Choosing Forever Read online

  Tipping my head back to look up at the ceiling, I held back the bile that rose with every groan and productive growl. Tom wasn’t so lucky. In fact, the only ones who were lucky and didn’t start gagging were Ebru and Ma.

  Taking a deep breath and sighing, I went to get up to help Sabine pack and offer to fly her home. I was also thinking about how I was going to try and get her to forget this moment as she packed, when an airy whistling fart filled the room along with Gramps chuckling and singing, “Pop goes the weasel.”

  Looking over at Sabine in absolute horror, I almost passed out with relief when I saw her with her hands covering her face, but her shoulders were shaking with laughter. I’m pretty sure it was laughter because the noises that joined it weren’t hysterical crying ones…yet.

  Before I could sit down and enjoy the feelings of relief though, he started humming Despacito.

  Normally, I’m the serious one in the family. In fact, I was the only one of us that had been born with a brain and any dignity whatsoever, but after that I had zero self-restraint as I collapsed at Sabine’s feet and got ready to beg her not to leave me.

  Just as I opened my mouth to start though, the Cesspool Karaoke track changed to Rawhide.

  After the first chorus, I just picked Sabine up and ran.

  Sabine

  “What are you reading?” I asked Brett as I walked out of the steamy bathroom. I loved the showers that he’d had put into his house here. It was like a holy experience every time I had one.

  “Looking at the legalities of this,” he mumbled as he clicked the mousepad.

  I was loving this trip to see the Townsends. My family had never been affectionate or involved in each other’s lives. Once I’d moved to England, my Grandmother had made up for that, but I doubted any family would ever be like this one.

  Brett had been busy ever since our last visit here for Ebru and Cole’s wedding, it had been non-stop. Even working from home, there were so many instances when he would get a phone call or his head of security, Coleman, would come into the house to meet with him in Brett’s home office. There had been a lot of security updates since the fire, though, so I just put it down to that and the fact that we worked in a demanding and busy industry.

  Getting comfortable next to him on the bed with my iPad, I was about to read my emails when I looked over at Brett’s screen briefly.

  “Why are you looking up familial divorce?” I’d found today hilarious and great example of why the Townsends were such a fantastic family. Brett apparently had not.

  “You really need to ask me that?” He sounded so incredulous that I burst out laughing.

  “It wasn’t that bad!” His mouth dropped open as he watched me laughing. “And I would think that maybe you would be more concerned that a video of it was now on YouTube.” I picked up my iPad and hit play on the video that Maya had sent me the link to earlier.

  “I’ll kill him,” Brett growled as he listened to Hurst singing Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You, which was frequently interrupted with groans and graphic noises like we’d heard earlier. There was also a lot of spraying sounds and Hurst sniffing and declaring that ‘it smelt better’.

  I moved it out of his way as Brett lunged for my iPad. “Stop! You’ll miss the best bit.”

  “Linda,” Hurst yelled at that moment on the screen. “Bring me some ice and the A&D, will ya?” He started muttering as he went about his business, spraying again. “Huh, when did I eat carrots?”

  The sound of footsteps joined him and Ren’s muffled voice said loudly, “Fuck me. It smells like someone shit a Christmas tree!”

  I was laughing so hard now that I swear I could hear the blood rushing around my head. My parents would be disgusted if they heard this, but I thought it was one of the funniest things ever.

  “Please tell me no one has watched it!” The question was a rhetorical one as Brett typed furiously on his screen, no doubt telling Tom to remove the video. He was too late though, the number underneath it showed that over one-million people had. “Motherfucker,” he whined after his phone dinged with the response.

  “I’m sure that no one will know that it’s your grandfather,” I reached for my iPad, intending to read emails, but the title above the video started me laughing again.

  Digging for Townsend oil

  At that moment, the dinging from Brett’s phone became almost constant, each one getting another curse word, and each increasing in volume.

  I loved this family immensely.

  “Oh, for fucks sake,” Brett whined as he read the most recent message on his phone. “I’ve got to take him to get a Christmas tree tomorrow.” Banging the back of his head off the wall behind us, he muttered before deciding on what to do. “I’m going to drop him off in the middle of nowhere.”

  Laughing, I cuddled up beside him and fell asleep to the pinging coming from his phone as message after message arrived. I don’t know what time he fell asleep at, but the next morning things weren’t any better, so I agreed to go along with them to try and diffuse his anger.

  What a mistake.

  Six hours later…

  Even with my scarf and a towel that I’d found in the car wrapped around my face I could smell them.

  “I told you to make sure there were no animals around it,” Brett seethed as we drove back to their Ranch. He was sitting in his jockeys as Hurst sat calmly in the back in his boxers. “You said you had checked it more than once and that it was clear.”

  “It was!”

  “So,” he growled, “how did you miss the huge motherfucking skunk sitting underneath it?” he yelled, his voice sounding ten times louder in the small enclosed space of the car.

  “Musta walked up after I checked,” Hurst replied, sounding like he and Brett hadn’t been sprayed in the chest by the animal when Brett had fired up his chainsaw. Hurst had wanted to use an axe, but Brett had vetoed the idea for safety reasons.

  Keeping his eyes on the winding road in front of us, Brett lowered his head slightly and sniffed his chest, gagging as he caught a whiff of what seemed to be imbedded in his skin now.

  Before he could yell at him again, Hurst picked his cell up from the seat beside him and hit a button.

  “Linda, get the tomato juice out, will ya?” Her voice could be heard talking back to him, but I couldn’t work out what she was saying. “Na, Brett didn’t check the tree and we got skunked.”

  It was a miracle that we made it home alive given the amount of times Brett tried to grab Hurst. Each time I made sure that I grabbed the wheel just as he turned and lunged.

  Unfortunately for Hurst, Brett had age on his side and the car had barely stopped before he jumped out, ran into his grandparent’s house and picked up all of the tomato juice that Linda had left on the counter in the kitchen. All that could be seen after that was a blur as he ran to his house to bathe in the stuff with Hurst yelling obscenities after him.

  Sniffing my coat, I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to get rid of it.

  A tapping on the window of the car that I was still sitting in scared the shit out of me and made me squeal as I turned and saw Linda looking in at me.

  “Did they at least bring the tree back?” She wiggled a can of pine scented aerosol at me. “I figured I’d give it a spray to get rid of the smell of skunk.”

  Staring at her in shock, I shook my head slowly. Not even a nuclear bomb could have gotten rid of that smell.

  “That lazy old bastard,” she grumbled as she stormed up to the house. “Where are you, old man?” She shouted as she walked in. “I can smell you. I know you’re here!”

  Getting out of the car and leaving the door open to try and get rid of the smell, I walked over to Brett’s house hoping that he came to bed smelling normal. I’d never come across a skunk in my life and I never wanted to again.

  “What the fuck?” I stumbled as I walked into a scene from Carrie when I went into the bathroom. There was red all over the glass of th
e shower, the white tiled walls and the white tiled floor.

  Looking at Brett who was standing away from the spray still covered in the red juice, I would have panicked if it wasn’t for the empty cartons of tomato juice piled in the corner of the shower. He was standing naked as the day he was born covered in red as he scrubbed his skin.

  “I smell like a football team shit on me,” he growled, scrubbing hard at his chest.

  How the family had survived life I didn’t know, but once I started laughing I couldn’t stop. I ended up curled in the corner of the bathroom, holding my side and struggling to breathe as I laughed. During all of it, though, like the best girlfriend in the world that I was, I held my phone up and recorded every last second of it.

  Two

  BRETT

  The only thing that I think I’d ever taken seriously was my job in the family’s oil business. It wasn’t until Ren found Maya that it even occurred to me that I could settle down at some point and have a family of my own. I hadn’t gone actively looking for it, but I’d stopped messing around outside of work and had sat watching as Ren showed me the alternative to how I’d been living. Then along came my niece and the twins, and now Cole was going to be a dad too…

  Sitting back, I watched Sabine walking around getting ready for work. She was the difference, my turning point and the one thing that I’d said I never wanted. Then again, I guess I wasn’t lying because I hadn’t met her at that point so I couldn’t have known the difference that one woman made.

  We’d been back from spending Christmas with my family for three days and not one of those days had passed with me wishing that we’d just stayed in Piersville. It had been non-stop with work, issues on sites that needed resolved and then the letter that I’d walked in to find on my desk yesterday morning.

  Things had been relatively quiet recently with the bullshit going on with whomever was targeting my family, until I’d gotten a reminder of the message I’d received at Cole’s wedding. The Queen will fall. Those words played on a loop in my brain. I hadn’t slept last night thinking of all of the things that had already happened and then imagining them happening to Sabine. The thought of losing her or her being hurt made me sick to my stomach.

  She was different in so many ways. I was her first, she’d given me the biggest gift a female could give a guy. In return, she was my first – my first love, the first female to mean something to me who wasn’t family; my first everything.

  “I’m ready,” she stopped in front of me and broke me out of my thoughts. Focusing on her, I took in her outfit. She had on a dark red dress that was tight and fell just below her knees. I fucking loved this dress. I fucking loved her! “Are you okay, Brett?” Her head tilted to the side like it always did when she asked a question.

  “Is that a French thing?”

  Doing a quick glance down at her outfit in confusion, she looked back up and crossed her arms.

  “My dress? Something is bothering you, no?” Another thing to add to the list, her accent. There was never any rhyme or reason for why some words in a sentence would sound French and the rest English. Even my brothers wouldn’t shift their focus when she spoke. Tom described it as accent and word porn and would deliberately get her to say certain words just for the thrill it gave him, the asshole.

  “No, the head tilt when you ask a question.” I deliberately ignored the last part of her question.

  Shrugging, she picked up her bag from beside me. “I do not know. Is it an American thing to ignore questions?”

  She was too sharp for her own good. Standing up, I walked toward the door, holding it open for her. “After you.”

  “No fucking way,” I roared as I threw my mug across the office.

  “It’s the only way to keep her safe, Brett.” Coleman hadn’t even flinched as it had sailed past him. “Look man,” he leaned forward in his seat. “You need to look at what is right there in front of you. Doing this might keep her safe, keep her alive!”

  This morning there had been a thick envelope waiting for me on my desk - no postage, no delivery company, nothing. When I’d opened it, there had been photos of Sabine with her face scratched out or with a red cross over it.

  It was the last one that had hit the hardest, though. The photo showed her getting a coffee from the coffee bar opposite our building, the person taking it pointing a gun at her back and she had been completely oblivious. The real shit of it was, her security was fucking standing beside her and they’d been in a busy coffee shop. If they’d shot her, it would have been at point blank range and no one would have even been able to stop it.

  “I can’t send her away.” My voice sounded so croaky as I said it, but I just couldn’t. She was everything to me.

  “It’s the only way, Brett!” Coleman voiced what I knew was true.

  Sitting down heavily, I put my head in my hands and grabbed handfuls of hair. I hadn’t said the words to her yet, but I loved her. How could I hurt her? Fuck, how could I live without her?

  “What’s the plan?” I didn’t lift my head, I just continued looking at the floor beneath me. I was walking a fine line between a range of emotions and if I looked up at that moment I might give into the urge to do something fucking stupid. Top of my list was walking to her office and shooting anyone who came within twenty feet of her. Unfortunately, that would mean shooting innocent people, but were they actually innocent? If someone got that close to her in a public place without her security keeping a close eye on them, did they know her?

  “Brett, look at me.” It was an order to get my shit together and look up. Taking a shaky breath, I raised my head. “It’s not permanent, but you’ve got to make it real for her. They have to think that it’s done or they’ll still go after her. Do you understand?”

  “Just tell me what to do.” My voice didn’t even sound like my own anymore. Looking back down at my shaking hands, I swallowed down the yell that I wanted to let rip out of me.

  She was my world.

  Sabine

  Six hours later…

  I watched out of the window as the plane took off, not actually seeing anything. I had known that something was different with him over the last couple of days when he wouldn’t touch me or come near me, but I’d thought it was something work related.

  The Brett that had just so callously thrown me out of his life was the Brett that I had heard and been warned about, not the Brett that I thought I’d known.

  You’ve been fun, but I’m done now. Because you’ve lasted longer than most, here’s a pair of earrings to say thanks.

  When I’d tried to get him to talk about it, he’d made me feel like I was a nuisance and had thrown it all back in my face.

  Yeah, thanks for the cherry, but it really didn’t mean that much, so don’t make more out of it than it actually was. Take the earrings and leave. We’ll send your shit to wherever you go.

  Well he could keep my shit. He could keep the earrings, he could keep all of it. He’d thrown my virginity back in my face. Until that point, that night had been one of the best memories of my life and one that I thought, regardless, would always be something that I cherished. How stupid of me.

  Months previously…

  Walking into his bedroom, I decided it was time to pack up my things. My knee was healed enough that I could look after myself now and I didn’t want to impose on him any longer. No matter how much he denied it, and what he did for me, I was always worried that I was being a burden to him. It was also a weakness of mine after my family had made it clear that I was only there for their financial gain and that anything else made me a nuisance, so I felt it was better to go now before he actually told me to.

  “What are you doing?” Brett asked, looking confused as he watched me pick up my bags from his closet and bring them through.

  “I think it’s time to give you back your home and independence, Brett,” I laughed as I opened the first case. I was trying to make light of it and not make him feel like I was begging for a denial to my th
oughts.

  “What are you talking about?” The look he gave me as he walked up to take my bags out of my hands and put them back in the closet was almost hilarious.

  “I can walk better now,” I followed after him to try and get my bags back. “And the pain isn’t like it was before. In fact, the doctor…”

  “He was a quack,” he snapped, putting my bags up on the top of the shelving unit where I couldn’t reach them.

  “You said he was the best,” I sighed, going back through to the bedroom and sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Well, I was wrong. It’s still painful, isn’t it?” At my nod, he continued. “And are you still taking the pain medications?” It was a rhetorical question because he knew that I was, so I just sighed and watched him as he paced around in front of me. I’d actually expected him to be relieved to get his freedom back, so when he dropped to his knees in front of me I thought maybe he’d tripped and fallen. “I don’t want you to go.” The words came out so quietly that it took a couple of seconds for them to sink in.