Because Forever (The Avenue Book 2) Read online

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

  Copyright © 2018 by Beth Cranford

  No part of this work may be used, stored, reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations for review purposes as permitted by law.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold 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. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Design by Shanoff Designs

  Copy Editing by Missy Borucki

  Manufactured in the United States

  Contents

  Synopsis

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Another Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by B. Cranford:

  Synopsis

  Everyone should have a chance at forever . . .

  Twenty-Five Years. That’s how long Odette Peterson called Austin Andrews her best friend. Until he let his mouth ruin it—in more ways than one.

  Five Minutes. That’s all it took for their friendship to fall apart, leaving her heart a little broken and her life a little emptier.

  One Hour. That’s the amount of time she agrees to give him to try and find his way back into her good graces. Not that she thinks for even one minute that it might work.

  It won’t, because . . .

  Forever. That’s what Odette’s looking for. Someone to spend her life with; someone who’ll see her as more than just one of the guys. And there’s not a thing Austin can do to stop her.

  Except maybe tell her that he loves her . . .

  For Charles, my best friend and my forever.

  Prologue

  “So, Mike McGee asked me out today,” Odie said, stuffing her wallet and keys into the sports bag draped over her shoulder. “And I said—”

  Austin placed a hand over her mouth to cut her off, then gaped at her for a full minute, trying to let the words sink in.

  Shaking his head and lowering his hand, he finally managed a response. “If you tell me you said yes, babe, I’m going to have to, I don’t know, book you to see a shrink. Meatball McGee. Really?”

  “Yes, really. Wait, are you surprised that he asked me out?” She tilted her head and looked intensely interested in his answer. “Or something else? Like that someone asked me out at all, perhaps?” Her eyes narrowed and his brain-light flashed red, practically screaming, “Abort!” and encouraging him to do . . . something.

  Unfortunately, something didn’t much help. “Well, it’s . . . I mean—”

  “Just because you don’t see me as a woman—”

  Austin cut her off with his mouth. Not words, but with the insistent press of his lips to hers, in an attempt to prove what she seemed to willfully overlook.

  He hadn’t planned to kiss her, not really. The fact that his mouth was on hers was both surprising and incredible. Surprising because he’d thought about it so often. Incredible because it was Odie.

  It might have been a shock to her, but it was to him, too.

  But the thing was . . . he saw her as a woman. He’d seen her as one for years, and yet, she’d never seen him as anything more than Austin Andrews, the discarded son of parents who chose their religion over their children, and who’d once told her—when he was ten years old, mind you—that he’d never want to kiss her because she was Odie. His Odie.

  It was awkward, their lips touching but not moving. The warmth of hers seeping into his, reminding him that this was their first kiss—maybe their last if she didn’t get on board soon—and it was going badly.

  So, so badly.

  Finally, he decided to follow through on the kiss he’d initiated, moving his lips softly on hers, encouraging her involvement and praying to God that she’d kiss him back.

  Please, let her kiss me back.

  He felt like a teenager again. No, younger than that. A not-quite-teenager experiencing his first kiss and knowing absolutely nothing about what he was supposed to do. Even his thought processes had regressed until “kiss me back, kiss me back, kiss me back” was all that filled his increasingly empty mind.

  She did. Finally, she did, her tongue brushing across his lower lip, giving him permission to open and taste her properly.

  Properly. For the first time.

  “Garfield,” he whispered, pulling back to look at her flushed cheeks, her reddened lips, her flickering navy blue eyes.

  Such pretty eyes.

  But the flickering stopped the moment his long-used endearment registered. Why? he wondered, moving back in to kiss her again, and again, and again.

  “Stop.”

  “What?” His own eyes, which he didn’t realize he’d closed as he’d leaned in to take her lips again, flew open. “Why?”

  “I’m going on a date with Mike—”

  “Meatball? You’re going on a date with Meatball McGee? You’re smarter than that, Odette. He’s a fucking idiot, whose balls are the size of grapes and who only wants you because you’re, like, the only person in this gym he hasn’t made a pass at yet. Don’t be an idiot, Odie, come on.”

  Okay, so this whole conversation wasn’t going to go down as one of his finest moments. He was smarter than he was acting, and even though he’d called her an idiot—which he didn’t mean and didn’t believe—there was only one true idiot here.

  Himself.

  He had let his jealousy get the better of him.

  Fuck. And then he’d let his anger do the same.

  Chapter One

  Several Weeks Later

  Odette Peterson was three sheets to the wind.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her coffee table, with cherry red boxing gloves on her hands and a glass of wine precariously cupped between them, she was blinking madly and wishing for . . .

  Austin.

  No, she wasn’t going to say his name or think his name or spell his name or anything. Not anything. Because she was mad at him.

  Fit to be tied.

  Up in arms.

  Seeing red.

  Well, the red she was seeing was possibly the gloves, the wine or maybe her hair, reflected back at her in the window that looked out over a currently empty street.

  Whatever, she was pissed at him. Still.

  And just to make sure that anger stayed at the right temperature to stop her from caving and calling him—her best friend since she was seven years old and he was eight—she decided to listen to the voicemail he’d left the day after he’d ruined everything.

  But first, she had to put the wine down, remove the boxing gloves and . . . something else. But what?

  Pick up the phone,
Odette. She nodded her drunken thanks to the voice in her head. And then, having negotiated all three steps with only one near-fumble of her glass and one slurred curse word, she cued up the message.

  “Odie, come on. You’re being ridiculous and you need to talk to me. All I said was that you were better than him”—

  She paused the message with a wobbly-but-righteous tap of her finger to the screen before giving Aussie a piece of her mind. “You stupid idiot, you didn’t say I was better than him. You said I was smarter than that and acting like a dumb girl.” She scoffed. Then added an eye roll for good measure. And if the eye roll was so pronounced she swayed in place, then fine. That just meant she was committed to her anger.

  A second righteous tap and Aussie’s voice filled her ear again. “And you are. I didn’t mean to upset you, Garfield, so just call me back. You know you want to forgive me. And you know I’m right about Meatball McGee.”

  “His name is Mike, not Meatball. And you’re not right. You’re, you’re, you’re–calling me?” She stared at the screen of her phone, a picture of Austin—eyes crossed, tongue poking out, sandy blond curls flopping all over the place—and decided she was going to answer.

  For the first time in weeks, she was going to talk to him.

  The call connected after the seventh ring—not that Austin was counting or anything. It was one ring away from going to voicemail again and he was already mentally preparing his grovel when he heard her voice.

  “You know, you’re not right,” she greeted him, a looseness to her words that told him she’d been drinking. Probably red wine. She hated it, so only drank it when she wanted to get drunk, because she knew she’d drink slower and not overindulge—strange logic, but Odie logic.

  “Garfield,” he breathed, relief making his shoulders drop and his heart slow.

  For the first time in forever, it wasn’t beating angrily in his chest at the idea of her ignoring him again.

  “I just wanted to date someone who saw me as a girl and not a–not a”—she hiccuped, an adorable sound that made him want to rush over to her place and make sure she was okay—“cat who likes lasagna.”

  He laughed at that, her indignant tone at being called Garfield—a nickname he’d bestowed on her as kids when he’d seen the cartoon for the first time and realized there was a dog called Odie.

  What had started as a joke had become a term of endearment that he couldn’t give up. Not after twenty-five years.

  “I know you’re a girl, Odie. But you have to admit, you do love lasagna.”

  “I am a girl. I have boobs and a pussy and needs and you’re the idiot and I–I–I’m gonna be sick.” She hiccuped again and he heard her deep, slow breath in. She was trying to settle her stomach.

  “Odie, let me come over. Please.” He wanted—no, needed—to see her. This stupid fight or grudge or whatever was getting out of hand.

  “No.”

  “Come on. I’ll only stay long enough to explain and make you love me again. Two, three hours, max.” He said it with a smile, sure that if he could just get her to see him, it wouldn’t be five minutes before she was his best girl again.

  Best friend, that’s what he meant.

  “No.”

  “I miss you.” And wasn’t that the truth? For weeks—no, months—he’d been trying to get her to talk to him. At first, he’d stopped by her place, only to leave with a bruised ego, and foot, when she’d slammed the door in his face, crushing his foot in the process. After that encounter, he’d taken to leaving her endless voice messages, yet only one had garnered a response.

  He’d messaged her to tell her that Ashton, his sister, had been attacked in the parking lot of The Avenue, the bar he and Ash owned. He’d asked her to please, please come back to work because he needed her.

  The swiftness with which she responded belied how worried she was about Ashton, how much she cared about his sister. Her text reply, however, had been brutal in its honesty.

  Odie: I’ll cover her shifts and help out, because I love her and I don’t want her to worry. Not for you. So don’t talk to me or touch me or even acknowledge me. Got it?

  Unwritten was the final request—don’t kiss me again. But fuck if that was an endless challenge.

  No one was as kissable as Odette Peterson.

  And for the past few weeks, no one hated him more.

  “I miss you, too,” she replied, startling him from his memories. “But I’m so mad at you. How dare you? Huh? How dare you call him dumb one minute and kiss me the next? How dare you ruin it?”

  It, he knew, was their friendship—one that spanned more than two decades and all kinds of highs and lows.

  “Odie,” he choked out, hating that she was still so mad at him. She’d never been able to stay mad at him before, so why now? What was so different now? “Let me come over. Please.”

  “Okay. No. Yeah, fine.” She grumbled a little off to the side, a habit she’d had for as long as he’d known her—turning her head just far enough away from the speaker that her words became inaudible, but not far enough that you didn’t know she was fussing about something. Usually him. “One hour. That’s all.”

  Thank God. “I’m on my way.”

  Chapter Two

  Odie stood, looking down at the discarded boxing gloves, the two empty bottles of red wine and the mostly empty glass that sat beside them. Should I tidy up? It was a fleeting thought, one that was dispatched almost as quickly as it struck her.

  After all, it was Austin coming over. Not the Queen of England, or even Meatball McGee. Austin Andrews, former best friend, current mortal enemy.

  Kind of.

  They’d be more mortal if he’d get the memo that she was feuding with him and wasn’t interested in his smiles or his jokes or his pretty curls she wanted to tug on just as an excuse to touch them.

  Touch him.

  Why did he have to kiss her one minute and call her a stupid girl the next?

  Why were boys so dumb?

  For crying out loud, she was in her thirties and still dealing with playground shit that she should have left behind two decades and at least three regrettable hairstyles ago.

  The knock on her door saved her from another minute or two or twenty spent mentally cursing Austin and, as she made her way past the raised counter that separated her kitchen from her living area, she steeled her shoulders.

  She’d said one hour, only because he’d caught her at a weak moment, and that was all he was getting. And then, she was moving on.

  She didn’t need him, or his friendship, or his anything anymore.

  She nodded decisively and took one last fortifying breath before opening her front door and giving him admittance.

  “Oh, shit, Odie.”

  Lingerie.

  Black, lacy, silky, flimsy lingerie.

  Creamy, smooth, soft-looking skin.

  Odette.

  Oh shit.

  Austin cleared his throat at the same moment Odie seemed to realize that she’d opened her front door in next to nothing, her hands flying up to cover herself. Except she was drunk and uncoordinated, her stiff, splayed hands moving up and down over all that exposed skin, trying to decide what to cover.

  She looked like the World’s Worst Mime doing the robot dance.

  The World’s Worst Sexiest Mime doing the hottest version of the robot dance he’d ever seen. Would ever see.

  Down boy, he instructed his cock, who saw Odie, her flushed, milky skin, her blue eyes wide with surprise and was already standing at attention.

  “Can I—” Lick you all over? Touch you? Kiss that mole on your left shoulder that’s been taunting me since I was fifteen and you wore that shirt with only one shoulder? “Come in?”

  She nodded, finally settling her hands on her stomach. “Yeah–uh.”

  He crossed the threshold and turned, taking a minute to breathe deeply and get himself under control. He disguised it by closing and locking the door, but actually, he was reminding himself that he was th
ere to apologize, grovel, beg forgiveness.

  Not slam his lips on hers again.

  Not pluck the thin black strap that held her lingerie-dress-top thing up and see if it would snap.

  Nope, he wasn’t here for that. And besides, if he touched her, that material wouldn’t be the only thing snapping. His control would poof, disappear, too.

  “I’m going to change.”

  He turned to face her—to beg her not to change, to let him take a photo of her dressed, or undressed, like that, so if she decided not to forgive him, he would have something to look at when he was thinking of her and touching himself at night.

  Jacking himself to memories of their one kiss was great and all, but a visual reminder of her would be even better.

  Surely she’d take sympathy enough on him to allow that. Right?

  “I’ll be . . .” He pointed around the apartment, not at any one thing, because his brain had officially short-circuited and words and plans and actions and . . . anything really . . . were hard to come by.

  Hard. Come. Odie. Sit.

  Four words were circling around and around in his head—making him so distracted that it wasn’t until Odie walked back into the room, a loose NYU T-shirt and bright blue leggings now covering her, that Austin realized he was still standing in the entryway of her apartment.

  “I need water,” was all she said as she glided into her kitchen, her movements graceful even though he knew she’d been drinking. “Go sit down, would you?”