Heart of Clay

By Lee Brazil

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Brazil
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310511295

Lee Brazil

Somewhere in a small town in up-state New York are a librarian and a second grade teacher to whom I owe my life. That might be a touch dramatic, but it's nevertheless one hundred percent true. Because they taught me the joy of reading, of escaping into worlds crafted of words. Have you ever been nine years old and sure of nothing so much as that you don't belong? Looked at the world from behind glasses, and wondered why you don't fit? Then turn the page and see… there you are, running from Injun Joe in a dark graveyard; there you are fencing with Athos; there you are…beneath the deep blue sea- marveling at exotic creatures with Captain Nemo. I found myself between the pages of books, and that is why I write now, it's why I taught English and literature for so many years, and it's why my house contains more pounds of books than furniture. If I'd had my way, I'd have been a fencer…or a starship captain, or a lawyer, or a detective solving crimes. But instead, I am a writer, and that's the best thing in the world to be if you ask me, because as a writer, I can be all those things and more. If I hadn't learned to value the stories between the pages, who knows what would have happened? Certainly not college…teaching…or writing.

Book preview

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.

Acknowledgements

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. As such, any resemblance to any persons, living or deceased, businesses, events, or locales is coincidental.

Copyright Feb. 2015 © Lee Brazil

Editing by Jae Ashley

Cover Photo by Julian @dollar photo

Cover Design by Laura Harner

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

Trademarks

501s (Levi's): Levi Strauss & Co. Corporation

AAA: American Automobile Association, Inc.

Barefoot Contessa: Garten Food Corporation

Batman: DC Comics Partnership

Chevy: General Motors, LLC

Glenlivet: The Glenlivet Distillers Limited

Google: Google, Inc.

Grand Marnier: Societe des Produits Marnier-Lapostolle

Grey Goose: Barcardi & Company

Jack Daniel: Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc.

Jägermeister: Mast-Jaegermeister SE

Jose Cuervo: Tequila Cuervo La Rojena, S.A.

Mercedes: Daimler AG Corporation

Solo: Solo Cup Operating Corporation

Southern Comfort: Southern Comfort Properties, Inc.

UPS: United Parcel Service of America, Inc.

Yankees: New York Yankees Partnership

Heart of Clay

An M/M Contemporary/Paranormal Romance

By

Lee Brazil

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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