Surrender Read online

  Surrender

  Wrecked, Book Two

  Kelly Fox

  Contents

  Character List

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Story Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kelly Fox

  F/F and Paranormal Romance as K.C. Littleton

  COPYRIGHT @ 2020 by Kelly Fox

  Cover Design: cateashwooddesigns.com

  Copy Editing and Proofreading: oneloveediting.com

  Formatting (Vellum): lescourtauthorservices.com

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.

  The Licensed Art material is being used for illustrative purposes only.

  This book is dedicated to my mom, whose own fight with PTSD shows me that you can battle dragons and still have joy shining out of your eyes. Sorry, Mom—still not gonna let you read this book.

  And to Sweater Lady, who never let me get away with anything.

  Character List

  Martinez Family

  Nick – co-owner of Wrecked

  Scout – Nick’s sister, retired WNBA player, angel investor

  Jules – Nick’s sister

  Roly – Nick’s cousin, co-owner of Wrecked

  Koenig Family

  Jake – Nick’s brother-in-law, volunteer at Wrecked, works for Scout and Evie

  Evie – Jake’s sister, Scout’s wife and business partner, pizza fairy

  Wrecked Family

  Elijah Temple – new employee, Nick’s boyfriend

  Thane – volunteer, Corner of Heavy Things

  Jean-Pierre Sehene – Scout’s friend, retired NBA player, angel investor

  Stephen Benning – client; he’s got the one good arm

  Morris – client; resident crank

  Bash Brothers – clients; twin Viking-looking motherfuckers

  Prologue

  Jake

  10 Months Ago

  My car is an island, and the parking lot is lava. It’s after hours and time to drop off the supplies at the pizza shop. I thought I might pull up close to the front door, get the supplies out, and get back to the art piece I was working on, but no such luck. Ned, the security guy from hell, seems to know exactly when I’ll show up, because there he is, in his security-logo’d VW Beetle, eyeballing me with scorn, daring me to park illegally.

  Fuck you, Ned.

  These bad days are rare and getting rarer, and I’m usually able to get my arms around them a little better, but I didn’t sleep well last night, and I want to get this over with, because I fucking hate the dark.

  I had another one of those weird, prickling moments as I washed my El Camino today, and I had the feeling that someone was watching me. I’d been a jittery mess and had gotten really fucking thirsty, but my sponsor, Dev, sat with me until the crawling want bled from my pores.

  Keys in hand, run to the back of the car (truck?), pull down the first four bags of flour, haul those over one shoulder, walk quickly across the parking lot. Don’t be weird. I repeat the process in my head over and over until I’m pretty sure I can get it done in under a minute. I turn off the car, unlock the door and hop out, turning my ankle. Nonono, it’s not that bad, I just need to walk it off and stick to the plan.

  I run-hobble to the back of my car, yank down the back, and pull the flour toward me, straining my shoulders. Hup, over the left shoulder, get going. The keys make a rattling clang as they hit the asphalt, and I pause. Stay? Go? Is it dangerous to leave the keys out here while I run these in? I have more trips to make, so I’ll be out in a jiff.

  As my mind spins, I catch movement to my left and a dark shadow falls over the space between me and the door. Every muscle locks and my fucking useless legs are going exactly no-fucking-where.

  A mangy stray darts from the blackness, the angle of light throwing his shadow several feet. I exhale, and blood returns to my muscular system. It’s just a dog. Just a goddamned dog. I swear to you, my brain hates me.

  Ned chuckles in the darkness.

  Seriously, fuck that dude.

  When my sister, Evie, asked me to switch the supply drop-offs to after hours, I said yes because I can handle the dark. Maybe.

  When I enter the shop, Evie is exhausted, barely holding herself up as she wipes down the counters while Scout slow-blinks as she counts the till. They’ve both been working insane hours, and it’s taken a toll. Even then, they offer to help me unload, and I refuse them outright. I stack the bags of flour in the back, then dart out, pick up the dropped keys, and get my next load.

  You’d think that I’d be less freaked-out with each subsequent trip, but you’d be wrong. At least I didn’t drop the keys again. On my final trip, I get the last bags of flour up over my shoulder, then cradle the two baskets of peaches with my right arm.

  You may be curious about peaches at a pizza shop, but Evie’s a mad scientist with her daily specials, and all I know is that I eat well on Wednesdays. She’s got a crush on our boss, Scout Martinez, and Scout would be a stone fucking idiot if she let Evie slip through her fingers.

  As I hip open the door, Scout catches my attention. “Jake! Buddy—I believe you’ve heard of my friend, Jean-Pierre Sehene?”

  The words barely leave her mouth, and I lose control of my body, freezing in place like a piece of furniture. I’m so geeked out that I can’t even look at the man. Worse, while I’m frozen in this minor eternity, the world is still shifting around me. Still in top form, Texas Ex and NBA legend Jean-Pierre Fucking Sehene places an enormous hand on the baskets of peaches that threaten to topple. “Here, let me take that from you.”

  I go from averting my eyes to staring up at him, gawping like a goddamned big-mouth bass. Holy shit, he’s so much bigger in real life, I think stupidly to myself. I flash back to the early 2000s, when I started watching every UT basketball game with a pillow over my teenaged arousal and planned my halftimes around jerk sessions so that my balls wouldn’t detonate somewhere in the middle of the third quarter. Sehene’s senior season had me reaching for the Bag Balm on the regular… my dick was chafed.

  While I am absolutely freaked-out, his accent—not unlike Djimon Hounsou’s deep, Afro French rumble—is a steadying presence in my soul, and my internal sentinel takes a seat for one glorious second. I let my eyes wander up his muscular, veiny forearms to his jaw, down his copious, slender black and umber locs, loosely tied back. His skin, inches from mine, is such a lustrous, deep dark color that I lose myself in it. All six foot eleven of him is potent, beautiful man. There are days when I despise being gay. This is not one
of those days.

  I realize that I’ve gone still and quiet for a beat too long and then remember my voice. “Merci beaucoup,” I say, wondering at the French that has slipped through.

  “De rien. Tu parles français?”

  He wants to know if I speak French. Part of me wants to say no, fuck no, but the warmth in his eyes, the expectant smile across his lips, tells me that maybe he hasn’t heard his first language in a while. So, I tell him how I spent six months in France ringing out my twenties, and I try not to think about what I’d brought home with me from that experience. His delight is palpable.

  His eyes warm further, and I damn near startle again when I recognize the interest. What a goddamned nightmare. Jean-Pierre-Fucking-Sehene just gave me at least bi-eye, if not full-on gay-eye, and I’m too much of a damned ramshackle to be of any use to him. I’d recently lost the first serious boyfriend I’d had in a long time—a man who was a pocket-sized version of the beast in front of me—to a near-relapse in my sobriety. God, I’m such a mess.

  Scout’s grimacing at me like sorry, buddy, he’s straight, and it occurs to me that she actually doesn’t know. He blinks away the expression and grabs both baskets from me.

  Jean-Pierre

  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone more beautiful in my life. He’s stunning. As I lean in, I notice that his eyes are ringed in the slightest bit of amber and shot through with a stunning shade of blue and maybe gray. I remember at the very last moment that Scout doesn’t know about me, not yet.

  I shake my head and pick up the basket of peaches, following him like a lovesick puppy to the back of the shop. I try to think of something clever to say, but the words of four languages in which I am fluent fail me, quite miserably. I brush his arm accidentally, and he freezes up again, rather charmingly. I admire the shirt, plastered to his body with sweat, and the width and strength of his shoulders. He’s smaller than me but built to take me. I inhale the salt and testosterone and imagine how beautiful he would be spread out beneath me.

  Scout invites me over, plying me with pizza as we regale the Koenig siblings with funny stories from the world of basketball. On more than one occasion I catch Jake sneaking looks at me, and I smile each time. He scowls to himself and refocuses on his hands.

  What a lovely dark cloud of a man.

  Chapter One

  Jake

  Current day

  Oh, Jesus.

  Morris, who is about a hundred and seventy-three years old and a massive pain in my ass, has been heckling my yoga class for the last fifteen minutes. He’d just finished jawing about the fact that his fifty-two-year-old girlfriend was making him attend “so that we can do more of that Kama Sutra shit.” While I applaud self-expression in all its forms, I’m not so sure that I need to hear how reverse cowgirl nearly broke his hip, and I definitely don’t need the explicit outline of his ancient testicles in shiny polyester. Let’s just say that his happy baby pose probably retraumatized several of our combat vets.

  “Look at what you’ve done to Benning,” he complains, pointing to my buddy Stephen, who is working with his three prosthetics today and may, in fact, be stuck in downward dog. “How the fuck am I supposed to get into that position?”

  I jog over to help Benning release the pose, and while we find a modification using a folding chair and a blanket, I respond, “Morris, you’re supposed to get as close to it as possible and then improve over time.”

  I’ve been told that I can be a little intimidating with my face’s tendency toward resting scowl, but Morris doesn’t give a fuck. “Then why are you getting into that position when nobody here can? Seems like bragging to me,” he says, his disco balls dangling even more crudely between his bent knees in the modified downward dog.

  I share a frustrated eye roll with Elijah, the assistant manager of Wrecked, the gym where I’m currently teaching yoga to combat vets and old cranks. I close my eyes and will myself the extra patience I need to get through this class. “It’s supposed to be aspirational. I wasn’t much better than you when I started out. It gives you a goal to aim for, and I’m here if you need help making modifications.”

  “So, you’re here to make me feel like shit. Like a stiff old man. Great job, Jake. You’re excelling at it.”

  I concentrate on the floor, trying to calm down enough to count backward from ten. Elijah, who has more patience with that old coot than I do, pipes up. “Shut it, Morris. Stop taking the class off track. Do it again and I’ll ban you from the gym for a month.”

  Elijah pauses for dramatic effect, practically daring Morris to respond. Morris scowls at Elijah but chooses to remain silent. “That’s what I thought. And if we have to look at those grizzly old balls of yours in that shiny goddamn fabric, you can feel inferior silently. The rest of us are trying to focus and do the best job we can, so play along or shut up.”

  Morris harrumphs, then tosses out, “So now that the kid is getting rogered by the owner of the place, he gets all mouthy. Great.”

  Elijah and Nick, the guy who owns the gym with Roly, got together in the last month or so, and they are still in that disgusting phase. I walked in on them in the showers this morning, and… yeah. Rogered is a good way of putting it, but it wasn’t Elijah on the receiving end this morning.

  Elijah’s grin is wicked, and he winks at me as he responds, “I can’t help it if the boss likes the things I do with my mouth, old-timer.”

  Roly, who’d positioned himself directly behind the largest man in the class, pipes up from beyond the mountain. “You know, I’m pretty mouthy, and I’m not rogering anyone.”

  Two or three of the guys in the class snicker, I’m guessing because they know firsthand that he’s strictly a bottom. Roly then whispers to the large bear in front of him, causing him to blush furiously.

  Yeah, this class has officially gone off the rails.

  Most of the time I’m proud of the fact that I’m turning my life around, that I’m rounding on two years of sobriety, that I’ve been given a major promotion within Scout and Evie’s organization, that I’ve found a faith practice that suits me, and that I’m able to give back to the community with my love of yoga.

  Then there are days like this, when I’m reminded that I’m still driving a rusted-out El Camino, that I’m living for free in my sister-in-law’s condos, that I’ve still got medical bills out the wazoo, that until recently my love life has been a codependent joke, and that I’m being roundly ignored as I try to convince cranky, doubting military vets that breathing in through one’s pelvic floor is a real thing. Wow, it’s as if every dream in my little gay yoga-loving heart has come true.

  Oh, and my therapist just retired, so I’m filled with more anxiety and self-loathing than usual.

  Fixing Morris with a dark stare, I bring the focus back to the top of the room because I am a very serious yoga instructor.

  Cue massive eye-rolling.

  Shaking off my thoughts and trying to return to a state of presence, I start a series of sun salutations and try not to lose my concentration because of the person in the back row.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you retired basketball god, Jean-Pierre Sehene.

  He’s one of the angel investors at the gym, and he’s responsible for more masturbatory action than any of my previous lovers combined. I’m grateful for the space, I’m grateful for his support and friendship over the last several months, but when he shows up to my classes, it’s damn near impossible to remember my own name, let alone the sequence for crow pose.

  I have a date-with-benefits situation that is petering out, and in a couple of days I’ll be ending it, because I don’t know how much longer I can go without Jean-Pierre’s hands on me.

  It’s time to make a run at the big guy, and it’s going to be a challenge. He’s been looking at me like I’m fine china, and I need him to start looking at me like I’m something less brittle and a helluva lot more moldable. Like clay. Or Play-Doh.

  Fuck, I’m an artist, not a poet. You get the
drift.

  I’ve taken to wearing loose pants and longer, flowing shirts because I have a better chance of hiding the fact that I want to have my good friend push me up against the wall and fuck me until I’m a drooling, limping mess. It doesn’t make life any easier that he’s some kind of magical yoga guru from another planet. While I try to make all of my poses Insta ready, there is no competition when a six-foot-eleven man performs reverse warrior like a goddamn piece of art. The long arc of his body, the dark sheen of his skin, the curtain of locs falling behind him.

  God, he’s so beautiful.

  Jean-Pierre

  Mon dieu.

  Jake in the morning light is a vision. He pairs these wide-leg pants and loose tops that hide his strong ass and beautiful body. His tangle of thick, almost black hair catches the sun, and my heart speeds up.

  His gorgeous face is in a concentrated scowl as he works to get the class back on track, so I focus and work through the familiar yoga moves, just grateful to be here since I have never served in the armed forces.

  I once brought up my lack of service to Nick, the co-owner of the gym, and told him that my investments shouldn’t automatically give me an exemption. His response was curt and to the point. “Jean-Pierre, you survived a genocide, and I know that the interview you gave to Oprah didn’t cover the half of it. You belong. End of discussion.”