“You have the permits for me?” Booth asked, all business now.
“Ah, yeah, I do, but I also have some bad news,” I hedged, not really wanting to go into the expense of the new demands from the council. “Maybe we should get Ford in here too,” I suggested.
“He is flying an order of medical supplies to a remote town on the border of Victoria and Adelaide. Give me the bad news Jason, I believe you have a recital to get to.”
“Yeah, about that, how come you, Mannix and Steel aren’t going?” I asked somewhat annoyed that my arse was the only one on the line if I didn’t make it to Shiloh’s dance recital.
“Because our wives and kids have been away all day and, I for one, want to be here when Stells and Gabriel get home. I am sure it is the same for Mannix and Steel. What’s the matter brother, you scared of what the princess will do to you if you are late again?” Booth taunted me, knowing full well the answer to his smart-arse question.
“Of course, I fucking am! She is ten years old for fuck’s sake surely her obsession with Frozen and Tour of Duty should be expired by now,” I practically shouted, dread and foreboding feeding my mood.
I hated the TV series Darth introduced my niece to at the tender age of two. The big man left more than a legacy of a good soldier and loyal brother, he also left pain and suffering for all members when Shiloh was pissed off.
Booth barked out a laugh, enjoying my torment, the fucking arsehole.
“You have ten minutes, so talk,” Booth prompted me.
“Right, well you have to build a two and a half metre high concrete barrier all around the shooting course, has to be done by the end of the month. Have a good night mate,” I said, quickly laying it all out, then turned around to walk out of the war room. Serve the bastard right for getting out of fronting up to yet another recital.
“What the fucking fuck?” Booth boomed behind me just before I closed the door, deliberately and effectively cutting off my president’s reaction to the costs the club was going to be hit with now. The last noise I heard, walking down the hall was the sound of something smashing in the room.
“There goes another hundred or more bucks,” I mumbled happily. Vincent Booth was well known for throwing expensive gadgets when his temper got the better of him.
Smiling and whistling to myself, I continued through to the main room, passed the pool table and bar and out the door. Shiloh was waiting and that was not her best quality.
“How many times do I have to say sorry Squirt? I couldn’t help it if I had to stop and pull over a speeding driver on the way to the dance school,” I explained for the fifth time in less than ten minutes.
“You are chock full of shit policeman. Don’t think for a second you are getting out of watching Zeke tonight,” Shiloh threatened me in her own unique way. I gave up years ago telling her off for her language, Charlotte still tried and the swear jar punishment was still in place, but… the jar filled quickly.
“Can’t we watch something else? How about Ariel or Belle?” I tried hopefully. Anything than Zeke, please Lord.
“Darf reckons you are a pussy Uncle Jay. Man up and take ya punishment.”
Automatically, I looked around the car, as I did every time Shiloh brought up her bodyguard. Logically, I knew I couldn’t see him or hear him, but on occasion, I felt a shiver when my niece spoke of her beloved Darth. Whether it was his presence or just the fact that he still existed for her creeping me out I wasn’t sure.
I knew him well, had known him most of my teen years and into my thirties. We spent a lot of time together in the gym boxing and shooting the shit. I feared for my life a time or two, but for the most part Darth had been a good mate.
So, I got used to the unique, if a little weird, ghost thing. If it made Shiloh happy and gave her a coping technique then I was all for it.
“Tell Darth he can go—”
“Uh, ah, Uncle Jay, your swear jar is fuller than mine,” Shiloh tutted me, her cheeky smile producing the two missing teeth, one up the top the other one directly underneath making her even more endearing and cute.
Deciding not to get into an argument about adults swearing versus a kid, I chose instead to turn on the car stereo. Meatloaf blasted out of the speakers, biting off my groan I tried to zone out one of my niece’s favourite bands and concentrated on the direction I was heading in.
Six years ago, I literally swapped houses with my parents. Staying in the home I planned on living in with my wife for the rest of our lives and that not happening, hit me too hard. Zoe put her touch in every room in the house in the short time she lived with me, splashes of her favourite colour purple was everywhere. Even the scent of her perfume haunted me each time I opened the front door and walked in after a hard shift at the station. It got so hard, my dad suggested we simply swap places. So, I handed over the keys, and moved back to my childhood home, leaving most of the furniture for mum and dad.
Driving towards the roundabout where one way led to my old place and the other to my current one, I forced myself not to look to my right and set my indicator to turn left.
God damn Nymph will this ever get any easier? I asked Zoe silently, the same as I did every single time I hit the turn off.
“Yep,” Shiloh said all of a sudden, breaking me from my melancholy mood.
“What?” I asked in a raspy voice, the hairs on the back of my neck standing tall.
“Darf said, yep,” Shiloh repeated over the loud music of Bat Out of Hell.
Steeling myself, I looked forward and kept driving. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. And I was definitely going to ignore the last few minutes.
“Are we going to see Zoe tomorrow Jay-Jay?” Shiloh asked, as if what she just told me hadn’t rocked my heart.
It hurt me a little that Shiloh referred to her mother by her given name, but called Charlotte mum. I know she hadn’t technically met Zoe or bonded with her the way Zoe bonded with our girl during the pregnancy. If Shiloh only knew how much she had been wanted by her mum, how desperate Zoe was to finally hold her baby. Though, I loved Charlotte and the way she treated Shiloh as her own, never treating her differently to Bastian.
Charlotte came into Shiloh and Deck’s life at the right time, my gratitude for the beautiful dancer taking on the role as mother touched me. I just wished it could have been Zoe loving Shiloh, raising her with me.
Wishing was a waste of my time; however, life’s cruel blows taught me that.
Reaching over I grabbed Shiloh’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Yeah Shy-Shy, we can go see Zoe tomorrow,” I agreed, the huge lump in my throat preventing me from saying anything else. Tears threatened to fall, but I willed them away. No amount of tears could change the path my life took or the reality I woke up to every morning. They were useless and self-indulgent, being thankful for the little girl beside me bopping along to a rock song a better option. Her long raven curls and her deep blue eyes, all her dad and me, there wasn’t much of her mum in her but that was okay. Every time I looked at Shiloh, I saw my Nymph and that alone helped the healing process along.
Loving again wasn’t on my radar, I loved Zoe with a fierceness only my love for Shiloh and Bastian came close to that.
Chapter 2
KELSEY
“Come on Peter, time to get back in your cage,” I called out to my rabbit. Peter was an American Sable and weighed in at a very unhealthy eight kilograms, thanks mainly due to the fact I had no control when it came to Peter and those huge dark eyes. Peter wasn’t the only victim in my menagerie who got overfed and slightly obsessively loved, all my animals meant the world to me. My dachshund, Sassy, no longer resembled a sausage dog, she was more like a meatloaf dog now. Which was why she was currently on a diet or her vet threatened me with pet owner’s therapy. I am pretty sure there was no such thing, but I wasn’t taking any chances of him pulling a coup of some kind and take Sass from me.
Locking the cage door, making sure the padlock was firmly clicked in place, I waggled my finge
rs at Peter then grabbed the basket of freshly picked vegetables near Peter’s cage and stood up, moaning at the ache in my lower back.
“God damn I need a man to massage these aches in my back,” I told Peter. “And all the other aches I have too,” I added, sarcastically.
Yeah like that is ever going to happen, you scare the men off with just one look at your face. The depressing thought entered my mind before I could stop it, and as always happened whenever I thought of my face, my hand immediately reached out and cupped my left cheek, the thick and jagged scar exactly where it had been this morning when I looked at myself in the mirror as I performed my morning cleansing and moisturising.
There was never going to be a time for the rest of my life when it wasn’t going to mar the left side of my face, never could I look in the mirror and see flawless skin.
Ten years ago, my mother slashed my face with a serrated bread knife in our own kitchen before letting her boyfriend at the time take me, throw me in the boot of his car and drive around for two hours with me locked in the boot only to get caught in the act of breaking into a house. Turned out my mother’s douchebag boyfriend was behind the horrible spree of home invasions that plagued Ballarat and my mum knew. She also sold me to the said douchebag so she could keep indulging in her drug habit. One she preferred over her own daughter, but she made sure that I was nothing to look at for not only her boyfriend but for all men.
Slashing my face with the bread knife not only scarred me for life, it destroyed my confidence and basically turned me into a homebody. The only regular places I went to, other than my back garden, were the local café, owned by the wife of a local firefighter, Stella Booth’s sweet shop, Kara’s Restaurant and the Farmers’ Market. I sold fresh organic fruit and vegetables, plus organic honey from my hives, and other preserves and chutneys I made and jarred myself. It was the perfect way to earn a decent living without having to join the human race more than once or twice a week.
My face could have been fixed with corrective surgery, not easily but the doctor I spoke with a year after mum attacked me said with a few procedures and skin grafts the scar on my cheek would be minimised considerably. It hadn’t taken me long to decline the operation, one, I couldn’t afford the money for such expensive surgery, it was not an elective operation therefore I had to pay for it. And two, I was not ashamed of the injury, others might have been but for me… it was an everyday reminder just because you could give birth didn’t mean you had a right to be a mother.
My mother had hated me from the minute I’d been born, or more than likely when she found out she was pregnant. Obviously the later because I had been born addicted to heroin, my first weeks in this world had been spent in withdrawals. Not the best start in life, and not the best mother to go home with either.
“Such a pity party your life is Kels,” I muttered to myself. I did that a lot, talked to myself. The animals were used to my constant rambling about anything and everything, they were really the only companionship I had other than… a deep rumbling of a powerful engine caught my attention as I made my way across the path to my back door. My driveway stretched all the way back to the end of my property so I had a bird’s eye view of the house directly across the street where the bottle green Mustang was pulling into presently.
Quickly, I scampered to the small out building that housed my firewood and garden tools, and took a hiding place behind the opened door. Careful not to let too much of my body be seen, I poked my head around the door and watched the man who had saved my life, literally, and who’d made sure my childhood had some fun moments.
He was also the man I loved more than anything in the world.
Jason Johnston was perfection; honourable, resilient, caring, dangerous, and drop dead gorgeous. He was also broken, untouchable, and very uninterested in a scarred nobody like me.
With just a hint of stalker, I drank in the sight of Jason as he got out of the car, his long muscular legs encased in tight faded denim with rips at the knees made him even sexier. He wore a fitted black tee, stretching over his massive biceps, the material clinging to his washboard torso. My core tingled, when his hands came into sight, large hands, strong, long but thick fingers ended with clean white blunt fingernails. His middle finger had a tiny white scar across the knuckle. One fingernail had a small black spot from an arrest when the perp shoved Jason against a police car and Jason hit it on the side mirror hard enough to cause injury. Damn he had beautiful hands, but they were nothing compared to his handsome face.
The past ten years had been kind to Jason, to both of the Johnston twins if I was being honest. Jason’s dark black hair didn’t show any sign of greying despite being in his mid-forties. He wore it shorter than he did back then, a sort of a rebellion he went through to show the differences between him and Deck, who since I’d known him had short hair, and even more severely shorter when he joined the army. Deck still sported a buzzed do, but Jason had a thick head of glorious black hair.
What I wouldn’t give to slide my fingers through, pulling his head down to my thighs to —
“Hey Mermaid, what ya doin?”
I started and dropped the basket of veggies when Shiloh Johnston’s cute pixie voice cut me from going any further into my head and more to the point where I had Jason’s head going in my daydreaming.
Looking up, I saw Shiloh running down my driveway, her raven curls bouncing wildly behind her. Also, behind her was the object of my desires, daydreams, fantasies and generally every thought I had ninety-nine percent of any day.
I laughed at the use of the nickname Jason gave me when I was only a little girl. With my colour there wasn’t much else to call me, the red hair said Ariel and Jason made sure it stuck.
Gathering up the tipped-out carrots and parsnips quickly, I gave myself a mental count of ten before I stood out from my hiding spot leaving the basket at my feet, focusing on Shiloh and not her sexy as sin uncle.
“Hey there Shy-Shy, how are you, little miss? How is that cute baby brother of yours,” I asked, holding out my arms for her to barrel into as she always did. For a ten-year-old, she was small in stature, but her impact was huge to your body and your heart. People were powerless not to love Shiloh Zoe Johnston, and I was no exception.
“Oomph! Dear god child have you been working out? You get bigger every time I see you,” I teased wrapping my arms around her slight body.
“Bastian peed on my schoolbook. I tied him to a chair. I am getting more muscles can’t ya tell? I been practising my climbing skills, veggie lady,” Shiloh answered, in the only way Shiloh could. Raising my eyebrows, I dared a glance at Jason, who had just made his way slowly behind his niece, his face a mask of indifference, but those blue eyes of his sparkled with love for the little girl.
“Been getting into shit and trouble more like it Squirt. Your mother nearly had a fit when she found your brother tied to Booth’s chair in the war room,” Jason mumbled. “G’day Mermaid, how goes it?” he asked smirking at me. I kept my right side to him, nervously flicking my hair from behind my ear so it fell over my left cheek. Jason’s low growl when he saw me do it sent my lady parts into a spiral of tingles and sparks. How on earth did an angry growl do that to me? Good grief I was batshit crazy, there was no other explanation for my constant state of arousal whenever the man was in sniffing distance of me. Setting Shiloh back down on her shitkicker clad feet, I smiled shyly at Jason.
“Good, fine, yeah I’m okay… yep all good,” I rattled away like a fool, but at least my rambling put the sexy smirk back on his handsome face.
“Good to know sweetheart. It’s getting late out, you should be heading inside and locking your doors Kels,” Jason suggested gently and once again my core clenched and my heart soared at the endearment and his genuine concern for me. I could pretend that his suggestion was because he was madly and desperately in love with me, not because he was a police officer and had some kind of misguided sense of responsibility towards me.
Couldn’t I?
> “Hey Kels do you think I can play with Peter tomorrow? Kelsey? Yo, Mermaid!” Shiloh shouted at me, ripping my eyes from the sexy man in front of me and getting my attention back on her.
“Huh? Oh yes, yes, of course, you can baby. Come on over in the morning, and before you play with Peter, I will make you waffles and pancakes for brekkie, if your uncle is okay with that?” Looking at Jason through hooded eyes, I waited for him to give his permission.
“Why not, saves me burning another pan. How about nine a.m. that way we get a sleep in, gives Shiloh time with the genetically monstrous rabbit then we can head to the cemetery before lunch with grandma and pa,” Jason said in a neutral voice, his tone didn’t give away any kind of emotion, especially with the mention of going to the cemetery. I knew he visited Zoe on a regular basis, not only with Shiloh but on his own too.
The beautiful blonde had been and, probably still was the love of his life. And why wouldn’t she be? I had fond memories of Zoe, I hadn’t managed to spend all that much time with her after Jason first introduced her to me years ago when they happened upon me one night walking home alone with a load of groceries.
The memory of Jason’s reaction seeing me all alone and walking in the dark still made me tingle. A stupid reaction for a thirty-one-year-old grown woman, but hey, sometimes all a girl had was her dreams. And my dreams were chock-full of Jason Johnston. Jason walking, Jason laughing, Jason smirking, and Jason calling me Mermaid.
Sighing, I concentrated back on Miss Shiloh, who was looking at me like I needed therapy or something.
“Mermaid, are you feeling good? Cos you are making some real weird moaning sounds. Sometimes I hear mum doing the same thing early in the morning before Bastian and I get out of bed. She does this funny squeak then dad growls and says—” Jason’s hand landed over Shiloh’s mouth cutting off what I was sure to be embarrassing to know about Deck and his wife, and letting me off the hook with an explanation as to why I obviously moaned out loud.
Love Heals (The Love Duet Book 2) Page 2