Unruly Read online

  UNRULY

  © 2015 by Cora Brent

  All rights reserved.

  BOOKS BY CORA BRENT:

  GENTRY BOYS

  Draw

  Risk

  Game

  Fall

  DEFIANT MC Series

  Know Me: A Novella

  Promise Me

  Remember Me

  Reckless Point

  I love to hear from readers! Contact me at [email protected].

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  COPYRIGHT

  Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarities to events or situations is also coincidental.

  The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.

  © 2015 by Cora Brent

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design: © L.J. Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations

  Cover Photo: Topher Paul

  Cover Model: Alex Phillips

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I could easily double the length of this novel with the exhaustive list of readers, bloggers, authors and other members of this indie community who have earned my eternal gratitude by offering their support, encouragement and friendship.

  Since that would probably be impractical, I’ll only mention a few here.

  To everyone else, I hope you know you’re in my heart.

  To Jennifer Miller, Gypsy Rae Choszer, Sabrina Paige, Jordan Marie, Joanna Blake, Leslie Wilder, Lana Grayson and all the fantastic ladies of C.O.P.A., I am enormously lucky to share this profession with such creative, supportive and altogether inspiring people. Thank you for your humor, your handholding and above all, your integrity.

  Very special thanks to Jess Peterson, Sue Banner and her talented author son Daryl Banner, Terra Oenning, Lisa King, Kimberly Beale, Ana Rosso and Andrea Florkowski. I’m so blessed to count you among my friends.

  Lastly, we authors rely so heavily on the hard work and dedication of bloggers. We appreciate you all. So thank you for your enthusiasm and for everything you so tirelessly do for the indie community.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: JUNE 2009

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART TWO: DECEMBER 2010

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE: JULY 2013

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  PART FOUR: MAY 2015

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  CLAUDIA

  Everything had already been paid for. Still, Rocco would have been willing to postpone the wedding. He told me so. He was thinking about Jack of course. He knew Jack would be remembering the last time there was a wedding in the family.

  Six years ago.

  It didn’t sound like a long time. It was a senatorial term, a kindergartener’s birthday, an anniversary that recommends a gift of iron. I had no idea how I came to possess this last piece of information but I was sure it was correct.

  Jack had startled me when he insisted that we start leading the guests in the tarantella. No one expected it even though the dance had been a keynote event at just about every Giordano gathering since he taught me the steps some twenty-five years ago. But Jack wore his misery on his face. He flinched under the weight of the clapping rhythm and his movements were listless. Our spinning became slower and slower. That’s when I realized he was crying and trying to hide the fact that he was crying. We slowly reached a sad halt and I hugged him tightly for the second time in a week. The first time was the morning of a funeral. Before that, I hadn’t hugged my father in six years.

  Six years was long enough to cram a lifetime of love in, but only if you know it’s all going to end prematurely. It was long enough for a child to be born and start to become aware of the world as the people around her looked on with pride. Six years was a long time to slowly die.

  Or maybe it wasn’t long at all to the one who was actually dying.

  “Claudia.” There was a voice at my back and I jumped, surprised. I’d run out here alone and had not heard anyone follow me. But if I had to be followed by someone I would want it to be him.

  I waited for him to come to me and he did. Every nerve in my body was instantly alert, an effect that he alone was responsible for. He was one of those rare men with an overpowering physical presence. It seemed to increase with every passing year. He was clean-shaven today, probably out of respect for the bride and all the wedding pictures she would treasure through the years. His tux was carelessly rumpled though and his grief was apparent. I caught sight of him as Jack clung to me on the dance floor and he appeared stricken. They all were. We all were. We had good reason.

  “Did you find him?” I asked and he nodded.

  “Yeah, he was vomiting in the men’s room. Rocco asked him if he wanted to go home but he shook his head and said he just wanted another whiskey shot.”

  I watched the lightning bugs flicker in the darkness. When I was little I used to catch them by the dozens and keep them in a jar. Now that seemed like a cruel thing to do.

  “Did he get it? His shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rocco should know better. Jack’s already had too many tonight.”

  “Does it matter, Claudia?”

  I closed my eyes. “No. No, it doesn’t.”

  He was next to me now, his breath close enough to brush my neck, his shoulder touching mine as if to reinforce the fact that he was here, that he was solid and masculine and our long history couldn’t be ignored. None of that was an accident. It never was with him.

  I knew I should go back inside. I should check on Jack and also make sure that someone was keeping an eye on Allison. Sometimes I forgot that the little girl who was my sister was at an age where she could easily be my daughter. Then when I remembered I always felt maternal, protective. Especially now that her own mother would never again have the chance to do any of that protective mothering.

  The ocean was miles away but I could smell it. A faint summer breeze carried its perfume the way the desert wind bears the scent of its telltale greasewood. When I was living in the southwest I desperately missed the coast. But since I had returned to Long Island I yearned for the desert.

  Goddamn it. Why the hell do I always want what I can’t have?

  He was still beside me. He turned his head when I whispered
his name. The longing in my own voice was thick, unmistakable. Anyhow, Easton has known me long enough to understand what I want.

  “Here?” he asked as thirty yards away the reception carried on without us. But he was already breathing fast and his voice was husky with the knowledge of what his body planned to take.

  “There,” I said and pointed to the shadowy area around the side of the building where the light didn’t reach.

  He seized me; aggressively kissing, feeling, shoving the rock solid length of himself against me so hard I felt every inch through the layers of our clothing. He kissed me so roughly I knew my lips would be swollen and I still hungrily angled for more. When he moved to my neck he sucked the skin between his teeth with enough pressure to inflict the barest hint of pain and it drove me wild.

  “Easton, I need this,” I gasped, already fumbling with his pants. “You need this too.”

  “And I’m taking it,” he growled, grabbing my hair in one fist and pulling lightly. He was no longer a gentleman. I didn’t want him to be. “Until you’re spent and shaking and still fucking begging for more.”

  “Yes,” I pleaded in a pathetic whine. “Like the first time. Like the last time. Like every time.”

  I allowed him to carry me into the shadows and I was drunk, not with alcohol but with consuming passion. I remembered the feeling well. There was no objection when my dress was hiked up, my panties ripped off, and the crude force of his sudden entry into my body obscured everything but the agonizing desire of the moment.

  And it was agony. Sweet hellish agony.

  From that first careless coupling to the years of misunderstandings and complications and finally to the hard-fought friendship between us now, it had all led us here.

  He was thrusting so deep, forcefully. My legs slipped and I could barely hold on. I took it though. I loved it.

  “Only you, Claudia,” he gasped as he withdrew, holding me in his strong hands and kissing me deeply as he thrust again. That was enough to push me over the peak and I buried my scream of ecstasy in his neck. He didn’t let up though. He was relentless that way, always had been. He wouldn’t indulge in his own pleasure until I’d come again. Easton was right; I was trembling and spent. But I was still ready to go down on my knees and take him in my mouth until he shuddered and released, sinking down beside me with a moan that sounded like my name.

  We fell back into the wet grass, holding one another fiercely as I recounted every other time we’d had sex. Somehow I knew the number. Twenty-one. I remembered each of them. I remembered how at first there was something necessary and basic about the ways we would wreck each other. Then it all became complicated. There was anger. There was confusion. There was the emotional turmoil of finding each other amid moments of blissful perfection, only to lose everything again. He was always there, always with me, even in the years I did not see him at all.

  Is that enough, Easton?

  Is that love?

  I kept waiting for an answer.

  I’d been waiting for a long time.

  PART ONE: JUNE 2009

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER ONE

  CLAUDIA

  It wasn’t likely I would ever get over my fear of flying. From what I knew of fear, it was very mercurial, often subdued but rarely conquered completely. When the plane began its slow descent into the New York metro area I closed my eyes like I always did and bit my tongue just enough to wince, a distraction from the rising nausea. I tried to crowd my mind with pleasant things. Instead my brain veered in a different direction and I thought about Jack.

  One morning during the spring of my sophomore year at Arizona State, the sound of a thunderous engine attacked my dreams. My subconscious must have recognized it because I bolted sharply awake. Brynna, my roommate, was snoring gently with one long suntanned leg dangling over the side of the bed. I flopped back into the pillows with a sigh and checked the time. It was early, six fifteen a.m., and my alarm wouldn’t be ringing for another hour. My room was on the first floor so noise was a chronic problem.

  The knock on the door was a little strange. It was loud, insistent, with no question that its creator had every right to be banging away in the soft light of dawn.

  Brynna snored blissfully on so I got heavily to my feet and in two long strides was at the door.

  “Holy shit,” I said softly as I stared through the peephole.

  My first instinct was to scramble back into bed, cover my ears and scream. That wouldn’t have made him go away though.

  “Claudia!” he shouted and his booming voice echoed in the corridor.

  I opened the door. He was disheveled and unshaven, wearing a black t-shirt with white patchy lettering and jeans. A Mets baseball cap was perched jauntily on his head and his arms were braced against the doorway to show off his muscles in case anyone was watching.

  Someone was. Women always watched Jack. I saw Embeth from down the hall round the corner in her tight spandex. She stopped so short her blonde ponytail fell forward and she dropped her iPod.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I hissed.

  Jack lost his wide grin. He frowned. “That’s how you say hello? You lose all your damn manners out here in the desert?”

  “I don’t remember being taught any damn manners, Jack.”

  He yawned. “Look I’ve been on the road for fourteen fucking hours without taking a piss. Have some mercy and show me where the toilet is.”

  I pointed. “That way. Don’t wander into the girls’ room by mistake.”

  “Wouldn’t dare. Be right back.”

  “Awesome,” I muttered and slumped against the doorjamb.

  Embeth was frozen in place as she watched Jack saunter past and it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if he winked at her with a silent promise for later. Actually it would have surprised me more if he didn’t do that. Embeth was his type. Jesus, they all were.

  “Daaaam,” she drawled as she sidled up to me once Jack had disappeared. “That your boyfriend, Claudia?”

  My mouth twitched. The question wasn’t new. It had been a while since I had to answer it though. “Not even close.”

  Embeth’s face split into a smile. “Brother?”

  “No.”

  She waited for me to elaborate but I held out. I stared down at my toes, flexing them against the scratchy carpet and remembering the noise that had yanked me from my sleep. I knew the sound of that engine like I knew the sound of my own voice. The Chevelle was even older than Jack and he must have driven it all the way out from New York on a whim. The car had originally been my grandfather’s pride and joy. He’d only grudgingly sold it around the time Jack started taking on a lot of the heavy lifting at the garage. The blasted roar of that car’s monster engine was the music of my childhood.

  Embeth shifted beside me, glancing down the hall. I knew what she was waiting for but I didn’t feel like being friendly about it so I stood there in frozen silence.

  Less than a minute later he reappeared. He’d fixed the baseball cap, stuck it on his head backwards so that he looked even more youthful and roguish than he was. He grinned at Embeth before returning his gaze to me. At that point he must have seen something pretty ugly in my face because a twinge of doubt flickered in his eyes. How long had it taken him to drive all the way out here?

  And why for fuck’s sake didn’t he pick up a phone and tell me he was on his way?

  Because I would have told him not to bother coming.

  He stopped walking and cocked his head, staring at me with curious uncertainty, like I was this tedious puzzle he was required to solve against his will. He’d always looked at me that way.

  “Em,” I sighed, rubbing my eyes. “This is my father, Jack Giordano.”

  And that was how it had always been.

  “Yes, he really is my father. Yes, he does look young. After all, he was only fifteen years old when I was born.”

  For all the time it took him to drive out to Arizona, he didn’t stay there long. Two
tumultuous days after he knocked on my door he hopped in his car for the drive back to Long Island. I stood there in front of my residence hall listening to the receding noise of the car’s engine, feeling both relieved and a little hollow.

  Jack Giordano had never been anyone’s idea of a model parental figure. He had his reasons. He’d arrived at fatherhood as a baffled teenager who reportedly impregnated the girl down the street in a girls’ bathroom during Lutztown High’s homecoming dance. Years later, when I was a student drifting around those same hallways, sometimes I couldn’t help but linger in the pink-tiled restrooms, breathing in the humid stench of stale sewer water and wondering which stall had hosted my conception. The idea usually made me feel a little sick. After all, who the hell wants to think about their parents boning, even if they were just two idiot kids who thought sex was as significant as a game of checkers. I started sneaking into the teachers’ lounge to use the bathroom there. That way I wouldn’t be bothered with visions of Jack’s pants around his ankles as the biological fact of my existence began.

  Jack’s evolution to adulthood was slow. Actually, it still appeared to be incomplete. Forever full of charm and boyish magnetism, he recklessly paraded tons of female companions through my childhood. They tended to treat me with polite detachment, none particularly interested in playing would-be mother to a snotty little tomboy. I couldn’t exactly blame them; my own mother had rejected the role before I could even crawl.

  We weren’t close, Jack and I. We circled each other somewhat warily and as the years flew by I was loosely raised by a mixture of family members. People who were introduced to the Giordano family for the first time kind of scratched their heads over my place in the scheme of things. I was a niece to a rowdy pair of boys. I was a granddaughter to a middle aged couple who scarcely had any gray hair. And I was the child of a man who forever looked and behaved like an overgrown teenager.