Stronger By Your Side (Great Love Book 2)
Read Stronger By Your Side (Great Love Book 2) Online
Authors: A. Hart
An Original Publication From A. Hart
Stronger By Your Side
Published by Amanda Isaacson and A. Hart
Copyright © 2015 as “Stronger By Your Side”
All rights reserved.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and locations are either a product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious setting. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or people, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written consent from the author. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
First Digital Edition, 2015
Dedication
To the love of my life,
You have supported my dreams from the second you met me. You have done so in every way possible. It doesn’t matter what I say I want to do, you tell me that I can do it and then start telling me ways I can start. Your faith in me is astonishing and your support in me unwavering. I loved you from the moment your big brown eyes met mine. In that moment my belief in love at first sight was solidified. We grew up together and created a magical life that no one saw coming, no-one except you, you saw it all. Your faith in our love is like nothing I ever dreamt of. You are my best friend and will always have the largest piece of my heart. Thank you for supporting my dreams, even if it meant me typing away into all hours of the night. I love you, always and forever.
I will say to you what you carved into a piece of driftwood on our fifth wedding anniversary…
In high tide or low tide, I’ll be by your side.
& Christopher… I am absolutely and completely stronger by your side.
Love,
Your Amanda
Megan Maxwell
August 3
rd
, 2015
I took a deep breath and blew out my cheeks in frustration. I combed my fingers through my long, black hair and then placed it in a high ponytail on top of my head. What am I supposed to do now? I looked back at Charlotte, asleep in her car seat, her blonde curls sprawled over her little toddler face. In that moment, I was grateful for her sugar-induced coma. I looked down at my cellphone and thought about calling Travis. Nope, not happening. I would get a twenty minute lecture on why I should have let him drive and why he should have come along with Charlotte and me. I loved my late husband’s childhood best friend. My late husband, Charles, grew up with Travis, and they were practically brothers. Travis had been looking after us for the past two and a half years. Sometimes he was a godsend but lately, he was getting out of hand. Travis was smothering me to death, hence why I insisted on driving across country, with my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, by myself. Not to mention that I was hauling a trailer through the mountains in the late summer heat.
At least the air conditioner was still working, because the temperature read a toasty 95 degrees in the Nevada desert. Whatever Charles’s old Bronco’s issue was, it wasn’t the battery. I wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing or a good thing. I knew who I needed to call. I really didn’t want to play that card, but I was out of options. Calvin Smith, my late husband’s other best friend, the one Charles gave his life for in Afghanistan, had told me to always call him for anything, no matter what. Calvin and his wife, Emerson, made sure to remind me every time I saw them. I picked up my phone and dialed.
I listened to it ring, and then on the other end I heard Emerson’s voice. “Megan?” I sighed to myself, hating that she sounded worried.
“Hey, Em. Is Cal there?”
She was silent for a second and then answered, “Yeah, you want to talk to him?”
This time I sighed out loud. “Yeah, just put me on speaker.”
I heard her setting the phone down and then, after a click, “Megan? What’s wrong?”
I blew out my cheeks again. “Nothing . . . nothing . . . Lotte and I are both fine, I’m sorry I worried you, it’s just—”
Cal interrupted me. “It’s just?”
I blew out my breath, which I must have been holding. “You know how you said if I ever needed a favor to call you?”
Cal’s voice sounded concerned as he answered. “Yeah?”
I snorted quietly. “Well, I’m calling it in.”
I could hear Emerson wrestling with Maxine and Mariam, their twin daughters, in the background. “Where are you?” Cal asked with a concerned tone. “Are you in town yet?”
I laughed a little to myself. “God, No. I wish . . . I drove through the night last night, and then around seven, when Lotte woke up, we stopped at a Denny’s in Fernley, Nevada for some pancakes.” (Hence the sugar coma, induced by a heavy amount of syrup.) “Then we played at the park for a little, and we left like an hour ago, but then, all of a sudden, the Bronco just stopped working.”
He was silent for a second as I heard him wresting with something. “Okay, I’m putting on my shoes now . . . where the hell is Travis?” His voice sounded a little bitter when he asked.
I sighed. “He’s probably somewhere in front of me, and I know it would be easier to call him, but Cal . . . ” I struggled with what to say and then just decided on a simple, “I really just don’t want to.”
He blew out a breath. “No problem, just curious. It will take me a little over an hour to get there. Does your air work?” I nodded to myself and then answered, “Yeah, battery is still good, air’s on.”
“Alright. Well, just stay put and I’ll be there.”
I smiled out loud with gratitude for Cal. “Thank you!”
Cal responded, “Anytime, Meg, see you soon.”
I hung up the phone and looked back at Charlotte. I was extremely grateful that the truck conveniently broke down right around her morning nap time. That, and how hard she played at the park earlier, made this crisis much easier. Add a frantic, confined toddler to any situation, and it quickly became ten times worse.
I was in a little bit of a rush to get to our new home and was very anxious to get there as well. Those two reasons pushed me to drive through the night last night, so to add to it all, I was running on no sleep. Maybe the truck taking a nap was a good thing because, if I were honest with myself, I needed one too. I was only a little under two hours from my final destination. Of course the truck would die now.
I sat back and closed my heavy eyes, letting the sound of cars rushing by on the freeway lull me to sleep. I pictured Charles’s smiling face and smiled to myself. I missed that smile, I missed everything about him. I held onto every last ounce of him, and when Lotte (Law-dee, Charlotte’s nickname) came hurling out of my womb looking just like her daddy despite her tan skin, which came from me, my heart rejoiced. Looking at her, I saw her dad. She had his emerald green eyes, his contagious smile, his dimples and his blonde curls. I had clung onto him, and yet my house began to feel less and less filled with him. His clothes stopped smelling like him and the bed stopped feeling like it was empty.
I was desperate to get just a little hint of him again. It had been almost three years, but I felt this pull, like I needed to be in his hometown. I needed to be near anything that reminded me of him. He’d made me a new person when he came into my life, a better person, and I was terrified that now that he was gone, the new me—the better me—would be too. That couldn’t happen. I wouldn’t allow it, because I had our little girl to raise and care for, and she deserved the best in the world. So my remedy to squash my fear? Move cross country. Crazy, yes, I know it seems that way.
At first I didn’t want to be surrounded by his hometown, but now it sounded like comfort. Comfort that I was longing to have again. After Charles’s Aunt Jules asked over and over for us to move there, I finally decided to take the plunge. It was Travis’s hometown as well, and he needed to get back to his life. He had his own demons to face and his own reasons why he needed to go back. I knew that, even if he didn’t want me to know. He wouldn’t leave my side due to a promise he made my Charles, and so this move had to do with him as well. I decided that the move was good for all parties involved.
Charles had a brother, Caleb, who looked like a slightly chubbier, brunette version of Charles. Caleb had a wife, Rachel, who was blonde, tall, blue-eyed and beautiful, and two sons, Caleb Jr. and Connor, who both looked like a perfect combination of their parents. Charlotte was right between the two boys in age, so it worked out well. It would be nice for her to grow up with cousins close by. Charles’s dad was much like mine and wasn’t anywhere to be found. Sadly, his mom had died when he was 17, a year before we met. His Aunt Jules, who was his mother’s sister, had since taken on the role of Mom and was a blessing to Charles, Caleb and me. Jules didn’t have any children of her own, so she took her new roles of Mama Bear and Grandma Bear very seriously.
Charles’s hometown was a small town where everyone knew everyone, and they helped their own. I loved small towns for that reason. In a small town, you were never alone. It wasn’t like in a big city, where people see terrible things happen and just walk by like they weren’t happening. I could pay testimony to that. I can’t even count the number of times strangers ignored suspicious things that happened to me growing up. My mind did something I often begged it not to—it lingered on the images of the people who refused to ignore it. I cleared my mind and forced the images back like I always did.
Jules managed to get me a job as a Kindergarten teacher. Her friend was on the school board, and they happened to have a last-minute opening. I taught kindergarten in North Carolina for the past four years—except for my maternity leave—so it was a perfect transition. Charlotte would get to go to the preschool right next to my school. She wasn’t quite three, but she was potty trained and bright. They agreed to allow her to attend an extra year. Jules having connections and its being a small town helped. To make my life even easier, Aunt Jules was letting Charlotte and I live in the apartment above her coffee shop in old town Wheatland. The best part was that it would be rent free, in exchange for cleaning the coffee house at night and for sorting the mail. Everything seemed to fall into place smoothly. I felt like it was a sign that this was indeed the right move.
Charles’s family and friends were the second best thing I had ever had to a functional family. The first real thing I had was something I didn’t like to think about—they were those people who didn’t ignore my suspicious childhood. It was painful to allow myself to go there in my mind. The sad truth was that the people I considered family had been taken away from me when half of them died. Then I did the worst thing imaginable: I abandoned the last member of that family, the only other person who had loved me. I didn’t want to think about that right now. I didn’t want to think about him. I tried not to. I tried not to think about his mom, the woman who had treated me as her own, or his dad, the only man I never feared. I didn’t want to think about him, the boy who had befriended me when no else would.
That was my past before Charles, and the second I married him, the second I closed that chapter, I decided not to look back. I couldn’t. I decided to think of my life as starting the day I married Charles. I pushed my life before him into the very back of my mind. Sometimes memories and flashes of the past would come back, and it would take everything I had to block them out. I couldn’t think about the family I could have had, because I had one now and I needed to focus on them. I needed to focus on the present and the future. So instead of allowing my mind to think of my could-have-been parents, I thought about Jules and how kind she had been to me. I thought of Charles and the new life he had given me.
Jules was currently the closest thing that I had to a functional mother. My birth mother was probably in some motel somewhere getting high—she had been since I could remember. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, which was a huge city in comparison to Wheatland. I had only been to Wheatland a half dozen times, and somehow it seemed to get smaller each time I visited. That was okay with me. I despised any big city since I fled Atlanta eight years ago.
I’d barely been eighteen when I left home, and I’d been scared to death. I was escaping from many things, but mainly I escaped my birth mom, whom I refer to as Missy. I escaped Missy’s neglect and her plague of groping men. One groping man in particular convinced me that I needed to go and never look back, so I did. When I ran, I found myself outside of Fort Benning, Georgia, and in the arms of one young, handsome soldier.
Now, almost three years after that handsome soldier died, I was a 27-year-old, widowed mother. I was broken, completely and utterly broken by Charles’s death. He had made me new, he had made me the woman I always wanted to be. Now he was gone, and when that fully hit me, when he no longer defined me . . . what would I become? Like Missy? Over my dead body. I opened my eyes and blinked. I must’ve been sleeping or thinking deeply for an hour, because the clock read an hour past when I called Cal. I looked back at Charlotte and thanked God that she was still in a solid slumber. A big, blue truck swiftly pulled behind me, and I sat up in relief.
Cal jumped out of his truck, and I was about to smile. Instead, I grunted in disapproval. Travis hopped out of the other side of Cal’s big, blue truck. I flew out of the Bronco and straight to Cal. Despite being over six feet tall and built, I wasn’t intimidated by him—okay, maybe a little, but I didn’t show it. “Really, Cal?” I leveled him with a look as my hand flew in Travis’s direction. Travis stood there, looking like he was going to punch a baby kitten. He wasn’t as tall as Cal, but he was taller than me. He was fit, but he had more of a bad boy look than Cal. Both Cal and Charles had an all-American boy look. Travis’s light brown hair and hazel eyes gave him that, but then his tattoos and attitude made him look a little more mysterious.
Cal ran his hand down his face. “Nice to see you too, and he pulled up to my house to say hi before he drove the rest of the way home and he . . . ”
Travis walked up and glared at me, hands on his hips. “He is standing right here, and he is pissed that you didn’t call him when your damn truck broke down like he told you it would!”
I shook my head. “See, Travis? That’s why I didn’t call you, you . . . you ass hat!”
Cal smirked, but Travis looked more hurt. “Ass hat?” He asked in a hushed voice, brows raised.
“Yes, ass hat. Now, can we just fix my truck and get us home?” Home? Huh, strange for me to consider a place I hadn’t visited often as home, but right now it was all I had. It was my last hope. I hadn’t felt at home since Charles died, and suddenly I felt like I was being called to something, like something bigger than I could understand was waiting for me there.
God, I hope so.
After a brief pause, Cal and Travis both nodded their heads and made their way to the hood of Charles’s old Bronco. Travis mumbled something under his breath, but I ignored it. Just then, Charlotte started frantically yelling, “Mama . . . Mama!” right on cue.