(3 Book Box Set) "Romancing The Bull Rider" & "Craved by The Cowboy" & "Cruise Away with Him"

  Chapter One

  Thomas Wolfe believed that, ‘you can’t go home again’. He obviously hadn’t ever been to my home; because, in ten years, precious little had changed. In fact, my parents hadn’t altered the décor of their house in over two decades. My bedroom was unchanged since the day I left for college. My twin bed still had the predominantly pink patchwork quilt laid on it. The cream drapes hung in the window. My dressing table still had rosettes, for gymnastics and horseback riding, placed neatly around the mirror. It was the room of an adolescent girl.

  So, the fact of the matter is, when I finally accepted the cold hard truth; after three months of searching for another job and desperately trying to make ends meet, I did go home again. And it was as if I’d stepped back in time.

  Mom and Dad professed they were happy to help me until I got back on my feet, but they were also predictably self-righteous, and I suspected it took everything within them to not scream, ‘I told you so’ from the rooftops.

  “Life in the city can be tough,” Mom said. “Your dad and I feared this might happen.”

  Breathing deeply before responding, I tried not to start an argument. “You had a premonition about Blue Rock laying off a hundred people?” I murmured.

  Turning from the bread dough she was mixing, she brushed her floury hands on her white apron. “These things happen,” she said tartly. She was only twenty-one when she’d given birth to me. Now, as she started to nudge fifty, she looked pretty good for her age. She was slender, just as she’d been throughout my lifetime, and still had most of her hair color, with just a hint of gray peaking at the temples.

  “You’re right, Mom,” I replied, trying to focus on the laptop that sat before me. “They do.”

  She continued to lecture me about how I should have been satisfied to get a job locally. I didn’t see the sense in arguing with her. It seemed fruitless to point out that I’d been living and working successfully in New York City for just under seven years. She wouldn’t have listened. In her opinion, living in the city was the surest way to ruin my life. So, while she relished telling me that I’d made the wrong decision, she was secretly glad that I was back in Woodbridge, Connecticut. It was a sleepy, affluent town, a bubble (or so my parents believed) that kept out all the nastiness of the world.

  And God knows they tried to keep me away from the “world”. At thirteen, I attended Sacred Heart Academy in Hamden. It was an all-girls Catholic school, which offered the obsessively religious, guilt-laden education that my mom in particular was eager for me to receive. Mom and Dad were both devout Catholics, as were their parents. They expected me to follow suit and become a God-fearing woman, who retained her innocence until marriage. They viewed sex as nothing more than a means of procreation.

  Sending me to an all-girls school was intended to help on that front, to keep me away from temptation and ensure that I didn’t create temptation in any young man. It worked, at least for a while. By the time I left home for college, I was socially awkward around boys and artless in my conversations with them. I also learned to always be suspicious of their motives. However, I didn’t buy into all the Catholic Church had taught me. Gradually, I stopped attending mass on Sundays. Then, I met a guy who pulled me even further from the faith my parents had so desperately wanted me to follow.

  Greg was a physics major, a staunch atheist, and one of the most handsome men I’d ever met. He talked to me about the vastness of the universe, and convinced me that creation myths have always existed in some form.

  “Organized religions are a human’s way of trying to understand what seems incomprehensible,” he would tell me. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

  My own doubts, which I suspect had simmered under the surface for at least a few years by that point, were stoked by his persuasive arguments. He was incredibly intelligent, charming, and witty. Falling in love with him was ridiculously easy. It was a naïve first love, the kind most of my peers had experienced at sixteen. But it was a fervent, fierce kind of love; one that made me feel that I would do anything for him. However, there was one thing he wanted that I shied away from for a time, not because I didn’t want to give it, but because I was scared. Thankfully, he was much more understanding than I could have hoped for. Slowly but surely, he chipped away at my insecurities.

  After nine months of dating, and at the age of twenty-one, I took the final step of defiance against the religious dogma my parents had forced upon me.

  Having received absolutely no sex education, my first time was exactly what you might expect: a little clumsy, painful because I was so tense, and, I dare say, it didn’t rock Greg’s world, either.

  Afterward, I felt a bizarre mixture of emancipation, coupled with an overriding sense of guilt. Whether I believed what my parents believed or not, I’d let them down. I knew they’d be terribly disappointed if they ever found out.

  My relationship with Greg continued for another year after that, but things were strained. We were having sex regularly during that time, but I can’t say I ever really enjoyed it. My mind was always drifting to the things I’d been taught. As much as I wanted to disregard it all, I couldn’t—not entirely. Eventually, once we’d drifted so far apart that neither of us could ignore it any more, we parted amicably.

  That year, we both graduated; he moved to California and I headed to New York, where I’d already secured an intern position at Blue Rock. I moved up quickly, putting in more hours than my fellow trainees. By the time I was twenty-five, I was the fund manager’s assistant and I was content.

  My love life was sparse and I’d had two boyfriends since Greg. Neither relationship lasted longer than a few months, and just like before, the sex was a disappointment to me. Frustratingly, I knew the problem was mine and not the men I chose. Even masturbating, I found it hard to reach an orgasm, and I would feel misplaced shame at the act. However, sexual gratification quickly became the least of my concerns.

  Blue Rock suffered a major hit in the economy crash, and I was one of its casualties. At first, I was disappointed, but not overtly concerned. After all, I thought, I’d be able to get another job without too much hassle. But as the weeks turned to months and every application was either ignored or responded to with a curt decline, I started to panic.

  Despite attempts to pinch pennies and beg a little leniency from my landlord, I eventually had to admit defeat and give up my apartment.

  That’s when I found myself back home in my parents’ house, sitting at the kitchen table trawling through job sites while my Mom made a batch of bread from scratch and still found the time to lecture me about the mistakes I’d made.

  “So, you will be coming to mass tomorrow?” she asked suddenly, ripping me from my melancholy thoughts.

  “Hmm?” I replied, lifting my head as I realized I hadn’t been listening to a word she said.

  “You’ll be coming to mass,” she said, this time it was phrased as an expectation rather than a question.

  “Oh,” I mumbled. “I don’t know…” I hedged slowly. “I…umm. I don’t really think so,” I eventually uttered.

  “Mmm,” she hummed discontentedly.

  “Mom,” I began with a soft sigh. “We’ve been over this. I told you, I haven’t been for a while and I just…I don’t feel it’s for me.”

  “Jesus is for everybody, Melissa,” she tossed back at me, turning her back to attend to the beeping oven.

  “You know Michael hasn’t been to church for years, either,” I sullenly responded. “You don’t give him the third degree over it.”

  Michael, my younger brother, stopped attending church when he was eighteen. By the age of twenty-six, he was living in Florida, had had a string of girlfriends, many of whom my parents knew about, and was ‘living in sin’ with his current lover, Kate. None of this seemed to bother our mom. Apparently, it was perfectly natural for a man to ‘sow some wild oats’ and since none of his girlfriends had been ’good Catholic girls’, that meant it was acceptable.

/>   “He’s still young,” Mom told me. “He’ll come around once he finds the right woman and starts to think about marriage and children.”

  The youngest of the family, Livia, was in her junior year of college and wanted to go on to med school. She, as far as I knew, still shared our parents’ beliefs and had even talked about joining a medical mission. She was, therefore, the ‘golden girl’.

  “All I ask,” Mom sighed, “is that you come. Just listen to what Father Perry has to say.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I grumbled, picking my laptop off the table and retreating to the privacy of my old bedroom.

  I couldn’t bring myself to attend church with my folks, which led to more lectures; some from my mom, some from my dad, and some in which they tag-teamed me. My dad was not only concerned for my immortal soul; he was worried about the here and now.

  “You need to think about marriage,” he urged. “Who’s going to take care of you if you haven’t got a husband?”

  “I’ve managed okay so far,” I bit back.

  “Well…” he shrugged, one eyebrow arching.

  “This is a blip,” I told him sharply. “I will get a job and get out of your hair.”

  “It’s not about getting out of our hair,” he argued. “I just want you to have a man you can depend on, so you won’t experience any more of these ‘blips’. Besides,” he added smiling, “don’t you want to have children?”

  “I don’t know Dad,” I huffed. “Maybe one day.”

  “You’re not getting any younger.”

  “I’m not even thirty yet, Dad!”

  These debates with my parents would go around and around in circles, neither of them ever seeming to understand my point of view.