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Her Kind of Bastard
Kyle Black is dangerous to know. He served time in jail for killing two men. A woman would need to be crazy to fall in love with a guy like him—wouldn’t she?
Elementary schoolteacher, Charity Harper, has had her fair share of hard knocks. At the age of twenty-six, she is content to leave the past behind her and just enjoy the job she was born to do. When she meets Kyle Black, a thirty-five-year-old motorcycle customizer, she is wary, but also sexually drawn to the good-looking bad boy.
Kyle Black has a past, a past he would sooner forget—that’s if the small-minded town of Sharpsville, Texas will allow. He may have been rehabilitated into society by the love he feels for his seven-year-old son, but they aren’t going to give him an easy ride.
When they both embark on a sizzling and sexually charged affair, Charity brings her name into disrepute. The Board of Governors at her school demand she sever all ties with the disreputable bad boy or suffer instant dismissal.
Faced with the most difficult decision of her life, will Charity make the right choice?
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Excerpt
Master of Submission
As Charity Harper luxuriated in a warm bath, she felt the stresses and strains of the day slowly begin to diminish. She loved children, and one day, in the not too distant future, hoped to have a brood of her own. However, a class of some twenty or more five- and six-year-olds took its toll on her resilience, making Charity savor her “me” time.
She’d been working as a schoolteacher at Blue Beacon Elementary for almost four years now, and by and large she loved every minute of her job, not once regretting the move from Freshwater, Missouri, to the small friendly town of Sharpsville, Texas.
She let out a long, lingering sigh as she squeezed the giant sponge, allowing warm scented water to cascade over her bonelessly relaxed body. “Ooohh, that is so wonderful.” Her other hand hung limp over the side of the tub, and right now she didn’t give a damn that she dripped water on the tiled bathroom floor. “Ooohh, lovely. Heaven. Sheer Heaven.”
When the shrill, insistent noise of the telephone roused her from the sybaritic pleasure she was enjoying, Charity cursed herself for not remembering to have it within easy reach. “God damn it, woman, will you never learn? Take the phone with you when you have a bath.”
Closing her eyes once more, she steeled herself against the irritating sound, hoping it would simply go away, and she could return to her therapeutic relaxation. It didn’t, instead endlessly ringing, until she could take no more. “Okay…okay you win. Whoever you are, and whatever you have to say, it had better be good.”
Breaking the suction that stuck her to the tub, she pulled herself upright before stepping from the freestanding bath.
“Okay, I hear you. Give me a break will you.”
Almost falling as she slid like Bambi on ice across the wet tiled floor, Charity hastily shrugged on a fluffy robe as she raced toward the lounge.
She wrenched the phone from its cradle. “Yes!” She knew she sounded pissed, but wasn’t minded to beat herself up over it. After a hard day at school, she deserved her wind-down time. “Charity speaking.”
“It’s your mother.”
Right now she needed this conversation like she needed a hole in the head.
“Hello, Mother.” Not once in twenty-six years of life could she ever recall referring to her mother as Mum or Mom. It saddened her at times, but that was just the way things were—had always been. Sarah Harper was a duty mother. A woman who looked all but perfect to outsiders, but in reality was anything but. Sure, as a child Charity had always been well fed and immaculately turned out by both of her excessively strict parents, but neither of them were able to give their daughter what she needed most of all—love.
Charity didn’t blame them anymore, because as one year had merged into the next, she’d grown to realize that her birth parents were incapable of such life-enforcing emotion.
No, unbending discipline was what Elijah and Sarah Harper were best at. Their “God fearing” ways, making them unafraid to spare the rod on their own flesh and blood. Her mother was forty-four years old when she was born, and Charity often wondered if the age difference had exacerbated the mother-daughter disconnect.
When she was a child, God was everywhere in the Harper household, but not in a benevolent, loving way. No, Charity had been raised to fear the wrath of the Almighty, which often took the form of a studded strap against her bare ass. Needless to say, since growing up and moving away from home, she hadn’t once felt the urge to go to church.
For as long as she could remember, she’d always been attracted to the bad boys of this world. Her first taste of the excitement of rebellion being when Tommy Lawson refused to do what Miss Collins told him while in first grade. She’d instinctively gravitated toward him after that, much to her parents’ stern and ever-present disapproval.
With the phone still pressed to Charity’s ear, her mother had only uttered three simple words “It’s your mother,” yet already the lack of compassion that so characterized the woman was clearly evident.
“How are you, Mother?”
“Your father suggested that I contact you.”
There was that disconnect again. The inference being that had it been up to Sarah Harper, she wouldn’t have bothered to call her godless daughter in the first place.
“And how is Father?”
“Your father strongly suggests you should come home for the Easter vacation. We could all attend church together, just as we used to.”
Just as you forced me to, you mean.
Clearly, both her parents were still as unbending, unforgiving, and uncompromising as ever, and Charity had no desire or intention of returning to the parental strangulation that lay waiting for her in Freshwater, Missouri.
“I’m visiting friends, Mother. It’s been arranged for some time,” she lied.
“I see, Charity.”
She didn’t of course, because her mother was incapable of understanding what made her only child tick.
A strained silence then followed, and Charity became determined to stand her ground. Even into her early twenties, she’d have never dreamed of confronting her mother with an opinion of her own. However, she’d moved on in the last few years, and at twenty-six, she was now her own woman. “Tell me something, Mother, how did we reach the point, where neither of us can stand the sight of one another?” Even though she was over eight hundred miles away, she clearly heard Sarah Harper suck in a belligerent breath.
“Such blatant disrespect. You’ll go to hell, my girl. You were always a troublesome, wayward child.”
“So bad that you needed to beat the devil out of me, that’s right, isn’t it, Mother?”
“Yes, Satan was never far from you.”
“Bullshit…I was just normal kid, who longed to love and be loved by her parents. But do you want to know something, Mother…your sickening piety drove me straight into the arms of Satan.”
“Oh yes, you’re one of the Devil’s disciples, all right, but I don’t blame myself, because your father and I did everything we could to keep you from his evil clutches.”
Charity shook her head in disbelief. “Can you see how deluded you sound?”
A familiar sneer made its way down the line.
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