Pelvic Flaws (An American in the UK Book 2) Read online

  Copyright © Nikki Ashton 2018

  All Rights Reserved ©

  Pelvic Flaws

  Published by Bubble Books Ltd

  The right of Nikki Ashton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A reviewer may quote brief passages for review purposes only

  This book may not be resold or given away to other people for resale. Please purchase this book from a recognised retailer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Pelvic Flaws

  First published November 2018

  All Rights Reserved ©

  Cover design – JC Clarke from The Graphics Shed

  Formatting by—JC Clarke from The Graphics Shed

  Edited by – Brooke Bowen Hebert

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to all my girls

  My friends, my rocks, my shoulders to cry on, my ears to bend

  We laugh raucously together

  We pee ourselves together

  We sweat like horses together

  We get drunk together

  We still act like we’re eighteen together

  Our shopping trips now consist of food and drink

  Our memories are shared and rose-tinted

  I love you all unconditionally

  You love me back and don’t care how inappropriate I am

  You are the best

  You know who you are.

  Please note, due to the nationality of the characters both English and American spellings and phrases may be used.

  Also be aware, for the benefit of the story, there may be some poetic license around some legal issues and their timescales, but wherever possible the correct procedures have been noted.

  Pelvic Flaws

  When one sneeze can ruin your day

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to all my girls

  My friends, my rocks, my shoulders to cry on, my ears to bend

  We laugh raucously together

  We pee ourselves together

  We sweat like horses together

  We get drunk together

  We still act like we’re eighteen together

  Our shopping trips now consist of food and drink

  Our memories are shared and rose-tinted

  I love you all unconditionally

  You love me back and don’t care how inappropriate I am

  You are the best

  You know who you are.

  Katie

  “I swear to God,” my friend Mandy said in a hushed tone. “It’s as dry as a desert down there.”

  We all looked at her with a grimace, each one of us feeling her pain. Mandy was well into the menopause and was giving our ‘book club’ the benefit of her experience. I for one was riveted, especially as every single month a fresh round of symptoms hit me. Last month had been trouble sleeping, this month it was the mood swings – just ask my kids. The parched vagina, I’d had on and off for a while.

  “So does it hurt when you have sex?” Trisha asked, while shifting her one-year-old from one boob to another, giving us a glimpse of her big brown nipple. “Even after a year, it still feels like Dave is pushing a pineapple up my Mary.”

  There were a few hissed breathes from the rest of us who were sipping coffee and pretending that we’d read the latest, supercilious, trite shit which Belinda, our self-appointed leader, had picked for us to review. We only met every two months, because that was how long it took to get through the boring crap she made us read.

  Mandy sighed. “Not so much but it’s so damn frustrating. Poor Jim is knackered trying to produce some lubrication. I have to say ‘keep going babe, almost there’, but he’s more likely to start a camp fire with all that rubbing.”

  “Have you tried lube?” Samantha asked, before shoving a huge piece of cake into her mouth.

  “Yeah,” Trisha added. “Dave and I swear by it, but that’s for when we’ve lost the front door key and have to go around the back.”

  Samantha almost choked on her cake as the rest of us burst into laughter.

  “You’re disgusting,” I said, still giggling.

  “Nothing wrong with some rear-end action. You need to try it.” Trisha popped Marnie off her tit and covered herself up.

  As we all shrugged and took a sip of our coffee, Belinda reappeared from visiting the bathroom.

  “So, what do we all think about the anally retentive character?”

  And we once more fell about laughing.

  Making my way home from book club, I wondered whether the house would be empty when I got home. The home I lived in with my three children – Isaac, nineteen, who thought himself a bit of ladies’ man – I blame my mother who always told him he was the most gorgeous boy ever. Annie, seventeen, a real drama queen if ever there was one, and Charlie, my ten-year-old baby. I loved them dearly, but they drove me bloody nuts on a daily basis. If they weren’t arguing amongst themselves, they were ganging up on me to try and persuade me to get a dog, or making the house look as though squatters had moved in and had a rave in the lounge.

  It was hard being a single mum, more so as the kids got older. Coping with them when they were small was much easier. I could take away toys and put them on the naughty step, now though, it was bloody hard getting six feet tall Isaac to sit on the third step up. I blamed their father for the shit they gave me, because while Carl and I were on good terms and had divorced through a mutual decision, the kids still liked to play each of us off against the other. ‘If you won’t let me, then dad will’, was the most common sentence in our house. Seeing as my forty-seven-year-old ex-husband h
ad remarried and was now with the gorgeous, twenty-six-year-old Sophie, who has provided him with a two-year-old cherub called Jessie, I felt inadequate enough without having their father shoved in my face. This often meant I was butting heads with them, because there’s one thing I wasn’t and that was a pushover.

  I also missed adult company, more specifically male, adult company. I was forty-five but I wasn’t dead from the knicker elastic down, and as much as Carl and I grew apart in most ways, we’d still been fairly compatible in the bedroom, right up until a few months before he left. It wasn’t that I didn’t go out or avoided trying to meet someone, it just hadn’t happened. I obviously didn’t float anyone’s boat in the looks department. Men were so picky these days. Even though I wasn’t fat, I was probably curvier than I’d have liked. I had a little roundness to my tummy and even though they looked cracking in a bra – never underestimate the value of good foundation garments, according to my mother – my boobs, while not quite spaniel’s ears, would definitely not pass the pencil test. My mum insisted I was pretty, apparently I looked ‘just like that Sandy girl in the film Grease’, but I didn’t see it myself. Maybe when I was younger, but my hair, which was once a lovely golden blonde, was now what I’d call digestive biscuit and my eyes were too pale a blue to be memorable. Long story short, I wasn’t getting any.

  Inwardly bemoaning my life, I pushed the button for the pedestrian crossing, and heard my phone buzz in my pocket. When I looked at the screen, I smiled.

  “Hey, Annie. You okay?”

  As the rapid beeping started, I jostled with a woman with a pushchair and started to cross.

  “Mum, what time will you be home?” she asked, the tell-tale whine in her voice that she wanted something.

  “About twenty minutes, why?”

  The woman with the pushchair eased it in front of me, evidently wanting to race me to the other side. I rolled my eyes and skirted around her and jogged to the pavement, reaching it before she did, forcing myself not to do a victory lap.

  “Can you take me to Sally’s?”

  “And what would that magic little word be?”

  “Oh God,” she sighed. “Please.”

  “Depends on whether the house is a mess when I get back.” I smiled waiting for her to combust.

  And right on cue. “That is so unfair! The boys are the ones who make the mess but I’m the one who gets it in the neck because you won’t give me a lift. You need to tell them to clear up their own crap, but no, they get away with-.”

  “Annie!” I snapped. “Take a bloody breath before you keel over from lack of oxygen.”

  “So will you take me?” she asked, manoeuvring easily back into a whine.

  “I suppose so, but if that house is a mess when I get back, I won’t be happy.”

  “Okay, okay, so you said.”

  “Annie, you push it young lady and you won’t be going anywhere.”

  Shit, who said it was a bloody joy having kids? Whoever it was, they were damn liars. Don’t get me wrong, I loved them, I just wished I’d maybe had one child who I could have moulded into a perfectly, well behaved human being. Trouble is, which of my children would I have chosen to have?

  Nope, it was far too difficult a decision to make.

  As I considered each of the qualities of my offspring, I reached my car and sighed with relief that there was no parking ticket attached to the windscreen. I’d only had a couple of quid in my pocket when I parked up, so the last half hour had been a game of jeopardy – would the car park warden do their Storm Trooper march through, or as was usual spend their time in the market café, because they’d already made their monthly quota of fines. Market café it obviously was.

  I threw my bag on the back seat and got inside, turned the key and made a silent prayer. When I heard the engine turn over, I almost wept with relief. My fifteen-year-old Vauxhall was being well behaved for a change.

  With a quick check of my lippy, because you never knew if a dishy copper would stop you on the way home, I stuck it into gear and made my way home to what undoubtedly would be chaos and mess.

  Dex

  I kicked my office door shut and prayed to God that none of the damn idiots I employed followed me, because I was likely to pull their heads off if they did.

  We had a strict fucking policy at Heaven & Ink- no one, and I mean no one, got a fucking tattoo under the age of eighteen. Everyone had to provide ID, unless of course, like me, they were fucking old and grey – if you called forty-six old. I still had a lot of life left in me. Shit, I could party half my staff under the table and they were all under thirty-five. The point was, someone, and no one was admitting to it, had booked a kid in for calf tattoo without checking his age. I get it, anyone can slip through, but you’d have thought an experienced tattooist like my guy Jethro would spot an underage a mile off before he put the needle to his skin. I fucking did.

  I’d gone in to ask Jethro if he’d done his stock check and as soon as the kid looked up at me, with fear in his damn eyes, I’d spotted that he was underage. The kid didn’t last even a minute of my interrogation before he picked up his Fantastic Four backpack and fucked off – come on, a Fantastic Four backpack, wasn’t that a big enough sign. Jethro’s ears were probably still ringing from me ripping him a new asshole. As for the other three artists and Scarlett, my receptionist, they were all still quaking too.

  I wasn’t a hard boss, but this was my damn livelihood and a lawsuit, or even dealing with an angry parent, was not on my ‘to do’ list. I just wanted a quiet life, which was why I’d moved my business to the UK from the US. Life in Dallas had been hard and fast and had led me to reassess what the fuck I was doing. Moving to the UK seemed the logical place to start fresh. I had dual citizenship, seeing as my mom was from Manchester. I had no ties in Dallas. My parents were both gone and I had no siblings, so why not leave.

  Slamming down onto my chair, I pushed it back and put my feet up on my desk, not caring that I’d got pages of new tattoo designs scattered all over it. I was pissed and needed a few minutes to calm down. My go-to stress relief would have been cigarettes in the past, but nowadays it was either taking out my pencils and sketching new designs, or kicking back and closing my eyes for ten minutes, sucking a mint, and taking some deep breaths. Trouble was that tended to be when images of Cherry, my ex, flitted through my mind. It had been almost three years since she’d accidently walked in front of a UPS truck, but images of her sweet face were still as vivid as ever. For the first time in almost two years, we’d partied together, but when I told her it didn’t mean we were getting back together, she’d run out of the bar and that was the last time I saw her alive. A week later, I heard she was dead. I hadn’t wanted to get back with her, because truth be known, I was already fix‘in to leave the US, but her dying kinda sped up the process and I left before the funeral. I felt some guilt that I hadn’t attended. We’d been together for three years before I left her, but we’d already been broken up for two and our last conversation wasn’t great, so I figured it best I stayed away. Even if I’d wanted to go, I got the feeling I wasn’t really wanted. When her mom called me to say Cherry had been killed, she made it clear it was a family only funeral, ergo, don’t come anywhere near, Dex.

  I did read the only tiny newspaper report I could find, mostly because I was a fucking dick and wanted to check I hadn’t upset her into doing something stupid. According to the report though, she was carrying groceries and wasn’t looking. Sad thing was, she lived in a tiny town, halfway between San Antonio and Houston, where there was barely any traffic.

  Rubbing my eyes, I heaved out a breath and thought about my night ahead. I didn’t go out much, but I felt like I needed to get laid. It had been a while and I knew just the person who could scratch my itch.

  Picking up my cell, I dropped my boots to the floor, landing them with a thud and typed out the number and waited for it to be answered.

  “Hey stranger,” Debbie crooned on the other end. “Not seen you for ages
. You okay?

  “Good an’ you?”

  “I’m fine. So, what can I do for you?”

  There was a playful tone in Debbie’s voice that said she knew exactly what she could do for me.

  “Dinner tonight?”

  “I’m busy tonight, hon. I can do tomorrow.”

  I would’ve liked to have met her that night, but I could wait.

  “Yeah, sounds good. You want me to pick you up?”

  Debbie was a thirty-eight-year old divorcee, who lived with her mom and had specifically asked for me to tattoo the angel on her back – in fact, being specifically requested was the only time I tattooed anyone these days. Apparently, she’d seen an article about me and my work in Inked Magazine and was adamant that I did her art. We hit if off during our three, two hour sessions and agreed to dinner, which led to sex. She made me laugh, was pretty good at blow jobs, and didn’t want anything serious, so we suited each other just fine.

  “That’d be great. Half past eight?”