A Son of Carver (Carver High #2) (37 page)

Thank you for reading
A Son of Carver
, I really hope you enjoyed it. Coming into this book, I knew I was going to have to drag Nash out of the hole I had dug for him in
A God in Carver,
which I was eager to do. It’s straight up torture writing a minor character through the protagonist’s point of view when you know that they are being largely misunderstood. Nash, and the entire Carter clan, hold a special place in my heart and I hope you eventually saw in him what I always knew was there. 

The generosity of strangers continues to astound me. Thank you to all the bloggers who take time to shine a light on independent authors, to all the readers who take a chance on unknown authors and to the huge, passionate, amazingly supportive independent writing community.

There are six women who have beta read for me since my third release and I’ve come to rely on them greatly. Krystal, Diana, Krista, Joyce, Jillian and Heather – thank you for your continued support. My books would be hot messes without you. Heather Marie, I am regularly entertained and educated by your book reviews, I’m in awe of your support of independent authors and totally jealous of your social media savvy. Thank you for using all of your talents to support my books. And Krystal, thank you for not forgetting about me even when I’m not writing and for loving my characters as much as I do.

Over the past three years my books have become like a part of the family. Everyone in my house works around them when they are being conceived and welcomes them with open arms when they are finally sitting on our book shelf. I couldn’t do this if it wasn’t for the support I receive on a daily basis from my children and especially my husband. Thank you to my parents who brought me up in a house where a book was always within arm’s reach and anything was possible. Thank you to my extended family and closest friends whose enthusiasm makes me want to be a better writer.  

If you want to read more from me and Nash is your kind of guy, I would get to know Paxton. Please enjoy the first five chapters from
Part of Me.

One Year Ago - Paxton

I’m at the one…
one
… gas station in beautiful River Bluff, Minnesota fueling up Dr. Dixon’s BMW M5. I don’t know why I’m fueling it up - it’s got a quarter of a tank and I got nowhere to go. But I needed to get out of my uncle’s house and, shit, the gas station is about the most exciting thing happening in this town.

This place is a trip. Five days ago I was in a bed at Mercy Hospital in Chicago recovering from a morphine overdose. I was taking the morphine to make my cocaine withdrawals bearable. I was trying to stop snorting cocaine like an addict because I could no longer afford it – I had quit my band and my other source of income, my girl; Stella, was gone too.

That was then and this middle-of-nowhere town is now. My mom, Rachel’s, home town. I’m living in a town she never talked about, with her brother that I didn’t even know existed until the day before I moved in with him. Which is not uncomfortable at all.
Shit.
After I signed all the legal documents, Mom sent me off with an ATM card, her husband’s obnoxious Beamer and a promise that both would be taken away from me if I ever stepped foot back in the state of Illinois.

That’s not gonna be a problem. Chicago is a city I never want to see again. This place – with the cows and the fresh air- might be location number two. But, hell, it’s only for a year and considering the shit I’ve been living through for my entire life, I can handle a year of anything.  And when the year is up, Dad will be out of jail and Venice, California will be home. The next time I step foot back in that dirty, grimy, beautiful city I’ll never have to leave again. I just have to get through this year.

I put the nozzle back on the hook and head inside the station so I can waste some more time. When I walk in, the girls that were checking me out in the parking lot look like they’re waiting for me. After the girls I’m used to, these ones look like kids. Inexperienced, innocent, simple kids.
Or maybe not
. The one with the dirty blonde hair is looking at me like she’d be willing to drop to her knees in the middle of the Gas-N-Go. I nod at them then go in search of the candy isle. I hear them giggling and I try to remember the last time I messed around with anyone under the age of twenty. I’m guessing these girls are about sixteen. I just turned nineteen, but that don’t seem right. I feel like I’m twice my age. The fact that in a couple of days from now I’m gonna be a senior at River Bluff High seems like a cruel joke. I’ve been so far off my mom’s radar for the last four years that she didn’t even care, maybe she didn’t even notice, that I completely dropped out of my senior year of high school. But when word spread around Glencoe – the high-end Chicago suburb where she reigns with her Dr. husband and her precious step children – that her delinquent son was not only a dropout but also a drug addict and (if the rumors are gonna be believed) suicidal, Mom changed her tune and took enough interest in my life to consult the lawyers and get me the hell out of the state.       

I can see the blonde heading my way. She stands beside me and clears her throat, but doesn’t speak. “You got something you want to say to me?” I ask her, reaching down to grab a couple of Snickers bars.

“Are you Dick Reil’s nephew? The one who’s living with him?” she asks nervously. Word apparently spreads quick through this town.

“Why would you think that?” I ask the girl.

She shrugs her shoulders. “We don’t see a lot of new faces around here. I heard you’re gonna be a senior at the high school. My friends and I are heading to a field party so we thought we’d invite you… you know, if you have nothing else going on.”

I turn to her now, my eyebrows pinched together. “What the hell is a field party?”

She looks over her shoulder to her friends, then back at me. “You know… a party… in a field?”

“No, I don’t know. You people just hang out in some farmer’s field and call it a party?” I ask, laughing at the visual in my head.

“Well, I mean, this one is down by the river. There’s like a big fire and a keg of beer and music. Are you from around here?”

“Do I look like I’m from around here?”

The girl’s eyes run over my body. She pauses at the tattoos running down my arms and over the palms of my hands. “No. Not at all,” she tells me.

“There’s gonna be beer in the field?” I ask her.

“Yep.”

“Shit,” I mutter because I can’t believe this is my life. “Lead the way,” I tell her, dropping the candy bars back on the shelf.

I follow the girls down some unlit, dirt road and eventually both sides are lined with cars. I park and get out, not waiting for anyone to lead the way. I can see a fire in the distance and I can hear the country music blaring from someone’s car stereo.
Holy shit
. It’s really a party in a field.

As I make my way into the crowd of high school students I can feel several pairs of eyes on me but all I want to see is the keg. I’ve done plenty of partying in my life. My dad got me high and drunk for the first time a week before my tenth birthday and I spent the next six summers in California keeping up with him and his vatos. Maybe not keeping up, but learning how to hang with men. But we never drank from a keg of beer.

I find it - there’s a kid manning it and everything and I wonder if this is his field.  “Here you go, man,” he tells me with a big smile.
Fucking weird
. No, ‘Who the hell are you?’ or even a, ‘Do I know you?’ Just, ‘Here you go, man’. I’m not gonna argue with him. I take the cup and head away from the fire, where most of the gang is congregated, and down to the water.

The air is sticky, but warm like a California night. A river is not the same thing as the Pacific Ocean, but it makes me smile anyway. It’s been four years – four of the messiest years of my life – since I felt that Pacific air, but it’s not something I’ll ever forget. I close my eyes and I can almost smell the salt and hear the waves crashing onto the shore. I can feel myself on my board, riding the waves. Better yet, on my board grinding the streets.
One year.

I’m lost in my little daydream when I hear a girl laugh the words, “Oh shit.” I look over to the patch of trees where the sound is coming from. A petite girl with long, blonde hair, who is clearly sloppy drunk, is laughing her ass off for no apparent reason. She buttons up her jeans and adjusts her flannel shirt and doesn’t notice me at all. I smile to myself, I can’t help it. The girl is damn cute- beautiful, even. I’m not gonna get attached to anything in this wasted year of my life, but I wouldn’t mind finding a little country virgin to mess around with.

“Jesus, Emily, you drunk bitch,” another voice says from behind the trees. This voice sounds sober and a little husky and completely sexy.  When the girl stomps out of the woods I’m completely taken aback. She’s got the body of a woman… a grown ass, sexy woman. And I’m not making assumptions because every inch of her is clear as day in the short, tight, blue tank dress she’s got on.
Not what I was expecting to come strolling out of those trees
. My eyes run down her long legs to her bare feet and back up her body again. She and her friend head my way, although I don’t think they see me. I’m staring at the girl’s long, thick chocolate colored hair that is hanging down her back and over her shoulders in loose curls and, I swear to God, I can feel it running over my body along with her tongue.

I’m watching her as she tries to steer her friend away from the woods when her eyes suddenly flash to mine. It’s not exactly light out here, I mean the moon is bright and the fire is big, but she’s still too far away from me to make out any kind of details, but when her eyes meet mine I feel something.

She comes my way, I think she’s heading to me, but then she gets her friend sitting down on what I thought was a random log that I was standing in front of but apparently qualifies as a bench around here. “Are you good?” she asks her friend, giving her an amused smile.

“Oh my god. Why the hell did you do this to me?” the girl moans.

“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow, Emily, but it was worth it to see you smile again.”

“Did you take a picture? ‘Cause I’m probably not gonna remember it tomorrow.”

“I took all kinds of pictures. I’m gonna look at them every day until you start smiling without assistance again.”

I feel like I should walk away- clearly they are referencing some heavy shit going on in the blonde’s life, and the way the brunette is talking to her feels intimate. Like I shouldn’t be part of it. But then the brunette tells her friend to chill out for a few minutes. She stands up and turns to me. She takes a step until she’s right in front of me.

And then I can see her eyes.

I stare at her and she stares at me and something passes between us. Something inside of me is reacting to something inside of her, coming alive like it never even existed until I looked at her.  It’s an ugly fucking feeling that makes me so hungry it hurts for a minute. I’ve felt this before. Once. I’ve felt it once before, but it sure as hell was not while looking into some chicks eyes for the first time. It was after a lot of chaos, disaster and desperation. When I was begging to belong anywhere with anyone. I know what this feeling means and where it will end and I’m not interested in going there again. But I can’t look away from the girl’s turquoise eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks me, snapping me out of my little la-la land moment, and I can’t help but smile at her. It’s the first hint of attitude I’ve come across in this town.

“Ask me nicely and maybe I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t care enough to ask you nicely. What I really meant to say was, why the hell are you still standing here?”

Adrenaline starts flowing through my body for the first time since I pulled off the interstate and into these serene rolling hills. She’s the first desirable thing I’ve seen in days. And I want her. “You’ve got a mouth on you.”

She looks at me like I’m an idiot, shaking her head like she doesn’t have the time for my banter. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Don’t you think you would remember if you’d met me before?”

She laughs at my cockiness. “She’s not in a position to move,” she says, nodding her head towards her friend who is looking up at us from her place on the log, “and I need a minute. So why don’t you take your ass back to wherever you came from,” she tells me, turning her attention back to her friend.

“Chicago,” I tell her.

“What?”

“You asked where I came from.”

“No. I don’t give a shit where you came from. I told you to get out of here.”

“What about you?” I say, just trying to engage her in any way possible. I can’t stop staring at her lips. I have an overwhelming desire to suck the shiny pink gloss right off of them.

“What about me?”

“You don’t seem like you belong here.”

She pauses at that comment. It looks like she’s trying to keep up her badass demeanor, but when she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth I know it’s to keep from smiling.

She likes the idea that she doesn’t belong here.

“I don’t belong here. As fate would have it, I’m going to school in Chicago.”

I flinch at that comment. Her words snap me right back into reality and I take my eyes off hers because those eyes of hers are telling me lies. If she’s headed to Chicago then, clearly, I wasn’t supposed to cross paths with her. I can already tell, two minutes into meeting her, that she’s not your average girl that can be easily forgotten. And as far as Chicago and everything in it goes, all I want to do is forget.

“Is this what I should expect when I get there? A city full of cocky assholes?”

“You’ll fit right in,” I tell her.

I’m still not looking directly at her, but I notice when she cocks her head at me, like she’s finally interested.

“I’m Jessa. What’s your name?”

I laugh at her sudden change of attitude.

“What? That wasn’t nice enough?”

“It was fine. I’m Paxton. It’s really great to meet you, Jessa,” I tell her facetiously, still not looking at her.

“Do you go to school there – in Chicago?”

“Since kindergarten.”

“So what the hell are you doing here?”

I look at her again, at her eyes, at her hair. If she’s leaving to go to Chicago and I’m gonna be stuck in this hell for the next year then, shit, maybe I should just take her. One last hurrah before I put myself on auto pilot for the next year. All I want to do is put my fingers in that hair of hers and know what it feels like to bite down on her fat, wet lip.

I step to her, until I have to duck my head to see her eyes. The defensiveness drops off her face and I hear the hitch in her breath. “Maybe I came here looking for you,” I tell her as my fingers slide into her hair and I grasp it, maybe too hard because a small whimper escapes her mouth. Her hands wrap around mine, like she’s going to pull them away. But she doesn’t.  I keep my fingers buried in her hair, but my thumbs run down the soft skin on her face and land on her neck. I push down until I can feel the blood pulsing through her veins.

She stares at me and I stare back at her like there are words passing between us, but neither of us is speaking. Her eyes become intense, her nostrils flare and her lips part and I don’t know what that means –
is she turned on or pissed off
? I lean in closer, needing her lips on mine. Her hands move from mine and I think she’s going to push me off of her- because that would be the rational thing to do when a stranger fists your hair and is about to kiss you- but then her hands move to the back of my head and her fingernails dig into my skull… and there is no going back after that.