In This Life

by Cora Brent

  COPYRIGHT

  Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarity to events or situations is also coincidental.

  The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.

  © 2018 by Cora Brent

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design: Sofie Hartley, Hart & Bailey Design Co.

  Cover Photo: Sara Eirew

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Titles

  Synopsis

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE

  Gentry Boys Box Set Books 1-4

  GENTRY BOYS (Books 1-4)

  Gentry Boys Series

  DRAW

  RISK

  GAME

  FALL

  HOLD

  CROSS (A Novella)

  WALK

  EDGE

  SNOW (A Christmas Story)

  Gentry Generations

  (A Gentry family spinoff series)

  STRIKE

  TURN

  Worked Up

  FIRED

  NAILED

  Stand Alones

  UNRULY

  HICKEY

  Breathless Point (Coming soon)

  DON’T MISS A THING!!!

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  Words that describe Nash Ryan:

  Loner.

  Unpredictable.

  Wickedly hot.

  Unforgiving.

  Probably not the kind of man anyone should trust with an infant.

  Definitely not the kind of man any woman should trust with her heart.

  When Nash returned to town to take care of his baby brother I thought I knew exactly who he was.

  It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.

  I also thought I was done giving my heart away until he proved differently.

  But we don’t have a chance because it’s all ready to unravel.

  And the secrets I’ve kept will be our undoing.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve known tragedy.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve always chosen to be alone.

  But my life of solitude ends now because a terrible twist of fate has made me

  the guardian of my four month old brother.

  Suddenly I’ve got a kid to raise and a family business to save.

  There’s no time for anything else.

  That’s why Kathleen Doyle and I made this arrangement.

  Once a skinny nerd girl who used to follow me around, she’s now a single mom with flaming hair, a killer body and too many responsibilities.

  We told each other it was just sex.

  We told each other there were no strings attached, no expectations.

  We lied.

  And the consequences will cost us.

  But I’m not surrendering this new family without a battle.

  Because in this life we might only get one chance to have it all.

  The phone began buzzing in my back pocket at the exact second I pushed the key into the lock. I ignored it and opened the door to my apartment.

  The drive home from Portland had been long and my adrenaline was finally wearing off. By now dried blood had stiffened over the broken skin along my right knuckles. The cuts stung when my excitable German Shepard licked at the wound with a sympathetic whine. Meanwhile, my phone issued one more plea for attention and then was silent.

  “Easy, girl,” I said, fending the dog off and heading for the kitchen sink.

  I winced and flexed my hand under the stream of cold water. There was some antiseptic in the cabinet on my left. I twisted the top of the bottle off with my teeth and poured it over my split knuckles, hissing a curse when it throbbed like a bastard. The swelling would probably remain for several days and be a pain in the ass when the cuts scabbed over.

  And yet I regretted nothing.

  A few shallow scrapes were an acceptable price to pay for teaching some abusive dickhead a lesson. As I remembered the guy’s pained groan as my fist connected with his jaw I smiled.

  Nope, I didn’t regret a thing about tonight.

  I was still in the process of dealing with my injured hand when I heard my phone ping with a voicemail alert. My gaze landed on the digital microwave clock. It was half past two. There’d be no reason for a call at this hour. I lived alone, had no girlfriend, and barely said two words to any of my neighbors. The only reason I’d driven all the way out to Portland tonight was because an old buddy from college had a six hour layover in the city and I reasoned even an antisocial prick like me could stand to set foot in a bar once a season.

  After I drove my friend back to the airport I circled back to the bar where we’d been hanging out. I had a reason, one that most people wouldn’t approve of. I wanted to see if the son of a bitch who’d made his date cry was still around. And he was. He was a soft-bellied sloppy bastard who kept sucking back shots even though he wasn’t the type to hold his liquor well. When he staggered outside a little while later I followed. He paused to take a piss in a gloomy corner of the parking lot and didn’t even have time to drop his dick before I crashed into him. He likely chalked it up to an everyday mugging until the very end when I got close enough to smell his sour breath and the rank stink of his fear and hissed, “Don’t you ever fucking hurt a woman again.”

  He would know what the words meant. He would remember the way he twisted the girl’s arm behind her back and whispered something in her ear while her face twisted with pain before she managed to shake out of his grip. At least she had enough sense to run out on him and the fucker must have thought that was the end of it, never guessing what kind of man was watching from the other side of the bar.

  After I slammed the spineless douchebag against the wall one last time for good measure I disappeared, unconcerned about cops. There were no eyewitnesses in sight. Plus I’d parked two blocks away and pushed a baseball cap down too low for any street cameras to catch my face.

  I hadn’t planned this, hadn’t come out tonight with the intention
of catching some asshole in the act of exercising his testosterone on a female just because he could. I never did plan these things.

  But when I found them I reacted. I had to. Because I knew the terrible truth. All too often in this life justice didn’t happen in time to save those who needed it the most. That was the thought keeping me awake at night, that if I didn’t step in then no one else would.

  Roxie pushed her food dish and whined again so I gave her some water and a handful of biscuits. She chewed happily while I opened up the sliding glass patio door and stared out at the beach. I could hear the north Pacific waves crashing against the rocks in the darkness. Earlier the weather had been calm but now the wind was fierce, the May air colder than usual. Everything about this environment suited me; the cold, the lack of sunshine, the storms that rolled in off the chilly ocean and battered the shoreline. I’d been living in this apartment for two years and I had everything I needed. My work could be handled from home and my rent was reasonable. That might sound like a lackluster life to some people but in all honesty I wasn’t lonely at all. I didn’t miss people, not really.

  Hell, I could always talk to my dog if I got desperate.

  Tonight my buddy had shaken his head over his Crown and Coke and begged to know if I was having any fun at all these days. I knew what he meant and blew off the question because I didn’t like explaining myself and because he wasn’t really that great a friend anyway.

  If I wanted to find something pretty to keep me company I knew where to find it. There was a busy college town less than twenty miles away. Yet I didn’t do that, didn’t haunt the bar scene in search of willing college girls because I was no longer the casual hookup douchebag I’d once been. I didn’t have anything permanent to offer anyone. My solitude had become too ingrained. Nothing and no one would change my mind about this self-imposed exile anytime soon.

  As if objecting to my thoughts about solitude and exile the phone in my back pocket rang again. I closed the sliding glass door and withdrew the buzzing object. The number on the screen was an unfamiliar one. An Arizona number.

  “Hello?” I said as the first instinctive feelings of unease bubbled in my gut.

  “Nash?” choked out a voice. There was sobbing. “Nash, it’s Jane.”

  Jane. Technically Aunt Jane. My father’s younger sister drifted through life in a placid artistic haze while wrapped in the wardrobe of Stevie Nicks. We kept in touch via email but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked to her. It might have been the last time I was back there in Hawk Valley. Four years ago. No, five years.

  And now for some reason Jane had hunted down my phone number to call me in the middle of the night. And she was crying.

  “What happened?” I asked and a sense of dread arose as I remembered something I tended to forget these days, that there were people in the world I cared about.

  Through sobs and halting words she told me all of it.

  I listened but I didn’t comprehend, not immediately.

  I should have anticipated that the most terrible things happen when you’re least likely to see them coming. Fate was one cruel motherfucker and I should have remained ready for another blow. I wasn’t ready for that agony the first time the bastard called ‘fate’ had decimated my life.

  I wasn’t ready now either.

  I wasn’t fucking ready at all.

  The threat was always there in dry seasons. Some clueless camper might flick a cigarette into the thick brush or ignore the campfire warnings to roast some hot dogs because there’s always some jerk that believes rules don’t apply to him. And just like that ten thousand acres of green ponderosa pine would go up in smoke. The mountains were dotted with picturesque towns and cabins all over the place so there was a lot at stake when the alarm went out. Fire crews would spring into instant action to evacuate the threatened areas and they’d work tirelessly until the danger was contained.

  Sometimes it wasn’t enough.

  Sometimes the combination of wind and flames would thwart the best efforts men could possibly give.

  “Kat?”

  The voice at the kitchen door was shrill. Three sharp raps on the wood followed.

  “Kat, it’s me!”

  My stiffened joints complained when I disengaged from the hard wooden chair I’d sunk into when the sky was still dark. I tried to cross the room before my mother banged on the door again and woke everyone up. She was not renowned for her patience.

  “Please, hush,” I hissed when I cracked the door.

  My mother blinked at me in the mid morning sunlight. “You look awful,” she informed me. Her list of assets had never included tact.

  “Sorry, I didn’t prioritize my beauty routine this morning.” I opened the door wider so she could pass the threshold. She brought the acrid smell of smoke with her but that couldn’t be helped. When there was a fire in the nearby mountains the haze and the stink inevitably drifted over Hawk Valley.

  My mother made a beeline for the coffee pot, sighed when she found it empty and began noisily filling the carafe from the tap. “There are news trucks and fire teams everywhere,” she said in a tone that implied their presence was ruining her day. “I couldn’t even get my coffee this morning. The line was ten deep at Ed’s.”

  “What a bummer,” I mumbled, thinking of all the people who would love to count a ten minute wait for coffee as their biggest problem this morning.

  “Yes it was,” she said, not catching my sarcasm.

  The coffee machine hissed as it warmed up. I rubbed my eyes, starting to feel the physical effects of last night’s horrors. Mentally I couldn’t do it yet, couldn’t quite absorb the emotional torments to come. There was no end on the horizon. There would be crying and funerals and in time the sheer despair would subside but there would be no end. Just a sad new reality. And an orphaned child.

  “Kathleen, are you all right?” My mother sounded concerned now. She really wasn’t heartless. It’s just that sometimes her sensitivity gauge got stuck.

  I swiped at a rolling tear on my cheek. “I can’t believe this is all real,” I said.

  She nodded and for the first time a look of grief passed over her face. Heather had been her niece after all. She’d been my cousin.

  “I know,” she said. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be a little bit grateful that cancer took my sister at a young age. But I have to say I’m glad she didn’t live to see the death of her only child.”

  I reached over to grab a ceramic mug from the cabinet above the sink. My fingers bypassed the whimsical pastel cup collection and closed around a souvenir mug that displayed a row of lush green pine trees beneath the words Hawk Valley Happiness in red script. There were dozens just like it sold in the Garner Avenue store my cousin Heather owned and operated with her husband, Chris. She’d designed these herself.

  After I poured a cup of coffee for my mother I filled one for myself. We both drank our coffees black, one of the very few things we had in common. We sipped from our cups in sad silence as I thought about how different the world had looked twelve hours ago.

  The winds had been very strong last night, stirred up by some meteorological collision that probably would have made sense to me back in my academic days. My only concern was that the noise would keep Emma and the baby awake. Luckily my three and a half year old daughter hadn’t inherited my fitful sleeping habits but the baby was another story. He was only four months old and this was his first night away from his parents. He fussed as the wind battered the exterior walls and whistled through the tiny cracks it found. I rocked him for a solid hour before he settled down but I didn’t mind at all. It was nice to feel the warm weight of an infant again. Now that Emma was past the throes of toddlerhood she often refused to be cuddled.

  When Heather had asked me if I’d watch baby Colin for the night so she and Chris could enjoy a romantic anniversary at their cabin up in the mountains I didn’t hesitate to accept. She’d almost changed her mind and brought him along but Chr
is laughed, called her a hovering mama bear and the two of them left for their anniversary trip alone.

  Colin was finally asleep when I settled him in the portable crib in Emma’s room and that’s when I heard the first of the sirens. They could have been from anything. A car accident. A downed power line. I didn’t dwell on them. Just as I was about to leave the room Colin released a sharp cry and I lingered in the doorway for a moment to see if he was waking up but he simply shifted and fell asleep once more.

  Hours later I was awakened by a hysterical call from Chris’s sister, Jane. She was the longtime girlfriend of the local fire chief so she’d heard the news first. The fire had moved quickly and mercilessly, swallowing entire acres in mere moments before a sudden burst of rain hushed its fury, not extinguishing it completely but giving the crews a chance to battle back. The first responders on the scene had the grim task of checking the half dozen cabins that had been engulfed. Only one was occupied. There would still need to be a formal identification of the bodies but everyone knew that cabin had belonged to the Ryan family for generations. And Jane confirmed to the authorities that her brother and his wife had driven up there yesterday evening.

  Now I couldn’t stop thinking about that lone shrill cry from Colin. I wondered if that was the moment his parents found themselves surrounded by fire. And I wondered if one of the tragic mysteries of the universe had occurred, if his infant mind somehow knew what had happened miles away up in the mountains.

  “Mommy?” Emma padded into the kitchen like a sleepy angel in her pale blue nightgown.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said, holding out my hand to her.

  She remained where she was, staring at me solemnly. She was old enough to have permanent memories of last night, of being awakened by the sound of sobbing adults.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  “Come here, my pretty girl,” my mother said and crouched down with her arms open. Emma glanced at me once and went to her grandmother.