Southern Rocker Boy (Southern Rockers Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

on the cheek before I escaped down the hall. I barely made it inside my room before the sorrow knocked me to my knees.
    I knelt there on that hardwood floor, rocking back and forth like a child, as I wept for my family and my home.
    I didn’t know where we would go from there, and suddenly I was frightened. I felt untethered, like a kite that had slipped from the strong fingers keeping it anchored and secure, swept away on a breeze heading to places unknown. Where was I going to go? What was I going to do? How could I leave the only real home I had ever known?
    How could I change the only code I had ever lived by? Was that worth a marriage to someone I wasn’t sure was ‘the one’? Did I really have to compromise my heart for my honor?
    I needed my Daddy more than I had ever needed him in my life, yet his wise voice had been silenced.
    It seemed like just another painful injustice so I allowed a brief pity party of one in the darkened shadow of my childhood room. I didn’t rise to my feet until the grief was spent, purged like a toxin.
    I staggered to my bed, landing with bounce on the springy mattress before rolling onto my back. I stared out my bedroom window at the tall mesquite tree that stood like a sentry just outside.
    My heart ached and my stomach tied itself into a knot.
    No, I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I would do, especially since leaving my only home seemed inevitable.
    But I was a Riley, born and bred. I would have to find a way to be there for my family, to stay strong for my mother and determined for my sister.
    I would make my Daddy’s life count for something, even if we didn’t own a scrap of the land he had nurtured. This house. That tree. Even the fucking roof he’d died trying to repair.
    As long as I drew breath, my Daddy lived on in me. I was cut from the same cloth. It was my duty to live the life of greatness he had been denied.
    I was barely twenty-four, but suddenly I knew that I became a man the day I buried my father.
    The time for hijinks was over. No more romancing all the pretty girls or getting rowdy with my beer buddies. No more following the path that someone else set.
    My family’s future was on me now. And I had twenty-four years of learning from my father to know what he would have wanted me to do in his stead.
    So I would do as Jackson Riley had done. I’d give anything to protect the women I loved, the two I knew, beyond all doubt, I couldn’t live one day without.
    I swore then and there the devil himself couldn’t stand in my way.

2: Take the Long Way Home
     
     
    It took six weeks for us to tie up loose ends and bid a final farewell to our homestead. The day I stood on our land for the last time was just as painful a goodbye as leaving Daddy behind in the cemetery. I knew it was true for Mama and Leah as well. They both clung to each other as they cried. A moving van had already been jam-packed with all the belongings we had left in the world, which wasn’t much after the auction.
    It turned out that the sale of our property wouldn’t cover what we still owed, so we had to piecemeal everything over a scant few weeks. We sold the farm equipment first, because we wouldn’t need it in a two-bedroom apartment in the city. We sold the livestock, but at about half the cost of what it was worth. The neighboring farms benefited from our losses. Courtney didn’t accompany her folks to our auction who, to their credit, energized the bidding so we could get a little more bang for our buck.
    But things had been tough all over. The Adams still had two kids in college and Old Mr. McCready was raising his daughter’s kids and barely had enough to pay his own ranch-hands. As much as everyone wanted to give us a fair asking price, they were simply unable.
    Then we sold the furniture we couldn’t take with us. It seemed pointless to put it in storage. So all the pieces handed down throughout the years were sold at the bare minimum, including my Grandma’s