AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 1
COOPER
Home is where the heart is. That’s what they say, don’t they?
That a place, a building, is actually where you can be at peace. Where you can be yourself.
Until I was twenty years old, I didn’t believe in that bullshit.
I knew it to be crap.
Home was where you slept. Where you pressed your head to the pillow and could rest without fear of anyone trying to hurt you.
For nineteen years, I lived in blissful ignorance. Until I met Lauren.
She changed it all. Changed me. And all these years later, I was still trying to figure out exactly how the fuck that happened.
My jaw clenched as I pulled into Willow Hearth, a town where I’d lived during my college years, only twenty minutes away from my alma mater.
It was small, but large enough to have two schools attached to the district. More subdivisions than anything, an IHOP and a couple of ethnic restaurants that were actually better than anything I’d found in the Big Apple.
Weird that I remembered that now as I was pulled over by a cop.
All of a sudden there he was behind me. I wasn’t doing a damn thing wrong, hadn’t been speeding, and sure as shit hadn’t been weaving in and out of the lines—there was zero reason to pull me over, and yet, the douche was.
Grumbling under my breath as I pulled in on the side of the road, just far away enough from the verge so as not to fear for my cherry red Lexus, I waited for the officer to approach.
An old bastard. In his fifties, probably due for retirement, and pissy about it.
“License and registration, please, sir.”
I shot him a tight smile, knowing I’d get further with honey than vinegar. Reaching for my documents in the glove compartment, I passed them over.
“Are you aware your license is overdue, sir?”
I blinked. That was why he pulled me over?
“It can’t be,” I told him, still blinking at him. “My PA handled that last month.”
She had to have done, didn’t she?
I scowled at the thought, then groaned. Fucking Tiffany with her fucking baby hormones.
Jesus, the girl had gone crazy once she’d had a bun in the oven. My competent as fuck PA had morphed into a ditzy bag of estrogen the minute she’d seen the blue line on the pregnancy test.
I’d been paying the price ever since.
Groaning under my breath, I grit out, “I apologize, officer. My PA’s pregnant and is forgetting even the basic sh—” I cleared my throat, gritted my teeth again. “I understand you’ll have to fine me.”
It would serve her right if I docked the fine from her fucking salary, but Jesus, I couldn’t do that.
Tiffany reminded me of Lauren some days. And now she was pregnant, she reminded me of all the things I could have had once but would never be able to have now.
In fact, her baby bump was one of the reasons I was all the way back in Willow Hearth, Maine.
The back end of beyond wasn’t my stomping ground anymore. I was a marketing executive now for an advertising company in Manhattan, one I interned at all those years ago.
Leviathan and Dronig had been my home now for the past eight years, and I was tired of that.
Home being my place of work wasn’t enough anymore.
Seeing Tiffany’s baby belly grow had only cemented that further.
I needed to know what Lauren made of herself.
Badly.
I needed to see where all her dreams and talent had taken her.
I needed to see who she was married to, if she had kids. What kind of jerk had been the lucky fucker to nab her…
Because, I was in no doubt that she’d be married by now. That she’d have kids, and that she’d be a career woman too.
She was like that.
Any guy who she was lucky enough to be with would just never let her go.
Well, that is, aside from me.
