Finding Mr. Happily Ever After_Nathan Read online

  Finding Mr. Happily Ever After: Nathan

  Melissa Storm

  Melissa McClone

  Contents

  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

  About the Authors

  More from Melissa Storm

  More from Melissa McClone

  Binge Read This Series!

  © 2018, Melissa Storm & Melissa McClone.

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  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; it may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  * * *

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, or the author has used them fictitiously.

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  Cover design by Mallory Rock.

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  Partridge & Pear Press

  PO Box 72

  Brighton, MI 48116

  To all those who set me on the path to my own Mr. Happily Ever After… Oh, and to Mr. Storm :)

  Prologue

  “You’re going to look gorgeous.” Daisy, a top wedding hairstylist in New York City, artfully arranged the curls on Jazz Michaels’ head with the care of a true professional. “People will gasp when you walk down the aisle, Jazz.”

  “Thanks.” Jazz’s stomach fluttered at the thought of standing in that enormous church later today. This was it. The day she had felt certain would never happen had actually arrived.

  The countdown to saying “I do” had begun. Jazz and her four bridesmaids had visited a spa yesterday so their fingernails and toes all looked pretty, but sitting here in one of the salon’s fluffy white robes with her make-up free face reminded her she still had much more to do before truly looking the part of a bride.

  Daisy added another bobby pin to the side of Jazz’s head. “Any advice for those of us ready to give up on love?” She laughed and grabbed another pin from the counter. “Well, me.”

  Jazz understood the frustration in her voice because she’d felt the same more than once. And with more than one guy, too. She nearly laughed herself. “You never know where love will take you, so keep yourself open to the possibilities.”

  The stylist nodded along as she continued to work. “Even if it means risking your heart?” she asked, past hurts reflecting in her bright eyes.

  “Especially then. Marrying your Mr. Happily Ever After is worth whatever pain and heartache you have to go through to find him.” Jazz believed those words wholeheartedly now, though she hadn’t always.

  “Did you have to go through a lot to find yours?”

  “You have no idea.” Jazz thought back to how she’d arrived at her wedding day. A flurry of memories swept through her brain. Some were bittersweet—time and maturity had helped dull the hurt from others—but the majority brought a comfy warmth and feeling of destiny. She smiled. “It’s been a journey I never imagined myself taking. And it all started the first time a boy asked me to marry him when I was eight years old…”

  One

  An eight-year-old Jazz Michaels slipped through her bedroom window and onto the roof outside. The night air was cool against her arms. She’d been in too much of a hurry to put on her coat. Old shingles slipped loose under her sneakers and fell to the yard below, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d made this daring journey dozens of times, though never quite as quickly as she attempted to do so now.

  With a huge jump and an equally enormous amount of luck, she could make it from her roof to the neighbor’s just three feet away. If she fell from here, she’d break her arm, or leg… or neck, but this was one of those days when not jumping—when staying behind in her cold, angry house—was far scarier than taking the leap.

  She landed on all fours with a thud, grappling for purchase on the flat, sloping roof, then pulling herself into a crouch. Just a few more feet to go now, less than a yard to safety, to Nathan.

  “Please be home, please be home,” Jazz muttered under her breath as she closed the distance to her best friend’s window. Almost there…

  “Jazz!” he cried, shoving his window open and startling her. He yanked her through in one fluid motion. “I thought we agreed. No more sneaking. You could get hurt!”

  “I didn’t, did I?” she answered with a hand on each hip and the hope she looked braver than she felt. Oh, how she hoped Nathan couldn’t see the way her arms shook under the sleeves of her worn pink and white softball T-shirt.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan wrapped her in a hug, and Jazz finally allowed herself to fall apart in his arms.

  He pulled back to look at her, his brown eyes searching her blues for an answer she wasn’t sure she felt ready to give. “Jazz, you’re my best friend. You can tell me anything.”

  She sniffed and wiped her runny nose against her sleeve. “I’m scared, Nathan,” she whispered. “What if he—? Or she…?”

  “You’re freaking me out.” He sounded not only concerned, but also scared. “What happened? Is it your parents?”

  She nodded. The shiver was back worse than before.

  “Did something happen? Did they hurt you?”

  “No, no, it’s not that…” She took a deep breath, hoping the extra oxygen would bring her courage. But for what? Her mother had made her promise not to tell, not to tell her teachers, her grandparents, or even Nathan. But how could she not when this particular secret ate a hole right through her chest in the place where her heart should be?

  Jazz didn’t know a lot about love, other than that it was dangerous. And scary. And definitely for grownups only. If not for her parents’ example, she might think that she loved Nathan—like a brother or cousin or something—but she knew better. She knew how love made people do crazy things and speak hurtful words.

  She didn’t want that with Nathan. His friendship was too important to ever say those three horrible little words.

  And yet, here he was, waiting for her to say something, anything.

  “Mom said it’s a secret just for family,” she answered at last. Her voice shaky, hardly her own.

  Nathan grabbed her hand and willed her to look him in the eye rather than at his feet. “I’m family, Jazz. We’re better than family. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  She shook her head sadly. What had she hoped to get out of coming here? It wasn’t fair to Nathan that she couldn’t explain herself, but how could she ever put what had happened into words?

  “What if we got married?” he blurted out, quick to offer a solution. “Then we’d be, like, official family. And you could tell me, right?”

  She laughed at the serious expression on his face, but he didn’t join her. Instead, he dropped to one knee as they’d seen people do in movies and on the TV.

  Nathan grabbed Jazz’s hand. “Jazz, marry me. Right now
, and I promise to protect your secrets. I promise to protect you.”

  She tried to laugh, but she was still too shaken to do anything other than cry. “Nathan, this is ridiculous. We’re too young to get married.”

  “Then let’s get pre-married.”

  “Pre-married? What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I just made it up, but c’mon, Jazz. Tell me what I have to do for you to feel better. I hate seeing you cry.”

  She rolled her eyes at Nathan, feeling some distance from the scene she had witnessed back at her own house. After a deep, steadying breath, she said, “We don’t have to get married, but I’ll tell you.”

  He nodded vigorously and rose from the floor.

  Once they were seated side by side atop his Transformers bedspread, she let him in on the big secret she wasn’t supposed to share.

  “Last week I saw my dad hit my mom hard in the stomach so nobody could see the bruises. She said it was the first time he ever hurt her and that he didn’t mean to and wouldn’t do it again, but I don’t think she was telling the truth. That’s when she told me to forget I saw anything and made me promise not to tell.”

  Nathan hugged her against his side but didn’t say anything. He combed his fingers through her hair, the way her mom sometimes did, seeming to sense the worst was still to come.

  And it was.

  Jazz wanted to cover hear ears to stop the memory of her dad yelling, the terrifying thuds one after another, and her mom crying. Instead, she took another slow breath and swiped at the stubborn tears refusing to leave her alone.

  “Tonight my dad was angry again, and he pushed Mom so hard she fell down the stairs.” Saying the words didn’t make Jazz feel better, but she knew telling Nathan was the right thing to do. “I heard the whole thing from my room, but I was too scared to go out and help my mom. I-I-I came here instead.”

  Nathan’s eyes darkened as if now he had secrets he needed to hide. She hated making this his problem, too, but she needed someone to know, to support her, to… help.

  “You did the right thing,” he said, giving her another squeeze before moving toward his bedroom door with determined steps. “I’m going to get my mom. She can help.”

  “No!” Jazz sobbed. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”

  “I know but…” One breath followed another until Nathan stood taller. His birthday was six months before Jazz’s, but he looked so much older right now. “Some secrets aren’t meant to be kept, and this is one of them. What if he hurts you next? What if your mom needs to go to the hospital? We have to get help.”

  Jazz thought about what Nathan had said as she waited for him to return with his mother. There were two kinds of secrets—some were okay to keep, but others held untold dangers. Maybe that meant there could be two kinds of love, too.

  She continued to think this over as Nathan’s mother treated the wounds on her own mother’s arm and side. She thought about it the next morning when she realized her father’s car had not returned that night.

  Three weeks later, she still hadn’t reached a conclusion about whether there could really be two kinds of secrets, two kinds of love, but she did know two things for sure.

  Her father wasn’t coming back.

  And that fact made her very happy, indeed.

  Two

  By the time she’d turned thirteen, Jazz had become a firm believer in both secrets and love—and especially in the point where the two of them intersected.

  She’d always cared for her best friend and couldn’t be sure of the exact point in time in which caring turned into crushing. But she first recognized the funny feeling that zipped around her heart and settled in her stomach whenever she looked at Nathan about a week ago.

  It was a Sunday, and she’d just returned from early service with her mother. When she entered her bedroom, she glanced over toward Nathan’s window that sat slightly lower than her own across the skinny strip of yard dividing their two Nassau County homes. It was an instinct, something she did without thinking.

  Catching sight of Nathan always gave her comfort. Until that particular Sunday when she accidentally spied Nathan coming into his room after a shower. He wore a towel slung low across his waist, leaving the rest of his lean body exposed.

  And Jazz couldn’t look away. Did he know she could see him? Was he hoping that she did?

  It hadn’t been such a long time since they had innocently played house, he as the daddy and her as the mommy. She’d kissed him on the lips many times as part of their play, but it had meant nothing then.

  Now that they were both in eighth grade, Jazz played a different kind of make-believe. She imagined what it would be like to feel Nathan’s lips on her own once again, what it would be like to sneak out of her room at dark and spend the night wrapped in his arms. Mostly, she wondered whether Nathan felt the same way she now did. And why it had taken her so long to realize her very own Prince Charming lived right next door.

  It had taken eight years, to be precise.

  They’d met when she was five and he was six. Jazz’s family had just moved to the neighborhood, having relocated from their dingy apartment in Queens. Nathan’s family had been there for generations and would continue to live in that old-fashioned Long Island colonial for many more generations to come.

  Nathan said his parents fought about this frequently. His dad wanted to move out to Massapequa, said they could afford to move, said he’d earned a better zip code. But Nathan’s mom insisted on staying close to her Italian-American family, said that without family, they had nothing. Besides, he worked so much, he was hardly ever in the house anyway, so what did he care?

  Nathan wished his parents would stop fighting. Jazz hoped that she and Nathan would live next door to each other for the rest of their lives. He was all she had other than her mom, but those two were also all she needed.

  Five years had passed since her father stomped out of the house in a fury, never to return. And even though she and her mom had less money now, they were happier, too.

  After seeing Nathan in that towel, Jazz spent the week thinking about love and what it meant. Her parents had said they loved each other, but their love hadn’t been the forever kind. Not even close, but she and Nathan would be different. She had no doubt.

  Her heart fluttered when Nathan’s window opened and his handsome half All American, half Italian stallion features beamed out at her like a beacon calling her home.

  She and Nathan knew each other inside out. They knew each other at their bests and at their worsts. Jazz expected—and he probably did, though wouldn’t admit it—that one day they would fall in love. Why couldn’t that day be this day?

  “Hey, Jazz.” A sly smile quirked its way across his lips, and tingles filled her tummy. This was her chance. Maybe he was going to ask her to their year-end dance, or maybe she could ask him. There was no reason they should…

  “Hey, Nate. I was just wondering, if—”

  A second head emerged through the window. This one had tight, dark curls and bright red lips. Jazz’s heart dropped straight into her stomach, where gurgling acid would it eat alive.

  Nathan kissed the girl on her cheek. “You know Angela, right?”

  “Sure. Hi, Angela.” Jazz tried so hard not to frown, but judging by the look on the other girl’s face, she hadn’t succeeded.

  Angela pouted her lips. “We were just wondering if you wanted to come to the dance with us.” She spoke with a slight accent that felt like it may have been faked. "You do have a date, right?”

  Nathan smiled big enough for all three of them. “Yeah, Jazz. We could go double. It would be fun.”

  “Uhh, yeah, okay. I’m going with…” She wracked her brain for a name, any name. “Tony. Tony Evans.”

  “Ooh, you two will be so cute together,” Angela gushed.

  “Yeah, you two are cute together, too,” Jazz said, even though the words made her want to vomit. First she’d devoured her own heart, then she’d spit it back up. No wo
nder Nathan would rather date pretty, perfect Angela than her.

  “Aren’t we just?” Angela cooed, giving Nathan a kiss so forceful, a smudge of red lipstick marred his cheek.

  “Well, we better be going,” Nathan said almost apologetically. “We’ve got lots of studying to do.”

  “Sure, studying.” Angela giggled and then shut the window, leaving the blinds conspicuously open as if to taunt her victory in Jazz’s face.

  Could Angela tell that Jazz liked Nathan more than a friend—and, more importantly, would she tell? As Jazz pictured the two of them laughing and gossiping about her pathetic crush, anger roiled in her stomach. Nathan would never do that to her, but he might also never return her interest.

  Oh, what a hopeless situation.

  Especially because she’d only ever pictured going to the dance with Nathan. Going with Tony would hardly be any better than staying at home, but then again, nothing would be worse than admitting she didn’t have a date to that smug, best friend stealing Angela.

  She reluctantly picked up the phone and dialed Tony.

  “Thought you’d be going with Reed,” he said when she mentioned the dance. She decided not to mention that she’d thought so as well.

  “Would you go with me?” she asked, having to force each word out. Tony was so not her type, but at least she knew he would probably say yes.

  “Yeah, of course. Meet you there?”

  “Sure, Tony.” She had a date, but that didn’t make her feel any better. Sure, she would save face, but she still wished things could be different. “See you there.”