Table of Contents
Jerk It
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale
Blurb
Prologue
Prologue II
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Jerk It
Copyright © 2021 Lani Lynn Vale ®
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 either 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.
To my CrossFit family.
Y’all are the best and make working out and dying tolerable as long as we’re all together.
Acknowledgments
Golden Czermak - Photographer
My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Uplifting Author Services - Cover Artist
My mom - Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred and thirty-seven times.
Kendra, Lisa, Jen, Tara, Laura, Penney, Brandi, Jen, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale
The Freebirds
Boomtown
Highway Don’t Care
Another One Bites the Dust
Last Day of My Life
Texas Tornado
I Don’t Dance
The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC
Lights To My Siren
Halligan To My Axe
Kevlar To My Vest
Keys To My Cuffs
Life To My Flight
Charge To My Line
Counter To My Intelligence
Right To My Wrong
Code 11- KPD SWAT
Center Mass
Double Tap
Bang Switch
Execution Style
Charlie Foxtrot
Kill Shot
Coup De Grace
The Uncertain Saints
Whiskey Neat
Jack & Coke
Vodka On The Rocks
Bad Apple
Dirty Mother
Rusty Nail
The Kilgore Fire Series
Shock Advised
Flash Point
Oxygen Deprived
Controlled Burn
Put Out
I Like Big Dragons Series
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie
Dragons Need Love, Too
Oh, My Dragon
The Dixie Warden Rejects
Beard Mode
Fear the Beard
Son of a Beard
I’m Only Here for the Beard
The Beard Made Me Do It
Beard Up
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom Guardians MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
Keep It Classy
Snitches Get Stitches
F-Bomb
The Southern Gentleman Series
Hissy Fit
Lord Have Mercy
KPD Motorcycle Patrol
Hide Your Crazy
It Wasn’t Me
I’d Rather Not
Make Me
Sinners are Winners
If You Say So
SWAT 2.0
Just Kidding
Fries Before Guys
Maybe Swearing Will Help
Ask Me If I Care
May Contain Wine
Joke’s on You
Join the Club
Any Day Now
Say it Ain’t So
Officially Over It
Nobody Knows
Depends Who’s Asking
Valentine Boys
Herd That
Crazy Heifer
Chute Yeah
Get Bucked
Souls Chapel Revenants
Repeat Offender
Conjugal Visits
Jailbait
Doin’ A Dime
Kitty, Kitty
Gen Pop
Inmate of the Month
Madd CrossFit Series
No Rep
Jerk It
Chalk Dirty to Me
Blurb
Mavis always assumed that she would be in a hospital with the good drugs when her time came. Not in the middle of the road, with no one around but the damn town mechanic that hated her.
But there she was, having a rock star’s baby, with no one to rely on but the one that let it be known around every turn that she was a horrible person.
From the time that she met Murphy and became best friends with him at the age of eight, she knew he was destined for greatness.
But then her grandmother fired Murphy’s mom, forcing them to live on the streets, and making Murphy to realize that maybe they weren’t best friends after all.
Murphy loved Mavis.
At least, he had when he was younger, before she betrayed him.
From that moment forward, Murphy goes out of his way to stay the hell away from her, and always makes sure to never get too close. Even though everything inside of him screams to make contact.
When he moves back to town after being gone for five years, he tries his best to stay away.
But there she is at his CrossFit gym. Then having a baby on the side of the road. Oh, and breaking him a little more with each step she takes away.
Eventually, they find their way back to each other. The only problem is, by the time that Mavis makes her way back into his heart, it breaks. And not in a rhetorical way. In the ‘he only has days to live’ kind of way.
PROLOGUE
Sorry for the mean, accurate, awful things I said.
-Alessio Murphy Romano’s secret thoughts
ALESSIO MURPHY ROMANO
I liked the girl.
A lot.
I wasn’t sure why, because she was a girl after all, but she was pretty fun to play with considering.
“Come to my favorite spot tomorrow,” Mavis ordered.
I wasn’t about to tell her no, even though I should. Mavis was my favorite pe
rson in the world. Sweet, funny, caring and considerate—she was the complete package. Even at thirteen years old, I knew that Mavis was something special. Something unusual that most kids her age weren’t, especially when you considered who her grandmother was.
“I’ll be there.”
And I was.
That next day, when I came to Mavis’s favorite spot, the old crone that employed my mother saw me.
And guess who wasn’t there? Mavis. It was as if she’d done this on purpose—this invitation to her favorite spot, which just so happened to be smack dab in the middle of her grandmother’s favorite garden on the estate.
I should’ve known in the beginning that this couldn’t be our ‘spot’ because of whose spot it actually was.
At first, I didn’t realize that.
Two hours later, my mom and I were kicked out. She lost her job and the included housing. We had nothing but our clothes, a few sentimental items and our car, and I learned the true meaning of being homeless.
PROLOGUE II
Bosshole-a person that turns into an asshole ten seconds after turning into the boss.
-Mavis to Fran
MAVIS
“Only you, Mavis Jean Pope.”
I looked at my grandmother and felt the anger rise, but I didn’t take the bait.
“Grandmother, it’s not like she knew that her birth control, as well as the double protection of a condom, wouldn’t be effective,” Fran, my baby sister, argued. “You seriously think that she would’ve done that if she knew? Because, I can guaran-damn-tee you that she wouldn’t have. Not when she’s getting close to finishing school.”
I was in the downhill half of school. And my sister was right. I wouldn’t have experienced that crazy night if I’d known that it would interfere with my plans.
But, seriously, that night I’d let loose. I might have done it anyway with how I’d been feeling thanks to my sister’s freak out in the middle of a store.
Which got me to thinking.
My grandmother really knew how to fuck people over.
Pearl Pope, the most prestigious woman deep in the heart of Texas. Mrs. Yamboree Queen. Mrs. Well-to-do. Mrs. Kick people out when they’re hurting the most.
“Why are you such a horrible person?” I asked with a snap, my temper fraying right along with my patience. “For one second, let’s not think about how this will affect your stupid self, and let’s consider how this will affect me.” I paused. “I’m in year four of my nurse anesthetist degree. That means clinicals. That means schooling out the ass. That means little to no time to be pregnant. So no, I of course wouldn’t choose this, for Christ’s sake. I would’ve waited. But, unlike you, I’m going to treat this like the miracle that it is, and thank God that I got pregnant and I’ll have a baby at the end of this. Then I’ll think about the fact that you won’t be there to be a part of his or her life.”
I was taken back to another time where my grandmother had been an awful person to a little boy that lived on our property with his mother. His mother was a maid at my grandmother’s estate. She lived in her own little small house at the back of the property, and every once in a while, I would see Alessio, her son, running around the back part of our property.
Until my grandmother asked them to leave because Alessio’s mother ‘couldn’t control her son.’
My grandmother snorted. “The moment that you need money, you’ll be singing a different tune.”
I might.
Or I might not.
Technically, I was a nurse. I made a hundred grand a year as it was. With my new degree that I would have at the end of this year, that would put me closer to the higher end of the hundreds. So no, I probably wouldn’t need this woman ever again.
But, like my grandfather said, burned bridges didn’t allow you to turn around and go a different way. Burned bridges were for people that were resolute in their path.
Was I resolute in my path? Probably not.
But this was the moment in time that I needed to make a decision.
“You can’t speak to me the way you’re speaking to me,” I finally said. “You may be my blood, but blood doesn’t make you family. Acting like a decent human being is obviously not your strong suit, so I guess that now’s the time to tell you that I want nothing more to do with you.”
My grandmother’s eyes blazed.
“Mavis…” Fran tried, but I was done.
“I’m pregnant. With a baby that is half a man’s that doesn’t want him. Now, I would appreciate it if you got out of my house,” I ordered.
“This house was bought and paid for by your grandfather,” she snapped. “I…”
“It’s in my name,” I said. “Because Granddad wanted to make sure that we both had something when he passed away. There’s nothing you can do about it now.”
Her eyes lit with an inner fire. “Well you can kiss your trust fund goodbye.”
“You can keep it from me right now since I got pregnant out of wedlock, but you can’t keep it from me forever. It will be mine eventually. And even if you were able to find some random loophole, you couldn’t keep it from me.” I rolled my eyes.
She hissed out a breath.
She hadn’t known that I knew that.
Which was funny as fuck because it’d been her husband that told me.
The man that had been the only shining star that had to do with my grandmother.
Our Granddad had been gone for eight years now, and not a day went by that I didn’t miss him.
But he made sure that my grandmother couldn’t hold our trust funds over our heads like she was doing now—at least not for long.
Whether she liked it or not, that money was mine in a year and eleven months.
“We’ll see about that,” she snapped. “Greevis. Time to take me home.”
I rolled my eyes and watched as my grandmother strolled proudly out of my sister’s house. Greevis, her driver and altogether helper for anything she might ever need, gave us a look that clearly said ‘sorry.’
I waved him away and then waited until the door shut before my sister looked at me. “I’ll help if you need it. She didn’t cut me off.”
I rolled my eyes. “If I don’t touch it, it’ll all the more money in the long run. Granddad invested it well.”
Fran looked down at my stomach. “I can’t believe you’re pregnant.”
I placed my hand on my belly.
It was still flat, but it was hard and very unusually weird feeling from the inside, so I knew that the pregnancy test was true.
If all was correct in my calculations, then I was twelve weeks along.
That meant that I knew the exact day that the baby was conceived.
“Did you really talk to Bayne?” she asked.
Bayne Green, the hot shot country star that’d been spawned by Paris, Texas, was my child’s father. And he didn’t want anything to do with my baby.
To the point that, when I’d called him, he’d offered me money to ‘take care of it’ and then had hung up the phone.
“I did,” I confirmed. “But when he found out, he told me to ‘take care of it’ and then sent me a few abortion clinics in the area.”
Her eyes rolled. “I swear to God. How did you step into that pile of shit?”
“Bayne is hot, and I had my beer goggles on that night,” I defended myself, then I let her have it. “I wasn’t having a good day. The day that I got pregnant, I was at that bar because of you,” I explained. “You’d had a bad day. You’d had a panic attack in the grocery store, and you wouldn’t calm down, so I had to force feed you your anxiety meds. And…I just wanted to escape for a while. Which was why I was at that bar that night. Why I slept with the guy in the band.”
Her eyes went haunted for a few seconds, then she dropped her head and looked at her hands. “Shit.”
Shit was right.
Not wanting to pour salt on a healing wound, I hoped to distract her with my next words.
“Sadly, I have to g
o to work.”
My sister grimaced.
“I wish you still worked there,” I sighed. “It sucks without you.”
“I know,” she admitted. “But it was toxic after the ‘incident.’”
It was.
My sister had worked at the hospital with me as a nurse on the same floor, but an error on another nurse’s part had made it to where she couldn’t handle being there anymore, so she’d left.
I’d stayed because right around the time that I’d decided enough was enough, nobody fucked with my sister, I’d found out that I was pregnant. And, knowing my Grandmother’s attitude was going to be this particular outcome, I’d made the difficult decision to stay at the hospital. Only after having the conversation with my sister, though.
She’d decided that I didn’t need to leave because of her dealings with the hospital and the staff—not that I agreed—but ultimately I took her assurance that she would be okay with me staying to heart.
My sister and I did not lie to each other.
We were the only thing each other had.
“What time is your appointment?” she asked.
I looked at my watch.
“In thirty minutes. Do you want to go?” I asked.
She snorted. “Of course.”
CHAPTER 1
First rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit. Second rule about CrossFit: always talk about CrossFit.
-Coffee Cup
MURPHY
I knew who she was the moment that she walked into my shop looking so down and dejected.
At first, when she offered me her hand, I considered not taking it.
I mean, she was the reason that I was homeless for four years.
But then I decided to just play as if what she’d done hadn’t shaped the man that I was today.
“Hi,” she smiled. “I’m Mavis.”
I hadn’t needed her to introduce herself.
There was no way that I’d forget those blue jean-colored eyes in that pretty face. Nor the long blonde hair that obviously hadn’t been cut much since she became an adult.
She hadn’t changed a single bit since I’d last seen her all those years ago.
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