Sweet Agony (Sweet Series Book 1) (20 page)

I glanced over at Riley and stared at the smile he wore. It was odd to see him smile. As long as I’d known him, he had been a black cloud of emotions. Now, a completely different person sat in front of me, and I couldn’t help being happy for him.

We might have had our differences, but we were still a team. That being said, I knew exactly what it was like to be driven fuckin’ nuts by a woman.

Riley was a lucky son of a bitch, and I bet he knew it. Me? I wasn’t so lucky.

There was no one other than myself to blame for my misery, though. I had kept the woman meant for me at arm’s length for half our lives. Then, when she’d thrown herself at me in what I now knew was one last desperate attempt to express her feelings for me, I had shut her down harshly. No, harsh wasn’t the word.

Brutally.

Coldly.

Angrily even.

Ginny had thought that anger had been directed at her and her many attempts to declare her love for me. If only she had known I was angry at myself, instead, because I had convinced myself I couldn’t have the one woman I wanted more than my next breath.

In essence, she had tried to hand me her heart, and I had metaphorically thrown it to the ground and crushed it under my combat boot.

These days, all I could seem to hear was my father’s advice from years ago playing on repeat in my mind.
“Ginny is a pure heart, son, beautiful from the inside out. You don’t want to break a pure hearted girl like that, because it would break her in ways you might never be able to fix. And, if you ever do that, you would only end up blackening your soul. If she’s yours and you’ve broken her, then you’ll be living without the very thing you need the most—your heart.”

If only I could have known how right he truly was back then, perhaps then I could have spared both Ginny and myself the pain we were enduring now.

There was only one thing my father had gotten wrong. Ginny was more than my heart. Even though I hated to hurt her, there was no way the experience had blackened my soul … because the woman
was
my soul. My very essence.

I missed her presence the way one would miss their leg if they had lost it. I was never steady on my feet anymore, stumbling through life without the balance I desperately needed. Ginny was that balance. My breath of fresh air. The heartbeat in my chest. She was the fucking sunshine in my life … and now I lived in perpetual darkness. I had damned myself by never telling her this.

Now, not only had I not heard from her in the last five years, but she’d all but disappeared from the face of the earth. Preliminary background checks I’d run had turned up absolutely nothing. As in, there was no Virginia DuBois who matched the angel who had lived across the street from me. I then reached out to some of my contacts in both law enforcement and private investigations and was met with more disappointment at every turn. No one could find her. It was as if she had never existed at all. Not in the city of Chicago, not in the state of Ohio, and not even in the whole damn U.S. of A.

The woman I loved had disappeared almost as if she had never existed in the first place. The only evidence she’d left behind were the broken, jagged, and jaded pieces of what I used to call a heart.

My angel, my Ginny was real, and I needed her back in my life. She was the light to my darkness. And who wanted to live in a world without light?

So, here I sat in a strip club, surrounded by beautiful women and plenty of other people, and I couldn’t give two shits. I was happy for Sullivan, but his happiness made me remember what I’d lost. Sort of like rubbing salt into an open wound, it stung like a motherfucker. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could sit here and stomach all of Riley’s good fortune.

“Holy shit. If that chick wasn’t utterly wasted, she’d be a bombshell,” I heard Chase say from the other side of the table.

People watching was better than musing over what I didn’t have, so I looked up in the direction Chase was staring at and promptly felt my stomach drop to the vicinity of my feet.

There, across the large VIP area, was what I had lost.

Now, she was found.

In a micro mini red dress, there she was, dancing sloppily to the music, her eyes glassy, indicating she was probably high and/or drunk, as some playboy in a fucking suit watched her with a displeased yet possessive gaze.

Maybe Miami was the lost and found for men who had epically fucked up their love lives.

A hand clapped down on my shoulder, and I looked over to see Riley looking at me in concern.

“You okay, man? Kara just said our party room in the back is ready, and you didn’t even hear her.”

Looking over his shoulder to where Kara stood, I apologized for not hearing her and then looked back at Sullivan.

“You all go ahead. I’ve got something I need to handle first.”

Riley’s eyebrows shot up. “You do?”

I nodded.

“You need backup?” Chase asked.

Shaking my head, I gave them the truth. “My past is flashin’ her ass in a red dress across the room and strung out of her mind. I’m gonna go find out why, and then I’m gonna be her goddamn fortune teller and explain what her fucking future is.”

“And that is …?” Kara asked, her eyes full of curiosity, although a smile was on her face.

“Me.”

Getting up from our table, I ignored the laughter of the people I’d been sitting with and started to make my way across the crowded room. Eyes locked on my target, I didn’t dare look anywhere else for fear she might disappear.

My heart was thundering away so hard in my chest it actually hurt. The last bit of rationale I had left my head found that pain ironic as the inner beast that had always belonged to this woman took over.

Loving Ginny had been a sweet agony I had endured for years now.

Here was my chance to claim my woman and show her I could give her everything she had ever wanted from me … and more.

By the time I was done carrying her out of this club and letting her know she was never going to disappear from my life again, she was going to realize she was mine. And I was going to give her the proof I had always been hers.

I had the key to her locket in my pocket.

It was time she learned she had always carried my heart.

Note From The Author

Thank you for reading
Sweet Agony
! You’re the absolute best for giving little ol’ me a chance. For every Indie Author you read, somewhere out there a fairy gets its wings! Okay, maybe not, but it still seems pretty magical.

For those of you thinking, “WAIT! She didn’t resolve all of the issues!” You’re absolutely right – I didn’t. If you’ve read my books before, by now you should know that I usually don’t. Some issues will be solved in the next book,
Sweet Recovery
. This was merely the beginning of Lucas and Ginny’s story. To pick back up where they left off, make sure to grab the next two books:
Sweet Recovery
and
Sweet Eternity.

I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did, please consider leaving a review at your favorite online retailers, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or review websites such as Goodreads. These are great ways to help spread the word about books to readers who have yet to discover them. Also, there are excerpts from four of my friends’ books, so make sure you keep turning those pages! Happy reading!

About the Author

Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.

She lives in Kentucky with her two little Rock Chicks in-the-making and her over protective alpha husband that she’s pretty sure is a latent grizzly bear shifter. She has a passionate love for reading and writing naughty romance, cliff hanging suspense, and out-of-this-world characters that demand your attention, or threaten to slap you around until you do pay attention to them.

She’s also a proud member of the Romance Writer’s of America (RWA).

For more information on Jessie Lane:

http://jessielanebooks.com/

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Needing To Fall

By

Ryan Michele

Copyright ©2016 Ryan Michele

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

Have you ever sunk inside yourself to a place of darkness so deep you couldn’t see the light? Had no hope? Felt completely alone in a world filled with so many people?

I have. I’ve lived it, breathed it.

Why?

Because life hated me.

It disliked me from the moment of conception, despised me when I was born, loathed me when I bounced from each foster home, and kicked me in the gut when I watched the one thing that meant everything to me leave.

For years, I drifted, unable to find my footing, never knowing what the word stable meant. Then a single moment in time rocked me to my core, changing me and making that solid ground I so desperately craved crumble at my feet, causing me to fall farther than I’d ever imagined.

The darkness of the swirling tornado that is depression captured me, pulling me down to its depths, drowning me, suffocating me, owning me.

A depth so deep, I didn’t think I’d survive and didn’t care if I did. I only wanted peace. I wanted the pain to disappear. I wanted to be … free.

Needing to fall into the cyclone of darkness was the only way I could find the light.

Mature Content. 18+ only
.

Excerpt:

Her hands tightened on mine. “Have you ever thought of going to his grave and telling him good-bye?”

I ripped my hands out of her grasp and pulled as far away from her on the couch as I could. If I could have made my legs work, I would have certainly gotten up and run as far away from her as I could. However, seeing as my legs were nothing but noodles, I simply sat there, staring at her, dumbfounded, my breath taking a vacation from my lungs.

She moved closer, my pulling away having zero effect on her. “Honey, I’m not saying this to hurt you. I just think it could help you. You never got to say good-bye.”

Tears streamed down my face. There was no point in trying to hold them back, because they would fall, regardless. Ugly sobs threatened to break from me. My chest was so tight it felt as if ropes were around me, squeezing the life out of me, the coarseness of it shredding my insides.

It was true. I had never said good-bye to Drew. The moment Mr. Peterson dragged Drew’s lifeless body out of my door then shut it was the last time I laid eyes on him. When I tried to follow, Mr. Peterson pointed his gun at me and threatened to shoot me, too. I wished he had. Then I could be with Drew and not rotting in a life that meant nothing to me. The pain would have melted in that moment, instead.

For the second time, I said, “I can’t.”

After Mr. Peterson came back, beat the shit out of me, and told me he was dead, I packed everything I owned, which was next to nothing, and ran away. I couldn’t look back; it hurt too much.

For almost a year of my life, I drifted. Each moment of those days, I wished Drew and I would have just run away, not caring where we would go or what we would encounter. Then he would at least be by my side, and I wouldn’t be so alone I couldn’t bear it.

Not once since his death had I ever thought of going to Drew’s gravesite. Some sick, twisted part of me didn’t want to let go of those last moments I saw him and replace them with him under the ground. I couldn’t help what rolled around in my head.

It was demented to think seeing him die before my eyes was more comforting than seeing him buried. It was almost like, if he was buried, all the memories I had of him would be gone, too. I would lose what little I had of him even more.