Sugar on the Edge Read online

Page 2

  And, so here I am, in a new country, a new home, with a manuscript that is just about forty-thousand words shy of completion and only two weeks left to finish it.

  Staring at the bottle of Scotch before me, I know I’m going to have to set it aside starting tomorrow.

  I hope I can set it aside.

  I don’t want to, but I need to.

  2

  “About time you got home,” Casey says as I step inside the door to the small beach house that we share. It’s almost nine o’clock in the evening, and I’m pooped. No… beyond pooped. I’m utterly exhausted, as I’ve been working since seven this morning.

  “I know,” I say, my voice laced with fatigue. “The photo shoot went much longer than I anticipated. ”

  “And just exactly how much of that time was spent trying to avoid the douche bag’s cheesy come-ons and lame innuendos?”

  “A good thirty minutes, at least,” I answer her with a wry grin, but then I give a tiny shudder. I do some contract work with a local portrait photographer and he’s an absolute slime ball, constantly hitting on me in the most inappropriate ways. Unfortunately, I need the job desperately, having just been laid off at the newspaper where I was the staff photographer. The paper couldn’t afford me full time, thus the layoff. At least they promised to contract certain projects to me, but it’s microscopic peanuts compared the regular ones they were paying me.

  Heading into the kitchen, I drop my purse on the kitchen table with a thud. Opening the refrigerator, I peruse the contents, but I’m too tired to make anything substantial to eat. So I pull out a bag of carrots and an apple. When I turn back around, Casey is leaning up against the counter with her arms crossed over her chest.

  She’s so beautiful that I feel dowdy next to her, but Casey is never one to flaunt herself… at least not around other women. Sure, she’s the biggest flirt when it comes to men, and her motto has always been “love ’em and leave ’em,” but she’s one of the nicest, most down-to-earth women I’ve ever known. I’m so glad we became roommates, because without her added help with the rent, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to stay here.

  “What did he do this time?” Casey asks, her eyes narrowing at me.

  “The same… casual brush ups against me, dirty comments,” I tell her wearily. “You’d think he’d come up with something original, right?”

  “Well, your luck is about to change, girlie,” she tells me with a grin, dropping her hands to rest on the counter at her hips. “I found another house for you to clean… it’s huge and the guy that owns it is super rich. With that, you can leave the douche bag forever. ”

  I take a bite of a carrot and, with my mouth full, demand, “Tell me more. ”

  “His name is Gavin Cooke, and he’s kind of weird… well, he’s kind of an ass**le. He’s some big-time, British author that moved here to finish writing a book. He needs someone to clean his house a few times a week, and he told me to have you call him. ”

  Munching and then swallowing the carrot, I consider this. Between the contract work at the newspaper, the part-time work with the douche bag photographer, and the two other houses I clean, it will mean even longer hours for me. I’m barely functioning as it is, and this will mean less sleep and sorer muscles.

  Unfortunately, I really don’t have a choice. Between my student loans, living expenses, and the brand new transmission I had to put in my car last month, I barely make enough money to feed myself much more than carrots and apples. On top of that, cleaning houses and hauling camera equipment provides me with too much of a workout for the very few calories I’m able to consume each day, and I’ve lost weight I couldn’t afford to lose.

  Still, the alternative isn’t appealing either. If I can’t make it here on my own, my only other choice is to move back home to Clearview, Indiana, and become that weird twenty-five-year-old woman that still lives with her parents. And while my parents are the nicest, sweetest, Midwest couple you can find, my life will absolutely stagnate back home. I worked hard to get out of our little town, so I could travel the world and take photographs of all the wonders I would behold. Granted, I haven’t made it any further than the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but that is practically a world away from my humble upbringing.

  Yes, I don’t have a choice. I’ll have to slot another job in. Once I get the transmission work paid for—which, thankfully, Smitty down at the local garage is letting me make payments on—I can ditch the douche bag and have more of a manageable life.

  “I’ll call him after I eat my dinner. Do you think it’s too late?”

  “Nope. My guess is that as a writer, he stays up late. At least, that’s my impression from when I went to pick him up at his hotel room to have him sign the closing documents and then show him the house. It was around noon, and I’m pretty sure he just rolled out of bed. ”

  Setting the carrots aside, I pick up the apple and take a bite. It tastes like chalk going down, my interest in food waning over the past several weeks. I’ve been so mired in hard work, coupled with a rising sense of panic that I’m not going to be able to survive on my own, that my appetite has been off.

  “I have some leftover pasta in the fridge I made tonight,” Casey says as she eyes me eating the apple. I don’t know what expression is on my face, but I’m guessing she can tell the apple isn’t doing much for me.

  “No thanks,” I tell her with a small smile. I’m too proud to take help from her, and even leftover pasta is still charity to me.

  “You’re wasting away to nothing, Savannah,” she gripes at me. “You can’t go on much longer like this. ”

  “I’m fine,” I drawl out with false confidence in my voice. “Like you said… this house cleaning job will be enough to put me in the black on my expenses. ”

  “You’re not fine,” she practically barks at me with narrowed eyes. “You’re working yourself to the bone. What are you up to now… like three jobs, plus you volunteer every week at The Haven with Alyssa and Brody. You’re hardly eating. Seriously, you’re putting your health in jeopardy. ”

  Now… I’m normally a polite, sweet, Midwestern girl. It takes a lot to rile me up, but having these reminders of my failures thrown into my face gets me a little irritated. “Back off, Casey. While I appreciate your concern, I’ve got this handled. ”

  She blinks at me in surprise, because I think this may be the first fight we’ve had as roommates. Out of my core group of girlfriends, Casey, Alyssa, and Gabby, I’m the least likely to get irritable with anyone. Some would even call me a pushover.

  “Fine,” she grumbles. “But it was just a small bowl of pasta I was offering. ”

  Taking a deep breath, I let it out slowly. Gentling my voice, I say, “I’m sorry. I appreciate the offer… I really do. But I’m one of those people that just have to do it on my own. You should know that about me by now. ”

  Casey nods her head grudgingly, because she does know that. In the four months that we’ve been roommates, she’s come to know me well enough to know that I have a streak of stubborn pride about a mile long and just as wide. It’s why I haven’t told the douche bag photographer to piss off, because yeah… while I need the money, I more importantly need him to know that he can’t rattle me. My days of being rattled are over.

  My phone chimes from inside my purse and I sit the apple down on the counter, wiping my fingers on my jeans. Pulling it out, I see it’s a text from Brody.

  My heart instantly lightens.

  Brody and his fiancée, Alyssa, run The Haven, a nonprofit, no-kill animal shelter where I volunteer. I love animals—dogs in particular—so much that I spend all of my free time there helping out. With three jobs though, that time has been less and less, and I feel my soul starting to starve. My love of dogs has been long standing, stemming from one, single event that happened when I was just six years old.

  I was out playing in the woods that surrounded our house in Clearview. We lived out
in the country, so Mom usually pushed me out the door in the morning while on summer break from school and told me not to come home until dark. I was with our family’s dog, Petey, who was a Lab. I had gotten lost and couldn’t find my way back home, and Petey kept me safe and warm throughout the night. I don’t know if it was my child’s imagination, but as I sat huddled at the base of a tree, I thought I heard coyotes, bears, and lions coming at me from all directions. Petey would growl periodically, his eyes searching the darkness around us. He would lick me every so often, assuring me that everything would be okay. I snuggled into his warm fur, clutching my arms around him tight, and I knew that I was safe.

  The search party found me around dawn the next morning, and Petey was hailed as the town’s local hero. He even won a medal.

  Since then, I’ve found myself happiest when I can be around dogs. While I can’t afford one on my own, if I can ever get out of this butt load of debt, I’m going to have five at least.

  Brody’s text is to the point.

  Got any time tomorrow to help? Alyssa has to go to Raleigh to pick up a horse.

  I shoot a quick text back.

  Not sure. I may have new job to start. Text you later.

  I stare at my phone for a moment, slightly depressed I can’t give him a simple “yes. ” I’d much rather be up to my elbows in dog slobber than cleaning some rich ass**le’s house, but that can’t be my priority right now.

  You could just accept the job we offered you, Brody responds.

  Yes, that would be the simple solution, but I can’t do that either. There’s no way I can let Brody and Alyssa put me on the payroll for The Haven. It’s a perfectly permissible thing for a nonprofit to have paid employees, but I also happen to know that adding me to the overhead will cause even harder work for Alyssa and Brody to have to raise money to support said expenditure.

  No, my time at The Haven will always be as a volunteer and while their offer meant the world to me, I had to sadly decline. Just as I do once more.

  I love you two for it, but my answer is still no, I text.

  His response is immediate. Stubborn.

  I laugh, because Brody has no cause to be lecturing me about stubbornness. After spending five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, he returned to the Outer Banks a broken shell of a man, that stubbornly refused to let people into his life and refused to believe that he was worth anything. But for the help and love of a good woman—that would be Alyssa—Brody would still be mired in darkness.

  I’ve become especially close to Brody and Alyssa over the last several months, Brody in particular. Ever since he fell in love with Alyssa, and told his family and closest friends his secret about doing time for someone else’s wrong, he’s become a completely different person. He’s warm, humorous, and fiercely protective of those he cares about. I’m just lucky that I happen to be in that circle, and the long hours we spend together caring for the animals has created a closely bonded friendship between the two of us. He once told me that he recognizes inside of me the same pride that he once held before he went to prison, and it was drained out of him. That made me sad and happy at the same time. Sad that Brody suffered, but happy that he compared me to himself, because as every one of his family and friends can attest, there’s no one more respected than Brody Markham.

  Looking up at Casey, I say, “How about giving me this guy’s contact information so I can call him?” Might as well nail down this job and hope it gives me some measure of peace that I’ll have some extra income coming in.

  “Sure,” she says as she pulls out her phone from her pocket and flips through her contacts. When she finds what she’s looking for, she holds her phone out for me to see.