Forgiven: The Nash Brothers, Book Two Read online

  Forgiven

  The Nash Brothers, Book Two

  Carrie Aarons

  Copyright © 2019 by Carrie Aarons

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editing done by Proofing Style.

  Cover designed by Okay Creations.

  To anyone who has waited a very long time for love to be requited.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek of Fleeting, Book One in the Nash Brothers series

  About the Author

  Also by Carrie Aarons

  1

  Lily

  Smoke pours out from under the hood of my car, and a clap of thunder has me gently banging my forehead against the steering wheel.

  “Why now?” I groan, asking the universe why my karma has gone from zilch to double zilch in the last ten minutes.

  Of course, my brand new vehicle is breaking down on the side of the road right as it’s about to storm. What a perfect metaphor for my life.

  Okay, it’s not that bad, I’m just being dramatic. But I’m tired after smiling and shaking hands at one of my father’s rallies across county lines, and all I want to do is curl up on the oversized couch in my townhouse living room with the most recent romance novel I checked out. Now, it looks like I’ll be waiting for a tow truck instead of pulling on yoga pants.

  The sky splits in a flash of light, right down the center, and not three seconds later does a boom from the heavens seem to shake the earth below my tires. The rain is threatening, and I dig in my bag for my phone to call Johnny at the garage I regularly use in Fawn Hill.

  But the line just rings and rings, and either he’s talking to every single resident of my small hometown, or I’m out of range. It’s probably the latter, and I have to suck in a shaky breath to keep from crying.

  Today has been trying. This week has been trying. Hell, the last ten years of my life have been trying. That’s just how it goes when you are nowhere near where you expected to be at this age. At one time in my life, I thought by twenty-eight, I’d be married with two children, watching from the stands as the only man I ever loved—

  I have to mentally shut the images flooding my brain down. Now the tears do come, sharp and brutal, stinging my face just as equally as they’re stinging my heart. How, after all these years, I can still be such a mess over him … it’s the cruelest act of fate I’ve ever seen.

  But, I’m a big girl now. I have my dream job; I run a local government entity, own my townhouse and have friends who love me for me. And hey, I negotiated with a car salesman last week to get this car down five thousand dollars in price. It may be malfunctioning now, but I’d worked hard to both save for this car and advocate for myself.

  So, remembering that, I swallow my emotion and call every garage or tow company within a twenty-five-mile radius. As I dial, the car gets worse; the smoke wafting over the hood and the smell of burning stinging my nostrils. I get out of the car, just in case it blows up, and continue my quest for a tow.

  I’m on garage number ten, whose voicemail I get when headlights come beaming in my direction. Another car! Thank heavens. My car broke down on a back road that even locals don’t normally use, but I like the shortcut back from Lancaster … and it’s a bit like driving down memory lane.

  The vehicle approaching is a truck, one of those monster things with tires as big as my torso and a bed that you could fit an entire football team into. Nighttime is fast upon us, and I can’t make out the color as dusk sets in, but who cares.

  I flag it down, attempting to point to my smoking car just in case the driver doesn’t realize that I’m stranded out here. It’s not likely that anyone from this part of Pennsylvania won’t stop, but occasionally, you’ll get a jerk or two.

  The truck slows down, and my heart rate instantly picks up.

  Because I know this truck.

  Not intimately, it’s been far too long for him to still have the same pickup he drove in high school. But I’ve seen it around town. It haunts my periphery, and whenever I spot it, I try to stay far away from it.

  The driver cuts the engine, and then there he is. Climbing out in all of his giant, muscled glory.

  My knees go weak, my mouth runs dry, my heart shakes unsteadily.

  Bowen Nash has always been the most gorgeous male specimen in my opinion; I never could take my eyes off of him. From the first time I saw him my freshman year of high school, the big, bad baseball-playing sophomore whose smile could charm a viper … every other guy ceased to exist.

  But at this moment? He was a man in every sense of the word. And my lord, no man had ever done it better.

  Broad, muscled shoulders led to arms thickly roped with hard-earned biceps and forearms. His chest alone was probably as long as my wingspan, and it led to a tapered waist where I imagined the steel-cut abs were smattered with hair darker than the close-cut fade that adorned his head. Not that I’d seen them in a very long time, but …

  Now he’s walking toward me, those massive, sculpted thighs pressing against the fabric of his jeans as he maneuvers like a jungle cat. Bowen has always had that unteachable swagger to him.

  I’m scared to look up into his face because that’s the part that hooks my heart like a fish waiting to meets its doom. Powerless, that’s what I am. The man’s avoided me for ten years, and yet, if he confessed his love for me tomorrow, I’d go running back.

  Sucking in a breath, I finally meet those blue eyes. The ones that gazed at me as we danced at prom. Those cerulean, almost translucent blue eyes that watched as I gave myself to him and only him, for what I thought would be forever. Bowen’s eyes had looked at me through all the most important moments of our young lives … and now, he barely swung them my way.

  “Oh.” He stops short once he sees it’s me that he’s jumped out of his chariot to rescue.

  What he meant to say is, “Oh, it’s you,” but the disdain in his tone still gets his message across.

  I’m not sure where it all went wrong. My memories of that time are still fuzzy. All I do know is that we crashed and burned, both physically and in our relationship. And I ended up l
osing the love of my life for reasons he still won’t reveal.

  “My car broke down,” I offer weakly, stating the obvious because I don’t know what else to say.

  Bowen looks at the smoking hood and walks past me, not even a flicker of kindness thrown my way. He pops the hood and disappears. After a few seconds, I round it, not able to stand here in his presence if he won’t even speak to me.

  “It’s fine, I’m calling for a tow. You can go.”

  He ignores me. “I’m not a mechanic, but I’d say your radiator is busted. Is this … someone else’s car?”

  The way he says it, he might as well ask if I’m seeing someone because his tone is so accusatory. As if he’d even care, which is the strangest part.

  “It’s new. I bought it last week.”

  “Someone took advantage of you.” Bowen’s gaze is unimpressed.

  This treatment makes me want to cry as does almost every interaction with my ex-boyfriend. From high school sweethearts to practical strangers … it was tragic.

  And in this instance, it was getting old. Jeez, it was far past old. It was ancient.

  “I said, I’m fine. I’ll handle it. You don’t want to help, so go.” My tone has more bitterness in it than I thought I could possibly direct toward him.

  Just as the words leave my mouth, the first of the rain starts to fall. Steadily pattering down onto us and the cars, I hold a hand up to cover my head. It does nothing, however, to remediate the sputtering under the hood of my car.

  Bowen looks at the smoke, at me, and up at the rainy sky … and sighs loudly.

  “I can give you a ride.”

  No please, no real caring about the statement, no courtesy. “Yeah … I think I’ll pass.”

  My sarcasm must have pissed him off. “Get in the car, Lily.”

  The nails digging into my palms bite with pain. “I said I’m fine. Don’t do me any favors, Bowen.”

  Overhead, the sky cracks with lightning, one I can almost feel the electricity of on my face.

  “I’m not leaving you out here to fry. Or worse, drown. Get in the car. I won’t be the one blamed if you die.”

  His words shock us both to stillness … and I realize he didn’t think about what he was saying until it was already coming out of his mouth.

  Because once upon a time, he had almost killed me.

  I move before I can think again, running to the passenger side of his truck. Bowen follows, a burly figure getting soaked as he angrily stomps through the rain.

  The rain sluices the windshield as we drive in silence, the wipers batting it quickly, only for the watery curtain to appear seconds later. It might be cold and damp outside, but inside the cab of the truck, the humidity of our attraction, the chemical way we’ve always been pulled to each other … it’s scorching me.

  This night isn’t unlike that night ten years ago, the one that changed both of our courses forever. Rain, lightning, darkness closing in and country roads that bend too easily. Him in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger seat. Some old Tim McGraw song on the radio.

  Except we weren’t those kids anymore, the ones who were wild and in love and thought the world couldn’t tell them boo. Those teenagers had their whole lives ahead of them, and they expected to be living them together.

  “Thank you,” I croak out.

  The truck passes the sign for Fawn Hill, Bowen navigating us through town. He ignores my sincerity. “You still stay with your parents?”

  Of course, he wouldn’t know that I bought my own place, finally, last year. We don’t know each other anymore.

  “No, I have a townhouse on Conover.” I smile.

  “I know the development.” He hasn’t looked at me since we got in the car.

  Part of me was hoping he’d say he was proud of me, that he’d always believed I could be independent of my political father. But, like always, he says nothing.

  Fawn Hill is deserted, most people are sitting down around the dinner tables with their families at this time. I take advantage of the darkness that’s set in … to stare at Bowen as he drives.

  The set of his cheekbones, his eyebrows, his jaw … they’re all filled with so much fury.

  As he pulls the car onto the one lane road that leads around the circle of my townhouse community, I direct him to a stop just outside my door.

  When he only grunts a goodbye, I melt.

  I forget that I wasn’t the only one who lost everything in that accident.

  My hand reaches for his face, my fingertips feeling over the rough of his barely there beard. It’s more like a five-o’clock shadow and is the exact same shade of the neat cut of his locks. The move must shock Bowen because his head whips around, and the minute his eyes lock onto mine, I’m clued in on the tiniest shred of vulnerability.

  He’s opened the door just a crack, and I search his expression, finding only pain, and it breaks my heart open. Bowen always seems to know how to make my heart weep.

  “I’ll say it for the thousandth time, but I hope you hear me. I don’t know what it is I did to make you hate me so much, but I’m sorry.”

  I slide out of the passenger seat and slam the truck door in frustration. The prickly sense of old scar tissue being cut open again stays with me for the rest of the week.

  2

  Bowen

  The throbbing in my collarbone aches like a thousand painful memories past.

  Fawn Hill’s recent down-pouring of rainstorms isn’t good for the scar tissue that runs rampant through the healed injury, and I could probably say the same for my heart.

  I open the blinds on my barbershop windows, fat drops from the sky coating them and leaving Main Street a blur beyond the glass.

  Thank God the library isn’t on Main Street. It’s closer to the elementary school, set off the main couple of roads in Fawn Hill, and I’m an appreciative bastard for that. If I had to look across the street every day and see her, I might go mad.

  Hell, I was already halfway to insane. I lived in the same town that my high school sweetheart and I had grown up in … and she still lived here, too. I was at the mercy of every person in this town who could still feel the undeniable chemistry between Lily Grantham and me and whispered about it as we passed.

  Lily Grantham.

  Fuck, did it have to be her on the side of the road? What the hell was the world trying to do to me?

  And why can’t I get the feel of her touch on my cheek out of my heart, my head, and scrubbed from my skin?

  Her smell still lingers in my truck. Every time I’ve gotten in the thing for the last four days, I can smell the lavender mixed with warm vanilla … the scent she’s worn for years. I don’t even know the perfumes name, or I’d have probably bought myself a bottle before now. To smell in the sanctity of my home like some weird serial killer.

  Really, I just missed her more than fucking anything.

  Lily had always been tiny. She was smaller than petite … her lithe, tight body was something out of Neverland. I’d always been a giant, and she’d been the pixie that fit perfectly in my lap.

  How I wished I could have lost control in that car, pulled her on top of me and felt those small curves under my hands again. Since we’d been together, Lily had become a woman. Over the last ten years, I had to avert my eyes not to notice the sway in her hips, the way her perfectly round tits show a hint of cleavage in those buttoned-up tops she wears.

  And my God, the black-rimmed glasses she dons for work? I’ve had to duck around a corner one too many times to banish my erection in public.

  The long brown hair that used to curl around my fingers when I made love to her. The midnight blue eyes that looked up at me, full of so much love.

  How could I even exist on this planet if those things weren’t mine anymore?

  But I’d made a promise, and it had kept me from her for ten years. One measly ride in a car, her fingertips on my jaw … it wasn’t going to undo all that.

  A couple of customers filter in and out throu
gh the morning, but it’s a Thursday and business is slower. The weekend will pick up, but I have a good gig going here, as the town’s only barbershop.

  Not that this is what I ever envisioned myself doing as a career. I thought I’d be well into a major league baseball career by this time, touring the country, playing in all the stadiums I revered as a kid.

  That night ten years ago changed way more than just my relationship with Lily.

  My life could always be worse. I owned my own business, had no one to answer to, fought fires when I was needed. The firefighting came about in a strange way, but the town needed more volunteers, and cutting hair wasn’t exactly exciting. I wanted the rush again, and that’s what it provided.

  But … I wasn’t necessarily happy. Those trophies and honors and plaques, they all sat in my basement, collecting dust. Sometimes, just to rub more salt in the gaping wound, I’d watch my baseball tapes, the ones Dad had made when I was trying to get scouted for college.

  In another life, I would be under those lights, in front of TV cameras, winning a World Series. The fact that I wasn’t doing that … it crushed me more than I even knew how to express in words.

  The bell over the door to my shop jingles, and I look up from where I’m wiping down a counter of one of the four stations in the place.

  Keaton sits down in my chair, and I walk over, swing a cape around his shoulders.