Loving Storm (Ashes & Embers Book 5)

by Carian Cole

As I stare at my little notepad, my cell phone beeps with a text message:

  STORM: Have fun today dress shopping. NO stressing. You’re beautiful. I love you. Can’t wait for you to be my wife. xo

  Pent-up stress seeps out of me in a cleansing sigh as I type back a reply:

  ME: I love you, too. You’re going to be the best husband. xo

  Storm has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to what I’m feeling. I can’t even count how many times he sent me a text or called me at exactly the right moment, even when he’s traveling thousands of miles away.

  As usual, I’m ten minutes late meeting Amy for lunch. I park my car in the first empty spot I find on the busy street and rush inside the café, searching for her among the small bistro tables, but I don’t see her anywhere.

  “Evie? Hello?” A girl sitting at a table by the window grabs my arm as I head back toward the front of the café, and I stare down at her in momentary confusion.

  “Amy?” I take a seat in the chair across from her. “Oh my God, I didn’t even recognize you! When did you dye your hair brown?”

  Her hand lifts to finger the ends of her glossy hair. “It’s auburn, not brown. And how could you not recognize my face? What kind of best friend are you?” she teases, opening her menu.

  “It makes you look completely different. It’s gorgeous.” Amy’s a natural blonde and totally owns it with her sassy “blondes-have-more-fun” attitude, but the darker color has softened her features, making her look even more beautiful and natural.

  “Now that I’m single—yet again—I thought a change would be good,” she explains. “Blonde me attracts dickheads, mommy’s boys, cheaters, assholes, and commitment-phobes. Maybe auburn me will attract an actual nice guy for once. It worked for you.”

  The hamburgers on the menu are screaming my name, with their side of crispy fries. No! I can’t! I shift my eyes over to the salad section before I reply to her comment. “I hate to debunk your theory, but have you forgotten the twelve years I spent with Michael? My hair color didn’t thwart his assholicness.”

  She closes her menu and puts it to the side. I’ll be so jealous if she orders a hamburger while I get a strawberry and walnut spring-mix salad. “He doesn’t count, Evie. He was a pre-existing condition from high school. As a beautiful adult woman, you landed yourself an amazing man.”

  I don’t think my hair had anything to do with my landing Storm, as she so nicely put it, but I’m not going to even try to set her straight. If she needs to believe hair color will help her find love, so be it. Most of us spent at least the first seven years of our lives believing an old man in a red suit cruises around in a sled with flying reindeer, handing out presents, and that hasn’t hurt anyone. Faith in hair color seems pretty harmless.

  “What are you getting?” she asks.

  “The strawberry salad.”

  “Ooh,” she coos. “The poppy seed dressing is amazing with that. I’m getting a cheeseburger. With chili cheese fries.”

  Damn it!

  “Are you excited? I know you’re nervous because that’s just you. But are you finally getting excited about the wedding?”

  “I’ve been excited about it since he proposed. I just wanted to take things slow.”

  “If you took it any slower, you’d be going back in time.” She grabs a roll from the wicker basket at the center of our table and pulls off a small piece. “If a guy proposed to me, I’d be sprinting to the altar.”

  The waitress arrives and I’m tempted to order the burger, at the last minute, but I stick to my guns and get the salad. I’m determined to lose ten pounds for the wedding. I want to look as perfect in my gown as I can for Storm - and in lingerie on our wedding night.

  Even though I stopped searching Storm on the internet a long time ago, the pictures I saw of him with various models with perfect bodies are forever burned in my brain. He’s assured me a million times that he only fooled around with a handful of those women and the rest of it was just posing for the camera to stir up attention, but it still amplifies my insecurities.

  “Evie? Are you listening to me?”

  Shaking my head, I refocus on Amy’s face. “I’m sorry, I was thinking.”

  “I said I think it would be pretty if me and the other bridesmaids wore red dresses. Red is really festive and it will match your flowers, and it’s sexy. I look great in red.”

  “You do,” I agree. “That’s a great idea.”

  She beams. “I’m not going to let Storm’s mother think of all the ideas. I’m your best friend. I know you better than anyone.”

  Ah. So it begins.

  I make a mental note to ask Storm if he’s open to eloping.

  Wedding gowns are magical yet evil things. They look so pretty on the hanger, but once you try to get your body into that stunning form-fitting mermaid-style dress, you’ll be wondering how your perception of width got so warped; especially your own width. And those gorgeous, flowing ball-gown-style dresses will make you feel itty-bitty buried under those layers of poof that just added at least fifty pounds of fabric to your body.

  “You’re way too short to wear something that poofy,” Amy advises as she sips champagne and sits in a velvet armchair in a corner of the boutique dressing room. “You look like a cupcake.”

  Asia tries not to laugh from her chair in the other corner.

  “I’m going to wear heels,” I protest.

  “I wouldn’t. You’ll break your neck trying to dance.”

  I throw Amy an exasperated look. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Just being honest. We all know you’re clumsy.”

  “I can put flats on when we dance. Lots of brides do that.”

  Asia nods, coming to my defense. “That’s a great idea. I can make them match the dress.”

  After I try on five gowns, Asia stands, looks me up and down, and pulls a gown from one of the racks. It’s somewhere between mermaid and cupcake, and it fits me almost like it was made for me. It’s perfect.

  “I can add the white faux fur trim, make a matching shawl, add a little bit of glitter for sparkle, and you’ll be a beautiful winter bride,” Asia says as she types all the details and my measurements onto her iPad.

  I turn around and around in front of the mirrors, falling more in love with the dress as I picture it with Asia’s customizations. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of this: the beautiful dress, the man of my dreams, a home of our own.

  “You look like a princess,” Amy says as she snaps pictures to send to Aria. “I’m not sending these to Storm, by the way. He can’t see it until you walk down the aisle.”

  Good. I don’t want anything jinxing our wedding.

  Chapter Five

  “Dude, your house is so close to mine you don’t even have to call me. Just yell and I’ll hear ya.” Talon looks out our kitchen window in the direction of his own house before giving Storm a friendly punch in the arm.

  “Who are you kidding? You can’t hear shit,” Storm jokes.

  Asia and I shake our heads. “Storm, that’s not funny,” I say. Brothers or not, it’s not okay to joke about Talon’s deafness in one ear.

  “Yeah it is,” Storm says.

  Talon shrugs and grins lightheartedly. “Trust me, Ev, I’m used to his abuse.”

  “It’s not abuse, it’s tough love,” Storm replies.

  “We should get going.” Asia leans her head against Talon’s chest, and I smile when he puts his arms around her. It always warms my heart to see how similar the brothers are. Talon and his wife, Asia, are the cutest couple, and we’re excited to live in their neighborhood and spend more time with them. “I’m sure Storm and Evelyn are exhausted from moving and want to finally relax in their new house.”

  Storm winks at me from across the kitchen. “We’re going to christen every room when you guys leave.”

  My insides flutter. This house has a lot of rooms to christen: four bedrooms, six bathrooms, two offices, a kitchen, a formal dining room,
a living room, and a great room, plus a finished basement with a guest suite. The house seems huge now, but we both want two kids someday and Storm wants room for his family to be able to stay for visits, like they all do at Gram’s house. I honestly couldn’t be happier about that.

  “Call me if you need any more help unpacking tomorrow. I’ll be home all day,” Asia says as we walk them to the front door. “And as soon as you’re settled, we want you guys to come over for dinner.”

  “We’d love to.”

  After they leave, Storm leans against the front door and smiles at me. “Alone at last in our home sweet home.”

  Home. I love the sound of that. “I think we’re going to be really happy here.”

  “Damn right we’re gonna be happy here.” He cups his hand behind my neck and pulls my lips to his. “Let’s go to bed, baby. Tomorrow we’ll test out all the rooms.”

  “That sounds perfect to me.”

  On our way upstairs, Storm picks up Halo. He carries him to our room and gently places him in his cat bed next to my side of the bed. Niko curls up on the floor beside him, just as he’s been doing since we all became a family.

  “Baby…stop messing with the curtains and sit with me. We gotta talk about something.”

  I turn from the cream valance I’m trying to drape just right around the window to find him sitting on the bed. He’s all boy-next-door cute wearing gray sweatpants and a white V-neck T-shirt that has a burn hole in it from when he used to smoke. The absence of his usual smile immediately makes me feel unsettled. Especially just two days after we moved into our new house together.

  “What’s up?” I climb down off the chair and cross the room to sit next to him.

  “Remember when I promised I’d never lie to you? No matter what?”

  “Yeah…” A flash of fear shocks my body. There’s no way a good conversation is going to come from a prelude like that.

  “I lied to you. Once. A while ago.”

  My heart seizes, and I stare at him until my vision blurs and I see two of him sitting in front of me.

  Oh my God.

  Here it is.

  Everything I was afraid of.

  He’s a player. A liar. He’s got ten kids scattered across the country. He doesn’t love me at all. He’s got an STD that’s now squiggling around inside me. Soon I’ll be itchy and choking on antibiotics, or I’ll be a stepmother to a baby that looks just like the band’s most avid groupie, Juggsy.

  He grabs my hand. “Evie…breathe. You’re turning blue, baby.”

  “I’m scared,” I whisper.

  He takes a deep breath. “I am too. I don’t want you to be mad at me. I hate when you’re mad at me. I just don’t want it sitting in my head anymore, eating at me.”

  “Okay. Please just tell me.” I don’t want him to tell me at all. I’d rather rewind back to ten minutes ago when my biggest worry of the day was how to make the curtains look like they did in the picture.

  But he’s going to tell me, and the curtains will probably never look right.

  “Remember that first night you came to my show with Michael and Amy?”

  “Yes.” How could I forget that night? It was the first time I ever saw Storm in his element, strutting around on stage with his guitar, flashing his sexy smile at all the women grabbing at his feet and screaming his name. He sang a song for me on stage and turned me into a puddle of emotion. Then he went down on me in a storage room with hundreds of people outside the door, including my best friend and my boyfriend at the time. It wasn’t one of my best moments.

  It was one of my best orgasms, though.

  The guilt and frustration of that night made me act like a bitch, and Storm and I had a fight. And then he—

  “I didn’t get a blowjob from Jill,” he blurts out. “I was drinking, and I was pissed, and I wanted to make you jealous. I wanted you to want me so fucking bad, and you pushed me away. I had to sit there and watch you leave with that asshole.”

  “B-But you said—”

  “I know what I said, but it didn’t happen. She tried, she was all over me…and I got rid of her. That’s when I texted you. I went home alone. Totally blowjobless.”

  I exhale with relief, but my heart is still racing in my chest. “So nothing happened that night with her?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  His green eyes, usually so bright and full of life, are dark and troubled in a way I’ve never seen them look before as we stare at each other; because he really cares.

  Because under the long hair, the tattoos, and the confident, flirting stage persona is a man with an honest soul and a heart of gold.

  “You promised you’d never lie to me,” I remind him. Of course this is a lie I can live with, one I’m even happy about. But after finding out I was unknowingly living with a liar for years, I need to know it won’t become a habit with Storm.

  He grabs me and drags me into his arms. “I know. It was one time and it’ll never happen again. You have my word, baby. I know that doesn’t make it okay. But I felt like I had to push you a little into staking a claim on me. Nothing else was working. I’d hit a low point.”

  I rest my head against his chest and circle my arms tightly around his waist. “You have no idea how jealous I was. The thought of another woman touching you made me feel crazy and sick.”

  “How do you think I felt watching the woman I’m crazy about leave with another guy?”

  “I’m sorry. I felt like shit about that. But you knew it was a messed-up situation when we met. Having feelings for you blindsided me. The entire situation sucked.”

  “It sucked bad.”

  I sigh and kiss his chest, directly over his heart, and let my lips linger there against the thin material of his shirt. “I’m so glad you didn’t do anything with her that night.” I say softly.

  “Me too. But lemme ask you something…if I hadn’t lied to you that night, do you still think you would have decided to leave Michael and be with me?”

  I don’t even have to think about the answer to that question. “Yes. Definitely. You already had my heart, Storm. You were right though. The jealousy pushed me over the edge a lot faster.”

  He pushes me down on the bed and climbs on top of me, lowering his face to my neck. His lips kiss a trail from my throat up to my lips before he pulls back. “When did you know you loved me?”

  “That’s so hard to answer.”

  “Try.” His lips touch mine again. “I want to know.”

  I slide my hands up the back of his shirt, reveling in the warmth of his skin, as I think back to our weekend trapped in his truck during the blizzard.

  “There were so many moments,” I finally say. “When you held me in the truck and stopped my panic attack…then when you told me how you saved Niko. How you carried me around in the snow. And when we held hands and slept together in the cabin.” I smile at the memories. “But I think what really did it was when you came and took care of me when I was sick, and you even remembered my favorite latté. You listened to me, like really listened to me.” I stroke his cheek as he takes in every word. “Christmas with you was amazing too. You know what? I think I fall more in love with you every day. I just keep falling and falling and falling.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “When did you know?”

  “All those same times you did…but there was just this feeling I had, right from the start, when I found you in your car. Even though you were acting like a bat-shit insane lunatic, I knew you were the one.”

  I giggle and kiss him. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Honestly? I liked how real you were. There’s nothing fake about you. And I liked that I could be myself with you. I didn’t want that weekend to end. I wanted to stay in that truck with you forever, and I didn’t give a fuck about anything else.”

  At least once a day I ask the universe how I got so lucky to have Storm in my life. Much like a storm, he blew into my life, created a bunch of unexpected turmoil, and then whisked me away from
it all toward sunny skies.

  Chapter Six

  We’re on our way to Storm’s grandmother’s house, where we’re having lunch with her and any other members of his family who happen to be there. Gram’s house is like a hub—someone is always visiting or staying with her for a few days.

  Our wedding is less than a month away, and Aria wants to discuss last-minute details tomorrow over breakfast. I’m pretty detailed out, to be honest. The past few weeks have been a blur with moving to a new house, taking care of wedding plans, and trying to keep up with work-related responsibilities. Since Storm’s band is on an extended break, he’s had time to be involved with everything, which I love. He helped pick out wedding cake flavors, our wedding bands, and dinner choices for the reception, and he took care of everything related to the honeymoon. He insisted on having pre-wedding photos taken at our new house with the pets, putting little bowties on Niko and Halo so they could pose with us. His cousin Vandal’s girlfriend, Tabi, is a talented photographer and captured romantic photos of us in our backyard as the sun set behind us. Then she took some adorable ones with the pets. Storm had our favorites printed on canvas and hung them all over the house, and every time I walk by one I’m stunned that it’s me in those photos; smiling, happy, madly in love.

  My phone beeps as we’re driving, and I pull it out of my purse to see a text message from an old familiar number on my screen. Oh, shit.

  MICHAEL: Can we talk? You haven’t answered any of my calls or texts in over six months.

  My brow creases. Michael has the worst timing. I don’t want to think about him or talk to him today, or ever.

  ME: What do you want? I have nothing to say to you.

  MICHAEL: You’ve been avoiding me since you moved out.

  ME: We broke up. There’s no reason to talk. That was forever ago!

  MICHAEL: Don’t you think everything happened too fast? We had a fight and you just left and shacked up.

  Is he serious right now?