Only for You (25 page)

Either way, I can’t
remember exactly what happened last night.

Bliss turns over, on her
stomach, exposing more creamy skin and curves I want to touch and
lick.

I grimace. Of course my
damn dick thinks
now
is the perfect time to turn my morning-wood semi into a
full-blown hard on.

Groaning, I try to rewind
the night’s events, but all I can see in my blurry mind’s eye is a
man talking to Bliss and me. We’re standing at a… I actually close
my eyes tight and try harder to make out the sign.

Twenty-Four Hour Bait and
Tackle Shop.

Some good time I had shown
Bliss.

I flop down on the pillow—a
mistake of epic proportions. I scrub my face with my
hand.

Damn it. I screwed Bliss
last night, but not before taking her fishing, and don’t remember
shit about it.

Maybe she will when she
wakes up.

Automatically my hand goes
to the chain at my neck. Maybe I had sense enough to—

My eyes pop open. “Where
the hell is my ring?”

A small hand touches my
shoulder, the unmistakable feel of metal hitting my skin. I look
down.

My ring is on Bliss’
finger, on her left hand.

“
Oh shit,” I
mutter.

“
Good morning to you,
too.”

My gaze flies to Bliss.
She’s all pink cheeked and cream-colored skin, the sheet covering
her body as she sits up.
Unfortunately.

But I’m not going to let
that, let
her
,
distract me. “Why are you wearing
that
ring?” That’s my ring. That was
supposed to be Violet’s ring. Only our plans were interrupted. Our
future had been interrupted.

She frowns. “Because you
gave it to me during the ceremony. You’re wearing one
too.”

I check my left hand. Sure
enough, there’s a ring. “What ceremony?”

She leans over me, dark
curls brushing my face as does the rest of her body. Too bad the
sheet’s between us.

“
Here.” She hands me a
piece of paper and my cell phone.

I glance up at the paper,
read it, and nearly lose it. “Fuck me.” Then I look at the picture
on the phone.

It’s a damn good thing I’m
lying down.

The man I had remembered
from last night? He’s holding a
Just
Married
sign made out of fishing lures and
wood.

“
Oh shit.” This time I
gulp the word.

Bliss’ pretty green eyes
search my face, her cheeks heating. “We haven’t consummated it,
yet. So technically, we could get it annulled.”

“
Consummated?” Right now
I’m too damn hungover, and it’s too damn early for me to
even
think
about
what that word means.

“
I’m still a
virgin.”

“
And?”

“
Our marriage isn’t
official, yet.”

How in the hell did anyone
let me, apparently drunk as shit, enter into any kind of contract?
“Oh.”

She glances around the
room, then down at the sheets before peering at me through her
lashes. Flirtation is nowhere in her posture or gaze. “So what do
you want to do—make me
not
a virgin or get an annulment?”

Epilogue

Ten years later

Cole

“
I carried her right off
stage and into, well, when you’re old enough, I’ll tell you the
rest of it,” I say, not meaning a word. No way in hell I’d tell her
about that.

My four-year-old daughter
looks at me, all wide-eyed. Her front two teeth are missing and her
hair’s done up in pigtails, reminding me of Kelly at the same
age.

“
Like a fairy tale,” she
breathes.

Rae laughs, kneeling down
beside us in the backyard. She ties Sadie’s shoes and gives her a
kiss on the cheek. Biologically, Sadie Violet Morgan was conceived
from a random egg donor and me, but she’s all Rae’s
daughter.

Rae signed the adoption
papers right after she was born. We paid a woman to carry her, all
legal and on the up and up.

Rae even did a documentary
about it, much to the amazement of her parents. “There’s no shame
in not being able to conceive. And there’s no shame in options
either—the legal ones that is,” she had been quoted as
saying.

We’re expecting our second
child, a boy this time, next month. Sadie is excited and so is
Kelly. She can’t wait to be an aunt again while my brothers are
excited about being uncles.

Yeah, brothers.
Plural.

Poor Sadie has so many
aunts and uncles that she’s rotten. Not sure who’s the worst about
spoiling her—Wyatt or Beau? But we spoil their kids too.
Four-footed or two-footed—it doesn’t matter to us.

As for their fairy tales,
that’s for them to share, not me. But I like to think I had the
easiest row to hoe out of all of us, though I worked the
hardest.

Wyatt, of course, would
disagree with me. He and Lacey—

“
You know your daddy,” she
says with a smile, pulling me out of my head. “He’s a
romantic.”

“
Mommy?” Sadie asks, light
brown hair shining in the sun. “One day will I have a fairy
tale?”

My wife of nine and a half
years gazes at me, love in her beautiful blue eyes, then she turns
her attention back on our daughter. “Yes, only for you, the frog
will turn into a prince a lot sooner.”

Exclusive Never Before
Seen (unedited) excerpt from
TRUE FOR
YOU
(Boys of the South Book 3), coming
October 2013, starring Jackson “Jaxon Hunter” Morgan and Bliss
Davenport:

Bliss

The only thing worse than
waking up
nude
with a guy who can’t remember the night before, is waking
up
married
to
him.

I glance down at the
wedding ring on my finger. It’s beautiful, white gold or platinum,
with diamonds all over it. And it’s the first piece of jewelry I’ve
ever owned.

Although, how long it will
stay mine remains to be seen.

“
No, I did not plan this,”
Jackson growls into his cell phone as I slip on my glasses. He
comes into focus and I blink. I’m not sure who exactly had my
glasses fixed, but a big part of me wants to believe that the man
standing by the bed had something to do with it.

“
It just happened,
Everett. That’s how,” he snaps.

Never in my wildest dreams
did I ever imagine I’d end up here, in Charleston, South Carolina
with country music’s golden bad boy, Jaxon Hunter.

In private, though, I think
of him as just Jackson.

My heart skips a couple of
beats when his dark blue gaze rakes over me. Strawberry blond hair
sticking up all over the place, a morning beard makes his face all
adorably scruffy.

Dark blue jeans hang on
his narrow hips as he paces. Tight abs, with an
, oh holy crap
, eight pack in the
making leaves my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth. Then there’s
the tattoos. Don’t even get me started on the tattoos, but I want
to get started on them.

He tilts his head and
smirks, as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking, sending my heart
into overdrive.

As if he could ever
be
just Jackson
.

I’m not stupid though,
despite agreeing to marrying him while I was perfectly sober and he
was perfectly drunk off his ass, to think that what will happen
next will be all hearts and flowers.

But I was desperate. I’m
still desperate. And I’m tired of living on the street, tired of
homeless shelters and crashing in bustops. Since I left the tour, I
have no place to go. No place to live, unless I go back home to
Forrestville.

A shudder racks my body as
I think about what waits for me at home. No, not my home, not
anymore.

My Uncle Brian drags me by
the hair, across the floor. I wrap my hands around his wrists,
trying to ease the stinging in my scalp. My glasses are barely
hanging on my face. “You were supposed to stay for a week, maybe
longer if you’d been any good.”

Pain slices though my
heart from where he’d beat me when I’d turned up this
morning.“Please, don’t send me back,” I beg. I’d rather stay here
and take my uncle’s abuse than go back.

Aunt Helen stares at me
with vacant eyes as she opens the door. “You’re sixteen. Old enough
to earn your keep.”

“
You told me I was hired
to
clean
his
house,” I scream.

“
Don’t you backtalk your
aunt.” Uncle Brian grabs my shoulder and throws me outside. I land
in the dirt, air rushing from my body in a painful
woosh.

The frame of my glasses
are painfully tight against my now raw skin face. Lifting my head,
I blink and can barely see a thing. The gravel I landed on has
scratched the crap out of them.

“
I’ll have to give that
bastard his money back, you worthless little bitch. Knowing him,
he’ll want his pound of flesh, too, and he ain’t getting it from me
or Helen.”

I spit out a mouthful of
grass and taste blood. Fear courses through me and my stomach
turns. I can’t go back there. I just can’t. I’d rather slit my
wrists than go back.

“
Here’s what’s going to
happen next: I’m going inside to finish my breakfast, then make a
phone call. In the meantime, I expect you to get your ass back
inside and shower, put on the dress Helen bought you and be ready
to go back.”

“
I’m never going back,” I
say through gritted teeth.

Brian’s face grows dark
and before I can move, he’s outside with me, fingers digging
painfully into my skin. “If I have to hog-tie you, I will, Bliss.
You ain’t anywhere to go and no place to live. Do you really think
anyone cares about you? You’re nothing.”

“
I hate you.”

His hand draws back and
before I can brace myself for what’s coming, he slaps me across the
face. My glasses go flying.

A hand lands on my
shoulder.

I scream and scream, the
sound jerking me back to reality, back to the warm bed I’m sitting
in. Slamming my hand over my mouth, I make myself stop
screaming.

“
Jesus
Christ
.”

“
Fall down seven times,
get up eight,” I whisper.

“
Bliss, hey, hey…it’s me;
it’s me. It’s Jackson,” he says, his voice still rough from sleep
and his hangover. He’s rubs my back over and over again with the
palm of his hand. “Are you okay?”

Breathing deeply, I bend
over, putting my forehead on my knees, wrapping my arms around my
legs. My glasses dig into my nose, but I don’t care.

“
Fall down seven times,
get up eight,” I whisper again.

“
Talk to me, baby doll,”
he pleads.

Turning my head a little, I
stare at him, though dry eyes.

I stopped crying four years
ago.

Read how it all began,
with the first book in The Boys of the South Series, available
everywhere and in print!

On the surface, twenty-two
year old Cole Morgan is exactly what any girl would be proud to
take home to meet her parents: He’s charming, intensely handsome
and goal-oriented...Only he has some secrets of his own, which
include provoking bar fights and a former drug-addict of a mother
slowly wasting away in a medical facility.

At barely twenty, Violet
Lynn is Country Music's hottest star, until one night of partying
gets out of control. Violet ends up in jail and on TMZ. Suddenly,
she’s the girl least likely to be invited anywhere. Sick of the
drama and keeping secrets, she runs away from the prying eyes of
the paparazzi to her grandmother’s home in Forrestville, North
Carolina.