Thick Love Read online

  Thick Love

  Eden Butler

  Contents

  Copyright

  Praise for Eden Butler’s Work

  Also by Eden Butler

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Thick Love Playlist

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Haitian Creole Words and Phrases

  Hawaiian Words and Phrases

  About the Author

  Thick Love

  Copyright © 2015 Eden Butler

  All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the Author. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Author Publisher.

  Edited by Sharon Browning

  Copyedits by Karen Chapman

  Cover Design by Steven Novack

  Image Edits by Alleskelle

  Cover Image by ShutterShock

  Section Headers by Chelle Bliss

  Formatting by Brian Morgan

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of any mentioned word-marks and references mentioned in this work of fiction.

  Praise for Eden Butler’s Work

  “Butler writes with a stylistic, descriptive flair that emphasizes the burdens of carrying physical and emotional wounds. She creates characters destined for each other and ready for life’s lessons. Chasing Serenity holds promise that the series roll-out will create Serenity-aholics.”

  —Michelle Monkou, USA Today

  “I loved this book! The hero is a tatted up Irish rugby player who has traveled to the states to play for college. Like the heroine he has a tragic past and when Autumn and Declan meet sparks fly! Nice to read a book that is anything but predictable.”

  —Kele Moon, author of the Battered Hearts series

  “This book explores emotional heartache, but on different levels. It’s not just about romantic love, but about the love of family (and “family” takes on a whole new meaning. It encompasses friends, too). From disconnect to possible re-connect. From old scars that refuse to heal, to potential emotional mending. You’ll feel it, deep.”

  —Maryse Black, Maryse’s Book Blog

  “Eden Butler has captivated my heart. From the town she created with its love of rugby to its foundation of friendship and family, I find I wish I could hop on a bus and stay there a while. The characters as flawed yet beautiful, broken yet unbelievably strong. Layers of intense feelings are still trapped in my heart.”

  —Nichole Hart, Sizzling Pages Romance Reviews”

  “Read [Thin Love] in one sitting! Without a doubt, my favorite dynamic of bad boy meets feisty good girl. Superb writing!”

  —Penelope Douglas New York Times bestselling author of Bully and Until You

  “Thin Love is more than just a book. It’s more than a story. It’s a journey—an experience that grabs you by the gut and won’t let go until it’s ready to release you. And damn, what a release it is. Eden Butler nailed it.”

  —Lila Felix, bestselling author of Love and Skate

  “By far my favorite Eden Butler novel. Keira and Kona’s chemistry is electric and leaps off the pages!”

  —Chelle Bliss, USA Today Bestselling Author of the Men of Inked series

  “I felt so connected to these characters and this story that it almost felt too personal to share it with anyone. But rest assured, I will be shouting the praises of Thin Love and Mrs. Butler from the rooftops so that I can make sure others experience what I have.”

  —Lori Westhaver, Red’s Book Blog

  “There is a bold mission when [Butler] puts pen to paper to grab our attention, open our hearts, and engage our imagination. Butler didn’t hold back with crafting these characters from different cultures, tossing in some major adversity, and challenging them to dig deep for inner strength. At the end of the day, Thin Love is hearty blend for the soul.”

  —Michelle Monkou, USA Today

  Also by Eden Butler

  Chasing Serenity, Book 1

  Behind the Pitch, a novella (Book 1.5)

  Finding Serenity, Book 2

  Claiming Serenity Book 3

  Thin Love, Book 1

  My Beloved, a novella (Book 1.5)

  Thick Love, Book 2

  Swimming in Shadows, a novella (Book .5)

  Shadows and Lies, Book 1

  For the readers who wanted Ransom to have a turn.

  Thank you for waiting for him to grow up.

  And for Karen who always talks me off the ledge.

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader—

  Thin Love was a second chance story about two passionate, a wee bit crazy, young people who lost and found each other many times. Thick Love is about their eighteen year old son and his own disheartening struggle to forgive, to love and to sort out what he wants and what he needs. He does this on his own long journey to becoming a man. It’s not an easy road. There are many hurdles, and some damn big potholes.

  Thick Love is not Thin Love, part two. This is Ransom’s story, not a generational rehashing of his parents’ tale. The heartaches he gives and receives on his journey are his and his alone. Please trust that I have very specific reasons for telling you this and please know that this is not the last you will see of Ransom and Aly. That’s the beauty of fiction—it makes jumping to the future possible.

  Be blessed and happy reading!

  Thick Love Playlist

  Knock 123 – Imelda May

  Wicked Games – The Weeknd

  Wild Horses (Kalsey Kulyk cover) – The Rolling Stones

  You Won’t Let Me – Karise Eden

  Stay – Rhiannon

  Breathe Me – Sia

  Woman’s Work – Maxwell

  Shake it Fast – Mystikal

  Ashes of Eden – Breaking Benjamin

  Gravity – Sara Barrellis

  Same Old Song – The Weeknd

  Skin – Rhiannon

  Prologue

  February, 2014 New Orleans

  Everything I owned had fit into a twenty year old avocado green suitcase with a pink and white striped ribbon along the front. Six bucks at the thrift store on Camp Street, and I had something that would take me from my father’s tiny cottage in Tremé to the loft above the dance studio where I worked part time.

  I carried two pictures in that small suitcase, slipped in between a manila folder and the few twenty dollar bills I had to my name. One of them was of my mother when she was eighteen, beautiful and full of the belief that her love for my father would silence any argument her family had about “taking up with the wrong kind of man.” She had died six months after that picture was taken.

  The ot
her was a Polaroid of me at six sitting on my grann’s lap at Café Du Monde. There was powdered sugar on my Tweety Bird tank top and my hair was held tight in pigtail braids. Grann died two years later, leaving me alone with a father who blamed me for both their deaths.

  In my heart, those two women had been the only family I’d ever need. The photographs had been stashed in the kitchen junk drawer; my father would not miss them.

  Seventeen and scared that my father had plans to marry me off, I’d done the only thing I could think of—I up and left without telling him. Rather than living with my high school friends in the Quarter—he would have expected that—I paid nightly for a dirty room at the Motel 6 on Old Gentilly Road and ate Dollar General brand Fruit Loops at night because they were cheap. But my boss could read the lies that lurked behind my excuses, and the tears that seemed to come so easily. When she figured out I had left home, she offered me the vacant loft above the dance studio. For now.

  So there I was, with my pathetic green suitcase, looking around the loft, wondering if I’d be able to sweet talk my boss’s son, Tristian, into taking me dumpster diving to find a sofa, when a car horn sounded outside. At the familiar sound of it, the small inkling of ease I’d felt for the three days I’d been free from him started to die. That horn turned my insides cold.

  Two more loud shrieks on the horn and I stepped out onto the landing, staring down the stairs at my father in his refinery work shirt. He stood next to the ’79 Chevy truck with peeling blue paint and rust on the underside of the bed. When I didn’t move, when his silent finger pointing at the empty space next to him in the parking lot went ignored, he laid on that horn again.

  “Me zanmi, Papa! Enough,” I said, coming down the stairs. “They’ll call the police.” The area wasn’t residential, but there were small, upscale offices that kept late hours and a few of the accountants the next lot over had complained about the music and teenage girls’ squeals from the studio just a few weeks before.

  “Dous, cheri, you come with me. I have no dinner, two days now.”

  “Don’t you ‘sweet’ me, Papa.”

  My father’s lip curled and he made a loud noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a grunt. “Petit se pa manti non!”

  I didn’t care if he wasn’t lying. I only knew that I had left his home and there was no way in hell I would ever go back.

  “Learn to feed yourself. I’m staying.”

  My father was not a large man. But his slight stature hid the muscle beneath ill-fitting clothes. I knew the arm he flexed as he stepped toward me was corded and strong. I knew the grip of his hand, how tight he could hold on to someone when he was angry—and he was always angry.

  Yet Papa wouldn’t touch me, I knew. He’d never needed a slap or punch to keep me afraid of him. He had never so much as spanked me. The fear I always felt in his presence came from that low, burning glare in his eyes and the tight, disgusted twist on his lips. His words were worse than any slap, and left deeper marks.

  Now he approached me, frowning, angry, his expression lethal and threatening. “Ou ban m manti,” he said, stepping so close that I could just make out the heavy bags under his eyes, as though he had not slept in days. His complexion wasn’t its normal light brown, but flushed and splotchy.

  He was right. I had lied to him. Telling him I had a dance retreat for work was the only way to keep him from following me when I left. “Yes, I did, Papa. And I don’t feel bad about it.”

  And then, for the first time I could remember, my father reached out and grabbed a hold of me. The tight clamp of his long fingers on my bicep hurt. “Ungrateful, disrespectful…”

  “Is there a problem?” A voice came from behind me and I cursed under my breath as Ransom approached, glancing between my father’s hold on my arm and his stubborn, suspicious expression. “You need to let her go,” he said, still with the same smile he’d worn when I met him earlier today.

  No, that was wrong, it wasn’t the same smile. This smile wasn’t happy. There was nothing welcoming in it. This smile was a threat, one that my father seemed to understand. He dropped my arm, but didn’t step back from me.

  Ransom’s gaze was still directed at Papa, but he tilted his head toward me. “You alright, sweetheart?”

  Before I could respond, Papa clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth, disgusted once again. “Modi, tifi, this your man?” Papa looked Ransom over, seeming to find nothing to approve of in once glance. His mouth tightened further and then he shook his head. “He’s a boy.”

  Ransom was a boy, still in high school, but he still towered over my father. “He is not my man,” I told papa, wishing the earth would open up so I could jump inside it. From the moment I had met him that morning, I hadn’t been able to stop marveling at beautiful, massive Ransom. No, he wasn’t mine, but I kind of wished he was. Still, my papa didn’t need to know that. Oh, he wanted me to have a man—but one that he chose, one that was thirty-five years old and mean as the devil. That was the reason I left his home—the main one, at least. “Besides, it’s none of your business.”

  “I will call the law,” Papa said, moving forward as though his words weren’t enough of a threat.

  “Call them, I don’t care,” I flung back at him, and surged forward to match his threat, forcing Ransom to step between us. “They’re not going to make me go back with you. Besides, I’ll tell them where your weed is and then what will you do?”

  Papa released a colorful list of foul words in Creole and tried moving around Ransom to get at me, but Ransom held him back with that massive palm pressed against my father’s chest. “You need to leave,” he told Papa. His smile had vanished. “Right now.”

  “She’s my daughter,” my father spat out.

  Ransom glanced at me over his shoulder. “You want him gone?” I nodded and he focused back on Papa. “She wants you gone. This is private property. You need to leave.”

  The low Creole cursing continued and my father only backed away when Ransom stood fully in front of me. For a second everything froze, and despite the tension in the air I caught the rich, soothing hint of Ransom’s cologne and the spicy, delicious smell of his skin. It made me thirsty. It made me hungry.

  Then, Ransom stumbled into me as Papa pushed him, but he recovered faster than I ever would have thought, grabbing my father’s arm, twisting the older man around to pin his wrist against his back and his chest cemented to the driver’s door of that old Chevy. I was amazed with how swiftly Ransom had moved—and how his protectiveness made a warmth work inside my chest. It was ridiculous to want someone you just met, but I could not deny what I was feeling.

  Papa jerked away from Ransom’s hold, but they had no effect as Ransom just stood there without moving, waiting until the older man finally calmed down. Then he jerked Papa back, opened the truck door and shoved my father inside the cab. As one hand braced on the roof, he leaned in towards my glowering father and snarled, “Leave. Now. And don’t think of coming back. If I have to, I’ll give the cops a head’s up, give them your plate number, tell them you’re trolling around a place where little girls take dance class.”

  Papa ignored Ransom and slammed the door shut, but I knew he wanted the last word. He always did. He looked past Ransom and fixed his furious eyes on me. “You’re a stupid little whore, tifi and will starve unless you spread your legs.”

  Ransom grabbed his collar, pulling him nearly out of the open window. “That’s enough, asshole. I don’t care if you are her father. You don’t get to talk to her like that. Ever.”

  We both stepped back as Papa spun out of the parking lot and I didn’t pull my hands away from my mouth until I saw his taillights disappear two stop signs away.

  “Hey,” Ransom said, touching my shoulder. “You alright?”

  “I…yeah. I, thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t like bullies,” he said, glancing down the road. “I especially don’t like bullies who try to shove their weight around defenseless wo
men.” When I cocked my eyebrow at him, he laughed. Back again was that warm smile, the genuine one, and the return of the sweet boy I’d met that morning. “Not that you probably couldn’t have held your own. I told you earlier, you’ve got that bad ass vibe. I meant that.”

  “Well, that was kind of bad ass too, you muscling around a man whose about forty years older than you.”

  Ransom shrugged, disregarding my compliment and then his face became serious. “You sure you’re gonna be okay here on your own?” He nodded toward the staircase behind me then moved his gaze around the empty parking lot. There were no other offices on this lot, just the dance studio and my loft above it but all around us were high-end buildings with new paint and stucco and perfectly manicured landscaping. It was a safe area; still, Ransom didn’t seem able to keep the worry out of his tone.

  “I’ll manage,” I told him, wanting to disappear for a little while, to recover from the embarrassment my father’s outburst had caused. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Well,” he said, walking me back to the staircase, “I kind of have a soft spot for bad ass women wanting to make it on their own.” His shrug, that lazy smile, were both relaxed, and I wondered how he could manage to pull off that ‘it’s nothing’ movement and still look so intimidating.

  “Mama’s boy?” I teased, knowing that the famous songwriter Keira Riley, Ransom’s mother, was, in fact, a bad ass.

  “Yeah. Maybe a little.” Again he shrugged and stepped closer like he didn’t realize he’d moved at all. “I just think it’s cool when a woman knows what she wants.” He looked down at me for a few seconds longer, then blinked as though he’d come back to his senses. “My mom and my uh, girlfriend, they’re both bad asses.”