The Storm Series, page 14
I could taste the copper dripping into my mouth as I bit the hell out of my lip to keep from giving myself away. His words hurt, and I couldn’t pretend that they didn’t. Especially, since words like that weren’t ever supposed to be said by him.
“It’s the reason that I’ve stayed with her for so long,” he went on, talking crap about me to whoever was on the other end of the phone. My bet was that it was his best friend, Reggie. I’d only met a couple of Lance’s friends, and Reggie had been one of them. If he was asking for advice, it’d be from Reggie and not Harold. “I mean…her body is outrageous. Plus, she’s a people pleaser. She doesn’t say no to anything, Reg. What guy in his right mind gives that up?”
Tears started forming behind my eyes, and the hurt was real. I’d been with Lance for over a year, and he was talking about me like I’d been nothing more than his own private sex slave. No talk about how I did everything that I could to make sure that his life was easy and peaceful. No talk about how much I cared about him. It was all about my body and how weird I was.
It also sucked that he believed that I was such a ‘people pleaser’ that I would let a man do things to my body that I wasn’t comfortable with simply to make him happy. That was absurd. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I enjoyed sex, and it wasn’t because I was easily manipulated. Everyone had their own sexual likes and dislikes, and I just happened to enjoy the freedom to go with what felt right in the moment. My sexual appetites had nothing to do with being anyone’s doormat.
“Look, I gotta go, but I’ll call you later tonight,” Lance told him. “I need to find a way to break up with her and hope that she’ll still let me fuck her. I’m torn, dude, and it’s a real dilemma.” Lance laughed at whatever it was that Reggie said, and my stomach clenched again. “Yeah, okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
I stayed where I was, prepared to face what I’d just heard. While I might be weird, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have any pride or self-respect. While I might prefer to keep the peace over arguing, that didn’t mean that I lacked a spine. While I might care for Lance as my boyfriend, that didn’t mean that I didn’t also care for myself.
His footsteps automatically came to a halt when he saw me standing just outside the bedroom door. Luckily, we didn’t live together, so this wasn’t going to be some drawn-out breakup. Sure, I had some stuff at his place, but nothing that couldn’t be thrown away or replaced.
“Gy…Gypsy…uh, what are you doing?” His hand went up to rub the back of his neck. “How long have you…uh, you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” I replied, happy that my voice sounded strong. There was no hiding the tears that I had wiped away, but this was still a win as far as I was concerned.
“Look-”
I threw my hand up to stop him. “Just don’t, Lance,” I told him. “Just don’t.”
He sighed, knowing that he’d been caught. “If it’s any consolation, I’m sorry that you had to hear that,” he muttered, his eyes contradicting his words. He wasn’t sorry at all, no matter what he was telling me right now.
“Just get out, Lance,” I replied quietly. “Seriously.”
His brown eyes raked my person from head to toe, and disgust slithered down my spine at how I hadn’t been able to see it before. “Such a fucking shame…” he muttered.
I straightened my back before saying, “If you don’t want me to bash your head in with my Tanzanite crystal, then I suggest you get the hell out of my house now.”
Lance’s eyes widened. “Okay, okay…Jesus…”
Yeah, not all situations called for peace.
Chapter 1
Gypsy – (One Year Later)~
With a smile on my face, I bagged the lovely necklace, inserted one of the store’s cards, then handed the bag to the handsome man that was smiling back at me.
“Thank you,” he said. “She’s going to love it.”
“I hope she does,” I replied. “If not, she can always come in and exchange it for something else.”
“Oh, no,” he quickly rushed out. “This is perfect. Again, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everything you did.”
With my smile still in place, I said, “All in a day’s work.”
“Thanks again.”
I just nodded as he left the shop, the bag in his hand, another happy customer that I hoped would stay happy. That was the focus of all my sales; I wanted people to be happy. Life was hard enough, and people were nasty enough, that happiness was quickly becoming a rare commodity in the world. Everyone wanted to magnify everyone else’s misery to make themselves feel better about their own wretchedness, and it was a vicious cycle that I wanted no part of.
At twenty-six, I wasn’t like everyone else. I hadn’t been raised to believe that you had to get married and have children, or that you had to chase money. I hadn’t been raised to judge people or their situations. I hadn’t been raised to always choose myself over others. I hadn’t been raised to fight and claw my way to the top.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
My parents, Vernon and Amity Banks, had raised me to love life. They had raised me to believe in something bigger than myself, and to always choose good over evil. My father had always been a simple farmer, and my mother had always been his perfect housewife. Now, that wasn’t to say that she was the perfect housewife, because she wasn’t. However, she was the perfect housewife for my father.
The crux of it all, though?
My father had been fortunate enough to have had an inheritance that made his leisure life as a farmer possible. While he worked hard and was dedicated to his craft, he didn’t need the money, so whenever production costs rose, his prices didn’t. He had a handful of people that worked for him, and there were always holiday bonuses, personal days off, etc. Happy with already having more than enough, Vernon Banks gave back and chose happiness whenever he could.
Always happiness.
As for Mom, she tended to everyone around the farm when Dad couldn’t, only she wasn’t really any good at it. Dad had a farmhand whose job was to follow my mother around all day and fix whatever she broke. However, she was just as happy as my father, and theirs was a marriage that should be envied by all. My father loved my mother, and she loved him back just as deeply.
So, free from the pressures of society and free from caring about what other people thought, my parents had raised me with that same kind of unabashed freedom. With no siblings to share in the affection, I’d been raised to expect people to treat me kindly and compassionately, and I’d also been raised to treat people the same way.
Still, it wasn’t always easy, no matter how hard I tried. Kids were relentless when faced with things or people that they didn’t understand, and I’d always been one of those kids that no one had understood or had taken the time to understand. My parents had named me Gypsy Lilac Banks, so that hadn’t helped any, either. It also hadn’t helped that I’d fallen in love with the idea of happiness.
So, after years of enduring the cruelty of other kids, the harshness of teenage love, and the nastiness of unhappy people, I was still me, and I still peddled happiness. I hadn’t let the trials and tribulations of life change the person that I was, and I hoped to keep it that way.
Looking around the shop, I couldn’t help but smile. When I had graduated from high school, college had been an option, but it hadn’t been for me. My parents had allowed me to travel for two years, and they’d been the best years of my life. The experience had been something which had led me to where I was today. Knowing that an industrial job would never be for me, I’d spoken with my dad after my travels, and he had invested in this shop for me. I’d been running it for six years now, and it was my sanctuary. It was a sweet reminder that I wasn’t the only person out there that chose happiness. My shop was a constant reminder that not all people were miserable. I saw hope in the people that came into my store. I saw people looking for something more than what they’d been told to settle for. This shop was about chasing your happiness, no matter who told you that it was impossible.
Life was all about possibilities.
The only problem?
I sucked at math.
Having always been steered towards the artistic side of life, things like math, budgets, and taxes had always escaped me. While I wasn’t at the point where the IRS was ready to shut the doors, I couldn’t keep asking my father to bail me out. Granted, he’d only had to do it once, and he’d been more than happy to do it, but it still hadn’t felt right.
When I’d opened the shop six years ago, I had named it Possibilities, and I had been eager but naïve. Now, that wasn’t to say that I was stupid, because I wasn’t. In fact, I was far from it. I just lacked the discipline to care about balance sheets and stuff like that. I wasn’t interested in the business side of things, and that wasn’t good for a business owner.
There was also the fact that people liked to judge me on my looks, so it was hard to ask for help sometimes. I was only five-foot-two, so I was petite, but that was the only petite thing about me. I had what my mother always called a voluptuous figure, which just meant that I had huge breasts and thick hips. Normally, that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but when you paired those assets with my blonde hair and blue eyes, a lot of people mistook me for a bimbo. Add in the fact that I owned a health and healing shop that pushed the use of crystals, aura cleansing, and even had a section for tarot cards…well, I was very rarely given credit for any intelligence.
Still, I didn’t let it get me down.
I couldn’t.
Luckily, my best friend, Polo Oatley, was always there to lift me up whenever I started feeling down. Polo was a year older than me at twenty-seven, and with his dark blonde hair and soulful brown eyes, he looked like you could tell him all your darkest secrets without any worry of judgement. Since he was a nutritionist and gym trainer, that was a plus in his line of work. He was also six-foot-one of absolute hotness, so that also helped.
I’d met Polo when I had signed up for a gym membership, and he had killed my dreams of slimming down. Since my breasts and hips were genetic and not fat, he’d been honest about exercise and rice cakes not helping me out. His honesty had been refreshing in a world where people usually cared more about the sale, and we had become best friends after that.
Polo was also the only person that I knew in the city of Sweeney. My parents lived two towns over, and this move had been my attempt at being grown, though it wasn’t working out too well. Yeah, I had ended up paying my father back, but I still felt embarrassed by having had to ask for help in the first place. My world travels were supposed to have made me wiser, but I guess not.
It was also the second week in November, and I knew that I needed to start getting my books in order. I could no longer do my taxes myself and still hope to keep Possibilities open to the public. I had a mess on my hands, and I knew it. I also wished that I cared more than I actually did. I wanted to be in a panic, but I was more scared of turning into a person that cared about money more than people. So what if I gave discounts all the time? So what if I helped a customer that didn’t have enough money? So what if someone accidentally broke something?
“I’m here!”
I looked up to see Rocky weaving her way through the store. “I see that.”
Rocky Leeds was a college student that worked part-time at Possibilities. She was my afternoon help, and that’s when I usually did my best to tackle inventories, payroll, or balance the books. Granted, Rocky was my only employee, but I still wanted to make sure that she got paid correctly for her time at work. She was a perfect addition to Possibilities, and I didn’t want to lose her until I absolutely had to.
Dropping her backpack on the floor behind the counter, she asked, “Do you need me to go grab any dinner before I start my shift?”
I shook my head. “Not unless you’re hungry,” I answered. “I have some leftovers upstairs.”
Also, luckily for me, my father had purchased this entire building for me when I’d told him about opening up my own shop, so I lived upstairs, which was convenient. I was also renting-to-own from my father, though he couldn’t care less. Still, it was one thing to accept help, it was quite another to take advantage of someone else’s blessings.
Rocky’s hazel eyes glittered down at me. “Are you sure? I’m thinking Tina’s.”
“Get me the enchilada dinner, please,” I said, weakening like a limp noodle.
Rocky just laughed, and I really did love the girl.
Chapter 2
Roark~
Most people believed that I had purchased this building because of its location, the price, or the sheer structural beauty of the place, but they were wrong. Though the price had been a steal, a foreclosure that had landed on my lap, and the location was a commercial resident’s wet dream with its corner lot and own street-accessible parking lot, I couldn’t care less about either blessing. Yeah, the colonial structure was another thing to be grateful for, making the office look inviting and professional, but that still hadn’t been the selling point for me.
It’d been the fire escape.
Storm Independent Auditing was located in a three-story building that had a fire escape that spanned the entire length of the building. The fire escape started on the roof, then hit each floor coming down until you met the sidewalk. However, it wasn’t your standard fire escape. Unlike the millions that you saw all over the town of Sweeney, Colorado, this fire escape had balconies that spanned the entire length of the building, and each balcony was positioned underneath the floor windows, allowing someone to smash a window to get free, but also have a place to land once they climbed out. Yeah, there was only one set of stairs, but I’d rather be outside a burning building than trapped inside it, no matter what.
So, thanks to this unique design, it was the perfect place for me to take my smoke breaks. No matter which floor I was on, I could step outside and pollute my lungs without needing to look for a ‘designated’ smoking area. Plus, I didn’t have time to look for ‘acceptable’ places to have a cigarette, especially during tax season.
Inhaling the nicotine, I thought about how I had let my cursed youth lead me down this path, and I really was a glutton for punishment. I mean, why else would I have chosen to become a CPA? Only crazy people signed up for this shit.
Growing up, my parents, Julius and Chanel Storm, had been good about letting us choose our own path in life. Dad had been and still was a police officer, and he’d done his best to keep us in line. Mom had worked in a hair salon, teaching us how to chase what made us happy, and when Ripley had finally started making serious money with his snowboarding, he had invested in helping Mom get her own beauty shop, and I was lucky enough to be able to say that my parents were both living their dreams.
Now, as for my older brother, Ripley, he was only a year older than me and a professional snowboarder. He’d tried the whole school thing, but an office job hadn’t been for him. So, immediately upon getting his engineering degree from college, he had tossed it in a drawer, then had gone on to try his hand at winter sports, and it hadn’t taken him long to become one of the most famous faces of the winter games. Ripley had endorsements coming out of his ears, and though considered old by sports’ standards, he was still kicking ass on the slopes. I’d lost count of how many medals and championships that were under his belt, and if it wasn’t enough that he was one of the best, his best friend, Phineas Moore, was right there with him.
Ripley was also married to my best friend, Junie Baylor. We’d met in college and had connected in a way that I’d never had with anyone else. Junie was one of the best people around, and for whatever reason, we had clicked as best friends, but that was it. I’d started to see her as a little sister only, and there’d been no going back after that. Though her marrying Ripley had finally made her my family by law, Junie had become family long ago. I should probably also get used to calling her Junie Storm now.
I could still remember when I’d first introduced her to Ripley. Cupid had struck him with a love-at-first-sight arrow, but because I’d warned him off her, he had stayed away for five years before finally making his move. Granted, he had asked my permission first, but I still wondered if he would have gone after Junie, even if I hadn’t given my blessing. My brother loved that girl more than his own life, and there were times when I regretted keeping them from each other for so long. Had it not been for my bit of overprotectiveness where Junie was concerned, she and Ripley would have been married ages ago. Nevertheless, they were married now, and I couldn’t be happier for them.
As for me, I didn’t have time for a serious relationship. People believed that CPAs were only busy during tax season, but that was far from the truth. While I did have a lot of seasonal clients, I handled my mother’s books and Ripley’s, and though my mother’s financial picture was rather straightforward, Ripley’s wasn’t because he didn’t have a steady income like most people. His income came in all kinds of different forms, and I did my best to make sure that Ripley’s future was as secure as my own. He wasn’t always going to be able to compete at his level, so now was the time to make his money work for him. Plus, my brother was very adamant about being able to support his wife.
As I thought about my brother and best friend, I never worried about how Ripley treated her, either. He knew that I had certain…expectations of him, and he also knew that I’d do my best to kick his ass if he ever made Junie cry. It was also fair to say that Junie would think twice before telling me if Ripley ever made her cry because of my issues, which was probably why I was still single.
Though my parents had raised Ripley and me to be decent human beings, and though Dad had done his best to teach us the proper way to treat women, I’d gotten an extra dosage of testosterone somewhere along the way. While Dad and Ripley were the epitome of what a gentleman should be, I was a bit more…absolute in my views about women. I had very strong opinions on how women should be treated, and I’d never been shy about voicing those opinions.
