Shawn's Law

Readers love

R
ENAE
K
AYE

The Blinding Light

“
The Blinding Light
is the best kind of read… Ms. Kaye has written a beautiful romance…”

—Crystal’s Many Reviewers

“This book keeps you on your toes and just when you think you have the ending figured out the author throws you for another loop… this was an excellent book.”

—Hearts on Fire

Loving Jay

“I loved this novel, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a believable romantic read with humour and a few sniffs. I look forward to reading more from this author and happily award
Loving Jay
5 stars.”

—Prism Book Alliance

Safe in His Arms

“Renae Kaye’s book starts off with a bang right from page one and never lets up… I absolutely loved this book and highly recommend it giving it 6 of 5 hearts.”

—The Kimi-chan Experience

“Some authors have an ability to make their characters come alive on page
and
inside your head and Renae Kaye has ticked that box, with bells on. Reading this story was like watching a favourite film.”

—Sinfully Sexy Book Reviews

By
R
ENAE
K
AYE

The Blinding Light

Loving Jay

Safe in His Arms

Shawn’s Law

The Shearing Gun

A Taste of Honey (Dreamspinner Anthology)

Published by
D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

Published by

D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886  USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Shawn’s Law

© 2015 Renae Kaye.

Cover Art

© 2015 Paul Richmond.

http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-63216-733-0

Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-734-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953476

First Edition March 2015

Printed in the United States of America

This paper meets the requirements of

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to the readers

who have embraced my characters

with open hearts. Thanks guys.

Shawn

Girls in garters and girdles will get you into trouble.

T
HE
FADING
sunlight suddenly registered with me as I was dabbing some painted shadow on my hero’s chest, trying to make his pecs look more like manly muscle and less like breasts. It wasn’t working. Unfortunately for me, the photograph I was copying showed the guy with chest muscles that indeed looked like breasts. I was trying to make them look better and not succeeding.

The darkening room made me think I should be packing up for the day, which had me looking at my watch and screeching in dismay.

“Mum!” I yelled loudly as I chucked my brush in a jar of dirty water and ditched the paint shirt I wore. Time had gotten away from me. It was with a sinking heart I realized I had been in my own world for an hour, letting my responsibilities slide. “Mum!”

I yelled again and my heart sank further as I received no answer. What had the old bat got up to now?

It was a hard job, but one I never thought of walking away from. When your parent has Alzheimer’s, you do the best you can. You complain, you moan, you groan. Sometimes you get angry. Sometimes you have fun. But you cannot take your eyes off them for too long, and I’d just left my mother for an hour. It was worse than having a toddler. No—scratch that. It was worse than having triplet toddlers. All with ADHD.

The last time I’d gotten caught up in my painting, she tried to make biscuits and nearly burned the house down. The time before that she weeded the veggie garden and pruned the apple tree for me. I never knew if I was going to get something good or bad out of her.

“Mum?”

I raced through the house looking for her, or at least looking for some sort of mess to show me what she’d been up to. The kitchen clock caught my attention—the big hand nearly pointing straight up, the little hand hovering over the four. For some reason, looking at a digital timepiece that told me the time was 3:57 didn’t make as much impression as the hands of that clock pointing to the twelve and four.

“Sugar cream puffs! Hippy-Hotpants will be by soon. Mum! Where are you, Mum?”

I noticed the light breeze flowing through the house. I whirled and ran for the front door. It was open. “Freak out. She found the key.”

One of my greatest fears was having the house catch on fire and not being able to get out in time because it was necessary to lock all the doors and windows to ensure my mother didn’t escape. If the front door was open, she’d found the key. I would have to find another hiding spot, since she’d obviously worked out the fake can of shaving foam in my bathroom.

“Mum!”

I raced outside. It was the end of summer, so four o’clock meant that it was still hot, and the temperature was probably still rising. The paving was baking and the sun still piercing. I knew that because, for the last six weeks, as often as I could swing it, I’d found something to do out the front of our house at precisely four o’clock. Cleaning the windows only took me two days. So I swept the veranda. Once that was clean, I tried sweeping the driveway. I weeded the front patch of garden, trimmed the bushes, fixed the sprinklers, and cleaned the spiderwebs from the letterbox. A week before, I ran out of excuses to be out in my front garden, so I resorted to transplanting strawberry bushes from the back of the house. It was the wrong season for transplanting, and they would probably all die, but strawberries were something I had plenty of. I could afford to lose a couple.

All to perv on a guy I didn’t know.

He was gorgeous. Taller than me (which wasn’t all that hard to be) with lean muscles and tanned skin, a leggy frame with wide shoulders, and a trim waist. If I stared long enough, I’d get a whole three minutes of eye-candy time as he walked his two dogs past my place and down the hill. I made sure I wore sunglasses so he (hopefully) couldn’t tell I was watching him the entire time.

I wished I knew his name.

But until then—
cough cough, if I was ever brave enough to talk to him
—I called him Hippy-Hotpants. He had that kind of tree-hugging, hemp-using, green-tea-drinking look about him. His clothes were made of loose, flowing material in bright colors—probably 100 percent cotton—and his feet were always in leather sandals that didn’t come from Kmart. And—my favorite—he had his light brown hair with golden highlights pulled back in a skinny plait that snaked down his back, nearly to his buttocks.

I had dreams about that hair. What would it look like loose? What would it look like wrapped around my fist? What would it look like wrapped around my…?

“Mum!”

I called again, hoping to hear her answer as I fumbled with the screen door and raced outside. Our house is built on the side of a hill, overlooking nothing more than other houses, but pretty, nonetheless. Our driveway is steep, and we have a series of large, wide steps leading from the front door down to the letterbox. To the left of the path there’s a rockery that holds the soil up. To the right, the larger portion of the garden is lawn and some big, leafy trees. I’d put a fence across the front boundary line to create another garden bed, and it enclosed the front yard somewhat and gave me less lawn to mow. The sprinklers were on, illegally watering that lawn in the daylight hours, and I frowned at them as I stumbled down the stone path.