Contents
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPER 7
CHAPER 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
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
THANK YOU
BONUS SCENE
Text copyright © Mary B Moore
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 permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The mention of FaceBook is made in a non derogatory manner and they have nothing to do with this work of fiction.
The rights to the design of this cover belong to Trinity Hanrahan and may not be reproduced.
Regarding E-book Piracy
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Dedication
Wow, this is a hard one. I’ve been so lucky to have people holding my hand from start to finish on this book and I’m so grateful to them all and to all of the bloggers and individuals who have promoted me and supported me in the weeks running up to the release of Forever Mine. You guys rock! You’ll see that in the dedications the phrases I’d be lost without you guys and I love you are said a lot- that’s because this is the complete truth. No one told me that this would be as hard as it was and without all of the support that I’ve had, I don’t think I’d be hitting publish.
To my family - thank you for being amazing and for supporting me and pushing me to get the damn thing done, I’m the luckiest girl in the world and I love you all banyak. And to my son - there is nothing in this world that equates to the love that you give me, and hearing you talk about me with pride is what got me to the 2 words I thought I’d never see - The End. Love you sayang and this book is for you. xox
To Eve Montelibano - I would be lost without you. Thank you for holding my hand and for being the beautiful woman that you are, for all of the hours that you’ve spent helping me and for getting me to the publishing stage. I love you millions.
Rhonda & Kiki - you mean the world to me and have made this book possible with your encouragement and support. I love you guys.
Jen, thank you for your encouragement and support from the very beginning and for all of the hours of laughs that we had over Cole and for pushing me to get this done. You’re amazing and I love you.
To my beautiful CJ- Thank you for every second you gave me of your time, for your knowledge, support, encouragement and for being you. Love you bubba
Sarah Curtis - You’ve stayed patient with me, pointed me in the directions that I needed to go and you’ve kept my spirits high throughout, thank you so much…….but I’m laying claim to Mace, he’s mine. Love ya honey!
Trinity Hanrahan- Thank you for the awesome cover, website and all of the graphics that you’ve done for me; be ready for the next demands coming soon. You’ve made this book what it is.
Emily & Shawn - Thank you for being my besties, insomnia buddies, my sounding boards, pushing me forward and for everything else that you do for me. I’d be lost without you guys and love you both very much!
And finally……..
To my boys- you bastards! For those of you who don’t know the story these assholes backed me into a corner to publish my work - something i’d never considered or wanted to do. You guys set me up, you emotionally blackmailed me and then you did the ultimate jackass move and double dared me with no returnseys. Well here you go, I’ve done it so: roses are red, violets are blue, I’ve got 5 fingers the third ones for you! That said, I love you guys and thanks for 20 years of fun!
1
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Ren
Jaysus but it was hot out. I'd been guilted into spending the day helping out on the family farm instead of working in my garage in town, and if I had been in there today like normal, I wouldn't be sweating my ass off in ninety degrees of heat and sun. Why had I said yes? Oh yeah, because of my mom. None of us could ever say no to her. With four boys and a girl under her belt, she pretty much had the entire family wrapped around her little finger.
At least, it was Friday so I could head into town tonight to get rid of this tension that felt like it was suffocating me. A couple of days ago I'd seen a dark blonde in Coopers while I was picking up some groceries. It had been her hair that had initially got my attention because it was so unfamiliar and between my brothers and me we pretty much knew all of the females in the county. I'd stared waiting for her to turn around because if the back was that amazing, then God would be a cruel man to make the front less than the back. When she turned and started walking in my direction, I'd been floored - who the fuck was this beauty? Was she passing through or staying in the area?
She'd turned just then, and I remember struggling to breathe for the second that we looked at each other for, until Grandad suddenly stuck his face in mine scaring the shit out of me!
"Ren boy! I was beginning to think you'd skipped the county. Where the hell you been and what are we staring at?"
By that point, I was twisting and trying to look around him back at the angel, but the old bastard was deliberately blocking my view and when he finally moved she was gone. For the last three days all I could think about was her, seriously seeing was believing when it came to how beautiful she’d been. The problem was I'd been back to town every day since and had gone into Coopers and hung around the area and there was no sign of her. I thought at one point I'd seen her driving a new black Escalade around, but it turned out to be George Montgomerys because he'd driven it into my garage yesterday saying that there was an electrical fault in the driver door that needed to be dealt with. Who was she? Was she gone now? I rubbed a hand down my face and decided I needed to get laid tonight to get my man card back because I was obsessing over this girl like chicks did over guys.
"Hey, sweetie,” Mom said as I walked in. She walked up and handed me a cold damp cloth to wipe my face and neck down and then handed me a huge glass of ice tea.
"Hey Ma,” my younger brother Cole yelled as he walked in before I could thank her. I watched as she gave him the exact same, but that was just so he didn't get jealous. Like she could tell what I was thinking, she caught my eye and winked at me - I’m so her favorite!
"Now don't y'all forget that the interior designer is coming to look at y'all's houses, okay?” She said hands on hips.
Mom had organized this weeks ago when she'd found out that someone’s niece was moving here and that she was an interior designer. Our parents had built us our own homes on the property on our 18th birthdays. Obviously, it take
s a while for houses to be built and all so we moved in when we were 19 or 20 when they were completed, but on our 18th's we had sat down with an architect, a plan was decided and we were allowed to choose where we wanted them to be on the land the family owned. I'd been living in mine for seven years, and in all that time I hadn't really lifted a finger to change the place or decorate it aside from hanging some pictures or shelves or shit like that. My excuse was I didn't ever have the time, but the truth was I didn't know what the fuck to do with it. Then mom came in with this curve ball and now I was feeling a bit protective of my home and trusting a stranger to decorate it. I mean, they didn't know me and what I liked and they didn't live there so how would they decorate it for me?
“Shit ma we know, you’ve been going on about it for weeks now. Whats wrong with how they look?" Cole whined. He was such a little bitch. Even my baby sister, Layla, didn't whine as much as he did.
"Y'all haven't done one thing to those houses since they were built. The walls are still covered in white primer and the floors are bare wood for the love of God,” she said throwing her hands up in the air in the way she did when she was truly exasperated.
"Now Ma, you taught us better than to leave our wood bare,” Cole replied with a smirk on his face just as I took a gulp of my iced tea which I sprayed all over the kitchen floor.
“Cole Jessop Townsend! That is...you are...I don't even know what to say back to that comment apart from the fact that you will eat your words the day you meet the girl who is yours, and you'll regret your tom catting when she finds out about it and you see the look on her face. Now get your mind outta the gutter and start thinking about what you're gonna ask her to do to your home, and you Renwick Samuel Townsend, go get a cloth and clean your mess off the floor. I swear I raised y'all better than this, you get this from your father's family,” she walked away to the pantry muttering under her breath.
"Speaking of which, last night at Jilly's I saw the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life. I've never seen her around here before, but she walked in with the Montgomery’s and hand to God she has unrivaled beauty in these parts,” Cole told me as I mopped my spit and tea off the floor while laughing at him using the term ‘unrivaled beauty’. He’d obviously been lifting Mom’s Harlequin books again; any other pubescent teen would hit Playboy or go online, but not Cole - he’d loved a ‘happy’ ending to his fantasies. Then again, didn’t all teenage boys want a happy ending to their fantasies, but Cole hadn’t thought outside the box and had stolen Mom’s books one by one until she found them in his closet. Of course, we’d never let him live it down since we’d found out.
"Really? Did you talk to her? What was she like?" Mom was suddenly full of interest because one of her boys was talking seriously about a female.
"She was quite tall, say to here," he said pointing at the bottom of his neck, “with long curly blondish hair and these eyes that..."
My head snapped up at the description of my angel from Coopers. ”She was with the Montgomery’s?"
"Yeah! All I know is she’s just moved here to work or some shit and has just rented the Twyman house outside of town. Jaysus, she's beautiful, man! I'm gonna head back into town tonight and ask her out," he wiggled his eyebrows, not realizing that he was now closer to death than he'd ever been in his life.
"The fuck you..." I started just as there was a knock at the front door.
My mom clapped her hands loudly, “That’ll be Maya. Y'all stop your arguing and get ready to meet the designer.”
Still in the kitchen with my brother, I put my face in his. "You won't be asking her out Cole. She's mine and don’t you forget that."
Before I could threaten him further, Mom walked into the kitchen with her guest. "Ren, Cole, this is Maya Price, the designer. Maya, these are two of my troublemaking boys, Cole on the left and Ren on the right."
Cole and I turned around and I damn near choked all over again. There standing in the doorway was my beauty from Coopers, who was now my interior designer. All of a sudden I felt a healthy interest in decorating my home, come on; and from the gulp from beside me, I'd say my shit head of a little brother was thinking the same thing. The only difference between his thoughts and mine was that the fact that she was mine was a reality for me whereas it was a pipe dream for him.
2
____
Maya
As my parents were in Australia and my sister was still in college doing her nursing degree, I decided to move to be closer to my Uncle, Aunt, and cousins here in Piersville. My dad was a diplomat working for the US Government and was now Ambassador in Canberra. Being without any close members of the family from the age of sixteen had made me desperate to be closer to my family, plus I loved them so moving here was ideal for me.
My boyfriend of nine months had turned out to be a bigger mistake than I'd thought, so feeling protected and having a career was a no-brainer for me. It was not that I was scared of Andy per se, it was just that he had been the campus slut when we’d been at college and I'd stupidly believed him when he said he had no interest in any other girls when he’d asked me out a couple months after we graduated from the University of Florida. When I'd decided that I actually couldn't stand the jerk and dumped him, it came out that the whole time he'd been fucking anything with a hole. He hadn’t taken the break up well though and had taken to turning up unannounced everywhere; now I just got regular texts, phone calls and FaceBook messages — those I could handle.
I was away from it all now though and I loved my new home. The Twymans had an old plantation style home that had belonged to a grandmother and it had been the first property I had visited, but I fell in love with it. They had no use for it as their family all had their own homes, so they'd decided to rent it out with a view to the renter buying it if they were interested. I had my nest egg from working and I could easily afford to buy the three-bedroomed property, but I wanted to get a feel for the area first and make sure that this was it for me. I had expected to fall in love with the quaint town and the lovely people who lived there, but I hadn’t expected to fall in love with the house itself, and I definitely hadn’t expected to fall in lust with some random guy that I'd seen in town, but that wasn't important. I was happy here and there had been such a huge interest in my business and doing work on not only homes but offices and stores; Piersville was the best thing to happen to me.
We’d moved from country to country all of my life until I was sent to a boarding school in Washington with my sister Lucy. I’ll always look at my childhood as a gift as I’d experienced so many cultures and had seen so much of the world, but because of it I didn’t even have a proper American accent - it was a mixture of accents. As a result of that and all of the moves, I’d never felt that I belonged and was used to people assuming that I was bragging about my childhood when I tried to explain about it, so setting down the roots that had been impossible growing up was very important to me and I just knew I’d be able to do that here.
I turned up at Colette Townsend's house and gasped at the size and beauty of it. It was old and had been looked after well. In the distance I could see other large houses dotted around and I realized that those were probably the ones that I was being hired to decorate. Damn, I'd give my left arm to decorate this beautiful place in front of me.
With a sigh, I opened the car door and jumped out into the heat. How could this family work outside on the ranch in this heat and humidity?
I could hear men's voices coming from inside the house as I knocked on the door and did a final check of my outfit to make sure that my white roll up sleeve shirt was still tucked neatly into my high waisted gray pencil skirt. I heard a woman say something and then the door opened and I was face to face with a beautiful petite woman with brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a face that didn't look any older than thirty. What was this woman's secret because I could have sworn my cousins told me that she had four kids, with the eldest being twenty-seven or twenty-eight?
"Hey, beautiful girl,
” she said putting her hands on either side of my face and looking into my eyes. I must have been seven inches taller than her so I automatically stooped when I saw her raising her hands. Coming from the city I wasn't really used to being that much taller than people, but here all the women seemed so delicate and petite and I felt like a giant in comparison.
"Hello, Mrs. Townsend, thank you for inviting me out here to look at your properties. Your home is just beautiful!" I caught a glimpse of the inside over her shoulder and immediately started to take notes for future reference, i.e. for my own home. Regardless of my profession, I could still find ideas from other homes; it was allowed.
Forever Mine (Providence Series Book 1) Page 1