Copyright © 2020 by Kaylee Spring
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Free Book?
Falling For Joy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Under His Care
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Driving Under Pressure
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Perfect Stranger
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
The Sergeant’s Roommate
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Also by Kaylee Spring
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Chapter 1
Lucas
“I’m going to marry that girl one day,” I say, pointing to the photo behind the cashier at the local diner called The Sizzlin’ Griddle. It’s a photo showing a happy family posing in front of a lake. A man and his wife stand on the sides, their two daughters between them. One is about my age, looking fresh out of high school. The other is younger. Maybe still in middle school.
“Boy, I sure hope you’re talking about Joy and not her little sister,” says the gruff man who takes my card. Only now do I look at his face and realize that beneath the week’s worth of scruff is the same man in the photo.
“No, sir,” I say, suddenly straightening up. “I mean, yes, sir. Joy. That’s the name of the girl in the photo? Your daughter, I mean?” Words are tumbling out of me without checking in with my brain if they are ready to go or not. It’s not just because I’ve declared I will marry this man’s daughter, not realizing she was his daughter. Most of my current stupidity stems from the fact that I’ve turned my gaze back to he photo, unable to take my eyes off the girl.
She is wearing a summer dress of yellow and white. Her hair is a soft auburn, held up in a sort of bun, but several thick strands have come loose. She was in the process of tucking one back behind her ear when the photo was taken. With a shake of my head, my focus returns to the man holding my credit card, and possibly my soul. My heart shrivels up in my chest, unsure in itself as the stout man stares me down.
“Sign there.” He points to a worn electronic pad next to a glass jar of individually wrapped mints. He doesn’t blink. I nearly misspell my own signature. “You serious about that?”
“I know it looks stupid,” I say, “but it’s sort of a habit now. My mom said they look like hieroglyphics.”
The owner of the store, father of my love, shakes his head. “I’m not talking about your signature, son.” Something flutters in my chest at the use of the common familiarity now in this context. “I mean about what you said before.”
The girl in the photo, Joy, is watching me, one hand in her red hair, skin kissed by the sun. I swallow down a wad of doubt that tangled up my voice box. “I’m dead serious. I’m going to marry her.”
“You say that about a lot of girls?”
“Never.” I’m afraid to breathe in case the air in my lungs is the only thing holding me up, like I’m a balloon full of helium that will slump a few days after the birthday party.
“What do you think?”
I nearly answer him, thinking he’s referring to me, but I’m not sure what he means. Before I can figure it out, a voice behind me says, “Daddy, stop.”
The same heat that burned an imprint of Joy’s face into the surface of my heart now surges along the melodic notes of her voice. When I turn, we are in each other’s personal space. Any other time, I would take a step back. This is too close for a conversation with friends, much less a girl I am meeting for the first time. But I cannot back down. Not after my confession.
“Joy?” It’s a question not of her name but of her purpose in my life. The bringer of joy. She doesn’t answer though. She is waiting for something. That’s when I stick out my hand to shake hers, feeling an utter idiot even as she meets my action halfway. Her hand is small but tough. She knows hard work, but isn’t a stranger to moisturizer.
Since I am already feeling like an idiot, I decide to go all the way. No use in sidestepping the disaster this is sure to become. “Nice to meet you, Joy. I’m your future husband.”
Chapter 2
Joy
“You’re not going to ask for my number?” I ask, prompting my father to raise his eyebrows before busying himself with the computer. It’s only then that I realize I don’t know the name of my self-professed future husband.
“Don’t need it,” says the owner of the cute butt squeezed into faded jeans as he sashays out the door. “I’ve got time. I’ll get it eventually. I mean, I expect that we’ll exchange numbers before we exchange vows.”
The bell above the door rings as he leaves. He looks back through the glass and smiles. Wings sprout on either side of my heart and flutter briefly.
“I approve,” my father says with a knowing smile I haven’t seen since I finally admitted to not wanting to take over the restaurant like he had always hoped. Although that smile contained more wistfulness in the eyes, while the current expression is all playfulness.
“Daddy!”
“What? He’s a good tipper.”
Becca drags me along to our usual table where she immediately erupts into an entire analysis of the event. “He was so cute. That thing about being your future husband…I like him. You know what? I agree with your dad. I approve. In fact, if you don’t take him, I will.”
“Ha ha,” I reply with an extra serving of sarcasm. The waitress arrives. Sally
.
I’ve always liked Sally. She’s been working for my dad since I can remember. She isn’t an aunt anything, but she is family. That’s not to say that people don’t mistake her for being a relative of some sort. She’s got the same curly red hair I’ve struggled to tame my whole life. The same freckle-spotted cheeks that keep me from spending too much time in the sun. She and my father could be siblings, if not for her eyes. My dad and sister and I all have the same hazel brown eyes. Sally’s are the same green as that boy’s who professed his love before even meeting me.
“Hey sweetheart,” Sally says with her trademark smirk. “Been a while since you stopped by. How many boys have you been through so far at that college of yours?”
I give her my most shocked face, even going so far as to fan my face. Then, in my best mock ‘Gone With the Wind’ accent, I reply, “Why, my word. I do declare. There are just some things a young lady does not reveal.”
Becca chimes in. “None. You know Joy. She’s the exact opposite of her name. Sucks the fun out of everything. Every time I invited her to a party, do you know what she said?”
“I can guess,” Sally says.
“I have to study,” Becca says in an impression of what I guess she thinks my voice sounds like.
“Girl,” Sally leans over me. “Let me give you some advice that I heard a thousand years ago when I first went to college. It goes like this: Party. Drink. Go wild.”
Becca gives a small whoop at this. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I’m not finished,” Sally says. “Party. Go crazy. But study more than you party. And sleep more than you study. Follow these three things, and you’ll have a great time that you don’t regret.”
“I especially like that last part,” Becca says, before I can interject and say that I would go to more parties if they had anything interesting going on at them. “Sleep more than you study. I’m hoping you mean with boys.”
“That’s not what she meant,” I say, but Sally just winks.
“Or with girls. Whatever gets your engine purring. As long as you still study and get real sleep, who am I to argue?”
Becca and Sally share a laugh that I turn down the invitation to, just like I did with all the parties Becca invited me to this past semester. I went to one, the first time she asked, because we’ve all seen the movies and all the hook-ups and wildness and memories made during such nights. But that party was nothing like that. Everyone was absorbed in screens of some sort. Phones. Video games. A movie playing passively in the living room while everyone worked through bottles of shitty vodka they’d bought for ten dollars a piece. No one initiated conversation with me, and, paralyzed with too many options, I just quietly returned to my dorm and fell asleep reading.
“What’s this?” Becca says and holds up a book. “It was crammed between the bench seat and the wall.”
The cover is a worn green fabric with golden lettering faded to near oblivion. As Becca shifts it under the light, the title reveals itself in a flash: Poetry from Around the World. She hands it to me, and I flip it open. The pages are yellowed, though not nearly as much as the edge, which is now a brown nearly as dark as its green cover. The inside flap has only a publisher and a date: Little Brown, 1939.
“Someone must have left it here,” Sally surmises what we were all thinking.
“Probably a student,” Becca says, which is the most likely answer. Living in a college town means that most random events are the result of freshmen too harried from their first semester living away from home. But this book has none of the hallmarks of being owned by a freshman. For one, it isn’t a glossy hardcover that would weigh down the average backpack; it is a pocket-sized edition with edges worn from being carried about religiously. If anything it might be a library book, except it bears no stamps. The pages are not dog-eared. No lines highlighted by a student frantic to memorize only the most important sections. But there is a bookmark about two-thirds of the way in, on a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire:
Under the Mirabeau Bridge
There flows the Seine
And our loves recall how then
After sorrow joy came back again…
“And here I was thinking I’d finally dragged you away from all of your books,” Becca says while snatching it away from me. She snaps it shut and places it on the table. “Before you can have your dessert, you have to order your actual food. You know, the stuff you eat? Do you even remember what eating is like?”
Before I can prepare a smart remark, Sally is joining forces with Becca. “I have to agree. You look like you haven’t ever heard of a steak. Don’t bother ordering. I’m going to start you both out with an order of potato wedges doused in cheese. Then our house burgers. Any complaints?”
“Sounds good,” I say in resignation, knowing I will be struggling to get out of this booth by the time Sally is done with me.
“Can we get some milkshakes too?” Becca chirps. “Chocolate for me. Joy?”
They both look at me. “I’m fine, really.”
“Two chocolate shakes it is,” says Sally. She is back behind the counter, putting in our order with Franco, the chef, before I can protest. Becca immediately launches into a retelling of her night before, complete with details that will require bleach to erase from my mind, but soon my thoughts are wandering back to the poem. I glance at the worn green book on the table and wonder if maybe, just maybe, it belongs to that boy.
No, not just some boy. My future husband.
Chapter 3
Lucas
“I just met the one.”
My brother looks up from his computer game. He’s wearing a headset and working in collaboration with his online ‘guild’ as he calls it. “What?” he asks, pulling one ear free.
“I said I found the one.” I fall on the couch. After a resounding chorus of spring creaks and stretching fabric, it comes to a rest under my weight. Rooming with my brother saves money but not nearly enough. I’m already planning my tenth date with Joy in my head, and I know there is no way I’m ever bringing her back to this dump.
Jake pulls his headset back in place with a laugh. “Oh, it’s nothing. My brother just said he found the one. I know, right? Just a minute, I’ll ask. Hey Lukie, where’d you find this girl of yours?”
“At that diner down town. You know, the one where we got those chocolate shakes a few weeks ago.”
“The one across from that strip mall with the Chinese place that gave us diarrhea? Seriously?” Jake’s raucous laughter ends with a swear. “You got me killed. I was on a streak too.”
“Hey bro,” I say as an after thought. “Don’t forget about tomorrow. You’re coming right?”
Jake waves his hand at me, which is about the most confirmation I’m going to get.
I swing into the bathroom due to the sudden fear that there was something stuck in my teeth when I met her. In the mirror, it’s just my face staring back. Teeth bare, nothing to worry about. I rub my hand through my three-day-old stubble. Wish I’d shaved this morning, but then again, some girls like the rough look.
This sets me on a looping course of whether she was into me. When I turn off this highway, I’m faced with a crossroads of possibilities: should I go back to the diner tomorrow? If she’s not there do I go back every day? Does that look too desperate or is it considered cute nowadays? Cary Grant could have pulled it off in his old black and white movies, but in those times I would be considered a gentleman, not a stalker. And I certainly don’t want to come off as a psycho.
So no stalking. Check. But then how do I ever meet this girl again? No number, no email. I could look her up on the Internet, but that would make me a stalker again. No. If she really is my future wife, that means we’ll meet up again. But maybe not soon enough. Maybe she’ll meet someone else before then…
And I am swirling down the drain again.
That night, I fall into a series of dreams. I’m in the diner, but there’s no one there. No workers. No customers. No photo on the wal
l behind the register. Then I’m driving and I can’t find my way back to the diner. I keep ending up in parts of the town I’ve never seen before. In the last dream, I finally meet Joy again, but she doesn’t remember me.
The next day is Saturday. Normally, I would sleep in, especially after a night of rolling back and forth, hypnagogic jerks pulling me back into consciousness and further from Joy. After slapping cold water on my face, brushing my teeth, and pulling jeans on, I’m back in the truck and on the road to the diner. This time, I know I’m not dreaming, because it’s right where I left it. So is the photo near the entrance with Joy and her family. Her father’s not there, but an older lady with a nametag that identifies her as Sally takes my order.
“Just coffee?” she asks.
A Sweet, Sexy Collection 1: 5 Insta-love, New Adult, Steamy Romance Novellas (Sweet, Sexy Shorts) Page 1