looked back. Three years later, when he was a week from eighteen, he heard his mother had been killed by one of the men she brought home.

  It was right after that he found Bran. He was also fifteen when Akio met him but unlike Akio, Bran’s father was the one who was the drunk. He never hit him or anything like that, but he had people coming to his house all the time because his father liked to gamble when he drank…and he always drank. After a group of men broke into Bran’s house and destroyed the few items he owned, he decided being on his own would be safer than staying with his father. He’d been with Akio ever since. That was six years ago and in that time, Bran had secured a decent job and became the first family member which also made him one of the closes to Akio.

  Bran was the one who ran into Jett. He was on his way to work one morning when he saw this scrawny kid, headfirst in a dumpster. Jett had grown up in foster care and when he turned eighteen, they kicked him out leaving him to fend for himself for the first time ever. Jett was a year older than Bran, but he acted younger. It took him a few years to understand Akio and Bran weren’t going to kick him out.

  Thijs was the next to join them. He was seventeen when Akio saw him. Akio got a job close to where Thijs seemed to be staying to keep an eye on him. It didn’t take long for him to see that if he hadn’t stepped in and help the young man with the fierce temper, he would land himself in jail or worse. It took Akio and Jett about a month to convince Thijs to come with them. He had fears they wanted something more than he was willing to give. It took him meeting Jett before he agreed to go with them. Akio still had a hard time controlling the temper Thijs had, but he showed him a few ways to calm down if he felt himself working up. Not perfect, but none of us were, he still had violet bouts when things felt too overwhelming for him. Thijs never hurt a person, but Akio and the others have had to patch walls because of him.

  Rasmus and Lars came into the house together. Because of Lars learning disability and Rasmus’ refusal to speak, people thought they were dumb. Being picked on constantly, they stuck together and looked out for each other; Rasmus more to Lars than the other way around, but Rasmus hadn’t seemed to mind. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought they were brothers the way they acted. They even looked alike other than Rasmus had brown eyes and Lars had blue. Both of them were kicked out of their homes when their parents learned or thought they were slow. With having multiple children in the home, and the fact money was tight for most, their parents couldn’t see paying for kids they would have to raise until the day they died. It was on the first day they were both alone that they met up and became fast friends.

  My heart hurt for all of them even though they seemed happier with Akio than they had in their previous situations, I also knew what it felt like to not feel wanted. Thinking of them losing their families made me think of mine. I wondered how Jasmine and the others were doing after my stepmom let them go. Being in our house, for most, was all they had known. To them, we were their family and to me, they were mine. Even years later, I couldn’t help but think about her every day. She was my first friend and the only one I could tell everything to. When I found out she was gone the same day my father was, it was like seeing two people I love dying right before my eyes. My heart was ripped out, stomped on put back dirty, only to have it done all over hours later.

  The only story I hadn’t heard was Zane’s. I knew he would tell me when he was ready. I wasn’t ready to tell mine either, so I wasn’t going to push him. Sometimes, saying the words out loud, made them all too real. If I kept it to myself a little longer, maybe it would all end up being a bad dream and when I woke up, by parents would still be alive and I would still matter to someone.

  And, as much as I wished that, I would miss Zane and the others. They were quickly filling the empty spots in my heart and making me feel like a human again instead of some invisible monster unless I could satisfy some sick twisted need they had. They never expected anything from me but what I offered. It was the same for me too though. All I wanted was to feel like I belonged somewhere, anywhere and they were doing that for me.

  I worked hard from the minute I woke up to the second I went to bed to make sure they knew how much I appreciated all they did for me. I never wanted them to think I was taking them for granted. Sitting in the cozy room they had made for me in two days, I smiled. I was happy and that was the truth of it all. Family wasn’t always blood. Sometimes, it was the people you chose to let in and the ones who chose to let you in. The little band of misfit men fit. It didn’t matter what happened in their past, they were only living in the present. I was sure Akio had more to do with that than even he knew. Strong, resilient and caring, he slowly showed them all who they could be if they let their past go and focused on what the future held. I wanted to get to that point too and knew I would, someday. I had my own battles raging in me I had to conquer one at a time to get where they were.

  I still had to find a way to get past what had happened in my house and I wasn’t sure how to do that. I knew she had something to do with it all, but I had no way to prove it. Even if I did, she had so many people in her back pocket, none of them would have believed me over her. She could put on an act like no other when she thought it would benefit her. I was sure she was still hunting me down. I wasn’t sure how the inheritance worked, but me not being around, had to be screwing up her plans.

  I wanted revenge even though I knew it wasn’t the way to go. I didn’t care. She took everything from me, and I wanted to take everything from her. My heart sped up thinking about all the people I loved that she hurt, and I wanted to act on it. It wasn’t the right thing to do. Akio was showing me that, but it wasn’t helping the feelings I had.

  If I stayed there long enough with them, maybe it would.

  19

  I was having one of those days where nothing felt right. On edge all day with an overwhelming sense of dread, it only got worse when the guys started to go to bed. Sitting in my room alone, I had too much time on my hands to think and thinking led to panic.

  Pacing the room, I tried to do what I was told by Jasmine when the panic attacks started after I lost my mom. I looked for something I could touch, one I could smell, and tried to hear the noises from outside. It wasn’t working and I felt my breathing quicken.

  Knock. Knock.

  The sound made me jump and spin almost making me trip on the rug. Making my way to my door, I opened it a crack to come face to face with Zane. He stood there and smiled at me and I couldn’t smile back. I wanted to, but the feeling was taking over and it took all I had not to burst into ridiculous girl tears in front of him.

  “Hey. I thought I still heard you up. Can I come in?” His blue eyes sparkled when the dim light of the room hit them, and his white teeth gleamed when his smile widened.

  “Sure,” I said and moved to the side so the door could open farther to let him in. I wasn’t going to be able to say no to his face and having him there would be better than sitting in the room alone.

  “You okay?’ he asked after really looking at me.

  “No, but I will be.”

  “Another bad night?”

  It wasn’t the first night he had walked in to say goodnight and I had been having a
hard time. On those nights, he would usually stay with me. Those were my favorite nights. The nights he wasn’t there, I hardly slept.

  “I guess so. I’m sorry,” I said and hung my head. They were all so strong compared to me and, as much as I wanted it, I wasn’t sure how to get there.

  “Don’t be sorry. Do you know most of us had the same problem in the beginning?”

  “No.”

  “It’s true.” He moved to my bed and sat down on the edge. The bed sat up so high, that his feet dangled. “I was real bad when I first got here. There were more nights I didn’t sleep than nights I did. If you think about it, none of us had it easy, so to go from chaos to calm, it’s a shock to the system.”

  “I guess. Maybe that’s what’s going on with me.”

  “It could be. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not yet,” I said. I watched his shoulders slump forward and his head droop.

  “Okay. Well, can you at least come here?” he asked and held his arms out for me.

  I sat on the bed next to him and let him put his arms around me. I rest my head on his shoulder and took a deep breath. It felt good to have a warm person touching me and even better that it was Zane. He slowly laid down and brought me with him. Moving our feet to push on the bed to move up, we lay across the bed instead of on the pillows.

  “I’ll stay again tonight if you want me to.”

  “Please.”

  “Okay.” He pulled me in tighter and squeezed all the anxiety out of me with the hug he gave. It was sweet but firm, letting me know he was there and would be.

  Before we fell asleep, I got my pajamas on and he climbed under the covers laying the right way on the bed. I moved in next to him and he brushed my hair out of my face. Looking at me, his eyes suddenly became distant and it didn’t seem like he was in the room with me any longer even though he was holding me.