Now Leaving Sugartown

by Carmen Jenner

  “Very dramatic, very heart wrenching, very sexy, very intense, very violent, very scary at times. Very enjoyable!”

  - Ali @ Ginger-Read Reviews

  “5 Magnificent Stars! In this heart-pounding and addictive love story, Carmen Jenner will have you laughing, crying, and become so spellbound with these small town characters that you’ll never want to leave. Who ever said small town living was boring has obviously never been to Sugartown.”

  - Debbie @ Keep Calm & Read Romance

  “Well, spank my ass, that was flipping awesome! My world has been rocked by Carmen Jenner’s debut book, WELCOME TO SUGARTOWN.”

  - Paula @ Romantic Book Affairs

  “Welcome to Sugartown will tear you to pieces but put you back together again with its humour and host of unforgettable characters.”

  - Jo-Anne @ Worlds of Wonderment

  “I don’t think I’ll ever see insignificant little towns in the same light again … danger, humour, tats, bikers, loads of pie eating (snigger), and enough chemistry to blow the roof off a science lab!”

  -Leanne Pearson, Author

  “Welcome to Sugartown, prepare to have your mind completely f*#&%ed over.”

  - Jess of A is for Alpha B is for Books

  “Not only was it panty-meltingly hot, it had an incredible storyline with engaging, well-developed characters.”

  - Christina of Love Between the Sheets

  “This book had everything from sugar coated sweetness, humor, sexual chemistry, friendly banter, angst, dirty talks, sexual innuendos, and a surprising twist of events that will totally keep you hooked till the very end.”

  - Michelle of Give Me Books

  “You HAVE to one click Welcome to Sugartown ... Not even kidding, right now I have a fierce lady boner for Carmen Jenner. I find this lady in the flesh and I’m gonna have to hump her leg or some s**t. (99% Probability of this occurring in public).”

  - Lola Stark, Author of Needle’s Kiss Series

  Sugartown Series

  Welcome to Sugartown (Sugartown #1)

  Enjoy Your Stay (Sugartown #2)

  Greetings from Sugartown (Sugartown #3)

  Now Leaving Sugartown (Sugartown #4)

  Savage Saints MC Series

  KICK

  TANK Coming Soon

  Taint Series

  Revelry (Taint #1) Coming Soon

  Closer (Taint #2)

  Hurt (Taint #3)

  Pepper Ryan grew up the troublesome, spoiled child of a rock god. With her less-than-stellar parentage, and the bipolar disorder that has plagued her existence, to say this little firecracker is a handful would be the understatement of the century.

  Sammy Belle spent more than half his life saving Pepper. He’d been her strength, her sanity, and the protective brotherly figure she never wanted to have.

  They were never meant to be together.

  They gave in anyway.

  And just when Sammy thought he had everything he wanted, Pepper ran.

  Now twenty-three, Pepper returns to Sugartown, a failed tattoo artist with one too many screws loose who’s down on her luck, wielding an ice cream van as beaten up as her heart.

  Sugartown’s most coveted bachelor has always been content with the quiet life he leads until Pepper, the hellion from his past, returns to test his strength, his patience, and perhaps even his sanity. But two can play at that game, and Pepper is about to learn that Sam can give as good as he gets.

  Can this good country boy survive Pepper’s cruel city world, or will the whole thing be put down to a bout of temporary insanity?

  One thing is for certain:

  He’s crazy about her.

  She’s just crazy.

  For my Mum—because my crazy had to come from somewhere. I love you so much.

  For the Readers

  THANK YOU!

  Seventeen years ago

  WHEN PEPPER wakes, it’s to utter darkness. Her clothes are wet. She shivers and clutches around in the dark for Stanley. She can’t feel him. Pepper can’t feel anything but fear of the all-encompassing black, the void that could be hiding all sorts of creatures that normally only live in her head. She can no longer hear Sammy counting. She hears nothing. Sees nothing.

  “Sammy?” she whispers, afraid to speak too loudly, fearing drawing out the monsters in the dark. Her heart races, and her lungs deflate as though they were balloons that someone cut the end off and all the air had rushed out. Her body felt like that—as though someone had come along with a shiny, sharp pin and stuck it in her arm, allowing all the energy to escape.

  Pepper’s small frame quakes, paralysed by fear and the knee-deep icy water, and try as she might to hold it back, a high-pitched keening cry escapes her trembling lips. She clamps a hand over her mouth, too terrified to even breathe. Though her nose is running and the tears coursing down her cheeks make her skin hot and itchy, she doesn’t move.

  “Sammy won’t ever find me here.” Before Pepper fell asleep, she had huddled farther inside the storm water drain as she’d whispered to her best friend, Stanley, a stuffed rabbit that Sam had given her for her fourth birthday, and with whom she had been inseparable from ever since. Stanley’s stitching had seen better days, his fur was a matted greyish-pink, and he was missing an eye where Pepper had picked it all away so that he looked as if he were permanently winking. Stanley was a sad looking rabbit, but Pepper loved him regardless of the fact that his stuffing was spilling from a hole in his left foot. She loved him because Sam had given him to her, and though she would never admit it out loud to anyone but Stanley, Pepper loved Sam. He was her entire world, and she was his.

  Now she feared the monsters would take her and she’d never see Sam or Stanley again.

  She should have found a better place to hide.

  After what seems like forever of trembling in the shadowy tunnel, a familiar voice cuts clear through her sniffling cries. She tries to speak, but she can’t, too afraid that it’s not Sam at all but one of the monsters coming to claim her as his bride and keep her here in the terrible dark forever.

  “Little!” Sammy shouts, and Pepper knows without a doubt that the panic-stricken voice belongs to Sam, because the monsters don’t know about nicknames.

  “Sammy,” Pepper wails. Her panic doesn’t abate, even though Sam is nearer. It’s still cold, and dark, and Stanley is still gone. Her breath comes in cold, shivery gasps. The quiet tunnel makes her raspy wheezing seem very loud. Too loud. Pepper’s lungs hurt and her head feels dizzy.

  Sam trudges through rainwater, knee-deep and murky with debris from the street. He splashes toward her, making enough noise to scare off even the bravest of beasties. A hand reaches out and grabs Pepper’s arm. She screams. It’s a scream loud enough to deafen even the bravest of beasties.

  “Shh, it’s only me.”

  “I’m scared, Sammy,” she cries, throwing her little arms around his neck as he hefts her out of the water and onto his hip. “Stanley’s gone.”

  “Don’t be scared, Little. You don’t need that stinky old rabbit, I’m right here. I’ve got you.”

  Sam whispers those last three words over and over as he leads them out of the pitch black. In that moment, Sam didn’t know how often he’d repeat those words to her throughout his lifetime, or just how many times he would lead her away from the darkness.

  But he did.

  He always did.

  He never had another choice.

  HOLY SHIT, it’s even worse than I remembered.

  It’s funny the things you think when you’re staring down the bowels of Hell. I pull the van to a jerky stop on the shoulder of the road and gawk at the tiny town spread out before me. It’s eight am, and it’s thriving with life. Cars bustle every whi
ch way, school kids are decked out in their blue uniforms, chatting animatedly as they cross the road, and the traffic actually stops to allow them safe passage. The shops on Main Street are all freshly painted in pastels. Flowerbeds line the footpath, and brightly-coloured petunias pop out of the soil to greet you. It looks exactly like Stepford threw up. Twice.

  Jesus Christ. I’m gonna need a bottle of Jack, and an entire prescription worth of anxiety meds just to get through five minutes in this shithole town.

  I ease the car out onto the road—okay, maybe ease is a stretch. What I mean to say here, is I slam my foot to the accelerator and fly down Main Street, doing sixty kilometres in a fifty zone. I would have gone much quicker, but I don’t need the cops riding my arse and asking questions about my newly-acquired ride. Technically, if you factor in that my arse-wipe boss hasn’t paid me for a month, I do kinda own some of this van—like a tyre, or the second-hand freezer he installed last month. Though considering I probably owe him damages from punching him in the face, breaking his nose, and stealing his phone so he couldn’t call the cops on me, I guess this could still be considered theft.

  It’s not like I set out to steal his ice-cream van, but the slimy bastard had rubbed his greasy, chesty Bonds-covered beer gut against my arse one too many times. When his meaty hands slipped under my skirt and boldly tried to go where no balding, impotent, bogan, fifty-year-old scumbag had ever gone before, I put those lessons Uncle Elijah had taught me to good use, and elbowed him in the face. I maybe could have done without the boot to the balls, but violence excites me, and it was a heat-of-the-moment type of thing. Of course, once I’d driven my stolen van home to the shitty Fitzroy apartment I shared with my soon to be ex-boyfriend—on account of him being an inconsiderate, selfish, but hot-as-fuck douche—the gravity of my situation sunk in. I had no money, nowhere to go, and a possible warrant out for my arrest.

  Coop, my biological dad, is in LA, so even if I could get him to wire me the cash, it wouldn’t be here before night fell, and I needed a place to stay. I needed to get the hell out of the state. I needed to go home.

  Home.

  I supress the hysterical laughter that thought produces, and unscrew the cap on my meds. I empty two into my palm and throw them back with the remainder of my flat, warm can of Coke. God damn, do I wish it were mixed with something alcoholic.

  I’m busy punching the buttons on the piece-of-crap stereo when I glance up, and some moron in a fluoro yellow vest and matching hat is standing in the middle of the road holding a stop sign. I hit the brakes. The van swerves and skids all over the asphalt, screeching to a halt just inches from the man, and a gaggle of horrified-looking children and their outraged mothers.

  The lollipop man is tall. His wide shoulders barely fit in the fluoro vest, and the sleeves of his shirt strain against bulging muscles. His hair falls into a messy, blond just-fucked shag around his face, and a set of gorgeous baby blues I recognise glare at me through the windscreen.

  “What the hell, lady? You didn’t see the gigantic neon stop sign?” he shouts, holding his arms out to either side of him. He lost the sign about the time I imagine he thought I was going to plough into him. “You coulda killed me. You could have killed these kids!”

  I ignore the frisson of heat that spreads out from the centre of my belly all the way to my cock socket. I have a thing for the mean ones.

  “Yeah, I saw it. About two seconds before I slammed on my brakes,” I scream back through the partially rolled down window. I unbuckle my belt that sits way too loose over my hips, because my lard-arse boss stretched it all out of shape, and throw open the door. It groans on rusty hinges. “So, little Sammy Belle grew up to be a lollipop man.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “You should,” I say slamming the door, folding my arms, and coming out from around the vehicle to see him better. “We used to bathe naked together.”

  Tittering comes from the kids gathered either side of the crossing, and the PTA Posse talk in hushed voices as their eyes roam over me with distaste.

  His voice softens, “Pepper?”

  “Naww, you do remember me.” I bat my eyelids coquettishly, then give him a devilish grin.

  Sam folds his arms, assessing me from my long pastel-pink hair right down to my calf-length leopard print Dr Martens. I don’t miss the way his gaze rakes over the ink sleeve on my right arm. Or the roses on my thigh playing peek-a-boo with my short skirt. His eyes flit back to mine with a grin.

  “Huh,” he says.

  I frown. “Huh, what?”

  “You grew up, is all.”

  “So did you.”

  “I’m six years older than you, darlin’. You would hope I’d have grown up by now.”

  And there it was, the reminder I spent my entire adolescent life trying not to hear: Sammy Belle is too old for me. Six years too old for me.

  You might not be thinking that’s such a big deal. Twenty-year-olds fuck men forty years their senior all the time. But most of those are money-grubbing whores and well, when you’re a horny fourteen-year-old girl lusting after a hot twenty-year-old, who’s only ever behaved the way a brother would, and you throw caution to the wind, remove your bikini top and hurl yourself at him? Yeah, trust me, you’re not ever going to forget something as insignificant as a six-year age difference. The memory of my humiliation came unbidden into my mind, and I chase it away with an appraisal of my own.

  Sam looks older. Good. But older. He’s tanned, and has lost that baby-faced boyish charm. He’s a man, and from the looks of the front of his jeans, he hasn’t forgotten that in my presence. I share a wry smile of my own, flicking the tiny Monroe piercing in my upper lip with my tongue. He clears his throat.

  “You look good, Pepper,” he says, before checking himself, and shutting his face down into a stoic expression. “Now, if you’re done terrorising the neighbourhood, I gotta get back to work. Someone has to keep the kiddies safe from Harajuku nut jobs, intent on flattening them with their ice-cream van.”

  I clench my jaw. “You did not just call me Harajuku.”

  “Run along, Sailor Moon,” Sam says, and winks. “Just be careful not to run anyone over, this time.”

  And just like that, he dismisses me. Sammy fucking Belle, the lollipop man, the guy who took me to my year-twelve formal, the guy who sat and made fun of all the other arseholes dressed in their tuxes and frilly pastel dresses while I wore spike heels, ripped jeans and a corset. The guy who told me not to give a shit that they were staring, because I was the most beautiful girl in the room, and he couldn’t take his eyes off me. The guy who I stole my first kiss from—that Sammy Belle, who’s a tanned, sunshiny real-life golden boy, dismisses me.

  I laugh, humourlessly.

  Run over? Oh no, Sammy. I’m going to run rings around you.

  Jumping back in the van, I twist the key in the ignition, and feel a sense of pride when she sputters out a big black cloud of exhaust smoke. She backfires, and I know without a doubt that every single pair of eyes in that street is staring at me. I flip the switch on the dash and “Greensleeves” filters out through the giant speaker on top of the van. The kids’ mouths open in excitement, because no matter where you are in the world, and no matter what time of the morning it may be, that sound means one thing: ice-cream.

  An errant little boy escapes the clutches of his pink tracksuit-clad mother, and heads right for me, shouting, “Ice Tweem!”

  When he’s close enough to the window I roll it all the way down, hang out my head and hiss at him, which sends him scurrying off the road and back to his mummy. Then I skid out and slowly, and very deliberately drive a dawdling circle around Sammy. He stands in the centre and follows me through the 360◦ revolution, eyes tight, face guarded, and arms folded against his broad chest.

  Sam the lollipop man is pissed.

  On the second drive-by, he just shakes his head, and I think I see a dry smile twist the corner of his mouth. I grin back, throw him a wink, and flatten my foot to t
he floor. The van lurches forward, and the gearbox protests as I grind it into second and zoom off in a cloud of black exhaust and squealing tyres.

  Sugartown might be the absolute end of the earth, but now that I’m a little older, I think I might actually have some fun here.

  “Pepper Ryan-Harris-Rowe. Why in the hell is there an ice-cream van parked in the middle of my lawn? It had better not be leaking oil everywhere.”

  Oh shit. The dragon lady’s back from work. I sit up on the couch and try ordering the chaos of empty Doritos packets and crushed beer cans on the coffee table. So I maybe should have given my mother a heads up that I was coming back to town, but we’ve never been the best at communicating our needs to one another.

  In her younger day, Holly Harris was apparently awesome. But to me she’s always just been this headstrong woman that likes to put a stop to all and any fun. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. And if anyone were to insinuate that the reason we don’t get along is because we’re too much alike, I will twat tap them into a new millennia.

  Growing up I found it much easier to talk to Pseudo Dad, Jack, or Biological Yet Geographically Absent Coop. He kinda has this way about him that makes you want to tell him shit. Like the time that Levi Quinn hit on me at one of the Taint parties. Is there anything worse than washed-up rockers who still think they’re God’s gift? That’s a rhetorical question. I’m telling you right now there is nothing worse. Anyway, Coop handed him his arse. Levi McDouchipants apologised. He still maintains he had no idea that I was in fact a) Coop’s daughter and b) only seventeen.

  My mother comes stalking into the house in all her five-foot-one glory. Her red curls are still as manic as ever, and she’s still as pretty as the last time I saw her two years ago. Though now she’s older, tiny lines wing out from the corners of her jade-green eyes, her cheeks crease a little when she smiles, and at five-foot two, I practically tower over the top of her.