Crazy Sexy Notion Read online

  Table of 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:

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  CHAPTER 1:

  CRAZY SEXY NOTION

  Copyright © 2018 Sarah Darlington

  Cover Design by Romantic Book Affairs

  Editing by Kamaryn Kretz

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or 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 written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, and events portrayed in this book are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced throughout this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  To every girl who wished for something more.

  CHAPTER 1:

  MICK

  My ‘aha moment’—that moment in life when everything clicks into place and you suddenly realize exactly what you need in order to feel some resemblance of completion, that moment when you know you have to risk it all…well, it happened as I was nearly decapitated by a vase. A vase! A Waterford Crystal, twenty pound, 40k euro vase from Ireland that my girlfriend and I had picked up on our last vacation—that kind of vase. It came flying at my head, flung with an incredible amount of force for a one-hundred and ten pound woman. It must have been all those sessions with her personal trainer, sessions that I paid for, that gave her such inhuman strength.

  I ducked just in time and the vase hit the wall behind me. Miraculously no crashing sound followed, only a giant thud of contact with the wall and then the floor. Wow. The vase was a really thick vase. Superb quality. Excellent craftsmanship.

  “You piece of shit, asshole!” she screamed at me.

  I’d never heard Sandra swear before. This was a first. She’d always shown me a refined, perfectly put together, proper side. Her true colors were coming out now. I almost liked this side to her better. Almost. Maybe if I hadn’t already had my previous epiphany then I might have reconsidered the break-up that I knew inevitably was about to follow this fight. Because I didn’t want the ‘wet-blanket, roll-over-and-die’ type in woman. I wanted someone who would challenge me and didn’t put up with my bullshit.

  For the first time in our relationship, Sandra was showing me more than just compliance and agreement. So for a moment, a very meniscal moment, I almost considered giving our relationship another try.

  But…Nah.

  No matter what her true personality was, I still wanted her out of my life.

  She picked up a lamp.

  “Sandra,” I said calmly, raising my hands up like she was a wild, rabid animal. “Put the lamp down. You love that lamp. You got it in Paris. None of this is the lamp’s fault.”

  “I hate you!” she screeched, and hurled the lamp with all her strength.

  The lamp wasn’t as lucky as the vase had been. It collided with the floor and broke into several pieces. As I watched it shatter beside me, I realized that I’d kind of liked that lamp. The lamp didn’t deserve this. So instead of trying to consul her, I grew indifferent to her temper.

  “You know what?” I said to her, my voice sharp and direct. “Your suspicions are perfectly accurate. I have been cheating on you. On multiple occasions with multiple different women. You know why? Because I just don’t care. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about where this relationship is going. I never have, and I can’t pretend anymore. I don’t love you, and I don’t want to love you. And you know I’m never going to ask you to marry me. So why are we both wasting our time here? I think we should end this. Yeah, I think that’s the best thing we can do. So would you please go?”

  There. I said it.

  Finally.

  Two years too late, but I said it.

  She was right. I was a piece of shit asshole. But at least now I was an honest piece of shit asshole. I watched as the tears started to fall down her cheeks. Then as she began collecting her things. Then as she packed her bags. And then as she left my apartment, slamming the door as she went. She told me she’d send a company out to come collect the rest of her stuff. In reality, the rest of her stuff was my stuff. I’d paid for it all, which made it mine. But, whatever, she could have all of it. Except the vase.

  “I’m keeping the vase,” I yelled at the door a few moments too late. The door was closed and she was already gone. I stood there in my now silent apartment, broken things all around me, still staring at the door.

  So back to my ‘aha moment.’ I realized why I sabotaged all my relationships—every single damn one of them. Because that was exactly what I always did. When things got to a point where stuff became too serious, too close to turning into forever, I inevitably did something to fuck it up. And I finally realized why I always did this.

  Raven.

  A girl from my past.

  The only girl that had any hold over me.

  The memory of my Raven, of leaving her behind all those years ago, haunted my thoughts daily, almost hourly. There was a guilt there that I never could shake. It was the deep seeded kind too. I hadn’t seen Raven since I was ten years old. Seriously, ten. Circumstance of life had separated us. She’d only been a childhood friend, but somehow this gut feeling inside me told me that she was always meant to be more. It was a crazy notion. But when I slept around with different women, it never felt like I was cheating on Sandra or whoever my current girlfriend at the time was, it felt like I was wronging Raven. Ridiculous, I know, because I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years! You’d think I would have forgotten her by now. But I had this loyalty to her and only her.

  Now it was time to do something about that loyalty.

  Or else I was doomed to forever have giant, twenty pound vases thrown at my head.

  I didn’t know anything about current day Raven. If she still lived in our old town, on Cherry Hill Drive, in the trailer across from my mother’s lot. For all I knew Raven could be an unwed mother of four, addicted to drugs, working some dead end job, if she was even working at all, and still living in that same damn trailer. Because that was the type of person that came from our neighborhood, the type of person that life chews up and spits back out.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know where she might be now and to what degree of fucked-up she might be after growing up there. Either way. I needed to find her, help her, hell…marry her…I didn’t know. Something. Maybe all I really needed was closure from the wounds of my adolescence, from those formidable years before my father rescued me from that hell-hole. Whatever. I had a plan now. I knew what I needed to do next. Make things right with Raven, help her, and hopefully heal something inside me in the process.

  * * *

  Three days later, and I roa
d shot-gun as my brother Nick drove us in his mint-green old-school Volkswagen Bug. We were currently in the ‘middle-of-nowhere’ Missouri—vast nothingness surrounding us. Any minute now we'd be crossing the state line into Kansas. After driving for twenty-two hours straight, only stopping for food and bathroom breaks, there were only miles left before we reached Pecan. Which meant my stomach at this point, heavy with the reality of my decision to drop everything and find Raven, felt a lot like I’d swallowed a gallon of battery acid.

  And yes, my brother’s name was Nick. My name was Mick. That coincidence happened because Dad didn’t even know I existed until I was almost ten years old. After having a fling with my mother, a few years later Dad married Pamela, my stepmom, and together they had Nickolas. Meanwhile, halfway across the country, I already existed. Nick and Mick—kind of hilarious, I guess. My real name was Mickey, actually, but I legally changed my name to Mick years ago when my father officially adopted me. I took his last name too because I wanted to scrub myself of my mother in all possible ways.

  Going back to Pecan wasn’t something I ever thought I’d want. The only time I thought I’d cross into Kansas again was at thirty-thousand feet, flying at six-hundred miles per hour, relaxing in a business class seat of a Boeing 747.

  “So why am I just now hearing about this woman?” Nick asked. “Who is she exactly?” He reached out, hitting the volume on the music, turning down the Taking Back Sunday song he had blaring.

  In the twenty-two hours since we first sat down in his car, he hadn't questioned this insane impromptu road trip once. Now with only miles left to drive he wanted answers. Typical Nick behavior. As much as he liked to act disinterested and aloof ninety-nine percent of the time, he also had this need to pry into everyone's business. To question and poke and prod—even if it meant exposing the one truth Nick desperately liked to keep hidden: he cared. He cared so damn much. It was my brother’s biggest weakness and his greatest strength.

  I opened my mouth to respond, not even sure how to explain Raven and my sudden need to find her, when Nick hit the blinker and pulled the car over. “Hold on,” he said. He parked on the side of the road.

  The Kansas state sign.

  Of course, he needed a picture with it. He’d taken one with each state sign thus far in our trip. So we both exited the car.

  Hot, suffocating wind whipped across the open plains. God, I'd forgotten how hellish this land could be in August. The sooner we could turn around and return to Maine the better.

  Nick ran up to the sign, the beanie that he always wore in place on his head, and he stood there rather awkwardly while I snapped a quick photo. Then we both hurried back to comfort of the air conditioning. “It’s pushing one-hundred degrees outside. You going to lose the hat while we’re here?”

  “Nope,” he simply answered. That thing never left his head; it was pointless to even ask. “So tell me about Raven then,” he deflected.

  Once the car was moving again, I admitted the truth. “Raven was my best friend from birth until the day I left Pecan. I haven’t mentioned her in years because I've always felt guilty about leaving her behind in Kansas.”

  “You were ten, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn't feel guilty. Did you even have a choice when Dad came to rescue you?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.” Yes. I’d had a choice. I knew then just as I still knew now that I could have refused to leave. I didn’t even know my father, but when he’d shown up on that random day in January fifteen years ago, I’d picked living with him over living with my mother without even blinking. Living with my mother and in that town had been that fucking bad. But Raven—I couldn’t help but wish somehow she could have been able to come with me. I'd been rescued, as Nick put it, but she'd been left behind to suffer and fend for herself without me.

  “I tried to write to Raven after I moved to Maine with Dad,” I admitted. “She returned each one of my letters with a big middle finger drawn on the back. She hated me for leaving her.”

  “Ouch.” Nick picked up his phone, glancing at the GPS. “Five more minutes to go,” he announced. “What if she doesn’t even remember you? What are you even hoping to gain by seeing her again?”

  I sighed, running my hands through my hair. “If she doesn't remember me then I'll make her remember. And I'm taking her home with me…unless she's married.”

  “Wait. Hold the fucking front door!” Nick glanced at me sideways like I was some stranger sitting in his car. “You’re—we’re—taking her home with us? Are you insane? You haven’t seen or spoken to this random woman in fifteen years and you want to take her home with us? What are we going pull up in front of her trailer—in the trailer park—and you yell out the window hey baby hop in? Seriously, Mick, are you fucking with me right now?”

  “I’m not fucking with you,” I told him and I cleared my throat for like fifteenth damn time today.

  It didn’t happen often, but when I was anxious my throat had a tendency to grow extra thick and scratchy. Something I blamed on my mother. My voice, even when I wasn’t anxious, always had a gritty tone, like a smoker’s, though I’d never smoked one cigarette in my life. But my mother was a ‘two pack a day’ sort of woman, with no regard to the damage smoking around an infant might do, and so I had a permanent husk to my voice—a husk that magnified when mixed with stress. And right now I was more anxious than I’d been in my whole damn life.

  “Oh my God,” Nick complained. “You’re wicked crazy. This is what a mental breakdown looks like. Sandra broke up with you and now you’ve lost your damn mind.”

  “I broke up with her, not the other way around. And don’t miss the exit,” I told him, nodding at the fast approaching Pecan sign.

  He groaned, taking the exit.

  Fuck.

  I might have been calm on the outside. But on the inside my heart raced like crazy. Meanwhile, Nick was having a mini panic attack of his own—complaining and ranting as he drove. We passed through the one and only stop light in Pecan and turned into the Cherry Hill Trailer Park.

  Everything looked familiar yet somehow different.

  “Okay, slow down, let me think,” I told my brother. Goosebumps prickled over my skin. It was entirely too eerie being here again—surreal, and not in a good way.

  All the trailers were copies of one another, the only thing differentiating them was the random junk piling around the outside of each. It seemed no one had enough room inside their homes to keep their stuff inside their homes.

  “So tell me when to stop—” Nick started to say.

  “Stop!”

  This was it. Raven’s trailer. Well…her mother’s trailer.

  For better or worse, here I was.

  CHAPTER 2:

  MICK

  I left my brother in the car, and walked for Raven's old front door. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder as I crossed the lawn. My own mother’s home was across the street. I hadn’t seen it or her in fifteen years, and I had no plans on breaking that streak today. Reaching the screen door, one that hung a little sideways on its hinge, evidence that if there was a man around he was lazy as hell, I knocked on the metal frame of the door.

  Nothing. No answer.

  “Hello,” I called out into the open home. “Mrs. Malone? Raven?”

  Again nothing.

  “Anyone home?”

  Until finally a little girl appeared in the shadows. She stared at me from a distance, halfway hidden by a bookcase. “Who are you?” the girl demanded.

  “Mick Jasmine. I'm looking for Raven Malone. Does she still live here?”

  “No,” the girl said sharply. “She doesn't.”

  “Can you tell me where she lives now?” I asked, trying to keep my patience. I'd never been good with kids. And I could see the uneasiness and distrust in this girl's eyes as she stared at me. Was she Raven's child? She had a familiar quality about her.

  “You're disgusting, mister! I should call the cops. You know what y
ou're doing with my mom is illegal? Tiff at school told me it's illegal. Plus it’s gross.” Gasping, as if her own words had frightened her, the girl then jumped behind the bookcase. “Go away,” she shouted. “Go away or I'm calling my grandma at work.”

  What? I didn't have the slightest idea what this girl was talking about. But I knew now, just from her fiery little temper, that Raven had at least one child—this girl right in front of me. Holy shit. She reminded me so much of the Raven I once knew.

  I took a breath.

  “Listen, kid,” I called out to her. “I'm not here to do anything illegal with your mother. We're old friends. My name used to be Mickey Lawson. I'm Sharleen Lawson's son. I'm just passing through town and wanted to see your mother. Where can I find her?” And why the hell are you home alone right now? It was the middle of the day on a Tuesday.

  Whatever I said must have helped ease her mind—because the girl left the safety of the bookcase's shadow and took a few steps toward the door and into the light. “You're not one of my mom's ‘boyfriends’ then?” She made air quotes with her small hands as she said the word boyfriend.

  What the hell? Boyfriends—plural?

  “No,” I answered.

  “Oh. Okay. Well, she's probably at home right now. It's her ‘day off’ today.” Again with the air quotes. “I stay with my grandma on Tuesdays.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the girl. She had blonde hair, braided, and pale blue eyes that stared at me. “How many siblings do you have, kid?”

  “None,” she answered skeptically. “Why?”

  Just wondering how much room we'll need in the car. “No reason. Will you show me which house is your mom’s?”

  “No. I'm not allowed to be at home on Tuesdays. I have to stay here. But our house is the last one on this side of the street. You can walk down there by yourself if you want. I don't care. It's a free country. Mom might already have a boyfriend over though.”