Page 45 of Forever Finds Us (Wisper Dreams #7)

brAND

A Year and a Half Later

My phone ringing on my desk jerked me out of the daydream I’d been having about what I wanted to do to my wife in our kink bed when she got home from work.

I answered and listened to Billie Cade deliver unpromising news.

“Hey, Brand. I’ve got an update on the search for your brother. I tried calling Abey a couple times today, but she’s been busy. I can wait to talk to her at book club later this week if that works better?”

“No,” I said, my heart racing, “please go ahead. What have you found?”

Abey hadn’t decided to look for Dixon again because the family was worried.

I mean, we were, but Bax and Bea wanted to adopt Stuey, and they had been coming up against roadblocks because the local courts wouldn’t accept the notarized paper relinquishing Dixon’s parental rights he provided the day he’d abandoned his son.

They’d found a death certificate for Kellie Gale, Stu’s birth mother, but not one for Dixon so the judge had contended that until he could speak to Dixon and make certain he was in the right frame of mind to make such a big decision, he wouldn’t grant the adoption.

But we still had no clue where Dixon was. It had been a year and a half since he’d disappeared from the Coulters’ place in Mad River, and now we needed to talk to him but hadn’t had any luck finding him. That was when we brought in Billie again.

“Unfortunately, not much. Look. I’ll keep my auto searches set to alert me if the dude comes back online, but from what I can tell, Dixon’s still off the grid. He either doesn’t have a cell phone or he’s using a burner. That’s not unusual for addicts though.

“But I can tell you he’s alive. There’s no John Doe cases or death certificates I can find matching his description. The floral tattoo you gave me a picture of helps with eliminating him when a case pops up with a similar description.”

“You weren’t able to find him in a rehab facility anywhere?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t in one.

But I can’t hack every single rehab in the US.

If we had a clue as to where he might be, it would be a start.

I’ve looked through the rehabs in the area of California where he was before, in and around Redding, and there’s one other place in Idaho I caught a short trail of him, but that’s a dead end.

“I can’t find him.”

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. The hope I’d had dissolved inside my chest like there was a leak in my lungs.

“I wish I had better news for you,” Billie said.

“Look, I’m not usually one for pep talks, but Abey and Roxi are family to me, which I guess means you and Dixon are too.

Don’t give up hope. He’s got something to live for.

He has a son. I used to be a jaded bitch, and I would’ve told you that didn’t always matter to an addict, but I’m about to pop out a munchkin myself, so I finally get it.

It does matter. It doesn’t mean your little bro’s addiction won’t win, but I know he’s fighting, wherever he is. ”

“Thank you, Billie. That means a lot. Can I pay you something? I know you said you’re doin’ this as a favor to Abey, but I don’t feel right knowin’ how much work you’ve put into this.”

“I won’t take your money, Brand. I don’t need it. But you can make a donation to Ace’s House or to a rehab here in Wyoming or something. That’d be cool.”

“I’ll do both,” I said, “in your name. Thanks again.”

Bax and Bea had a good lawyer, a Wisper local, Brady Douglas, and he said he could try to find a way around Dixon’s absence so they could adopt Stu.

Bax didn’t feel right about going forward without at least notifying Dixon, but even if we couldn’t find him and they weren’t able to go ahead with the adoption, it wouldn’t change Stuey’s role in their lives, in mine or Merv’s.

But Dixon’s story still ate at me. Not because I wanted to fix him, but because it was an ending I couldn’t control, an unfinished life. A loose thread that tickled my neck.

But I had better ways now to deal with my control issues. Much sexier ways.

A mile and a half away from Bax’s and Merv’s houses, the log A-frame I’d built for my wife sat nestled between the trees on a bluff, and the front door opened and closed softly, so I left my study and rushed to our living room to greet Roxanne after a long day’s work.

Her uniform was rumpled, and she looked tired, but she seemed happy to see me.

She smiled at me as she hung her hat on the hook by the door, and all the rest of my worries floated away.

Through therapy and meeting and talking with other families of addicts, I knew that I might never see my little brother again.

But I still had hope.

Roxanne

“What is that?” I squeaked. “It looks like one of those crocheted plant hangers from the seventies, but gargantuan sized.”

“That, my beautiful wife, is a suspension system.”

After work, my husband led me to the secret room in our home only he and I knew was there.

I supposed my sister-in-law, Bea, knew it was there because she had been the only other person Brand allowed to work on it when he built it, but she didn’t know what was in it.

Bax, Rye, and Clay had all seen the plans too.

They poured the foundation and helped frame our house, so they knew something was there in the room behind our bedroom in the loft of our gorgeous mountain house with fabulous counter space.

But I was betting not one of them could guess what Brand had transformed the room into.

I hadn’t even seen it, not since we’d painted the walls and Brand asked me to trust him to outfit it with new toys for us to indulge in.

We’d started out with white walls and rudimentary tools and toys—dildos, crops, nipple clamps, which I found I loved—but we were moving up in the world.

My devilishly handsome other half had finally convinced me to let him go to town.

The deep, dark, dusty-blue color of the walls calmed my nerves. And I had a lot of nerves right about now. Some of the items I saw when he led me to our newly decked-out playroom looked medieval.

He pointed to what looked like a folding table, but it was black and padded.

“See, here’s the table. It’s portable, so I can lay you down and tie you up, and then I push this button”—he stepped to the wall and lifted what looked like a small, flat flap next to a light switch, pressed a button the size of the pad of his thumb, and the ropes hanging from the ceiling began to lift in the air—“and move the table out of our way, and I can fuck you up in the air.

Or I can take you with my mouth while you dangle in front of me.

“Ain’t it great? Oh, and this over here is your very own pleasure throne.

” He rushed to the corner of the room and pointed to a short contraption.

It kind of looked like a camping chair, but King Aurthur style.

“It’s just a stool you sit on, but it’s got this opening here, and I lay beneath you like the queen you are and eat you out. ”

“Oh my God, Brand.”

“Yeah, I know, right? I can’t fuckin’ wait to taste you like that.”

It still amazed me to see the man Brand had become. No longer was he a closed-off CEO. All the different parts of him had blended into the excited, generous man who had become my husband. And the boy could get down and country like the best of them.

Therapy had helped him tremendously, and learning not to keep secrets had been freeing for him. And for me.

Turned out, I was in fact neurodivergent.

The doctors tried to prescribe medications, but I refused.

I was learning to manage my anxieties naturally, through breathing and sensory coping mechanisms, and by talking through my thoughts with Brand and Aubrey and my therapist. My family was supportive too.

My mama cried when I explained my diagnosis and said it was a relief to hear because it made so much sense and explained so many things she’d never understood about me.

As I turned to survey the rest of our new toys and the king-size bed in the middle of the room, my eyes began to bug out of my head. Something had been crisscrossed over our mattress.

“Those are bed restraints,” he explained. “They go under the mattress when we’re not usin’ ’em, but they keep your arms and legs spread for me so I can fuck you and torture you however I want.”

“Um.”

I hated to ruin the excitement seeping out of him like he was a kid in a candy store for the first time, but I might have been at the beginning stages of a panic attack.

“You don’t like what I picked out for us?” He stepped in front of me, angling his head down to look in my eyes. “If you don’t like it, it all goes.”

“No, I… I mean, I don’t know if I like it. I’ve never done any of this before.”

“Me either,” he whispered, stepping behind me. “We’ll find out together, okay?”

“Okay,” I said as he moved me toward the bed with his body pressing behind mine.

He laid me down and crawled over me, and his warmth eased my anxiety. He lay next to me, and I lifted my head so his arm could slide beneath.

“But the most important thing in this room, besides you and me, is that.” Pointing to a huge, framed photograph taking up a third of the back A-shaped wall, Brand said, “From the day you married me and made me the happiest I’ve ever been. Remember?”

As if I could forget one second of our wedding day, halfway across the world near the coast in Maremma, Italy. Both of our families had traveled all that way for us, and it was the most joyous time of my life.

And the happiness was doubled when Rye proposed to my bestie again at our wedding dinner after the ceremony, and Aubrey cried and screamed, “Yes! Okay? I’ll marry your sexy ass. Happy now?”