Text copyright ©2019 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.
Dedication
To my mother in law. I hate that your death inspired me to write this book. I wish you were here. I hate even more that I just deleted your name from my beta readers list.
Acknowledgments
Joe Adams- Model
Golden Czermak- Photographer
Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Cover Me Darling- Cover Artist
My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Kendra, Diane, Sarah, 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.
Table of Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
What’s Next?
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 (4-9-19)
F-Bomb (5-14-19)
The Southern Gentleman Series
Hissy Fit (3-19-19)
Lord Have Mercy (4-23-19)
Blurb
Ghosts are real.
Well, technically speaking, maybe not. But the ones that haunt a man’s soul? Those are very real. So real, in fact, that there are times when Castiel would rather silence them forever in the worst way possible than to go on living with them haunting his every step.
All it took was one single second in time for his attention to drift, and everything changed.
Life as he once knew it, is over.
Now he’s struggling to make sense of the pieces that are left, and he’s fairly sure at least half of them are missing.
He’s living for three things now.
His club—the Bear Bottom Guardians.
His work as a police officer for Bear Bottom Police Department.
And the occasional glimpse of a girl that makes his spirit feel free.
Despite the ghosts that haunt him, he’s not willing to present them with another target. Which is why he has to stay away from her. He can’t touch her. He can’t talk to her. He can’t get anywhere near her.
Not and live with himself afterward.
The only problem is, Turner doesn’t care what Castiel wants. She also has a solution for his ghosts.
You may call her Ms. Ghostbuster.
Prologue
Nice butt.
-Bathroom sign
Turner
10 years ago
16 years old
“Look, it’s the fat fuck that likes to play like she can race cars,” I heard from my side.
I didn’t bother to look up.
In fact, I would’ve driven right back out onto the track had my fuel not been low and my father not been standing in the pit road giving me a look from hell.
Now his back was turned, and he was talking to a few of his pit crew, and I was wondering how in the hell I was going to get out of this car without hearing it double time from the asshole twins.
I swallowed hard, wondering if I could just sit here until they left.
But then my dad’s voice barked out, “Get out now, Turner Hooch. We’ve got places to be!”
I took the steering wheel off, placed it next to me, then started the painstaking process of getting out of the car—through the window—while others watched.
I didn’t miss the boys snickering at my side. I also didn’t miss the ‘look at that fat ass slide out of the car’ or the ‘do you think she needs to be greased?’
I felt a tear hit my eye as I swung my first leg out.
Then, before I could control it, I lost my footing on an oil slick next to the car window and fell the rest of the way out of the car.
I hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud and then stared up at the quickly dimming night sky as I tried to catch my breath.
My hair was laying in the oil next to me, and I was having a hard time deciding what I should do next.
Should I roll to my side and get up on my hands and knees before using the car to push up?
Or should I use the car to pull myself up from the position I was currently in?
My father saved me, however, by walking over and offer
ing me his hand.
“You okay, baby girl?” he asked.
I took his hand and felt my six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound father haul me onto my feet.
But did he have to add the grunt of exertion at the end?
Yes, he probably did.
Which set the asshole twins off even more.
It was at this point that there was no denying that they were laughing at me.
Yet my father, being his clueless self, ignored them and kept his gaze on me.
“You okay?” he repeated.
“Sometimes, I don’t think she can get any fatter, and then she does,” I heard someone else say.
My head dropped.
“Let’s go, baby,” my father urged, guiding me away by placing his large arm around my shoulder and pulling me into his body.
We made it all the way out to the truck before he said, “Don’t listen to them, sweetheart.”
I scoffed.
“Yeah, like it’s that easy to do,” I muttered almost to myself.
He didn’t reply, only kept his arm around me until we were at his vehicle—the one that was given to him by his sponsor, Chevrolet—and guided me inside the vehicle before closing the door behind me.
I automatically reached for the seat belt and latched it into the lock, repositioning myself until the belt wasn’t digging so uncomfortably into my chest and belly.
We made it all the way home in silence, and by the time I arrived inside the house, I was about to break down all over again.
My dad had heard.
I was embarrassed.
So, so embarrassed.
Usually I kept all the problems I was having to myself.
If he’d known that there was a problem, he would’ve kicked the asshole twins out, and then I would’ve heard it even more while we were at school.
But this time there was no hiding the problems.
Nor the tears.
“Baby, wait,” my father said before I could head in the direction of my room.
I stopped in the mouth of the kitchen, then turned and stared at the man that knew how to mend my heart. The only man that had ever been good to me.
“What?” I asked.
“What they said? Don’t take it to heart,” he tried.
I heard the distinctive shuffle of my mother entering the room and turned to find her staring at us with wariness on her face.
I turned back to my dad.
“You don’t understand,” I whispered, eyes filling with tears. “You’re not fat. You don’t know what it’s like!”
My mother made a sound in her throat, and I looked over at her to see that she was staring at the ground.
My mother, Patty, did know what it was like.
She’d always been a big-boned woman and had gained a lot of weight over the last ten years.
Hell, she and I sometimes even shared clothes at this point.
I was not happy with my body.
I was not happy with the way that I couldn’t seem to control it even with diet and exercise.
Where some people accused me of not trying, I had to point out that I did try. A lot.
But unfortunately, my mother passed down her thyroid to me. A thyroid that hadn’t functioned correctly since I was nine years old.
From that point on, I’d put on weight. A lot of it.
So much, in fact, that I was now known as Turner-Turner to the people at school.
Turner-Turner meaning I was as big as two people, that way they called me Turner twice. Or sometimes Turner Squared.
“I don’t know what you want me to do about it, baby,” my father whispered brokenly. “If I could stop them, I’d do it. I’d tear every one of those fuckers’ hearts out and feed it to them. But you’ve forbidden me to say a word or step in. I’m running out of options.”
“Not one option,” I pointed out.
My father’s face went stormy. “You’re not getting surgery. You’re sixteen. People die from surgery!”
I raised my hands up in a praying position and gave my father everything I had.
“Please.”
He looked sick to his stomach.
“I don’t want to lose you, baby,” he whispered.
I smiled sadly. “Daddy. I’m just telling you now, if this keeps on, you might. I can’t live like this. Being in your shadow makes my heart literally break. I’m the racer’s fat kid. I know you’ve read the media reports lately.”
Dad closed his eyes, unable to deny that one.
“Please, Daddy. Please,” I begged.
“Let her, Garrett Lee. Just let her.”
I looked over at my mom, who had her back straight and her eyes wide open.
For once she was being firm with my father.
He realized it just as well as I did.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “But if anything happens to you, I’m going to be pissed.”
I smiled, the first genuine smile that’d graced my face in a very long time.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
Chapter 1
I always see all these ‘before coffee’ posts and wonder what kind of magical coffee y’all are drinking that turns you into a decent human being. Me? I’m an asshole all the time.
-Text from Turner to Jubilee
Turner
“What are you doing?” I hissed at my best friend, Jubilee.
She looked at me with strained patience.
“I’m going to go say hi to Castiel because that’s what nice people do, Turner,” she hissed.
I sneered at her.
“He’s not nice,” I told her.
“He’s very nice…to everyone but you, apparently.” She shook her head.
That was true. He really was nice. To everyone but me.
Granted, our relationship hadn’t started out on the best foot.
It all started when he’d pulled me over and given me a ticket for ‘reckless endangerment.’
Apparently trying to get around a slow-moving vehicle with a Chipotle burrito in one hand and my mascara wand in the other wasn’t acceptable behavior. I’d only been going sixteen miles over the speed limit, but since it was raining he’d said I wouldn’t be able to control my speed. I mean, Jesus, I tried to slow down and get back behind him when he sped up, but there was another man right behind me who was wanting to pass, too. So I sped up even faster. Sue me.
Which was a bunch of bullshit.
I could drive better than he could only dream of.
Water. Speed. Snowstorm.
Nothing affected me.
If I could handle a stockcar at a hundred and thirty plus miles an hour in the rain, I could handle my vehicle—which had excellent safety features and handled like a goddamn dream—at seventy-two miles an hour.
Not that Castiel thought so—or knew that I could handle my own.
“Come on,” Jubilee sighed. “It won’t be that bad.”
But it was that bad.
Castiel hated me and I hated him.
“Hey, Cast!” Jubilee chirped.
I hated the chirping. It was too early in the morning for all that.
I absently twirled a ringlet of hair that’d escaped my bun around my finger and tried to decide what I was getting for breakfast.
Waffles sounded good, but I didn’t want only waffles. I wanted a hotdog, too.
I could also go for a couple of onion rings.
I could order breakfast and lunch, couldn’t I?
I mean sure, I wouldn’t be able to eat but a bite of each…but it’d be worth it…right?
“Turner?”
I blinked, looking over at Jubilee who was staring at me expectantly.
“What?” I mumbled.
“Castiel invited us to eat lunch with him,” she repeated.
My eyes finally met the man’s that was staring at us—me—as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
Did he just ask me to sit with him because he was being polite? Or did he not think I’d do it? That I didn’t have the guts?
Honestly, the man sitting in front of me, feet kicked out in front of him, arms crossed tightly across that broad chest of his, while he watched me with a challenge on his face, needed a come to Jesus.
He needed to stop acting like he was better than me.
“Sure.” I shrugged carelessly as if I didn’t’ have a care in the world. “But I only have like thirty minutes, so we can’t dilly dally.”
“Dilly dally?” Castiel asked. “What are you, twelve?”
I narrowed my eyes at the asshole but chose to keep my mouth shut.
I didn’t know what it was about the man that got under my skin so badly, but there was seriously something about him that rubbed me the wrong way.
“My father says it and he’s in his fifties,” I told him. “Do you think he’s twelve?”
Jubilee pushed me slightly, indicating that I should take the inside spot in the booth across from the man.
I reluctantly took my seat and tried not to kick the man that hadn’t bothered to move his stretched-out legs.
As it was, when I finally finagled myself into the seat, he was still touching me.
Did he move?
No. No, he did not.
Jubilee followed me down, and I scooted over even more, my entire right side touching the wall.
“Tight fit?”
My eyes went from the wood grain table to the smug man’s face, and I froze.
“Um, what?” I asked.
“I said, tight fit?” he repeated.
I’d honestly expected him not to repeat it due to the look of anger on my face, but he did.
I frowned fiercely at the man, then wondered why I even bothered seeing as his attention was snagged by the waitress moments later.
A skinny, beautiful waitress that had pert boobs, a nice firm ass, and legs that went on for miles.
“Ma’am?” Castiel smiled pleasantly at the woman. “Would you mind taking their order? They don’t have long before they have to return to work.”
The woman’s eyes reluctantly tore from Castiel’s sweet-talking mouth to me, and this time her smile was forced.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
I bit my lip, wondering if I should bother ordering a kid’s meal, then decided to hell with it.
“I’ll have a grilled chicken salad,” I said.
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