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    In Love With the Enemy: A Short Story
    In Love With the Enemy: A Short Story
    In Love With the Enemy: A Short Story
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    In Love With the Enemy: A Short Story

    By Ann Major

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In this short story lonely, high-flying business-woman Kate Karlington is set to repossess everything Keith Jones owns, and is, therefore, his enemy. But when she meets rough, unsophisticated Jones and his little boy, she realizes all that is missing in her life.

    Grief-stricken, widower Keith Jones doesn’t know that the only men who have ever pursued Kate are fortune-hunters. When she offers him a job, he’s not tempted by her wealth, but because he’s obsessed solely by her.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMajor Press LLC
    Release dateJan 25, 2016
    ISBN9781942473084
    In Love With the Enemy: A Short Story
    Author

    Ann Major

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      Book preview

      In Love With the Enemy - Ann Major

      Connect with Ann to receive information about new books and freebies at www.annmajor.com

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      To Tara Gavin

      Again! And Again! And Again!

      All my books should be dedicated to her.

      Chapter One

      Anger and grief burned through Jim Keith Jones like acid as he set the chain saw down and picked up the ax. In six days, that rich vulture, Kate Karlington, would repossess what to her was probably just another motley collection of real estate, but what to him was a lifetime of dreams and hard work.

      He'd built his real estate holdings from scratch—vacant lot by lot, house by house, building by building. He'd painted and hammered and mowed and hauled trash—there hadn't been a job he'd been too good to do.

      Next Friday, Karlington would smilingly pick his bones clean and leave him for dead. Only, he wouldn't be dead; he'd be groveling in the gutter where he'd started, alive with the bitter reality that he had failed again.

      Karlington wasn't the only reason his mood was foul. It was May, a month that could be oppressive in Houston because so many days were as white and humid and smotheringly hot as this one. But today was especially dreadful because three years ago to the day, he'd buried Mary on a muggy afternoon like this.

      Jim Keith's filthy sleeveless sweatshirt was drenched with perspiration. His curly black hair was glued to his tanned brow. His dark eyes were bloodshot from the ravages of the night before. His damp ragged jeans clung so tightly to his hard thighs, the navy denim looked painted on.

      Slowly, carefully, his powerful arms lifted the ax and then sank it into the rotten trunk with all the vengeance his lean muscular body was capable of. When the blade crunched into soft wood, he grimaced as if razor-edged steel had sliced through his skull. No wonder. He had a six-star hangover. He had celebrated the anniversary of Mary's funeral by tying one on.

      He had gone home last night and drunk his dinner and watched home videos of Mary until he'd passed out. He did that every time her birthday and their wedding anniversary rolled around, too.

      This morning he'd awakened to a fuzzy white television screen, crawled to his refrigerator, drunk a single beer, brewed a pot of black coffee and scrambled a mountain of eggs. Then he'd showered and driven to his sister Maggie's and dutifully picked up his nine-year-old son, Bobby Lee, who’d tearfully begged him to let him sleep in or watch cartoons or play on his device instead of taking him to some apartment complex to work. Not that Bobby Lee ever did much.

      Father and son were now hard at work cleaning up Jim Keith's worst apartment project, which was located just off the Eastex Freeway in a crime-ridden neighborhood populated with low-income families. Or rather, Jim Keith was working. Bobby Lee kept disappearing.

      Jim Keith swung the ax again, and wood chips flew as the blade bit into the trunk. For three long years he'd tried to hold himself together. But every night when he finished work, the demons of loneliness and dark grief still haunted him. It was all he could do to get through the days and nights, all he could do to go through the motions of being a father, of being a businessman.

      Of being a human.

      But he was losing it.

      In those last months before her death, he hadn't cared about anything except saving Mary. He hadn't thought of his future or his son's, and because he hadn't, he'd borrowed against his properties and had taken Mary to Germany in the hopes of finding a miracle cure that his insurance wouldn't pay for. That was why he was badly overextended. That was why, despite his economizing and despite his working seven days a week, come Friday he was going to lose everything to Karlington.

      Houston was an oil town, but despite the latest woes in the oil patch, the overall economic picture in Houston wasn’t that bleak. Yes, oil revenues and job opportunities in the energy sector had plummeted while utility bills and property taxes had soared, but a lot of folks in other business were doing fine. If he hadn’t fought so hard to save Mary, he wouldn’t be in such dire shape.

      Karlington had swooped down like a scavenger and bought his notes at a humiliatingly low, deeply discounted price. Nothing could save him from her—nothing short of a miracle.

      And he'd lost faith in miracles when Mary died.

      He wouldn't have bothered to clean up the project today, since it was as good as Karlington's, except wielding the ax was therapy.

      The blade sliced one final time into the soggy trunk, and the rotten pecan tree groaned, toppling with a violent thud to the spongy, overgrown lawn.

      He pitched the ax into the weed-choked flowerbed beside his wheelbarrow and scanned the grounds for Bobby Lee. Jim Keith frowned when he saw the abandoned trashcan and the door to number 20 sagging open. He'd ordered Bobby Lee to pick up everything inside and out of that apartment two hours ago. It was a thirty-minute job at best even

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