Swirl: The Complete Collection (BWWM Interracial Romance) (Books 1-3) Read online

  Swirl: The Complete Series

  By: Lexi Lewis

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Table of Contents

  Publisher’s Notes

  BOOK 1: CHASING THRILLS

  Chapter 1: The Thrill

  Chapter 2: Home Life

  Chapter 3: Rude Awakening

  Chapter 4: Bedside Manner

  Chapter 5: Relating

  Chapter 6: Setback

  Chapter 7: Mistake

  Chapter 8: Regret

  Chapter 9: A Plot Afoot

  Chapter 10: In the Meantime

  Chapter 11: Just to Say Goodbye

  Chapter 12: Settling

  Chapter 13: Unsettled

  BOOK 2: TAKING SPILLS

  Chapter 1: Out of the Bag

  Chapter 2: More Problems

  Chapter 3: A Moment Alone

  Chapter 4: More Than a Taste

  Chapter 5: Hitting the Fan

  Chapter 6: Hitting Harder

  Chapter 7: Change of Plans

  Chapter 8: Breather

  Chapter 9: Danger

  Chapter 10: Consequences

  BOOK 3: UPHILL CLIMB

  Chapter 1: Harsh Truths

  Chapter 2: Family

  Chapter 3: Conspiring

  Chapter 4: Meet the Family

  Chapter 5: Respite

  Chapter 6: A Break in the Case

  Chapter 7: No Should Mean No

  Chapter 8: Public Face

  Chapter 9: Desperation

  Chapter 10: Leniency

  Chapter 11: The Face of Fear

  Chapter 12: A Steady Path

  About The Author

  PUBLISHER’S NOTES

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Monster Media LLC

  Swirl: Chasing Thrills

  Book 1

  By: Lexi Lewis

  CHAPTER 1: THE THRILL

  “And next up we have Reese Abbot. I’m sure we’ve all heard his name making the circuit of competitive snowboarding.”

  “That’s right, Tom. Reese has been making quite the name for himself in the past year and a half, and the rumor has it that he’s looking at turning pro.”

  “Well, he’s young enough to do it, Pete. Twenty-five and at the top of his game. This competition could be a turning point for this young man’s career if he manages to wow the judges. I know there are sponsors in the audience.”

  “I’m sure he knows it, too.”

  “He’s getting ready to make his run, the first ever from him in this competition. And with a wave to the crowd, he’s off!”

  “Look at him go! Right off the line, and it’s obvious why this young man’s name is on everyone’s lips.”

  Go, go! Reese pushed himself mentally. The air was cold and sharp as it rushed past him, but this was only the beginning. He’d shot down the mountain like a bullet, but there were still the jumps and the tricks to land. He was in the zone. This was his element. Speed and danger, seeing the ground looming below him while he twisted his body into different positions, it all got his blood pumping faster than anything else did.

  He focused on his breathing and the way his body moved, leaning into turns, angling himself properly to make the jumps he needed to. Reese could barely hear the roar of the crowd as he went, but this wasn’t about them.

  They would be satisfied either way. They just wanted a show. Reese was trying to satisfy himself. This had always been about him and pushing himself to do new and different things. To seek out those thrills that made him feel alive and keep trying to find one bigger and better than the last. In this line of work, it wasn’t that hard.

  Even though he wasn’t a pro yet, he had made a name for himself and a small fortune working with smaller sponsors who wanted someone to wear their merchandise. He made it look good as he went flipping over a gap or soaring down a hill, and the offers kept coming in. His agent spent a good hour a day trying to sort through all of it.

  In short, life was good for Reese Abbot.

  For the moment, anyway.

  The run was going smoothly. He blocked out the flash of cameras as he grabbed the bottom of his board, moving from trick to trick with smooth precision. He’d practiced this for weeks until he could almost do it blindly.

  Up ahead was a small hill of snow, designed to launch him higher than usual to give him more time to show off. Each trick had to be hit with exact timing so that when he came down, he could move into the last part of the run without any incident. The judges took points off for sloppy landings and falls, and Reese wanted to get as close to perfect as he could.

  He ran down his mental list of tricks in his head as he approached, prepping his body to launch into the first one as soon as his board had cleared the jump. The air was cold and clean, and the sun shone on the snow, sending up a glare, but he turned his head and avoided it, moving into the first trick and then the second.

  His pulse pounded in his ears over the roar of the wind whipping past, and the adrenaline was amazing.

  He was nearly halfway through now, and when he landed it would be on a steep downward slope, so he needed to angle his board just right.

  Just as he was transitioning into his second to last trick, the sound of something snapping broke through his concentration. His center of gravity had to be just right for this to work, but his foot felt like it was coming loose from the straps that held it to the board.

  It’s alright you can still make it. Just adjust and scale back the trick. You’ll lose out on style points, but it’s better than fucking up this landing.

  But then something hit the bottom of his board, startling him and making him lose the thread of what he was supposed to be doing. It tilted him out of the drop he had been preparing for, and with a rising sense of horror, Reese realized he was falling.

  The ground rushed up to meet him, and he hit it hard on his side, pain cutting through the adrenaline rush as he dropped and rolled. The board was getting tangled up between his legs as he tumbled down the steep hill, trying desperately to get his feet back under him so he could at least finish on his feet and maybe try to scrape some points together for a recovery. But he was just moving too fast.

  His body veered off the course a bit as it picked up speed, and Reese let out a sharp cry when his leg slammed a rock and then went over it.

  Pain lanced through him, radiating out from his side where he had fallen all the way to his fingertips and toes. Each time he rolled, it just made the pain that much worse, but luckily he seemed to be slowing down, thumping along the snow covered ground. He ended up on his back at the bottom of the slope, right at the foot of the hill that would
have launched him into another series of tricks.

  His ears were ringing, and his chest heaved as he tried to draw breath. Each inhale felt like knives stabbing him under his ribcage and in his side, but he kept trying to suck in the cold air, desperate to stop the dizzy, light headed feeling that was stealing over him. Lights flashed and popped before his eyes, and in the distance he could hear the sound of yelling and people moving around. He was so out of it, and his head was spinning with the effort of trying to make sense of what just happened.

  I fell. I messed it up. I’ve made that run fifty times in practice flawlessly, but I completely messed it up. I probably didn’t even place after that.

  It was all too much to deal with, and before it could register that it was a bad idea to pass out in the middle of the snow, his eyes were closing and darkness was consuming him.

  CHAPTER 2: HOME LIFE

  “Eve! Eve, you’re gonna be late! I’m gonna be late! Everyone is gonna be late, Eve wake up!”

  Evelyn groaned and rolled over, blinking her eyes open to look into the chocolate brown ones of her little brother, Devin. “What time is it, you little monster?” she asked, yawning.

  Devin made a face and waved a hand in front of his face. “Ugh, morning breath. It’s almost seven!”

  “Shit!”

  “You said a bad word!” Devin crowed, obviously excited to hear his big sister swear.

  Eve groaned again. “Stop that. Why didn’t my alarm go off?” She sat up and ran a hand through her messy hair, reaching for her phone on the night stand. She was sure that she had set an alarm for six-thirty in the morning. Plenty of time for her to get up, shower, and make breakfast before she had to get Devin to school and herself to work. She flipped to her alarm app and barely resisted the urge to swear again. “Because I set it for six-thirty pm, of course. God, I’m so stupid.”

  Devin had to be at school by seven-thirty, and she had to be at work by eight. At this rate, she was going to have to choose between breakfast and a shower in order to get them both where they needed to go. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have minded getting Devin to school a few minutes late since he just had homeroom first thing in the morning, but she very much did not want to deal with the looks people gave her when she had to sign him in.

  It was bad enough that she was doing this on her own, she didn’t need the entirety of the administrative staff judging her for it.

  “Tell you what, squirt,” Eve said, thinking quickly. “You go get dressed while I shower, and we’ll stop at McDonald’s before school.”

  His eyes lit up. Eating out was a luxury for them, especially for breakfast, and Eve felt bad. With her job as a nurse and the money she got from the state for taking care of her brother, she managed to keep all the bills paid and buy groceries as well as pay their next door neighbor to watch Devin while she had to work, but things were usually tight for them.

  There would be enough to get them both breakfast from McDonald’s that morning since she had just gotten her check cashed on Friday, but it would be their one indulgence for the week or maybe longer.

  Devin dashed off to go get dressed and ready, and Eve hauled herself out of bed and to the bathroom to shower.

  If someone had asked her even five years ago if this was how she envisioned her life going, she would have laughed in their face. At nineteen, she had been sure that she would be in medical school somewhere, learning how to save lives and put people back together. It had always been her dream to be a doctor, ever since he was a little girl playing with Operation games and making her Barbies operate on each other.

  For the first two years of her time in college, she had assumed that was the path she would take. But then everything changed.

  Eve could still remember it all so clearly. The phone call that had changed her life, the way her knees had given out and she’d had to grab onto the kitchen table in her apartment to keep herself upright.

  “We’re so sorry, Evie. There was a truck and the driver was drunk. Her little car never stood a chance. They got her to the hospital as soon as they could, but… She didn’t make it, Evie. We’re so sorry. So, so sorry.”

  Funnily enough, people saying sorry a million times didn’t do anything to make her feel better. Not when her mother, the woman who had been her rock through her entire life, who had braided her hair, made her meals, shared her secrets, and just about been her best friend was dead.

  Even now, three years later, she could barely remember that week.

  The funeral and everything had been a whirlwind, and all Eve remembered of it was crying a lot and people handing her covered dishes. She could remember someone sitting with Devin and explaining it all to him at the hospital and the way he had wailed and begged for someone to get his mother. Her heart had clenched at that.

  Devin had never known anyone but their mother. He was too young to remember their father and how terrible he had been. His mother and sister were all he knew, and with the removal of one, he had latched onto her.

  Really, that was what had broken her out of her fog of depression in the end. She couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces when Devin needed her.

  One of their mother’s sisters had offered to take him, but Eve barely knew her, and Devin didn’t know her at all, and he had screamed and cried at the thought of being separated from Eve. There was talk of putting him in a foster home, but that was dismissed automatically. Eve wasn’t going to leave her little brother to be raised by strangers who most likely wouldn’t care about him at all.

  So she’d changed her entire life around.

  At twenty-one, she was in no position to raise a child. No court in the world would have granted custody of a seven year old to her, unemployed and still is school as she was then. So he’d had to go stay with their Aunt Michelle while Evelyn went to school to become a nurse.

  It was as close as she could get to her dream with the way things were currently, and though on paper, her aunt was the one who had custody of Devin, once Eve had gotten stable enough to take care of him, he had come to live with her.

  She liked to think they were doing fine. He was happy and healthy, and if she was overtired most days, then she could only imagine that that was how it was supposed to be when you were essentially raising a child alone and working full time. It wasn’t how she had planned for things to turn out, but it was her life, and when it came down to it, it wasn’t all that bad. Devin made her laugh and smile, and she still got to work with helping people, so it was close enough. As close as she could get for now.

  “Eve! It’s seven oh seven! McDonald’s!” Devin shouted from outside the bathroom door, and Eve shook herself out of her memories and made herself get moving. “I’m coming. Put your coat on, it’s cold out there!” she hollered back.

  Thank god there was a McDonald’s right down the street. If it wasn’t packed, they could still make it on time.

  She got dry and dressed in record time, standing in front of the mirror to pull her twists up into a ponytail.

  Eve wasn’t sure if she would ever describe herself as pretty, but she’d had plenty of time to get used to her face in the mirror. She was short, about five foot four, but that ran in her family, and she smiled when she remembered how tiny her mother had been. Her eyes were a warm shade of brown, and they sat, almost almond shaped, in her face. She had darker skin than her brother, who her mother had always said took after their father (much to both of their displeasure), and the years of hard work and cutting back what she are so that Devin would have more to eat had made her lose some of the softness that she’d had since she was a teenager. Now she was leaner, but still had the curves that also ran in the family.

  Her hair was black and curly, currently styled into twists that were easy to pull back when she was in a hurry, and she was thankful that she had stopped straightening her hair months ago. It was a real time saver.

  Once she deemed herself ready to head out, she grabbed her purse and her coat and then headed out into the living room
where her brother was waiting, sitting on the couch and kicking his feet idly.

  She inspected Devin’s clothes and nodded, herding him into the car.

  Luckily the line for the drive through wasn’t long at all, so she got them both food and juice, watching Devin to make sure he didn’t spill all over himself while she drove. They pulled up outside of his school at seven twenty-eight, and Eve breathed a sigh of relief, ignoring the sharp look from the woman who was directing traffic. It wasn’t like there weren’t six other cars in the line dropping their kids off at the last minute.

  “Have a good day, squirt,” she said, grinning and ruffling her brother’s curly hair.

  “Bye!” Devin chirped and hopped out of the car, slamming his door shut behind him before bounding up to the front steps of the school. He was always so energetic these days, and it made Eve happy to see it. The first couple of months had been rocky, and he’d barely talked or slept through the night, making them both cranky and tired when they had to report to their respective obligations. But as time had gone on, he’d warmed up to living with her and sleeping through the night, and things had worked themselves out.