Rough & Ready Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Author's Note

  Rough & Ready

  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

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  EPILOGUE

  Take Me (Preview)

  Thank you!

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Lulu Pratt

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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

  Author’s Note

  Rough & Ready is a full-length 60,000+ word novel. Please note it ends at 90%.

  Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoy Rough & Ready.

  I’ve also included a preview of my book, Take Me, for your enjoyment.

  Happy reading,

  Lulu xoxo

  Rough & Ready

  Accidentally saved by the single dad

  You know those towns with the dirty names like Spread Eagle or Horneytown? Well, with my dirty mind I decided to spend my college break visiting them on an epic road trip with my best friend.

  Until my entrance to a sleepy town starts with a bang as my car crashes straight into the Welcome to Rough and Ready sign.

  Local mechanic Carter turns up to save me. He’s as rough as the town’s name and immediately has me feeling ready. He’s eye candy from head to toe but his arms stand out the most. Firm biceps, taut forearms and I have an overwhelming urge to run into them.

  It’ll take days to fix the car and there’s no motel in town. Luckily, he lets us stay in the trailer parked outside his house. I couldn’t be farther from my life at college.

  When his six-year-old son’s around a softer side of Carter shows and I struggle to keep my cool with all the heat he creates inside me. Before long it’s obvious the feeling is mutual.

  But there’s danger all around him. Danger I have to avoid from a secret I’m determined to learn. And more accidents waiting to happen.

  *** A steamy STANDALONE contemporary romance with a smoking hot hero. No cliffhanger, no cheating and a guaranteed happily-ever-after.***

  CHAPTER 1

  Phoebe

  “HOLD ME closer, Tony Danza!”

  Jo-Beth and I dissolved into giggles, our singing breaking off as laughter filled my car. I leaned my forehead against the fur-covered wheel of the old car, tears rolling down my face.

  “Keep your eyes on the road!” Jo-Beth shrieked, lifting my head off the wheel and facing it forward. “We may be in the middle of nowhere but there are still, like, coyotes and shit.”

  “You’re a terrible singer,” I informed my best friend, still tittering over our deliberate misquote of Elton John’s classic.

  “And you’re a terrible driver and you refuse to sing the right words,” she shot back, and we laughed again because we both knew she was right. We’d been on the trip for almost three weeks, and now in the home stretch, somehow, Jo-Beth’s voice had only gotten worse with the miles.

  “How far now?”

  Jo-Beth looked at our map. “Since the last time you asked? About five minutes less.”

  Ugh. Driving with her was awesome, but driving, period, is tedious in the extreme. You always have to pee, or you need food, or your back hurts and you need to have a walk. It’s like this never-ending confrontation with your corporeal dependencies.

  But if I had to slog across the country with anyone, it’d be Jo-Beth. She’d been my best friend since the first year of college, and now, going into our fourth year, it felt like I’d known her a lifetime. Jo-Beth had coaxed me out of my shell, showing me how to navigate adult social interactions with a twinkle and a wink. She was just like that. She fit in everywhere, like putty in the cracks. Which is not to say that I’m shy. I need time to warm up, that’s all.

  Dust blew past our window, further covering the beaten-up rustbucket in a layer of pale brown. I grimaced as sand smashed against the glass.

  “Are you sure your cousin is really gonna want this car?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “He’s sixteen. He’ll take anything with wheels and an aux cord. I think he said at one point that he wanted to use it for spare parts. Who knows. And he commented on my last Instagram of our trip that he liked how we were giving your car ‘character.’”

  “That sounds pretentious.”

  “Yeah, he’s going through his asshole phase,” she sighed. “Even though he liked my post, he DM’d me and said that making a private Instagram to chronicle our road trip was, and I quote, ‘tacky.’”

  Damn, kids these days really were little shits. Back in my day — oh, never mind. I’m only twenty-one. Said ‘kids’ are all of five years younger than me. Still, the joy of lauding my seniority over teens had to be indulged in before I reached the point in my life where I no longer wanted to disclose my age.

  “But it’s funny,” I argued. “Our trip, it’s not just like ‘la-la-la, here I am wearing a cute dress and looking hot around some cactuses.’ We’re giving the people humor.”

  See, this wasn’t just any road trip from east to west coast. Jo-Beth and I, dirty-minded girls that we are, had decided to spice things up by staying every night in a town with a naughty name. To wit — Intercourse. Spread Eagle. Horneytown. The Fingers. We stopped in front of each town sign, striking a funny pose and taking a picture. We’d garnered an audience of about three friends and Jo-Beth’s cousin, but we didn’t care. The account was for us and us alone, to remember some of the best times of our lives. And there had been sweet adventures already — karaoke with strangers, delicious crawfish, mad baths in the woods. It felt like I’d lived a lifetime in the span of one summer, the last real summer I’d ever get to enjoy, because as my dad was so fond of telling me, adults don’t have real summers. They work.

  Now wasn’t the time to think about that because warm rays were filling our sun roof, and everything was groovy, baby, even if we were planning on sleeping in the car that night as there was no motel in town.

  “Rough and Ready, here we come,” I whistled to the tune of “California, Here I Come.” Which was appropriate, given that Rough and Ready was a little town situated in the heartland of Cali.

  “The attractions of Rough and Ready are as follows,” Jo-Beth began. A few miles out of each town, we’d developed a tradition – whoever was in the passenger seat pulled out the beaten-up map that we had scrawled over with care, its wrinkles containing fresh inked guides to the tourist traps of each town. Normally, I prefer to go further off the beaten path, but as you can’t get much farther off the path than a place like Rough and Ready, we’d both decided it was for the best if, on this trip, we stuck to the town-sanctioned sights. After going through our list, we chose which activities still
sounded like fun, and which were too hacky to bother with.

  Jo-Beth read off the points of interest we’d located. “‘Notes: Mysterious alien light show in the hills. Go after midnight and before two. Bring beer and snacks.’”

  “Okay, we’re totally doing that,” I rejoined. “I wanna see some spooky shit.”

  “Are you gonna make me hold your hand like you do in scary movies?”

  I blushed. “Uh-huh.”

  Jo-Beth cackled, knowing me all too well. “You’re such a chicken, but we already knew that, so back to the list. There are only two on here. Second one is, ‘Abandoned building on edge of town, alleged by locals to have been a former brothel.’”

  My brows shot up. “No way. In this little Podunk Hollow place?” I swept my arm across the windshield, through which we could see whole packs of tumbleweeds. The town probably had more tumbleweeds than people.

  “That’s what it says here,” Jo-Beth replied, tapping the furrowed page. “Maybe it was for, like, gold diggers. Like, the real kind, the ones who dug gold.”

  “Sounds sexy.”

  “More like haunted.”

  “Sexy and haunted can coexist,” I argued.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, Phoebe,” she joked, playfully slapping me on the wrist.

  My friend was right. Of course, she was just messing around, but in truth, I did need to focus on something else.

  Because despite my better angels, I’m a little bit boy crazy. There’s plenty of other crazy about me, but the ‘boy’ one sticks out. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, as a kid, I couldn’t have given two shits about how my male cohorts spent their time on the playground. I was content to read fantasy novels in the corner and munch on Ritz crackers. Is it okay to be twenty-one and still miss recess?

  This — this being crackers, corners, and celibacy — all changed when I went to college. I know, you’re waiting for me to say that some frat dude with a snapback and a kegger broke my heart and I sobbed for three days and then emerged a hardened, hornier version of myself. And sure, there have been a few frat dudes here and there. But in reality, the clincher was all those damn classes on Freud.

  I’m a psych major, and for whatever reason, we’re required to talk about Freud pretty much every day for our first year of college. Yes, I’m aware he basically founded the field I’m going into, but then again, all his “clinical findings” have been widely disproven by the modern experts. I’m just saying, maybe we could stand to talk less about a dead white guy who got shit wrong.

  But back to my point. We started getting so into talk of sexuality and urges and desires and it was like somebody turned on my vagina’s faucet and never quite closed it. Understanding my body in a logical way helped me experience it in a physical, tangible way. Plus, listening to thirty-something male teachers in tweed jackets lecture you on penis envy is just hot. I don’t make the rules. In the intervening years, I went through so many stages of lust and acquisition, had the best — and worst — sex and generally self-actualized.

  Never mind that none of said sexual encounters had manifested into full-blown relationships. I reasoned that, as a psych major, I knew better than to believe in anything so impractical as love. Those were chemicals and societal expectations working under pressure to transform to fluid humans into a solid relationship. The phase shift was painful and pointless, and both people ended up the worse for it.

  Ahem. Anyways, that’s how Jo-Beth and I had ended up friends early on — through boy-craziness. Or, in her case, girl-craziness. In her spare time, when she wasn’t busy learning how to save the planet, she used her coding skills — where’d she get those skills? I’ve never learned — to help create a dating app for college campuses for the LGBT+ communities.

  Jo-Beth leaned her head against the passenger window and sighed, her breath clouding the glass.

  “I wish I didn’t have to work,” she muttered, for the umpteenth time.

  My hand found her shoulder and I gave it a little squeeze. “Sorry, bud.”

  “Being a physics major sucks.”

  “Hey, you had to go and be all super-duper smart and shit. That’s on you.”

  She smiled, and Jo-Beth was back to her usual sunny self. We’d both been grinding hard during the school year — hence the much-needed road trip — but as a physics major, Jo-Beth was putting in more hours than I was convinced existed in a day. She even had to work during our trip in preparation for the upcoming fall quarter, making her feel equal parts angry at her course load and guilty for abandoning me during much of the time we weren’t driving.

  I don’t mean to psychoanalyze my friend. It’s just a force of habit, a habit I’m trying to break.

  She tossed her blonde locks back and scooted further down into the seat, kicking her feet up on the dashboard.

  “We’re gonna be seniors,” she said, an observation she’d made many times on the trip, each utterance delivered with different inflections an emotion. Fear, excitement, anxiety.

  “Bridgeport’s been a hell of a ride,” I agreed. “I remember the day I got in.”

  “Same. I got the card that said ‘Welcome to Bridgeport University’ and it was like my whole life changed in a split second. And now it’s all gonna be over.”

  I turned to look at her. “The important stuff isn’t over. Like our friendship. That’s not a four-year thing, that’s a forever thing.”

  Ever avoiding emotional intimacy, she replied, “If you don’t put your eyes back on the road, we’re not gonna make it to four years, or even four more minutes.”

  Laughing, I shifted my stare from Jo-Beth to the road.

  Only I didn’t shift quite fast enough.

  What I now know to be a damn tumbleweed rolled into my view. I, mistaking it for a small defenseless desert animal, veered right. Jo-Beth screamed, I screamed, the car screeched, the dust churned.

  And just like that, airbags were filling up the cabin and black smoke was coming from the crevices of the vehicle. Technically speaking, the airbags didn’t really fill anything — they were so deflated from twenty years of being cramped up that they just kind of hissed out like dejected balloons.

  But airbag efficacy aside, we’d crashed into a tall, rusted metal pole.

  For a moment, we sat there, stunned. We’d crashed the car only one stop from our final destination. What was this frickin’ pole doing in the middle of the desert?

  “Are you okay?” I managed to ask my friend, breath coming heavy in my throat.

  Jo-Beth shook the dust out of her hair. “Yeah, I’m okay. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  I shifted forward in my seat until I could tilt my chin up and look through the glass at our iceberg, the thing that had sunk us.

  Well, that just figured.

  At the top of the pole, in brick red and dull blue, with burnt-out bulbs rimming the edges, sat a sign.

  It read, “Welcome to Rough and Ready.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Carter

  A DROP OF oil splashed onto my face.

  “Shi… shoot,” I muttered, tongue jamming between my teeth as I took a wrench to the source of the leak.

  “What’d you say, Daddy?”

  “Nothing, kiddo.” Learning not to swear around your kid takes years of practice and the patience of a saint. “Could ya hand me that flashlight?”

  “Mm-hmm!”

  The clop of Henry’s cowboy boots echoed through the high-ceilinged repair shop, reverberating off the cement walls. The boots were still a little big on him, but I figured that just left him with room to grow. In the meantime, I made him wear the boots with two pairs of socks so that they were snug as a bug.

  “Here,” he said, his chubby fingers passing me the flashlight beneath the car.

  I caught hold of his hand and planted a raspberry on his outstretched palm. He giggled and squirmed, and though I couldn’t see his face from my vantage, I could picture it — cheeks red, mouth full of baby teeth stretched into
a grin, that asymmetrical dimple emerging like a secreted gem.

  Shining the light on the engine, I sighed again. This old beauty — Cici, as Henry and I had dubbed her — refused to run.

  We’d found Cici on the side of a highway on our way to Henry’s annual physical. Our little village didn’t have a doctor in residence, so to get complete workups, we had made a morning out of it.

  This past month, the day after Henry’s sixth birthday, we were driving back along a road that was known only to the locals, and much to my surprise, I spotted an old race car just abandoned on the side of the road. Didn’t seem like there’d been an accident and the license plates had been removed. The body was in good shape. It was as if the universe had just plopped a gift into my lap.

  Well, kind of. Cici needed lots of work. Turned out her motor was shot, she had a punctured hose or two, and the steering was a mess. But I figured that maybe she’d be a good project for me and Henry and I’d made a lot of headway on Cici. Daddy-son bonding, y’know? Besides, it’s not like my regular job as a car repair guy took up much time. We saw about one vehicle every other day, max, leaving me with plenty of time to soup Cici up.

  Anyways, Henry had been learning plenty from our venture, the point of which had been to teach him an honest day’s work. Only a month on and he could name parts of an engine and fetch me all the different tools I asked for. I even let him get under the car with me, so long as he held onto my hand and squeezed it if he got nervous.

  “I’m hungry,” Henry complained, one booted foot stomping on the ground.

  “Me too, kid,” I said and slid out from underneath Cici. “Sandwich time?”

  He nodded, his blond curls bobbing. “Yeah.”

  I stood up with a groan, wiping the oil on my jeans and dragging a hand through the thin layer of sweat on my forehead.