Heart of Clay
A Contemporary M/M Romance
with a ghostly touch
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Blurb:
The ghost at the heart of the problem…
Clayton Merk,
accomplished, yet arrogant, businessman, has a reputation for one-night stands
and being steadfastly anti-relationship. When he decides to return home—to the
root of all his problems—he brings a co-worker with him as a buffer against the
past. Even though he’s ready to lay old ghosts to rest, he certainly didn’t
expect a literal ghost to lend a hand.
Brad Jorgensen, Clay’s
former best friend, has also clung to the past in an unhealthy way. He resents
Clay for a lot of things, not the least of which is his cousin’s death decades
earlier. At one time they’d been closer than brothers, but blame and anger are
powerful weapons of destruction, and they’ve left Brad in a wasteland of
self-doubt, hatred, and loneliness.
The ghost at the heart
of the problem has had enough. Bobby isn’t pleased with his cousin or his ex.
Their refusal to let go of the past has kept him on a plane where he doesn’t
belong and isn’t at home. He’s expended all his energy trying to get through to
Brad, without success, but Clay’s return finally gives him a foot in the
door…or out the door.
If he could just get the
two stubborn men together.
EXCERPT:
Heart of Clay
Chapter One
The garden was overgrown
now.
The screen door rattled shut, cutting off the sounds of Nan and
Pip chatting over iced tea on the enclosed back porch with a hapless Augie
Cruthers. Faint strains of clarinets and snatches of sulky vocals followed Clay
down the much worn wood steps.
When he was very small, and his parents had brought him here for
summer breaks, he'd tripped on the lowest step and split his lip. His tongue
flicked over the tiny scar at the memory. Since then they'd talked dozens of
times about replacing the narrow steps, but apparently now, just like in his
childhood, it was a task for another day.
Clay left the path and wandered over cropped grass, in a lawn that
seemed a lot smaller than it had been, until he reached an area where it was
clearly not maintained any longer. He couldn’t hear Nan, Pip, or Augie from
here, but if he turned, he could see their forms, dark shadows behind the
blurring screens of the porch.
Last Friday his young coworker had been undisguisedly dumbfounded
by the invitation to visit Clay's patriarchal home, but after exchanging
alarmed glances with his gape-jawed secretary and blushing profusely, he'd
accepted gamely. No doubt he thought he was next on his notorious superior's never-ending
list of conquests, but the fact was that Clay wasn't interested. Augie was
sweet, and cute enough, but sweet bored Clay. He preferred striking to cute,
and fleeting to long-lasting when it came to bed partners.
All of which made fucking a man from his office a bad plan,
especially someone like Augie who had happily-ever-after written all over his
sparkling green eyes, softly styled five o'clock shadow, and barely tamed
auburn curls. No, it wasn't sex that Clay had on his mind, it was distraction.
Clayton J. Merk could have told the man that he'd be serving more
as a shield, a barrier to memories and emotions that Clay didn't want to
experience again, but he figured that would become evident soon enough, when
they retired to their own beds at night.
Some small part of him might have been trying to shock Nan and
Pip, to maybe rub his gayness in their conservative family values a little, but
that part had been made to feel small and insignificant when Nan's faded blue
eyes had brightened with delight to see that Clay had brought a guest. In fact,
his grandparents had been so warm and welcoming, not even blinking twice at
Augie's gentle lisp and painted nails that at first Clay had thought they'd both
gone blind.
Then they'd been escorted to two very separate rooms and firmly
informed that the floorboards creaked, which Clay well remembered, and
instructed to show up for dinner in thirty minutes.
Over dinner, Augie proved his value as a distraction by displaying
a very unlikely but undeniably thorough knowledge of big band music, and Clay
was able to just sit and eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes as though his
doctor hadn't just told him that he could stand to lose twenty pounds.
Surveying the chaos of his grandparents' farm, Clay tried to
stifle his dismay. It had been years, closer to decades, really since he'd been
here, but it should have at least felt familiar, shouldn’t it? Instead, it was
as though the wilderness that his ancestors had carved a farm out of hundreds
of years ago was slowly taking back what it had ceded.
It was at once both more and less than memory had painted it.
It was greener, lusher, more primal. Adam and Eve or a court of
elves might have cavorted here as it was now.
Less manicured, tidy, or functional. It was difficult to imagine
the precisely laid out kitchen garden that his grandmother used to plant here
every year, row upon row of tomato vines and pepper plants, hills of sweet,
flowery cantaloupe, juicy watermelon, and prickly cucumbers interspersed with
plots of herbs and six foot corn stalks with their razor sharp leaves.
The fields that used to line the drive on the way in were no
longer planted with crops, just acres of rolling green grasses, up hills and
down into tree-dense hollows, hollers as the locals called them. It was
beautiful, but when the grass came up to your knees, as it did outside the
magic circle of manicured lawn surrounding the sixteen room colonial farmstead,
that beauty was overshadowed with the unknown.
It was amazing how something like tall grass could turn a place
he'd thought he knew like the back of his hand into some jungle of uncertainty
that made him question all the things he thought he'd decided upon before he
even left the city.
Somewhere at the bottom of the garden was a bench. Raising a hand
to shade his eyes, Clay squinted into the shadows of the setting sun. Of
course, with the garden overgrown now, it was impossible to find.
Crickets chirped and fireflies signaled frantically in the growing
darkness. He dragged in a deep breath, redolent with the heavy scent of dogwood
and rain. The fresh, gasoline-enhanced odor of cut grass announced that someone
had cut the lawn just that day. His feet ignored the frantic voice in his head
that ordered him to stay put, or to go back to the house, at the very least.
Chiggers, and ticks, and the lightning quick stings of any of a
dozen other belligerent plants and animals assaulted his bared ankles, but his
treacherous, sandal-clad feet forged forward, and he couldn't break his gaze
away from that northwest corner.
He knew where it should be, there in the darkest spot, deep in the
shadows, where the north boundary fence met the west boundary fence, under the
branches of a gnarled old peach tree, which had stood sentinel over both
farmsteads for so long that it had grown up and around and surrounded the
barbed wire fence.
The tree marked the border and was marked by it. Somewhere down
there, in that dark recess, was the bench. Crafted and carved by hand
generations ago by a tender-hearted lover whose bride had a fondness for
sunsets. Carved of local limestone, smooth and white, once it had gleamed
eerily, catching the moonlight and spinning his boyish imagination into
fantasies unbound.
Back when Pip and Nan had been, as Nan put it, full of vim and
vigor, and maintained the property to the nines, that was.
Now? When they scarce seemed to care about the house itself and
relied on some local boy to mow the simple acre of grass on which the house sat,
the rest of the hundred acres was left to go wild, much as he had every summer
as a boy.
And his feet were moving faster, tumbling him pell-mell down that
hill with a speed that left him breathless and clutching at his side, soothing
the physical ache because the one in his heart was so damned old and familiar
that he could almost ignore it.
Almost.
Except that…there it was.
In tall grass, dingy with dirt and pollen, bird excrement and
murky leaves, sloping down so one end wasn't even visible, was the bench.
Clay sank down on the limestone and buried his head in his hands,
shaking with the effort not to feel. Dragging in a deep breath, he consciously
stiffened his spine and forced his hands down. He clenched the filthy seat in
one hand and pushed back his hair with the other.
The field on the other side of the fence was everything his
grandparents' place wasn't. Furrows of brown earth promised a future harvest,
promised life.
As hard as he strained his eyes, that was all he could see.
"You've got a damned nerve, coming down here. I couldn't
believe it when they said you were coming." The angry words rumbled over
him, stabbing him with their hate and scorn. "You could at least have had
the decency to stay up at the house instead of coming down here and flaunting
your presence."
Clay stretched, feigning a casual attitude though icy sweat
dampened the back of his polo shirt. "Brad? It's been a long time."
"Not fucking long enough, Merk."
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