Title: To Mend a Broken Wing
Series: Rossingley, Book Four
Author: Fearne Hill
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 02/07/2023
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 71800
Genre: Contemporary, contemporary, gay, bisexual, interracial, NA, British, physical difference/phocomelia, found family, coming of age, humorous, cricket competition, children
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Description
“I think,” Lucien began, “that we accept the love we believe we deserve. And unfortunately, Noah doesn’t believe he deserves any.”
For twenty-two-year-old Noah, the revelation that his biological father is an ex-professional footballer is like tearing the wrapper from a cheap chocolate bar and discovering he’s won the elusive golden ticket. Every homeless young man’s dream, right?
Wrong. Because his father has also served a lengthy prison sentence. For murder.
With nothing to lose and facing a winter sleeping rough, Noah travels to France to meet him. Despite an angry encounter, Noah reluctantly agrees to stay at the ancestral home of one of his newfound father’s friends until he finds his feet.
Twenty-five-year-old Toby loves his village of Rossingley so much he’s never left. Working as a manny caring for the children of the eccentric sixteenth earl is his dream job. Sure, he’d like to travel someday and maybe find a boyfriend, one who doesn’t treat him like a doormat. But with his deformity denting his confidence, Toby counts his blessings and takes what he can get. That is, until a sullen, handsome misfit comes to stay, flipping Toby’s ordered village life upside down.
To Mend a Broken Wing
Fearne Hill © 2023
All Rights Reserved
I hated the French. Principally because they all spoke fucking French. And not the lumbering phrasebook French we learned at school, but a sneering, bastardised version of it, at three times the speed. My hatred thickened the farther south through France I travelled; it extended to the woman behind the ticket counter at Montparnasse station, closing her shutter at two minutes to one, forcing me to queue all over again at an adjacent counter. It extended to the portly ticket collector, scrutinising my valid ticket as though I’d handed him a fake fifty quid note, as his train à grande vitesse crawled at a snail’s vitesse through countryside far too pretty to belong to this arrogant, snooty nation. And it most certainly extended to the skinny madame seated opposite me in the carriage between Montparnasse and Poitiers, angrily flicking each page of the latest copy of Vogue as if I was personally responsible for the interdit de fumeur sign above her head.
Discovering I was half-French myself was the fucking icing on the cake. Mind you, for as long as I could remember, anger and hatred of pretty much anything and everything had been my default. I’d recently found out why, which made me angrier than ever.
The whole journey was questionable in the first place. More of a fool’s errand than a knight’s quest. What I labelled a determinedly headstrong personality, teachers had called reckless and disruptive, all traits contributing to why I would see this damned stupid idea through even if it killed me. To call quits now would be to admit I’d made a huge fucking monumental error.
Maybe I had. But what were the alternatives?
Sofa surfing sounded cool until it no longer became a choice, and then it very quickly became exhausting. Permanent impermanence. My daily reality since my mother had kicked me out. No privacy. Nowhere to keep personal stuff. Being asked to move on at any time. A few nights out on the streets.
I couldn’t blame her for showing me the door, not really. Entertaining the fuzz in your front room while neighbours earwigged over the fence soon got old. Nicking twenty quid from her wallet and smacking her husband round the chops hadn’t helped. Mind you, he’d given me a decent smacking back. I still had the bruises on my jaw to prove it.
She’d spat out the name of my real father after so much goading, and I swear if she’d had a knife in her hand, she’d have used it, then wiped the blood off and never looked back. Because I could be a really fucking annoying tosser when I put my mind to it. She’d spelled his foreign name out carefully, almost triumphantly, which should have been my first clue that I’d have been better off not ever knowing. But right now, me and emotional intelligence weren’t on speaking terms. I saw obtaining that name as a huge victory; she saw it as a route to getting me out of her hair for good.
Naturally, I justified my downwards spiral of bad behaviour. To myself and to anyone who cared to listen. Shiny new husband, shiny stepkids, shiny new life; finally, my mother had everything she wanted, and the brown-skinned misfit with the hot temper hanging around from her old life made the place look untidy. She’d done her best with me in the early days, but a quick shag on a moonlit beach at seventeen, followed by an unwanted pregnancy wasn’t the healthiest start to familial relations. My mum had been a resentful skint kid bringing up another resentful skint kid, and one with a different coloured skin to all the other kids in our backwater town. And with no man in the house to keep him in line. Not exactly a winning recipe for a mutually fulfilling relationship.
From that miserable hand-to-mouth existence to finding out that my biological father was an ex-professional footballer? Like tearing the wrapper from a cheap chocolate bar and discovering the fucking elusive golden ticket. Even if he was French.
Yep, yours truly was the result of a quick shag on a moonlit beach. Times were different back then, I told myself. So, what if this Frenchman about to receive a surprise visit had enjoyed an ungentlemanly one-night stand twenty-two years ago with a girl barely legal? Instantly forgiven and totally understandable. Everyone knew hot young women practically threw themselves at professional footballers, didn’t they? He’d have had to maintain the self-control of a Trappist monk not to succumb from time to time.
My son-he’d-never-known-he-had homecoming would be magnificent. I’d pictured our reunion scene: My dad’s house would be a dazzling white villa, somewhere very hot, overlooking miles of sandy beach. An azure sea. A sleek yacht moored nearby. The villa would have a kidney-shaped swimming pool, perhaps two of them, one indoors and one outside, and they’d be those fancy designs that created the illusion of merging with the ocean and the brilliant blue sky. My dad—in my head, he was Idris Elba’s double and twice as cool—would be patiently sipping an ice beer in the shade of the pool as if he’d been waiting for me his whole life, a missing piece of his perfect jigsaw. We’d exchange a manly embrace, his eyes brimming with tears of joy; his fit ex-model wife would be crying with happiness, too, because after years and years of praying they’d be blessed with a child, their dreams had finally come true. And so on and so on and bloody so on.
That fucking idiotic fantasy had lasted all of thirty seconds.
Because page two of Google painted an entirely different story. A Pandora’s box I’d prised open and now would give anything to slam shut again. As the truth screamed at me from my phone screen, in black and white, the red mist descended. Hatred and contempt for my mother grew even stronger.
Noah Bennett was the bastard spawn of a murderer.
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Fearne Hill lives deep in the southern British countryside with three untamed sons, varying numbers of hens, a few tortoises, and a beautiful cocker spaniel.
When she is not overseeing her small menagerie, she enjoys writing contemporary romantic fiction. And when she is not doing either of those things, she works as an anaesthesiologist.
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