Crash - Part One Read online

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t think John would be too devastated, but he wouldn’t be in the mood to celebrate either.

  “Don’t worry about it. We just weren’t working, so it was better to end it sooner rather than later.”

  “This might seem a little insensitive, but I have good news about Carter and me.” I gave John a summary of the conversation I’d had with Carter earlier. We’d left things with a promise to talk about it later, but I found myself talking to John as if it were a sure thing. Was that a sign I had already made up my mind?

  “He’ll be meeting the parents next,” John said.

  I put on a smile, but that was not something I was looking forward to. My relationship with Dad had been strained ever since the accident. Whereas Mom had started attacking life with a “you only live once” attitude, Dad barely spoke to me.

  I knew why, although he would never admit it. Whenever he saw me—saw my leg—he thought of William and it ate him up inside. Mom just medicated the pain away. Neither was a healthy solution, but how did you deal with the loss of a son?

  “Anyway, to business,” John said. “I have good news. In fact, that is an understatement. I have excellent news.”

  “An investor?” I asked. What else could it be?

  “Not just an investor,” John said. “A generous investor. I offered her some terms and expected her to come back with a counteroffer. Instead I got sent a load of contracts with our terms in there. This time tomorrow we will have two hundred thousand to play with.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” I said. “We should send this stuff to Scott. Assuming he will look at it without his fees paid.”

  “Already have,” John said. “In fact, speak of the devil—”

  Scott was calling John’s phone and he put it on speaker. I’d have to convince him to go easy on the unpaid legal fees.

  “Hi Scott,” John said. “You’re on speaker.”

  “Hi guys. How’re things?”

  “Good,” I replied. “Scott, before we get into the details, I know there are your legal fees that need—”

  “Oh yeah, thanks for the payment,” Scott said. “Your account is all clear so we are free to work on this investment.”

  I looked at John with a furrowed brow, but he looked as confused as me. “You received payment for the fees?”

  “Yeah, it went though a few hours ago. “

  “Oh, uh, great. I just didn’t expect it to go through that quickly. So, what about this investment then?”

  Scott gave us the idiot’s guide to the investment, but the gist was that we were getting the amount of money we asked for and only had to give up ten percent equity. The contracts included all sorts of restrictive clauses so the investor would not be able to interfere with day-to-day business. The investor was going through a venture capital fund, so details were sparse, but Scott described it as one of the best deals he had ever seen.

  That evening, we signed the contract and a “Kerry Woodson” did the same for the investment fund. We had our money. That meant the business would be set for a while and I could keep spending time with Carter. Today had been a good day.

  ---

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, dear. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I need to run something by you, though.”

  “Sounds serious. What is it?”

  “You remember that guy who asked me out in the restaurant on your birthday?”

  “I’m hardly likely to forget him, now am I?” Mom replied.

  “We’re kind of seeing each other.” Mom was silent on the other end, but I knew I had her attention. “Do you think you and Dad would like to meet him? I was thinking of arranging a dinner with the four of us.”

  “Oh, things are that serious already?” Mom asked.

  “I’m not sure, really,” I replied. “It’s a bit awkward because he has to go back to England in a few months, which means things have to progress a bit quicker than normal.”

  “That’s understandable. Plus, you really don’t want to let this one go. Once you snare someone like that, you need to reel them in and keep them.”

  “What about Dad, though? Do you think he will agree to meet him?”

  “Of course he will, darling. I’ll make him.”

  “And can you tell him to be on his best behavior, please? He’s been really rude to some of the friends I’ve brought home in past.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Mom assured me. “Actually, this was supposed to be a surprise, but I’ll tell you anyway. Your father finally agreed to go to grievance counseling. He’s seeing the same lady you and I saw after William died.”

  “Oh my God, that’s great news.” I was under eighteen when William died, so I had been given little say in the decision to go to counseling. I was glad I went, though. I would never get over William and I knew there would never be a day that went by without me thinking of him, but after a few months of talking to a therapist I was able to move on.

  Mom recovered too, in her own way, but Dad refused to go to any therapist. Instead he crawled into his shell, and our relationship had been strained ever since. Dad did not even show any sign of relief or pleasure when the driver of the car was given a ten-year prison sentence for manslaughter.

  “Don’t get too carried away,” Mom said. “He’s not the life of the party or anything, but he is getting better. I think he’d be only too happy to meet Carter.”

  Now I just had to get Carter on board. Who knew if he had ever met any girl’s parents before? The way he moved from woman to woman, it was quite possible that he had never had the chance. This would be a real test of our relationship and how seriously Carter really felt about me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next time Carter and I met, it was in a cheap diner for some lunch. If we’d met for dinner, then we would only end up going back to mine or his for sex. While that would no doubt be a lot of fun, I didn’t want it to distract me from my main goal.

  “Can I see you this weekend?” Carter asked while we waited for our food. Judging from the way he scanned the menu, I was fairly sure Carter had never been in a true American diner before. The meals here were cheaper than a bottle of water in the places he liked to take me.

  “You can,” I said, “but you will have to be prepared to travel.”

  Carter raised his eyebrows. “Are you suggesting we go away for a dirty weekend, Miss Saunders?”

  “Kind of. Except this dirty weekend will have to include a meal with my parents. They want to meet you, so I thought it would be fun to go back to my hometown and spend the weekend in my childhood bedroom.”

  Carter did not look keen on that idea. In fact, he looked like I had just invited him to spend the weekend at the dentist having his teeth drilled without any painkillers. Suddenly I felt stupid and naïve. He didn’t want to meet my parents because he had no intention of staying with me. This was all just a game to him, and I had fallen for it.

  “Emily, I’m not sure meeting your parents is a good idea right now,” Carter said. “We’ve only been going out for a few weeks. How about if we’re still going strong in a few months, then I meet them?”

  “No don’t worry, you’ve made your feelings on this perfectly clear.” I considered storming out of the diner, but it was crowded and I didn’t want to be one of those people who aired their dirty laundry in public.

  “Don’t be like that, Emily,” Carter said. “It’s not even that I don’t want to meet them. I just think this could put pressure on our relationship, and we don’t need that right now.”

  “No, we should just keep fucking and not let feelings come into it,” I snapped.

  “It’s not like that. You know this is more than just sex.”

  “It is for me, but I’m not sure about you. I don’t see the big deal anyway. You’ve already met my mom and charmed the pants off her. And I mean that literally.”

  “But I haven’t met your dad,” Carter said. “And from what you’ve told me, he can be
quite a tough character. Not that I blame him—I can’t imagine how painful it must be to lose a son—but I think it would be a little awkward.”

  Not to mention the pain of losing your big brother, I thought. William was the reason I didn’t go home as often as I should have and the reason I had been desperate to move away and go to college. My childhood bedroom was right next to William’s. Mom and Dad had kept his room exactly the way it was the day he died. Going home meant facing the loss of my brother, and I could only do that so often.

  My phone buzzed in my bag just as I was about to continue arguing with Carter. It was Mom. ”Dad can’t make it to dinner,” she’d messaged me. “Can we make it just the three of us?”

  “Shit,” I said, putting the phone back in my bag. “Looks like you’re off the hook. Dad can’t make it anyway.”

  “Oh,” Carter said, trying to look disappointed, but failing to hide his pleasure at the news. “Like you said, I’ve already met your Mom, so why don’t we go down to see her? I could do with spending some time out of the city, and I’ve never been to Arizona.”

  “Really?” I said. “You mean it? Okay, I’m going to tell Mom and book the flights tonight.”

  “Leave the flights to me,” Carter said. “I’ll sort that out.”

  “Thank you,” I said, leaning over and planting a kiss on his lips. He grabbed my blouse and held me close until a cough from the waiter signaled the arrival of lunch.

  I dove into my burger and smiled at Carter, wondering what he would make of Mom’s cooking.

  Chapter Twenty

  Carter might have been nervous about meeting my father, but he charmed my mother effortlessly and had her eating out of the palm of his hand. He complimented the house and even helped out with the cooking.

  I hadn’t realized this until now, but I found men who cooked incredibly sexy. More than once I wanted to drag Carter out of the kitchen and upstairs to my bedroom. Unfortunately, my room was directly above the kitchen, and I didn’t want to subject Mom to the sounds of her little girl having wild sex in the room above.

  “Can I take Carter away and give him a quick tour now?” I asked her as she placed the enchiladas in the oven.

  “Sure, honey. He’s all yours for the next thirty minutes.”

  “We can do a lot in thirty minutes,” Carter whispered in my ear.

  “Not now,” I said, giving him a playful slap on the arm and then squeezing his firm bicep for good measure. “You’ll have to wait until tonight for that. Let’s start in the living room.” I took his hand and pulled him toward the lounge.

  Carter gravitated straight to the childhood photos and took great pleasure in seeing me at various stages of my growing up. There was my milky white phase where I could have won a prize for the palest person in Arizona, and then the chubby phase where my legs resembled tree trunks. He was kind enough to laugh and say I looked cute, but I was not gullible enough to think he would have fallen for me if I were still fat. Although I only had one leg now and that hadn’t put him off too much.

  “Your brother looks like you,” he said, holding up a photo of William and me in the paddling pool. I must have been about five, which would have made William eight or maybe nine. He would have been twenty-seven now, maybe even married or engaged. A tear formed in my eye, so I pulled Carter along the wall to the photos of my parents when they were younger.

  “Who’s this next to your dad?” Carter asked, pointing at a photo of my father next to his brother. My dad had less gray hair in that photo, so it was probably about six years old, although I couldn’t remember the occasion.

  “That’s my uncle,” I said. “That might have been at his fiftieth birthday, but I’m not sure. That’s funny though, because most people who look at this photo think my uncle is my dad. Apparently he looks more like me. How did you know which one my dad was?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Carter said, quickly putting the photo down and moving on to look at some of my mom on her wedding day. “There is some resemblance there. Maybe you have the same chin or something.”

  My chin was nothing like Dad’s—at least, I didn’t think so—but it didn’t seem worth arguing about. Not when things were going so well.

  As we moved from the living room to the study, I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I looked through the window and saw the familiar sight of Dad’s red truck pulling up to the house.

  “Mom,” I yelled, running into the kitchen. “Dad’s home!”

  Mom smiled. “He did say he might get home early, but I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

  “What’s going on?” Carter asked, walking into the kitchen with a concerned look on his face. “Do we have another guest for dinner?”

  “Dad’s here,” I said, unable to contain my excitement.

  “Your dad? No, Emily. I can’t meet your dad.”

  “Why? I know you think it might be weird, but he’s here now and—”

  “No, Emily, you don’t understand. I really cannot be here. I have to go. I’ll—”

  The door opened and Dad walked straight into the kitchen as he always did when he could smell dinner cooking. Mom was right; he looked more relaxed and even had a smile on his face.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said, as he wrapped his arms round me for a hug.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “And this must be—” Dad let go of me and swung round to face Carter, who had shrunk back into the corner.

  Carter looked white as a ghost as he made eye contact with my dad.

  “I can explain,” Carter said, holding up both hands in defense.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” my dad yelled, clutching onto the work surface to steady himself. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Daddy,” I pleaded, snatching the phone from his hand. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on?” Dad screamed. “I could ask you the same question. I can’t believe you have invited this scum into our home!”

  “Oh my God,” I yelled at my Dad, barely holding back the tears. How would I ever keep hold of Carter now? After this embarrassment he would never speak to me again.

  “Emily, don’t you know who he is?”

  “He’s my boyfriend,” I replied feebly.

  “No, Emily. This is the man that killed William. This man killed your brother.”

  Author’s Note

  Thank you so much for reading my book and for supporting an independent publisher. I really hope you enjoyed it—I know I loved writing it. Part Two will be out soon!

  If I may be so bold, I would like to ask a favor of you. Most people do not leave reviews, but if you enjoyed the book (or even if you didn’t and have some feedback for me) please do consider writing a review. Independent publishers like myself are entirely dependent on reviews—we cannot sell books without them.

  Thank you!

  Mailing List

  If you enjoyed Part One of Crash then please join my mailing list to be notified when Part Two is released and for the chance to win a free advanced review copy. You will never receive any spam from me.

  About the book

  You probably noticed that this was not a full-length novel and that it was labeled as “Part One.” In the interests of full disclosure, I will tell you that this book is a story in four parts and each one will be released for $0.99 (at least initially). This is what is often referred to as a “serial” format of storytelling.

  I know that some readers hate serials. They feel like the author is ripping them off by splitting the book into pieces. I hope that is not how you feel now after reading the book, but if so I apologize. This is certainly not my way of making more money. In fact by writing the books like this I actually make less money because Amazon only pays out half the royalty on books priced below $2.99.

  The reason I have written this story in parts is so that readers can try it out without spending the full $3.99 up front. If you don’t like Part One then you have only wasted $0.99 instead of $3.99.
This still won’t suit everyone, but I did want to take this opportunity to explain the method behind my madness!

  leeched from mobilisim

  About the Author

  Miranda Dawson is a 25-year-old Californian who can’t find the man of her dreams and so writes about him instead. She likes reading romance novels and watching scandalous television shows. Her writing is influenced by both!

  You can contact me at [email protected] or check out my Facebook page.

  wonder who will be the leecher to post first, will it be leecher Sunflowers..hmm!!