Wild and Homicide: The Death Betrayal and Love Series, #5

By Paula-Michelle Trotter

Carla may be smart, confident and beautiful, but she has had to work her way out of a pit of darkness created by the death of her son. Her new mission in life is to help other families going through what she's faced. Being somewhat happy, and in a satisfying relationship, Carla finds herself feeling betrayed when she sees a gorgeous sexy woman naked in her boyfriend's house.

A.J., the Navy Medic turned cowboy, loves Carla, but he fears he may never have the chance to tell her or show her how much she means to him when his ex-girlfriend shows up unannounced. Will A.J. help his ex-fight a murder charge or will she steal the woman he loves?

Will Carla get the redemption she deserves? This is book five of The Death Betrayal and Love Series, each book can be read as a series or a standalone.

Each book has a charity attached to them, as you read, each book a donation will be made to help make the world a better place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paula-Michelle Trotter
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781797657752

Book preview

Chapter 1- A.J.

My name is Andrew James Harris, everyone calls me A.J.

I was born a country-boy. As a child, I grew up on my family’s farm in Northern California, but serving in the military called to my soul. The moment I was legally allowed to sign up for the Navy, I did. I spent most of my adult life as a Navy Medic until I realized, the lives I worked so hard to save were coming back to haunt me.

My life came full circle when I inherited this rustic little cabin from my Uncle Davy. This two-room cabin is nestled in the woods of the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and sits on a few acres, with a couple dozen head of cattle. It has been a blessing. A blessing I never knew I needed. My uncle knew I needed a life change more than I realized I did.

It was when I participated in the Oxford academic of Military Medicine’s study about post-traumatic stress disorder among navy healthcare personnel following combat deployment when I faced the fact that I needed to leave the Navy. They compared the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Navy healthcare personnel with others in combat who also served on multiple combat deployments to Iraq, Kuwait, or Afghanistan. The nearly eight thousand healthcare personnel developed higher rates of PTSD and those rates of PTSD multiplied with repeated deployments. It was the exposure to wounded or dead friendly forces that increased the rate and put the health care professionals at a higher risk. My PTSD comes back to me in the form of nightmares. Those haunting dreams forced me to take an early retirement and allowed me to get a business degree with my G.I. Bill.  Those debilitating nightmares were overwhelming, almost every night until I moved to this cabin.  I no longer dream about getting shot, bleeding out, and not being able to save the other guys in my unit.

Now, I’m the manager of a booming guest ranch. It’s the exact change my life needed. My cozy cabin is conveniently only a few miles away from my new career at The Ranch. My life now is all about entertainment, business, and cattle. It’s far different than it was in the military.

I have the perfect career now. My mornings are spent teaching people how to ride a horse, in the afternoon I managing the business side of the ranch, and I get to spend my evenings singing and entertaining the guest, while they are on vacation.

Meeting a whole new group of amazing people every week is a perfect life. It’s funny how much you can get to know about people when they are relaxed on vacation. There’s an old saying. People forget to enjoy life while they’re busy making a living. It’s very true. My job is to help them change that. 

Last year I met a girl who I thought I could have fallen in love with. It took saving her from a burning building to open my heart. But, that simple act turned into a new round of nightmares for me. The love of her life ended up being friends with an old blast from my past. Only the blast wasn’t a good thing. I came face to face with a memory I worked hard to forget.

While in the Navy, I was attached to a Marine Corps unit on deployment in Afghanistan. You see, I have a particular set of regrets. It’s the faces of the military members I saved that haunt me. I regret not being able to give them back their lives the way they were before each of their incidents. On the front line, I felt responsible for making sure they got to a hospital after patching them up the best I could.

There is not a day that goes by I don’t wish I could have done more for each one of them. I wish they didn’t have to live with the results of the limited resources we had in the field. They shouldn’t have to embrace the suck left over from war.

Sebastian Garcia is one of those faces. When he literally found my little cabin in the woods, it was his face that brought back all my demons. The nightmares came back, and my perfect new beginning was crushed.

Garcia is a great guy. He’s done wonderfully well for himself, probably better than I have. He’s a homicide investigator specializing in cyber tech stuff.  That girl I saved ended up marrying her boyfriend who is Garcia’s best friend, Drew. It was a double wack to my harmony. The one good thing that came from it was, it made me realize, I might be ready to move on from the heartbreak my high school girlfriend, Rylie, gave me. I grew up loving Rylie my whole life and have spent decades getting over the loss of our love. I never thought my heart would be ready to take a chance again.

Rylie didn’t want me to join the Navy, but I naively thought it would give me a chance to provide her with a beautiful life, as my wife. That never happened. She made the choice to dump me after I spent years encouraging her to accomplish her dream of becoming a comedian. But, she wasn’t on board with me fulfilling my dreams. That broke my heart. We kept in touch until she finally married someone else.

Recently, I met a beautiful woman named Carla. We’ve been dating for a while now. It turns out that she’s friends with Garcia and the girl I saved in the fire.

Carla is smart, confident, pretty and her nerves of steel make her sexy feminine side just as alluring as her strong, sturdy demeanor. She has ocean blue eyes that I swear see right through me. It feels like she can see into my soul. She’s been through more than her share of heartache. Things that are not for the faint of heart. There’s no playing games with her, not like I did with all the girls I screwed around with when I was in the military.  Neither of us have pushed the relationship beyond the just want to have fun and sex point yet, nothing too serious.  That on its own is refreshing.

Chapter 2 - Carla

My name is Carla Gray .

It’s common to hear people say they’ve been through hell in their lives. I’ve heard it said nearly a million times over the last few years. I’ve also heard it said. It’s not what you’ve been through. It’s what you’ve become from it. It’s all about what you make of your life.

That’s all bull shit. That’s usually always said by someone who hasn’t actually been through hell.

Today I am the working co-founder of The Tylor Gray Foundation. We specialize in helping families pick up the pieces of their lives after they are faced with living through hell. By hell, I mean the loss of a child. There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, it’s also true that it takes a village to survive the loss of your child.

With the help of my business partner, co-founder, and personal hero, Julia Ramos, we’ve worked hard to make this foundation what it is today. Julia is married to the love of her life, Jake Ramos. He is the Captain of the homicide division and happens to be best friends with Nick Caprisi, who is married to my other best friend, Izzy Caprisi. Izzy works here at the foundation too. 

Our foundation is a new beginning for victims of violent crimes, grieving parents, or even children who have lost their parents all in a senseless act of crime. We offer a multitude of services, everything from counseling, therapies, and spiritual classes. We specialize in healing from trauma and have recently expanded into a small private rehabilitation center with all of our dorm rooms filled. We’ve built our village. There is no other place quite like ours in the California Bay Area.

This foundation was a gift to me from Julia after the loss of my son, Tylor. She single-handedly contributed all the funds it took to open the doors. We have a beautiful group of friends who all work hard to make this place a success.

Izzy Caprisi has managed to keep a steady stream of financial donations flowing in, while she somehow manages to keep our offices organized. Our employees are all close personal friends and are truly the backbone of our services. Most of our staff know first-hand what it feels like to have been a victim and have worked their way into survival hood.  Like, Mariesa Roberts. She teaches our morning yoga classes and then in the afternoon she runs our children’s therapy groups with her degrees in child psychology and early childhood development. Mariesa is married to Izzy’s brother, Drew. We’ve become good friends. She may be the only friend who didn’t witness my emotional and mental breakdown after my son died.

Here’s what happened.

I lost my son in a horrific auto accident. But, that’s not who I am. At least, that’s not all I am.

It’s taken years, months, and days for me to build myself up to who I am today. It started out hour by hour. I struggled. It was the most painful moment of my life. Most people would think it would feel like someone reached inside your chest and ripped your heart out. It didn’t, at least not for me. It was like a blanket of numbness took over my body and my mind. I don’t even remember some of the things I said or did in that moment or many of the days after the accident.

I do know I made a choice to buy a gun. I used that gun to threaten the only other person who was struggling with that car accident as much as I was, Julia. At the time, I thought it was her fault. I thought she carelessly caused the crash that took my son’s life.

She didn’t. It was truly an accident.

Today I’m thankful she had it in her heart to be the bigger person and forgive me. She became my hero. From all the pain and suffering we both went through, we still managed to form a bond, an unbreakable bond. It was her kindness that pulled me out from under that blanket of numbness.

I’m embarrassed to admit I held Julia at gunpoint. I threatened to shoot her. I was driven by the pain of the loss of my son. She recognized that fact long before I did. She was suffering too. I just didn’t know it.

Julia’s now-husband was the investigator on the case at the time, and he was forced to shoot me to save me from shooting Julia. I’m thankful for that single gunshot. I’m even more thankful he has perfect aim. It was that one gunshot wound that changed my life. It saved me in ways I never knew it could. It also bonded Jake and Julia in a way as well.

Julia went to court and talked to the prosecutor to negotiate on my behalf, to get me the help I needed instead of letting me spend my days grieving in a jail cell. Instead, she helped me get the mental health treatment I needed. Julia even went to therapy with me. Sitting next to me explaining the pain and nightmares she suffered alongside me, we held each other together and lifted each other up when we both needed it. I had never known it was possible to show another human such unconditional love, but she did. That’s how we became friends, and from the start of that friendship Julia came up with the idea of our foundation. She gave me the foundation and a new life.

Julia has a grandmother we all know and love, Betty Webber. We all call her Grandma Betty or Granny B. She has been a wonderful supporter of our foundation as well. Grandma Betty always finds a way to help each of us in our group of friends out in a personal way. She’s what I