Carmel springs, p.1
Carmel Springs, page 1
His to Own
Copyright 2023 Monica Clayton
Published by M.E. Clayton
All Rights Reserved
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This book is a work of fiction. The entire content is a product of the author’s imagination, and all names, places, businesses, and incidences are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), places or occurrences, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without the express written consent from the author, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Formatting: Smashwords
Cover: Adobe Stock
Warning: This book contains sexual situations and other adult themes. Recommended for 18 years of age and over.
Table of Contents
Author's Note
Contact Me
Playlist
Prologue
1. Brett
2. Addie
3. Brett
4. Addie
5. Brett
6. Addie
7. Brett
8. Addie
9. Brett
10. Addie
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Author’s Note
Just a couple of things before I let you go and get your read on. While I am doing my best to work with better editing and proofreading software, all my books are solo, independent works. I write my books, proofread my books, edit my books, create the covers, etc. I have one beta who gives me feedback on my stories, but other than that, all my books are independent projects.
That being said, I apologize, in advance, for the typos, grammar inconsistencies, or any other mistakes I may make. Since writing is strictly a hobby for me, I haven’t looked into commitments in regard to publishers, editors, etc. My hope is that my stories are enjoyable enough that a few mistakes, here and there, can be overlooked. However, if you’re a stickler for grammar, my books are probably not for you.
Also, I am an avid reader-I mean an AVID reader. I love to read above any other hobby. However, the only downside to my reading obsession is when I fall in love with a series, but I have to wait for the additional books to come out. So, because I feel that disappointment down to my soul, when I started publishing my works, I vowed to publish all books in my series all at once. No waiting here…LOL. Now, the exception to that will be if enough readers request additional stories based off the standalone, such as in Facing the Enemy. At that point, if I decide to move forward with a requested series, I will make sure all additional books are available all at once. As much as this is a hobby for me, I am writing these books for all of you, as well as myself.
Thank you, for everything!
Contact Me
I really appreciate you reading my book and I would love to hear from you! Now, unfortunately, because I do have a full-time job and one part-time job, plus a family that I love spending time with, I’m not very active on social media. However, for the sites I do participate in, here are my social media coordinates:
Website
News & Updates
Author Pages
Social Media Sites
Newsletter Sign Up
Other Books
Playlist
His to Own – Safe & Sound by Taylor Swift
His to Protect – Dark Days by Punch Brothers
His to Cherish – Body Say by Demi Lovato
His to Keep – Lights Down Low by MAX
His to Win – Something Just Like This by Coldplay ft. The Chainsmokers
His to Love – Woman in Me by Shania Twain
His Need for Her – First Cut Is the Deepest by Sheryl Crow
His Desire for Her – Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney
His Craving for Her – Breakeven by The Script
His Love for Her – Stay by The Kid Laroi ft. Justin Bieber
Prologue
I’d learn a long time ago how to drown out the noise. I wasn’t here to engage in small talk because I had nothing to say. I wasn’t here to listen to any town gossip because I didn’t care to hear it. I wasn’t here to make friends because none of these people were worth being friends with.
I was here to work.
That’s it, that’s all.
I was here for the same reason that I’d been showing up five days a week for the past ten years. I was here to earn enough money to support myself, but that wasn’t the only reason that I was here. I was still here because I wanted nothing more than to leave this town, but I couldn’t do that without money. Oh, I could get up and leave with what I had, but I absolutely refused to fail once I left this town. I refused to end up a homeless failure just because I hadn’t been patient enough.
Nevertheless, reality was a brutal bitch, and she had no sympathy for best-laid plans. Just when I thought that I had enough money to make my dreams come true, my car’s engine would stall. Just when I thought that I had enough money to leave Carmel Springs, pneumonia would find me, causing me to miss work and acquire doctor bills that I couldn’t afford. Now, to people that earned more than minimum wage, life’s unexpected obstacles wouldn’t necessarily be a problem…well, I didn’t earn more than minimum wage. Sure, the tips helped some, but not much. Considering that the people of this town didn’t feel like I deserved anything extra, I was lucky to get what I did.
See, ten years later, I was still the town slut. I was still the girl from the trailer park that’d always had loose morals. I was still the girl that had given her favors to whichever boy looked my way back in high school. Sure, there were some townsfolk that felt sorry for me because they’d known my parents and hadn’t expected me to fare any better, but those same townsfolks had still done nothing to help my situation. The good people of Carmel Springs liked to show up at church every Sunday, but they didn’t like doing much else to get into God’s good graces. As if God couldn’t see them outside that church building, they went about their business as if their gossip did no harm.
As for friends, I didn’t have any. I’d lost the only few that I’d had back in high school. Not ready or willing to fight the popular crowd, I’d been left to fight my demons on my own. No one had wanted to be associated with the easy girl from the trailer park. High school was where the poor and unpopular kids still had hope for better lives, so no one had wanted me and my drama dragging them down back then.
Did I blame them?
Back then, I had.
Back then, I’d never felt so abandoned as I’d had when I’d lost my few friends.
However, ten years later, viewing life as an adult, I no longer resented those that had chosen to save themselves. Yeah, I still stayed away from them if I saw them on the street, but I no longer judged them as harshly as everyone still judged me.
Nevertheless, I didn’t let my hate for the town-or its people-keep me from showing up to work every day. I knew that a lot of people thought I kept my head down out of shame, but that wasn’t true. I served these people with my head down because I was afraid that any sort of eye contact might make the truth of how I felt about these people fly out of my mouth with no regard to how I needed my job.
Yeah, being a diner waitress wasn’t glamorous, but I’d gotten this job immediately after graduating high school and its kept me housed, fed, and clothed ever since. Sure, my house was a trailer, my food was basic, and my clothes were thrift-shop quality, but I wasn’t homeless, starving, or cold. I could still appreciate my blessings, even if they were meager ones.
So, even though I was as frugal as I could be with my money, it took a long time to save the kind of money that I needed to start a new life somewhere else. While it sounded incredible to believe that it’d taken me ten years to save up anything significant, I knew that there were a lot of people out there that understood exactly what I was dealing with. There were more poor people in this country than there were rich, and the struggle was real. Still, I might be poor, but I wasn’t stupid. When I finally saved enough money to leave Carmel Springs, my new life was going to start on a strong and positive note.
My immense desire to leave this town was also why I didn’t date. It made no sense to start something when I had no intentions of staying in this toxic town. Plus, no one wanted to date me anyway. Oh, there were plenty of men that wanted to buy me a beer, but that was about it. I’d always been good for one thing and one thing only, and the men in this town weren’t shy about reminding me of that.
Maybe being homeless in another town wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Chapter 1
Brett~
It’d been a no-brainer to come back to Carmel Springs once I’d completed my second tour of duty. With my entire family being here, retiring from the military and becoming a police officer for my hometown had felt like the right decision for me. Though we’d been raised to spread our wings, we’d also been raised to always have each other’s backs, and I wasn’t embarrassed to say that I loved living in the same town as my father and brothers.
At twenty
So, with nothing but males in the family, it wasn’t a big surprise that we’d all taken after Dad. Mom had worked as the director of the local recreational center (made sense since she’d had a boatload of kids), and Dad had worked as a Carmel Springs police officer before retiring from the force a couple of years ago. Nowadays, he worked with Trayce, Keats, and Max, but that was only when he wasn’t busy being retired and doing what retired people did.
At any rate, a retired Marine and Carmel Springs police officer, me and my brothers had all followed suit like an assembly line of Colter men. Clayton was the oldest at thirty-two, and he’d done two tours as a Marine before becoming a cop for Carmel Springs. Trayce and Keats were both thirty-years-old and identical twins. After their two tours as Marines, they’d gone into private security, not too fond of following the letter of the law, though Dad kept them in line. Colton Security did everything from home security to corporate security to actual guard duty. Jax was twenty-six and was about to graduate from the police academy after his two tours as, yep, you guessed it, a Marine. Maxwell was the youngest at twenty-four, and he’d only done one tour as a Marine before going to work with Trayce, Keats, and Dad. He’d been on the last leg of his military commitment when Mom had gotten sick, and though he’d been luckily enough to be home when she had finally passed, being away from her while she’d been sick had fucked with him, and now he was constantly worried about not being there for us; especially, Dad.
Max had also been the only one of us to inherit Mom’s bright blue eyes. On paper, Max always marked them down as blue, but they were more of a turquoise or cerulean color. The rest of us had inherited Dad’s hazel eyes, though the mixed colors varied depending on our moods. As for the rest of us, we all had Dad’s dark brown hair and his stature. Like Dad, Trayce, Keats, and Max were all six-foot-three, and Jax, Clayton, and I were six-foot-two. Max liked to tease Clayton that he was taller than him, but if it ever came down to fisticuffs, Clayton could kick all our asses. He’d been doing it ever since the twins had come into the picture, forcing Clayton to remind the little assholes of who was in charge.
So, yeah, some people might say that our family was the smothering kind, but we weren’t big on giving a fuck what people thought. My father and mother had always been big on teaching us to be our own person, though we’d been stupid teenagers just like everyone else. Still, I liked to believe that we’d outgrown our teenage idiocy, making Mom proud as she looked down on us.
All of our lives had taken a huge turn once Mom had gotten sick, and after that, what was important in life versus what wasn’t had been quickly cleared up for us. Seemingly, out of the blue, Mom had been diagnosed with COPD, and when she’d contracted a respiratory infection, things had…well, it’d been a dark time. It hadn’t been until after her death that Dad had confessed that she’d been struggling with COPD for a while, but she hadn’t wanted any of us worrying about her, so she hadn’t told us.
At first, resentment at keeping such a secret from us had hit hard. Our family hadn’t been one to have secrets. However, Dad had quickly put us in our places when he had reminded us that our happiness had been more important to Mom than her health, and as our mother, she had made a decision that she’d felt was best for her children, not her. Mom had been selfless until the very end, and Dad had been ready to square up with any one of us if we’d wanted to continue to blame her for loving us more than she loved herself. He hadn’t been bullshitting, either. He had also definitely put us to shame when he'd reminded us that none of us were doctors, so what did we think we could do for her that the doctors couldn’t. Though we’d gotten through it, it’d been hard. You couldn’t have seven males with too much testosterone in a situation where the only woman that they’d ever loved had been lost to them. Dad was still single, and we all knew that he always would be, despite being only fifty-three.
So, yeah, coming home to Carmel Springs had felt right. Even though I could be a police officer anywhere in the country, especially with my military background, Carmel Springs was home, and if nothing else, it was worth being home if only to keep Max from going off the rails with worry.
Now, while we all missed Mom terribly, we also knew that she wouldn’t want us spending our days and nights mourning her. She’d want us living our lives as happily as we could, the proof in how she had kept her condition a secret from us. However, it was also understood in the town of Carmel Springs that two days a year, we were closed to the public. Dad, Trayce, Keats, and Max didn’t go to work, and it was understood at the station that Clayton, Jax, and I would always be granted personal days for those two days a year. Mom’s birthday and the anniversary of her death were sacred to us, and we didn’t fuck around with that. Family was way too important to us.
With that being said, we were still all single, and I wasn’t quite sure why. Other than Clayton’s sour disposition, the rest of us weren’t too bad. Yeah, being in the military had made it tough to find something serious, but Mom and Dad had managed it just find; I had five fucking brothers to prove it. Granted, Jax and Max were still rather young, but there was no excuse for why Trayce, Keats, or Clayton weren’t family men already. Okay, Clayton was kind of mean, so I could see him not wooing anything with any real charm or grace, but Trayce and Keats had no excuse.
If I had to describe me and my brothers, I’d say that I was the nice brother, Trayce was the funny brother, Keats was the charming brother, Jax was the playboy of the family, Maxwell was the serious brother, and Clayton was the mean one. Okay, maybe not mean, but he could definitely benefit from a stint at charm school. Still, we weren’t ugly and had steady jobs, so I just didn’t get it.
At any rate, I had only one woman on my mind these days, but it was like I was invisible whenever she saw me. The chick acted like she’d rather keep company with man-eating crocodiles than have a conversation with me, and I really didn’t blame her.
After all, I had been kind of an asshole to her in high school.
*****
Addie~
The only good thing that I could say about Carmel Springs was that the weather was never too extreme one way or the other. The winters were cold, but not snow-up-to-your-eyeballs cold. The summers were hot, but not Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-I’m-melting hot. As for spring and autumn, they were just what you’d imagine from a small town portrayed on the Hallmark channel. Flowers bloomed beautifully during spring and leaves fell like colors of confetti during autumn.
It was absolutely picturesque.
While a lot of people didn’t give much thought to the weather, when you lived in a trailer, the weather felt very important. While the trailer park that I lived in wasn’t the worst out there, it was still pretty bad, and the trailers weren’t exactly up to code. Nevertheless, the rent and utilities were affordable and that felt like a blessing a lot of the time.
Living in a trailer park wasn’t anything new to me. Hell, it was all that I’d ever known growing up. My parents hadn’t been the best around, and though they were bad, they still hadn’t been the worst around, either. While a lot of bad stuff had gone on in my childhood home, worse had been happening in a few other trailers in the area.
