by JA Huss
He didn’t really leave me money. He left me another chance. Maybe to make up for the one he took away from me that night eight years ago. Maybe just to ease his guilt a little. But it’s more than nothing when I add in the way he delivered it.
Humble.
Apologetic.
Sincere.
There’s a phone in the drawer too. Maybe the one he gave me back at the cabin when he wanted me to take the Snowcat and leave. I had in my coat pocket, but when I remembered it when I was on the road in Garrett’s truck, it was gone. Must’ve fallen out when I was running through the woods.
I flick my fingers across the screen and it comes to life.
It’s just a generic background picture with all the standard icons on it. But the green messages icon has a little number one up in the corner.
He had something more to say. Something he didn’t want to say in person.
It scares me a little, if I’m being honest. There’s a very good chance it’s bad news.
But there’s no way I can’t read it. My finger tabs the icon and the message appears.
It’s a video of Merc.
I press play and he gives me a weak smile. “I know the hush made you think you loved me when you didn’t. I can’t change that. I can say I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I’d be lying. Because I love you so much right now and I wish you still felt the same. And I lied about something we talked about back at my house too,” he says, looking down so his dark hair covers his eyes. “No surprise there, I guess.” He looks up again and all I see is pain. “I can do more than kill and cook, Sydney. So I’m gonna show you something genuine. And no matter what you choose to do from here on out. This is real.”
He reaches out of the view of the camera and pulls a guitar in his lap. “I’m a pretty good player.” He smiles and I smile with him. “And I can sing. So I’m gonna sing you this song, and then, just so there’s no misinterpretation of what it means from me to you, I’m gonna tell you.”
He clears his throat, something I now realize he does when he’s nervous, and begins to strum the guitar. His voice is… well, it’s hard to believe that that hard man can sing so soft.
The song is Daughters by John Mayer.
I start crying in the first verse and by the time he’s done, I’m a sobbing mess. He sets the guitar down and folds his hands in his lap. Another gesture of nerves. And then he looks straight into the camera. “Those Company people, Sydney. They did this to you. They took away your right to a childhood. Your right to a father. I don’t have any daughters, Syd. But if we had daughters, I’d be good to them.” He stops for a moment, just enough time for my chin to start trembling as I try to pull myself together. “I’d be good to you too. I’d make everything up to you by breaking this cycle. And your daughters would never, ever have to have a conversation with a brutal killer like this. I would lay my life down for them.” He shrugs apologetically. “It’s all I’ve got to offer so I’ll understand if it’s not enough.”
He reaches out and turns off the recording.
And I have never felt so misled in my entire life. Have I been wrong about him all this time?
Another message makes the phone vibrate in my hand. He must have seen the delivery notice when I opened the video.
It says:
I swear to God, I’d be good to you.
Chapter Forty-Five - Merc
“A real man knows how to treat a woman softly.” – Case
I watch the message screen for several minutes, just hoping she will write something back. I hope, but I don’t expect it. Because nothing can make up for what I did.
And I’m just about to put the truck in gear and give her the space she needs when the back door of the bar opens. She peeks out and I know immediately that she’s crying.
She takes a step outside and sees me, waiting in my truck down the alley. I get out and walk towards her.
“Syd,” I say, stopping when she’s a few feet away. “I can’t prove myself unless you give me a chance to be the man I know I am. And you can’t know if you love me until I give you a chance to experience it.” I hold out my hand to her. “I don’t have a guarantee and I know I don’t deserve another chance. But I want one, Sydney. I fucked up and I’m sorry. I take it back.”
She walks forward and takes my hand and I pull her into a hug. I lift her up off the ground and let her wrap her arms and legs around me like an octopus.
“I’ll be good to you, I promise. I’ll do whatever it takes to set it right. I think you’re amazing. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met because you did it all alone. You pulled yourself up with no help at all. You fucking astonish me with your strength. And you’re so beautiful. I don’t understand how they never loved you. I really don’t. Hurting you is the last thing I want. I want to make you happy, make you smile. See the confidence I know you have. When you drove away out there in Montana, you split me in half, Sydney. You said you hoped I felt that pain one day, and I did. I felt it. You ripped my heart out when you drove off and I knew I fucked it all up. My father never recovered after he caused my mom’s death and I came here to beg for you. Fight for you. Because I don’t think I can recover if you never forgive me. Even if you walk away right now, as long as you know I’m sorry—”
She leans back from my embrace and stops me with two fingers over my mouth. “Hush.”
I let myself crack a small smile as I squeeze her. “It doesn’t work on me, cowgirl. It doesn’t need to though. Because I already love you.”
She kisses me on the neck and leans into my ear whispering, “It doesn’t work on me either. It never did, Case. I saw the man you could be back when I was sixteen. I just saw him eight years before you did. I put my trust in you for a reason. And maybe we didn’t fall into love the way most people do. And maybe it took us a lot longer than most to find our true selves. But I’m OK with that. We’re here. We made it. Together. I have always loved you and no word could fill me up the way you do right now.”
“I owe you a happy ending.”
“This might qualify.”
“So I guess we’re even.”
“I guess we are.”
I set her down and we walk back into the bar to close it up. Maybe not for good. But for now. All the mistakes we made need to stay where they belong. In the past. Because the only thing worth living for is the future.
We slip out of the darkness like that. We get in the truck and back on the road so I can take her somewhere bright.
We never look back.
We only look forward, our eyes fixed on the sun.
Epilogue - Merc
“You can live in the heat of hell and still be happy. As long as that hell is your home.” Case
“You know why we like the desert, Syd?”
She’s looking at my safehouse on the outskirts of Palm Springs with utter disgust as I try to find the right key for the front door. I don’t blame her. I have a four-million-dollar log home up in Montana and this is… well, I think the whole thing cost me seventy-five grand after renovations.
“Who’s we?” she asks, simultaneously shaking off a spider that is trying its best to crawl up her flip-flop and wiping the sweat off her brow. It’s ninety-seven degrees today. And it’s only late March. We’ve been traveling for weeks, just enjoying each other. And the freedom we have to be ourselves. But I’m ready to settle down, so I brought her here. My favorite place in the whole fucking world.
Plus, it’s nothing but sunshine for as far as the eye can see.
“Uhh…” Fuck. I’m not an assassin anymore, and I’m not here to dry out, either. But I already started to tell her that us assassins like to come to the desert to dry out after the kill. So I have to say something. “Me and you,” I answer back, recovering.
“It’s hot here.”
“It’s supposed to be hot. It’s the desert.”
“And this place, Case… I’ve lived in the woods for weeks on end at times. But”—she fans herself now as I try another
key in the lock—“it’s hot here. Is this house even up to code?”
The door swings open and a rush of cool air hits her in the face. She remembers I was talking and looks up at me with a smile. I love that smile. “Why do we like it here?”
I pull her inside and watch her face as she takes it in. She walks down the stairs to the sunken living room and with each step, the temperature drops. Three-feet-thick adobe mud walls will do that for a desert house. Especially one that is mostly underground.
She takes in the comfy couches and the cool tile floor. There’s artwork on the whitewashed walls and a guitar over by the Spanish-tiled fireplace, which I use on cold winter nights. And then she wanders over to the archway that leads into the kitchen. A chef’s kitchen with industrial appliances, white cabinets, and a nice stone countertop. I follow her in there, enjoying her reaction.
“We like it here,” I say, pulling her attention and her body back to me, “because I’m gonna make love to you in every room here. And get you pregnant here. And we’re gonna raise kids here and build an oasis in the backyard with a pool and a water slide. We can do anything we want here. Be ourselves forever here. We’re gonna start our new life here, Syd. And that’s why we like it here. We like it here… because it’s home.”
END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the end of book shit. There is where I get to say whatever I want about the story. They are never edited and typically done in a rush, so please excuse any typos.
I started asking myself where the hell this book came from about halfway through writing it. This mind control stuff freaked me the fuck out. I had to do research, so I Googled it, and six hours later I was convinced Al Roker and Tila Tequila were under the influence of Illuminati MKUltra mind control. I slept with my gun that night, I swear to God. I even loaded an extra magazine I had sitting empty in a drawer for five years, and put it within easy reach.
I did not like the research at all, and even though the mind control stuff in this story is pretty intense, it’s nothing like the shit I saw and read online. I tamed it down by huge orders of magnitude because it really bothered me.
I don’t know where I get these ideas, they just pop into my head. But I will tell you a little bit about this process as it relates to Merc, because he is really the only character where I had so many background constraints that came out of so many completely different scenarios.
Merc first appears in Slack: A Day in the Life of Ford Aston which released in December 2013. And in that book Ford picks him up at the airport and delivers him to Cheyenne where Ford first encounters Sasha as a twelve-year-old girl. Slack took place on the same Christmas Eve as this book. Then Ford got Merc involved in another scheme in Taut. Merc was also mentioned, though not present, in Come Back with Sasha, Harper, and James. And he had his biggest role yet in Coming For You.
I went into Slack knowing I wanted to write some twisty suspense about this dude and that he was “on a list” of killers being used by high and powerful people. I didn’t invent “the Company” until I wrote Come for the BEND Anthology in May 2014, but I knew in Slack there would be a secret organization in a future book to explain what Merc was doing that night. In fact, thinking back, I had written out some scenes where Ford actually went with Merc to that job, but I deleted them all, and left Ford out of it to keep Slack on track.
I also knew Merc’s book would be a long time coming because I had a lot of other projects planned, but Slack was my initial set-up for what would become Meet Me In The Dark. So by the time I started writing MMITD, Merc was real to me. I know him pretty well. I knew the book started with him saving Sasha on Christmas Eve and ended with him being fucked over by the girl he left behind. And I had already set up this mind control stuff in the Come books. James was insane, Harper was on weird drugs, Sasha might be a sleeper assassin.
All that stuff was there.
But I tell you what—this Sydney girl surprised the hell out of me in this book. She was the only one I didn’t know. I knew her father, he’s been mentioned before. But the only thing I knew about Sydney going in was that at the end of Guns (oh yeah, Merc was in that too) Merc is watching her coming out of a bar in Cheyenne with a guy… (“I watch the girl hanging on her piece of shit boyfriend outside the bar.”)
That was it. That’s all I had about Sydney. So her story unfolded as the plot progressed. I knew she was gonna have secrets and I knew she was going to get the better of Merc. She did that twice, so that made me happy. I knew Merc was an asshole and that he would walk away. That’s all I had. So I don’t know where I get these ideas. I do remember about a month ago, walking into the gym and telling my trainer, James, that I was writing some fucked up shit. That was during “research week”.
I find this book disturbing, but not for the same reasons that most people will. I don’t find Merc disturbing at all. I know him intimately. I see past what others can’t because I created him. So even though he is a violent asshole in the first half of the book, I know why he’s like that. I’m fine with Merc.
But all this mind control stuff really affected me in a negative way. I spent about a week researching it online. I read articles and watched videos. (And FYI, this MKUltra stuff was real. The really did these experiments on people back in the day by pumping them up with drugs without their knowledge. They admitted to it, and then the CIA, under the Nixon administration, promptly destroyed all the records) I looked for specific drugs to use, but ended up keeping it simple and leaving most of those brand names out. And it took me a while (Julie time – like a week) to put this plot together so that it made sense and could still be something people might like.
It was a difficult book for me in a lot of ways.
But I remember watching the commentary video on the Director’s Cut version of that Tom Hank’s movie, Castaway, and the one thing that stuck out was that they came up with the plot after they randomly put objects inside the Fed Ex boxes. And then they consulted survivalists to determine how Tam Hank’s character might use those things to stay alive on that deserted island.
So I kinda felt like that’s what I was doing in MMITD. I had these objects in the form of Merc’s past roles in other books, and I needed to figure out how I can use them to survive. It was fun (now that my mind control paranoia has waned) and challenging. But I’m really happy with how the book turned out.
Anyway, I know I write twisted thrillers. And sometimes people ask me why I don’t stop writing romance and just write thrillers. I have a really good plot for one just waiting for the time to write it. But I like romances. I don’t want to write thrillers with no romance. I think the romance is the best part. I like the way my characters are all so unlikable by themselves, but putting them together makes them complete. It softens their edges and makes them companionate. I almost never finish reading a book if the characters are too perfect. I like them to be damaged and ugly inside. I like the men to be mean and/or unlovable until that one special girl comes along who can tame them. And I like the women to find their own strength. These twisted plots give them the opportunity to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. So I’m gonna keep writing romantic suspense as long as I have plot ideas.
I hope you enjoyed this story. Merc and Sydney are messed up by themselves, but they are complete when they are together. I guess that’s my aim when I write. Take two fucked up people and make them better once they fall in love. :)
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book!
Wasted Lust - Sasha
Edited by RJ Locksley
Copyright © 2015 by J. A. Huss
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Find Julie at her website
www.JAHuss.com
Chat with
Julie
On Facebook
On Twitter
On Instagram
Follow Julie
On BOOKBUB
DO YOU LIKE TO WIN BOOK PRIZES?
Join her Facebook Fan Group to enter to win!
Wand to get sneak peeks at all the cool shit?
Join the Secret Stuff Newsletter List!
DESCRIPTION
A GIRL WITH REGRETS…
Sasha Cherlin died the night she let Nick Tate walk out on her for a life of crime. Her very essence was destroyed when they broke their promise to one another.
A MAN WITH REMORSE…
Nick Tate made his choice with her future in mind. He loved Sasha enough to know that leaving her behind was the only way to keep her safe.
A PATH TO REVENGE…
Special Agent Jax Barlow understands the bond of love and he plans to use it to get justice. Nick and Sasha will do anything to rewrite their past. He’s counting on that to bring them down.
Chapter One - Sasha
“Miss Aston?”
The man is the kind of tall that makes you look up.
He’s wearing a dark suit with a skinny black tie, and even though we’re indoors, he’s got sunglasses on.