Never Say Never Again Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for A. E. Easterlin

  Never Say Never Again

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  He didn’t mind very well, this big cowboy who demolished her defenses and tore down the walls she’d so carefully erected around her heart. What was it Pap said about his first meeting with Grandma Emma? That he’d taken one look at her and decided to make her his wife. Could it really happen that quickly?

  No time to ponder the answer to her question. The next second her mind shut down, and all she could do was feel.

  His kiss began slow and deep, making her heart race, blotting her doubts. She was conscious only of him and the strength of his arms as they curled around her and hemmed her in. Gently, he drew her against his chest, so hard and warm she could feel the heavy beat of his heart through the cotton of his shirt.

  She lay there while he played with her mouth, and enjoyed the sensation of his lips, the taste of his tongue tangling with hers. Plunging deep and pulling back, exploring, testing, learning. She smiled against his mouth, and he smiled back. There was no hurry.

  Praise for A. E. Easterlin

  A previous release in this series, SONATA BY MOONLIGHT, a Contemporary Romance, received four stars on Amazon and five stars on Goodreads.

  ~*~

  A. E. Easterlin’s Books

  Available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  A NECESSARY WOMAN

  The Heroes and Half-Notes Series:

  SONATA BY MOONLIGHT, Book One

  A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, Book Two

  NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, Book Three

  Never Say

  Never Again

  by

  A. E. Easterlin

  Heroes and Half-Notes, Book Three

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

  Never Say Never Again

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 by A. E. Easterlin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by RJ Morris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Yellow Rose Edition, 2017

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1318-4

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1319-1

  Heroes and Half-Notes, Book Three

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Shelly, my confidant.

  To Bart, my strength.

  And to Caitlin, the wind beneath my wings.

  And to my husband — you have always been my hero.

  Chapter One

  Maddie Mae Lowery stared in amazement at the white confection of her wedding dress and grinned at her reflection. Simply perfect! Hugging her curves like second skin, the gown cost way too much but was worth every dollar and the months of scrimping and saving.

  Turning to inspect it from every possible angle, she admired the delicate lace veil floating over her shoulders like vanilla icing sprinkled with white sugar topping. Good enough to eat. Sparkles of light from the glow of the huge chandelier shimmered in the long mirror, enhancing the overall effect. The owner of the bridal salon had been right. Together, this gorgeous dress and veil were undeniably…perfection.

  Maddie bit the corner of her mouth and slowly smiled. She’d never felt as beautiful or been as much in love. Today she would marry her soul-mate, the man of her dreams. Beneath a canopy of flowers, glowing in the light of a hundred candles, she’d promise to love, honor, and cherish the other half of herself. And tonight—finally, finally, finally—she’d belong to Harrison in every sense of the word.

  This was it—their day. The one she’d been waiting for since he first chased her around the playground in elementary school, escorted her to senior prom, joined her at Boston College as they earned their postgraduate degrees. She’d always known she would marry Harrison. And he’d always known he would marry her.

  Would Harrison like her dress? Enough to drop his ridiculous inhibitions and admit he wanted her as much as she wanted him? Deep inside, where no doubts or lies were allowed, Maddie couldn’t deny the lack of intimacy had stressed their relationship. Sometimes she wondered if he really wanted her at all.

  But lots of couples waited until marriage to have sex, and lots of girls saved their virginity until their wedding night. Right? I can’t be the only twenty-something virgin in America…can I?

  Voices from the courtyard penetrated her blissful daydreams. The slamming of a door. Deep male voices. Harrison and Tyler had finally arrived. A soft gasp of delight escaped her lips. Excitement gurgled in her belly. Maddie shoved the long train of her dress aside, rested her palms against the window at the front of the bride’s room, and glanced down, searching for a glimpse of her groom.

  Warmth flooded her face and desire pooled between her legs as she spied him. Harrison in his tux was every bride’s dream. Tall, muscled, his shaggy blond hair tamed for the occasion, he made her heart flutter. The same boy who had been a childhood playmate, who had listened to every teenage dream, now took her breath away.

  Excitement prodded her heartbeat, and she lifted her hand to wave…and froze.

  What. The. Heck?

  Squinting through the window at the scene below, she pressed her nose against the glass and tapped on the pane. Neither man heard her shocked reaction; neither man glanced up. Unaware they were being observed, Harrison strode to the front of the limo and halted in front of his best man, Tyler Bradford.

  She smiled at the typical male greeting. Big grin. Chest bump. Hands gripped in a firm shake, and Tyler pulled Harrison in for a hug.

  Wait a minute…

  That was no man hug; that was a real hug.

  And that was a real kiss. Full-on…lip-lock, tongue and all. Real kiss. All consuming, deep, hot, wet. An I’ll-never-get-enough-of-you kiss.

  Not perfunctory or chaste or appeasing like the ones she’d gotten from Harrison.

  Tyler Bradford was getting her kiss. The one she should have gotten from her fiancé. Why?

  Devastating pain slammed into her chest like a meteor bursting into earth’s atmosphere. Explosive and lethal, replacing her heart with a gaping hole. Her lungs burned as breath left her body. From deep inside, her truth voice warned that everything she�
��d believed in, counted on, dreamed of, was about to change right before her eyes.

  An anguished squeal pierced the silence. Hers. The room spun as the scene below tilted her world on its axis. Meanwhile, the kiss went on.

  Harrison! Look up here. At me, Maddie, the woman you’re going to marry. The woman you love. The woman who adores you.

  Slap. Slap. Slap.

  Maddie’s hand acted of its own accord. Harder and harder, she pounded on the window, all the while wondering why the glass cracked and fractured, and why her hand bled. A silent scream stuck in her throat and reality tiptoed over the slippery slope of her future.

  How much of an idiot could one girl be?

  That’s when it hit. He’d lied. Harrison didn’t love her. He couldn’t. Not if he could kiss another person—man or woman—the way he’d just kissed Tyler.

  A dark and gradual awakening crept into her mind, and bled through her veil. She glanced at the bright red with cold indifference. She might be the most gullible woman in the world, but she wasn’t stupid. The Maddie who loved Harrison with every fiber of her being died. In her place rose a Maddie cocooned in ice and anger.

  It was over. Instead of Lohengrin, a requiem played. Everything she’d thought she had, everything she’d dreamed of, planned for, counted on was based on deception. Her perfect day and perfect dreams were nothing more than an illusion.

  Bile rose in her throat, and its bitterness churned in her stomach. This is what it had all come to—a pathetic cliché. Bride abandoned at the altar.

  One hot, searing tear leaked from the corner of her eye and burned a trail down her cheek. Cold shivers engulfed her as reality seeped into her bones, freezing her body into a pillar of ice. Maddie sank to the ground and cradled her injured hand in her lap, unconcerned by the red stains marring the perfection of her dress. She was never going to need it anyway.

  You are such a fool, Maddie Mae. You wasted your life on a man who was never going to love you the way you loved him. Harrison may have been in like; but he was never in love. Not with me, anyway.

  He didn’t really love her.

  He didn’t really want her.

  The wedding was never going to happen.

  The sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs drew her gaze to the door of the dressing room. Panic and disbelief lodged in her chest as Harrison’s face appeared, plastered with an expression of guilt.

  “Maddie,” he called hoarsely as he stood frozen to the spot.

  Tyler, white-faced, looking every bit as shocked and guilty, came from behind and put his hand on Harrison’s shoulder. He whispered something she couldn’t hear, as Harrison nodded, his stare plastered on hers. She’d give a million dollars to know what was going through his mind.

  The one thing of which she was certain? Her perfectly beautiful day had morphed into a perfectly horrible disaster.

  The man of her dreams. The man whom she’d loved since childhood. The man she was about to marry…was gay.

  “Everything is ruined,” she spewed at the two men cautiously entering the room. “How could you do this to me? To us? A lifetime I loved you… You said you loved me.” Her voice broke on a dry sob. “I’d have done anything for you, Harrison. Anything. And this is how you repay me? Lying to me. Betraying my faith in you. Letting me find out minutes before we are to say our vows that you want someone else? What kind of a man are you?”

  His face grew red. “Maddie…” Harrison took another step toward her, an anguished expression on his face. “I’m so sorry, darling. I can explain.”

  “Don’t.” Her hand cut the air. “Don’t you dare call me ‘darling.’ You have no right to call me that. You should have told me—you owed me that much. If not as a lover, at least as a friend. Do you think for one minute, if I’d changed my mind, I wouldn’t have at least had the courtesy to come to you in private and explain? You’ve humiliated me, Harrison. Humiliated me and used me and broken my heart.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” he whispered.

  This was his excuse? “Then you failed. I am hurt—and you are a coward.”

  “If you’d let me explain…”

  Tyler cleared his throat, his hand finding its way to Harrison’s shoulder. “I think she gets the picture, Harrison,” he said quietly.

  Maddie glared at Tyler, reeling as she sank further into her old friend the wall. “Stay out of this. But you’re right—I caught on the minute I saw the two of you making out in the courtyard.”

  Harrison glanced over his shoulder. “Tyler, if you don’t mind, wait for me in the hall. I need to talk with Maddie alone.” Tyler closed the door behind him as he left.

  As useless as it was, Maddie’s tear-filled eyes implored him to tell her she’d mistaken what she’d seen. She waited, giving him time. Harrison squatted beside her, his hand reaching for hers before she jerked it away.

  “Why, Harrison? If you knew you weren’t in love with me, and didn’t want to marry me, why did you wait to tell me? Why let things go this far? I can’t believe this. I’m such a fool. All this time I kept throwing myself at you, trying to make you want me. There’s something wrong with me, I told myself—I’m not pretty enough, sexy enough, he’s bored—that’s why he doesn’t respond. I believed it was my fault. And all the time, it wasn’t me at all.”

  She threw her hand in the air, self-deprecating laughter erupting from her pulverized heart. “Of course you didn’t want to make love to me; you didn’t want to make love to any woman. You were my best friend, my soul-mate. I believed in you, trusted you…loved you, and the most important part of yourself you kept hidden from me. If you told no one else, you could have—should have—told me.”

  Harrison touched his forefinger to her cheek and brushed a tear from her face. So tender, so lover-like. She flinched. His fist gently tipped her chin, forcing her to face him. Because she had no choice, Maddie met his anguished gaze, her heart thumping an uneven rhythm.

  “Cheater!” she cried.

  “Maddie, sweetheart. Don’t you think I know how wrong this is? All the years we’ve been together, our friendship growing into something more. You expected me to marry you… I expected me to marry you.

  “For some time now, I knew something wasn’t right between us, but I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did. And I tried, Maddie. Truly. I gave myself a million pep talks. Called myself a million names. Believe me, I know how this hurts you because it hurts me, too.

  “Do you know how many times I convinced myself I could go through with the marriage? Make a home, a life with you, like we planned? I love you, Maddie. Truly I do. But it wouldn’t be good between us. I’m not in love with you the way you deserve, and I can’t be with you the way you want. It’s because I love you that I can’t go through with the wedding. Sooner or later, our marriage would end in heartbreak. You know it would. The timing is shitty, I know, and I’m sorry. Tyler forced me to face the truth. We were on our way up here when you saw us.”

  “Yes, I saw a demonstration of him convincing you,” she replied bitterly.

  “Don’t blame Tyler.”

  “Who should I blame? Because it certainly seems as if there’s enough to go around. You for not telling me you’re gay, Tyler for poaching my fiancé. Me, for being blinded by love and deluded into believing you loved me when you could barely bring yourself to touch me.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Maddie.”

  “Harrison, please. Just don’t say anything else.”

  She glanced up and watched the light play off the crystal drops in the chandelier, her head pounding, heart aching, mind struggling to make sense of this catastrophe. Sure, she’d lost everything she ever wanted…but making excuses and offering apologies was getting them nowhere. Nothing she said or did would change what happened today. There was no going back.

  And wasn’t this the perfect ending to a perfectly…Fucked. Up. Day.

  The face she used to love stared back at her.

  “What’s left to be said?” s
he asked. “Goodbye? I wish you well? What? Just go. I hope the two of you’ll be very happy together…because you deserve each other.”

  “Maddie, please. Don’t be like this. I know it stinks, but isn’t it better we found out now? Before we disappointed each other? Destroyed our friendship?”

  It stinks? Her whole world was crumbling, and the best he could come up with was, “It stinks?”

  “Friendship? You love me enough to string me along for practically a lifetime, to ask me to be your wife, to let me spend a fortune on a wedding that was never going to happen, and to let me find out you’re in love with someone else by kissing your lover in front of God, man, and everyone in attendance today. If that’s your definition of friendship, it’s a good thing I didn’t marry you.”

  “I’m so sorry, Maddie. What do you want me to say?” He rose and stepped back. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  She straightened her shoulders, summoned every ounce of pride in her aching body, pushed up the supporting wall, mustered every degree of intestinal fortitude she could dredge from the depths of her body, and faced the man she’d once loved more than life itself.

  “Too late for that. You could have told me you had doubts long before today. But now? There’s nothing more you could possibly say. I’m sorry for you, Harrison. Not because you struggled with your sexual orientation, which obviously you have. That has nothing to do with this.” She gestured between them with a shaking hand.

  “You lied. By omission or commission, you lied. I shared everything with you, every secret, yet the most important part of your life you hid from me. You aren’t the man I thought you were. Had you come to me before today, explained yourself, trusted me to come to terms with your feelings for Tyler, I could have accepted it. Not only didn’t you love me, you didn’t trust me. But you’re right about one thing—it’s probably good this happened. Once I found out the kind of man you truly are, I wouldn’t have wanted you anyway.”

  Harrison dropped his hands to his side. “Maddie.”

  “Goodbye, Harrison.”

  With nothing left to say, he turned and walked out of her life without a backward glance. Loss greater than any she’d ever known pierced like a sword through the center of her. Panic seeped up with the bile she tasted at the back of her throat. She couldn’t remember a time or an event without Harrison beside her, and the emptiness left her terrified. A bride shouldn’t feel this way on her wedding day, angry and scared and so alone. But she wasn’t a bride. This wasn’t her wedding day.