Until Joe by Smith CP

Author:Smith, CP
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boom Factory Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

Good to know I’m not in this alone

THAT MORNING SEEMED like a lifetime ago. After years of dealing with my father and the hurt he’d caused me, I’d still been surprised and ashamed of his behavior. It had been a long time since he’d brought me low, but thanks to Joe’s strength, I was standing on firmer ground. We’d left Folly Beach right after our showdown and subsequent tumble between the sheets. Joe was hell-bent on putting distance between my father and our final destination: The Outer Banks in North Carolina.

When he told me where we were headed, I immediately made a phone call to a good friend. She and her family had a cozy hideaway on the Outer Banks, specifically Cape Hatteras, a low-key stretch off the long barrier island that skirted the North Carolina coast. Cape Hatteras was void of large franchises and high-rises, as was most of the Outer Banks. If you wanted food, you ate at quaint pubs and restaurants in one of the many villages along the coastline. You could spend days in Hatteras with nothing but a good book and not be bored because of the peacefulness and lack of activity that surrounded you. The narrow stretch of coastline went on for miles without a single building in some places. Just sand and sea. But the villages along the coastal banks had plenty of shopping and recreations to keep you from getting bored if lazy days in the sun weren’t your thing.

One of my favorite activities on the Outer Banks was horseback riding on the shores near sunset. I didn’t know if Joe rode, but I was determined to do so while we were there.

I pointed to the three-story, stilted beach house that abutted the ocean. Decks on every level, the shake-shingled home lacked nothing, and the stretch of island Beachcombers, my friend’s name for her vacation home, sat on had very few cottages nearby. The closest neighbor was a good distance away, so we were virtually alone. My friend, Mayra, always kept a stocked house since they spent most of the summer there. But she and her husband were currently in Italy touring, so I knew the house would be open. One call to her housekeeper, Livy, who’d taken care of Mayra and her family for going on twenty years, explaining about my need for escape from my father—who she knew all too well and despised—and I had the location of the spare key and the security code with instructions to use anything in the home we needed.

When I climbed off the bike, I couldn’t stand upright. Joe might have made me feel twenty again, but my body didn’t agree. We’d been on the road for more than seven hours, stopping for the bathroom as needed, and food, of course, but no matter how young I felt in my head, my body was screaming at me.

I glanced up at all the stairs we had to climb to get to the main level of the house and inwardly groaned.

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