Dark Needs by T.M. Frazier
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to everyone who believes in me, especially my readers. Your messages and support mean everything to me. When I first wrote The Dark Light of Day I never thought it would become anything more than just a story I wrote. It was all of you who turned it into more than I could have ever imagined.
Thank you to all the bloggers who took the time to read, review, and share Jake & Abby’s story with their followers. Maryse, Aestas, YaYa, S&M Book Obsessions, my Goodreads readers, and Milasy & Lisa over at The Rock Stars of Romance. What you do for writers and what you have done fore me and my work has been nothing short of amazing. I will forever be grateful to you.
This year wouldn’t have been the same without the support of a very special friend of mine. Lea (Mistress L) from S&M Book Obsessions. Thank you for going above and beyond the book world for me. Thank you for your kind advice and words of encouragement from the very first moments of my pregnancy. I never thought someone I met on Twitter, someone whose first words to me went something like ‘I love your hair, I want to scalp you and wear your head’ would become such a great friend of mine and someone I would love very much.
Thank you to the author friends turned real life friends that I have made during this journey. It’s an odd but wonderful feeling to be both a friend and a fan. Aurora Rose Reynolds, Rochelle Paige, Tessa Teevan, Monica Robinson, Pam Godwin, Ella Fox, Joanna Wylde, Harper Sloan, Penelope Ward, and so many more, your talent and your success inspires me to keep going every single day. Thank you for being there for me when I needed you. I know your time is valuable, thank you for spending some of it on me.
Thank you to my husband Logan. It’s been a crazy fucking year, babe! Thank you for always supporting my dreams and for not looking at me like I’m psychotic when I ask you about crazy book scenarios, but instead countering with your own crazy ideas. Thank you for taking an interest in what I love. Thank you for loving my book world and the people in it. Thank you for loving your crazy wife, and trust me, I DO know that I can be fucking crazy.
Most of all, thank you for rubbing my back, holding my hand, playing music on my belly, telling me how beautiful I am (even though it was far from the truth), binge eating Oreos with me, running the bath for me, sleeping on the couch with me when I was too uncomfortable to sleep in our bed, and for crying tears of joy with me when we heard that first beautiful scream. Thank you for our new baby girl. Charley is so lucky to have you as her Daddy. I love you to the moon and back, forever and ever and ever. There is no one else I would rather journey through this life with.
Thank you to my baby girl, Charley. You are the most perfect little thing that has ever happened to us. Mommy loves you unconditionally, and you are never never ever allowed to read any of my books!
ONE
Jake
Owen didn't know who he was really running from when he took off from Coral Pines. In his mind he was probably escaping the police and his imminent incarceration for the shooting of my daughter.
What he was really running from was his imminent death.
I'd been up for three days straight but felt as if I could've bench pressed a semi-truck and rowed across the Coral Pines River and back and still not have fully exerted myself.
I was fucking elated.
I was also scared out of my mind.
Over the years it was that lack of fear that helped me to be able to carry out my work, and do it well.
But when I stood on the rickety front porch of Bee's Nan's house with one hand on the doorknob, I couldn't bring myself to turn it. I was frozen in fucking fear, unable to face what might happen behind that door once it opened.
What would Abby think of me when she came face to face with the blood that was literally still on my hands? When the reality of what I'd done, what I did, and what I would do again was right in front of her. What happens when 'Jake kills people' is no longer just an abstract idea?
Bee knew I was going to find and kill Owen, she encouraged me by showing me the pictures of the aftermath of Owen's vicious attack on her. She knew my blood would boil, and I would seek immediate revenge. When I turned that knob and Abby saw me, saw the bloody proof of who I really was staring her in the face and it all became real, would she still feel like she could accept that part of me? Would she still want me in her life? In Georgia's?
Abby loved me, for exactly who I was, fully knowing the devil lived inside me. Knowing of the brutality that was part of the deep seeded makeup of who I truly was.
It was easy to live with a theory, something that almost wasn't real because it wasn't something she had to deal with. It was entirely different to come face to face with the truth of it all.