I had them wide open, and I would never, ever, ever go back to him.
“I get to go with you to your chemo treatment tomorrow, at least. You won’t be alone!” I promised.
I’d originally had my gramps going with her tomorrow. It’d bugged the absolute crap out of me that she’d be alone, so my gramps had promised he’d go with her and forgo going to my wedding. Which had been another thing that pissed me off with Cole.
He’d made me choose.
I didn’t want to make that choice.
But I’d had to make it anyway.
Red flags were everywhere.
What the hell was wrong with me?
“About that…” Faye hesitated. “I’m done with chemo.”
My heart leaped into my throat, and excitement started to flood my veins.
“Really?” I cried out. “That’s great news!”
Except, a few seconds after my declaration, I realized that Faye had deflated.
“Faye…”
“It’s bad,” she answered. “I… it’s gotten three times worse in the two weeks since I was last scanned. I’m… I’m done.”
I felt my throat constrict.
“Faye, no…” I breathed.
I was up and moving, sitting on the couch next to my one and only friend and staring at her with horror racing through my veins.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I can’t anymore, best friend. I’m just so tired.”
I felt what amounted to a damn basketball lodge in my throat.
“No!” I cried past my constricted throat. “You can’t. You have to fight. You promised you would fight.”
A tear escaped down Faye’s face. “There’s fighting… and there’s dying, but only dragging it out longer.” She paused. “I hurt so bad.”
“Oh, no, honey. No.” I wrapped my arms around her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Faye sniffled and rested her head on my shoulder. “I didn’t want you to feel like you feel right now.”
I mewled in the back of my throat.
Then a cool sort of resolve started to settle inside of my chest.
“How long?” I asked quietly. “How much longer do you have?”
Faye’s beautiful blue eyes lifted to meet mine.
“Weeks. If I’m lucky. Months if I’m not,” she answered, swallowing hard. “I want to go to the beach.”
That was going to be hard.
It was the middle of the summer. Every single house that was on the beach was likely booked, and there was no way in hell I was going to get her inside a condo by myself.
“I’m going to look,” I told her. “We’ll get you to the beach if we have to camp in my car to do it.”
Faye smiled. “I knew that I chose good, best friend. I love you.”
Tears clogged my throat.
But I still got on my cell phone and started to look for Airbnbs.
Come hell or high water, we were going to the beach.
CHAPTER 1
Roses are red, true love is rare. Booty booty booty booty rockin’ everywhere.
-text from Tide to Price
PRICE
“I don’t want to go to the beach,” I said to my sister.
Cannel narrowed her eyes. “You will. I went through all the trouble of nabbing a big enough house that we could all stay there comfortably. So you will go, even if I have to force you to.”
Cannel, my baby sister, was a ball buster now that she’d met her husband, Will.
Lips twitching, I said, “But I don’t have anyone to watch the shop.”
“You have plenty of someones. And you have plenty of money, if you wanted to give everyone the week off, you could, and make life a whole lot easier for everyone,” Cannel countered.
I sighed. “I don’t trust them to not burn the place down around them. So I guess I’ll have to choose option B.”
Cannel clapped, all happy and shit. “Goody!”
I gave her a droll look, which caused her to smile devilishly at me.
And with that one look, I knew that this vacation would be worth it.
Why?
Because my sister used to smile like that before. Now not so much.
Hell, for a year there, I didn’t think she’d ever smile again.
What feels like forever ago now, she was abducted and sold to a man that kept her locked in his home as his own personal housewife for a year. For that year, all of the Battle Crows MC—which at the time only consisted of family—turned into a desperate swarm of people knocking over every molehill to find what lay beneath.
And by that, I mean we fucked shit up.
As in, no criminal outfit was left unbothered.
We hurt criminals. We hurt innocents. We hurt whatever and whoever we had to in order to get information on Cannel.
And, in the end, it wasn’t even us who’d rescued her.
It was a band of felons who’d gotten out of prison and formed their own club.
That club, Souls Chapel Revenants MC, essentially did what we did. Only they were a whole lot more proficient at it. They had the intelligence, skills, and abilities.
Whereas we were like bulls in china shops.
We fucked shit up and hoped it would shake some information loose.
The good news was, Cannel was home.
And she was smiling.
Oh, and forcing us all to go to the beach.
“Can I get a hug?” I teased, holding out my hands.
I fully expected her to say no and run away.
She didn’t.
She came into my arms and wrapped her spindly ones around me, pressing her cheek to my shirt.
My shirt that was covered in grease and all kinds of dirt.
God, this girl.
“I love you, sis,” I told her, wrapping her up in my arms and squeezing tight.
“I love you, too, Trinket,” she whispered.
Trinket.
God, when she’d originally dubbed me with that name, I’d hated it.
It was weird, and hard to pronounce. And embarrassing when your little sister said it in front of people that were your friends. Ones that gave you a hard time for how much your little sister loved you.
Yet, that year that she was gone, I longed to hear her say it again.
Now, I cherished when she called me that.
“I gotta go.” She sighed. “And the only reason I let you hug me was because I’m wearing black, and I’m in a rental car, and I’m going straight home.”
I laughed and eventually let her go.
Five minutes after she was gone, I started packing up my tools.
I owned a restoration business. But in my spare time, I worked on my cars at a buddy’s shop.
My restoration business was doing well. During natural disasters, or hell, even disasters of the human variety—i.e., people getting dead—I was called to clean up afterward.
Or, in the case of a natural disaster, I was called and I made it go back to how it was previously if I was able.
Floods, tornadoes, ice storms, murders, dead body on the wooden floor upstairs that leaked to the downstairs. I literally did it all.
You name the fuckup, I fixed it.
But there was only so much of my own business I could handle, and since it now pretty much ran itself, I had more free time to do what I loved. I.e., working on my old cars and restoring them.