Without a Plan: The Shady Pines Series

By Dover Kincaid

Donna Hendrix is from a happy upper-middle-class family in Atlanta, Georgia. Donna joined a sorority in college and married her college boyfriend immediately after graduation. During her marriage, she worked for her husband’s business.

After learning her husband has been unfaithful, Donna decides to dump him and break out of her mold as a perfect suburban housewife. She wants fun, adventure, and most importantly, a bad boy to fulfill her fantasies.

Joe Norris is from a happy middle-class family also in Atlanta, Georgia. After high school, he joined the marines. He then worked at both Harley-Davidson’s design factory and assembly plant. He returned to Atlanta and bought a Harley-Davidson dealership.

Joe has the biker look—6 feet 5 inches tall, 270 pounds of pure muscle, tattoos, and a beard. Women hang around his dealership, and the bars, concerts, and restaurants he frequents. He has lots of one-nighters but hasn’t met a woman that he sees as his life partner.

When they meet by accident, can he be Donna’s bad-boy fantasy? Can she be the woman Joe has been waiting for?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984570048

Book preview

PART 1

THE PAST

Chapter 1

The Divorce

While Donna sat in her lawyer’s office waiting for her soon-to-be ex-husband and his lawyer to arrive, she thought back to certain events in her life that had gotten her to this place. While growing up, she had always looked like a good girl, and for the most part, she had been. However, she had a wild streak that came out from time to time. This had gotten her into a bit of trouble as a young child and into several bad situations as a teenager.

If it hadn’t been for her two older brothers, Tom and Terry, her parents would have found out she smoked pot occasionally, had attended a frat party at Georgia Tech when she had been sixteen (where she had drunk too much and had gotten sick), and had a fake ID.

Once she was in college at Auburn University, which was several hours from Decatur, Georgia, where her parents and brothers lived, she had gotten a little wiser or maybe just a little bit more careful. She only had to call on her brothers once to get her out of a jam.. She had been in a minor fender bender and hadn’t wanted her parents to know she had been at a pool hall where some of the characters had been dicey and where drugs had probably been sold in the back room.

At Auburn, Donna pledged herself to the same sorority her mother had been a member of years earlier. Of course, she dated members of the brother fraternity.

In her second year of college, she realized that between attending classes and sorority functions she had little time to walk on the wild side. She adopted the sorority look and started an exclusive relationship with Jeff Mickelson, a handsome tennis player from the brother fraternity. She majored in Accounting because that was what her father had recommended and she found she actually liked it. When she graduated with her bachelor’s degree, she was already engaged to Jeff.

Jeff was only the second boy she had sex with, and he was much better than the first one from prom night in high school. She had obtained birth control pills from the on-campus clinic, so she and Jeff had sex often. He loved having sex, and she knew from stories passed around by her girlfriends that his technique was sort of slam-bam-thank you-ma’am. She seldom had an orgasm but always pretended to because Jeff sulked if she didn’t.

Her parents loved Jeff, her sorority sisters loved Jeff, her brothers tolerated Jeff, and she and Jeff had a life plan. Jeff was going to take over his father’s business once he had his master’s degree. Donna was going to work as his head accountant until she had their first child. After that, she would stay home and raise their children.

This was how her mother lived, all her mother’s friends lived, and most of her friends’ mothers lived, so Donna saw this as the natural progression of her own life, even though she knew there must be something more out there. She considered herself content until two things happened during her second year of marriage: She found out Jeff wasn’t being faithful, and their daughter was born with underdeveloped lungs.

Donna was seven months pregnant when she found out Jeff was cheating. A friend had seen Jeff in Fort Myers, Florida, with a woman they both knew after Jeff had told Donna he was going to Florida for a seminar. Donna was no doormat. She hired a private detective and found out that Jeff and this other woman had been seeing each other for several months. She also found out he was cheating with another woman at the same time. Donna decided to dig a little deeper and discovered that Jeff had been cheating since shortly after their honeymoon.

Donna decided she would turn a blind eye until their baby was born and then would file for divorce. When their daughter, Bethany, was born with problems that required surgery and frequent emergency trips to the hospital, Donna focused all of her attention on her child. Jeff was attentive to Bethany and her needs, so Donna hoped this life challenge had straightened him out. She was too busy with Bethany’s care to worry about anything else.

When Bethany died before her first birthday, Donna was overcome with grief, and she existed in a fog for months. Finally, after months of counseling sessions with and without Jeff, Donna was able to start moving on. She and Jeff took a vacation to Hawaii, they moved into a different house, and Jeff encouraged Donna to start back to work -- but not at his company. He told her that she needed a fresh environment free from the memories of being pregnant while working with him. She found out later that Jeff was having an affair with his new receptionist, so keeping Donna out of the office was a must.

One day when Jeff was away on a business trip, Donna decided to do some major spring cleaning. She went through their old personal files at home, throwing out anything that was no longer needed by the IRS and scanning anything that needed to be kept. During her review of credit card statements, she noticed an odd pattern.

It seemed that every few months, Jeff stayed at a hotel downtown for no obvious reason. Shortly after these hotel stays, he bought jewelry Donna had never seen. Donna hired a private detective again, and sure enough, Jeff was cheating again. In fact, he had never stopped cheating. There had been numerous women, so there hadn’t been any love connections. It had just been plain cheating.

She protected herself financially by opening a new bank account and moving half their savings into her private account. She went back to counseling, hired a lawyer, confronted Jeff with her knowledge of his cheating, and had him served with divorce papers.

At first, Jeff had denied the allegations of his cheating, but when Donna provided dates, names, and photographs, Jeff had fussed and fumed about Donna’s settlement request. However, when his beloved Sea Ray Sundancer ski boat mysteriously sank in about 150 feet of Lake Lanier’s water and he had an encounter in a parking lot late one night with two ski-mask-wearing men who suggested he could join his boat, Jeff’s lawyer called and set up the meeting to sign the final settlement papers.

All of that had brought Donna to her lawyer’s office on this day. She was determined to leave her old life behind, be self-sufficient, and give in to her wild side. At twenty-seven, with sable brown hair, amber eyes, and a size-four, five-foot-four-inch frame clothed conservatively, she still looked like a sorority girl, or as one of her mother’s friends had once commented, Such a pretty, sweet thing,. Now she was going to look for something a whole lot different from what she had known.

Chapter 2

Moving On

Donna’s settlement from the divorce was in the medium, six-figure range. Donna promptly invested the money, minus the cost of a ten-day vacation in Italy with her two sisters-in-law. At her mother and father’s request, she moved back in with her parents after her divorce. She also went back to school.

Within eighteen months, she obtained her MBA in Accounting from Keller Graduate School of Management. She found a job at Hartwick Associates, moved into an apartment near the office in Marietta (another suburb of Atlanta about thirty miles from Decatur), and started her single life.

After eleven months, Hartwick Associates was sold. Donna tried to hang in there with the new management but did not like its style. Budgets were cut, people were laid off or fired, the working environment became toxic, and the business’s profits were adversely affected. Donna knew it was just a matter of time before she was laid off, was fired, or the place folded.

She found a new job at North Industries in Sandy Springs, which was another suburb of Atlanta but an hour commute from Marietta. She liked the new location much better because there were more parks, bike and running paths, trendy bars, and restaurants, so she bought a condo near her new office.

Donna actively participated in events at her condo complex but avoided hooking up with anyone there because she knew that could be tricky if she decided she didn’t like the man after a date or two. After a few months, Donna joined a dating service.

Chapter 3

Donna Meets Allison

Donna dated frequently but found that she was always paired with average guys—that is, conservative men with conservative jobs and conservative expectations. She knew this was because her profile and her photograph screamed conservative. Although she tried, she couldn’t quite kick her conservative look. She was a sweater-set-with-a-pencil-skirt-or-pleated-pants kind of woman.

She bought fancy lingerie, sexy shoes, and even a few racy outfits, but she never had the nerve to wear them. Her two attempts to change her hairstyle had been disasters. She had her hair, which she wore in a long pageboy style, cut into a very short wedge. However, her hair had too much curl in it, and the Georgia humidity turned it into clown hair. She had it highlighted because someone told her that would give it more body, but it just made her hair drier. She went back to her old style.

Donna saw hope in the person of Allison Becker. Allison was a beautiful, tall redhead who wore sexy clothes and her hair in a multi-layered, well-below-the-shoulders style. There wasn’t anything conservative about Allison. Allison was a guy magnet, but she had a way of looking at people that said, Touch me and you die. Donna heard that although Allison had been onboard for only a week, and in spite of her snarky attitude, at least four guys had already asked her out, and she had refused all of them.

Donna worked in Accounting and Human Resources. She found out from the new-hire paperwork that Allison would be working in Programming and Operations. Donna was determined to get to know Allison and to see if some of Allison’s edginess would rub off on her.

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Allison was sitting in the small breakroom at North Industries reading a book when Donna walked up and said, Hi, I’m Donna Hendrix. I know you just started here last week, so I wanted to welcome you and ask if you wanted to go out sometime.

Allison looked up at this pretty brunette who looked like a librarian and said, If you’re hitting on me, I don’t swing that way. Sorry. She then looked back down at her book.

Donna laughed out loud and sat down across from Allison at the tiny table. Oh, no, I don’t do that either. I’m just trying to be friendly. I’ve worked here over two years, and I know there are less than twelve women in this whole place. I remember how hard it was to get to know people when I started, so I just wanted to help out.

Allison had recently admonished herself for her lack of friends. When she took this job, she had promised herself she would try to be friendly with any women she met, although for some reason, women seemed to dislike her on the spot. Allison closed her book and in a friendlier tone said, Sorry. I’m Allison Becker.

Donna took a bite of her yogurt and said, Yes, I know. I work in Accounting and Human Resources. I helped process your paperwork. I know there are only two other women working in Programming and Operations. I know you have a master’s degree in computer sciences from Georgia Tech. That must have been hard. I’ve heard its program is tough.

Allison cringed a little at the yogurt Donna was eating. She didn’t understand how anyone could eat yogurt without loading it up with fruit and berries. She said, Yeah, it was hard. Being one of only a few women in the program made it harder. How did you get into accounting?

Donna settled into her chair and laughed, I went to Auburn—the same place my mother went to college—and studied accounting because my father recommended it and my boyfriend at that time encouraged it. I really had no idea what I wanted to do besides get out of my parents’ house. How about you? Was getting out of your parents’ house a major factor in picking Georgia Tech?

Something dark filtered through Allison’s eyes, but she just said, Yeah, getting out of my folks’ place was a major factor. I received a partial scholarship to Georgia Tech. I read that computer programming was one of the hottest and fastest-growing fields, so that’s what I studied.

Donna said, I only have a few more minutes for lunch. I ran down to the mall and swung back through here to grab something to eat. When I saw you, I just wanted to say hello. So would you like to meet for drinks later? There are several places in the area where we could go.

Allison said, Not today. I take the train here from where I live, so I need to check the train schedule before I commit. How about I call you?

Donna stood with a beaming smile. Excellent. Give me a buzz. My extension is 5051. If you’re free, we can meet here at five thirty tomorrow and then flip a coin to decide where to go.

Allison said, It’s a deal.

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Donna met Allison for drinks the next evening, and they became friends. In addition to lunches in the breakroom a few times a week and drinks at one of the nearby bars almost every Friday, they started going out to dinner and the movies occasionally on the weekends.

Donna ran almost every day at the nearby