Jholee & Kiandre Read online

  Contents

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  Coming Next!

  Coming Next!

  Synopsis

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Message from Bianca

  About the Author

  Also By Authoress Bianca

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  © 2018 Royalty Publishing House

  Published by Royalty Publishing House

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  Any unauthorized reprint or use of the material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage without express permission by the author or publisher. This is an original work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contains explicit language & adult themes suitable for ages 16+ only.

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  Coming Next from ROYALTY!

  Available 1/31!

  Get ready for this EXPLOSIVE finale!

  Coming Next from ROYALTY!

  Available 1/31!

  Get ready for this EXPLOSIVE finale!

  Synopsis

  What are you willing to do for your family?

  For Jholee Marshall, that question has always been easy to answer: Anything. At twenty-two years old, Jholee had given up everything, including her full-time hours at school, her apartment, her expensive bags, and her car after her drug dealing dad’s indiscretions put their family in a bind that blindsided them all. With everything that Jholee had given up, that still wasn’t enough for her family to get back to normal, and after her dad shut down the thought of her taking her clothes off for money, she only had one thing left to sell: her virginity.

  Kiandre ‘TK’ Kincaid has had the Jacksonville streets secured when it came to moving weight, but after years of watching his father make money off women lying on their backs, he decided to try his hand at building his own legacy without stepping on them to get there. In order to make his dreams of owning a strip club a reality, TK finds himself moonlighting at his father’s sex shop from time to time. When circumstance leads him to working the front desk, it’s there that he meets the very impressionable Jholee. After realizing that Jholee isn’t cut out for being a sex worker, he trashes her application and literally takes matters into his own hands.

  Jholee and TK’s worlds collide faster than they both would like to admit, but just as there are things keeping them together, there are just as many pulling them apart, including but not limited to Jholee’s best friends, Riley and Octavia, her parents, TK’s parents, and TK’s girlfriend Cheyenne. But there is something about fate: You can’t stop it.

  Chapter 1

  Jholee was sitting in the garage that had been turned into a mini apartment for her, trying to do her homework, but her parents’ aggressive arguing could be heard through the paper-thin walls.

  “Lonetta, I am fucking trying, okay! Fuck!” Joe-Lee Sr. yelled at his wife of fifteen years.

  “You ain’t trying, Joe-Lee. If you were trying, we would have never been in this situation to begin with!” Lonetta shouted.

  “I don’t regret my son, Netta!”

  “You should! You tore this fucking house apart, and now look where we at! Had you been where the fuck you were supposed to been when you were supposed to been there, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. You fucked up everybody in this house and you still ain’t accepted your fucking part in this!” Netta shouted, before Jholee heard a door slam loudly, making her jump slightly. She didn’t know why she jumped when she was used to doors slamming around the house these days.

  Jholee wasn’t sure what started the argument but if she had to guess, it was about her dad’s ability to perform in the bedroom. His inability to perform happened when he had a car accident two years ago. Jholee’s mom, Lonetta Marshall, wasn’t lying when she said that he tore this house apart. Things happened so fast that it could have given her whiplash.

  Two years ago, Jholee, and her mother were at her baby sister Jaylah’s induction into the National Honor Society, waiting for Joe-Lee to show his face. It was strange because Joe-Lee never missed anything dealing with the kids. He didn’t care what was going in the streets, it got put on hold, when it came down to his baby girls, but this time it was different. Throughout the whole ceremony, Jholee kept turning around, hoping to see her father at the door, but he never came. The induction ceremony had started and ended, and it was nightfall and Joe-Lee still hadn’t shown his face. It wasn’t until midnight that one of Jholee’s college classmates tweeted her, asking her if she needed anything, and that she was keeping her family in her prayers. Confused, Jholee tweeted her back and asked her what she was talking about, and she sent her the article, prompting her to run to her mom.

  The article said there was a horrible two-car accident in Lake City, Florida, leaving two dead and three in critical condition. The article didn’t name any names, but we knew for sure that it was Joe-Lee’s glossy painted, candy apple red box Chevy sitting on twenty-six-inch rims. Lonetta, Jholee, and Jaylah hopped in her mom’s Escalade and drove at very unsafe speeds to the hospital in Lake City. Imagine their surprise when they got there, that Conway Peterson, Joe-Lee’s right-hand man, was already in the waiting room. The deer caught in headlights look that Conway had given the trio when they walked into the waiting room, let Jholee know that things were about to get very ugly.

  “Where the fuck is my husband, Conway?” Lonetta snapped.

  Lonetta was scared and mad at the same time. Scared because she didn’t know if her husband was dead or alive, and mad because Joe-Lee had no damn business in Lake City at all, especially if he hadn’t told her what the hell was going on.

  “Netta, just calm down,” Conway whispered.

  Conway knew calm and Lonetta Marshall didn’t go in the same sentence, so he knew the minute that he said that, he was about to get snapped on.

  “Conway, don’t tell me—”

  Cutting her mother off before she got them kicked out the hospital, Jholee asked, “Goddaddy, where is my father?”

  Conway looked at JoJo, his goddaughter, with a solemn look on his face. “JoJo, your father was in a ver
y bad accident, and we are waiting for him to get out of surgery now. Sweet pea, you know your dad is a strong man, and he will get through this.”

  Before Lonetta could say anything about Conway blatantly ignoring her to talk to her daughter, loud, blood curdling screams made everyone whip their head towards the sounds. Lonetta’s eyes turned to slits when she noticed that the screaming was coming from Victoria Butler, the mother of the bitch that she’d hated since high school. Netta looked back at Conway, and his eyes had grown large, and she knew that he wished that he could have been anywhere but there at that moment.

  Victoria stopped crying long enough to see Lonetta Gaines Marshall, the bitch that ruined her daughter’s life, and charged towards her, but was stopped by Vincent Butler, her son.

  “This is all your fault! My daughter is dead because of you. You had to kill my daughter too,” Victoria yelled.

  Jholee looked from Victoria to her mother with a confused look on her face. Jholee was familiar with the Butler family and the hate her mother had for them, but she would not let Victoria accuse her mother of something she knew for a fact she didn’t do.

  “Victoria, my mother, my sister, and I have been together all day. There is no way that anything you’re saying is true,” Jholee’s timid self spoke just above a whisper.

  “She didn’t literally kill her, but in every other way she did. She had to have everything my daughter had. Everything, including Joe-Lee, Sr.,” she hissed.

  Senior? Jholee queried in her overactive brain.

  “Victoria, now is not the time,” Conway urged, knowing what was about to happen the moment she let the cat out of the bag.

  “Yes, it is! Now is the perfect time! I’m sick of this! My grandson, Joe-Lee Jr. is in the ICU fighting for his life because of you. Joe-Lee Sr. always loved my daughter, which is why he would never leave her alone. Yep, you were pregnant with Jaylah while my daughter was pregnant with the son that Joe-Lee always wanted. He only married you because you threatened to leave and take his kids away from him. He knew that Vanessa would never leave him alone, regardless of his status, and he was right. She never left him alone.”

  Stunned at the revelation, Lonetta kept her head held high, and smiled, not wanting Victoria to know that she had gotten the best of her. “Well, if she kept her legs closed to married men, she wouldn’t be chilling in a morgue, now would she? Ain’t that in the Bible somewhere? I know you tote it around like it’s a Glock. Now, if you would excuse me, I think I see the doctor. I need to get an update on my husband.” Lonetta rolled her neck around before walking away.

  Everyone’s, except Jholee, including the other people in the waiting room, mouths were damn near on the floor at the wicked things that Netta had said to the grieving family. Jholee knew how low her mother could go, so she wasn’t the least bit surprised at the callousness of her mother’s words.

  “Doctor, I am Lonetta Marshall, Joe-Lee Marshall’s wife, and I need an update on him. Is there a plug I need to pull or something?”

  The doctor had a very surprised look on his face. Netta would have rather her husband be dead than having to look him in his lying face at the moment.

  “Actually, your husband came through the surgery well. He’s paralyzed—”

  “Paralyzed?” Netta cut the doctor off.

  “Paralyzed on the right side. With therapy, he’ll be able to walk with a cane in a few months. He had a stroke during the accident—”

  “Can I see my father?” Jholee asked the doctor because she felt herself getting ready to break down. Her father was her best friend, and she needed to see him.

  “He’s in an induced coma, so not right now. Maybe tomorrow,” the doctor said.

  The door opening brought Jholee back to the present moment. Her dad hobbled down the stairs with his cane and she gave him a small smile. Joe-Lee was still in therapy and getting stronger every day. Even though it’d been two years since the accident, he was still trying to get to where he could walk without his cane. When the doctor finally brought Joe-Lee out the coma, he came clean to his wife. He had gotten Vanessa pregnant, but it was completely a mistake. Joe-Lee told his wife that everything Victoria said was a lie. He loved Vanessa because she was his first love, but Lonetta’s crazy ass had his heart, and Joe-Lee was telling the truth.

  “My JoJo, how are you doing?” her dad asked and sat down at the foot of her bed.

  Joe-Lee grabbed his daughter’s small foot and placed it in his lap and started to give her a massage. Jholee loved her dad’s foot massages. He always rubbed her feet during their conversations. Joe-Lee always tried to treat his daughters the way that he would want another man to treat them.

  “I’m good, Dad. What was that fight about this time?”

  Joe-Lee sighed. “You know how your mother can be, baby girl. It doesn’t help that she has to look at Jr. every day and be reminded of the time I cheated on her,” her dad said.

  JoJo pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth and shrugged. She never knew what to say to that because she wasn’t sure what she would feel if the son of the woman she hated had to move in with her and her husband. JoJo didn’t think she would be over it either.

  After a brief moment of silence, Joe-Lee asked her, “Jo, are we good? Like, for real, for real, are we good? I feel like we are not close anymore. You haven’t shut me out like your mother has, but I can feel the shift in our relationship. I’m still your best friend. You know that, right?”

  JoJo looked at her twin. His Nutella-colored skin, full lips, big, bright eyes and a Crest commercial smile was what always got the women to grovel at his feet.

  “Dad, we’re good. I…” she paused to gather her thoughts before she spoke again. “I just… don’t know. I thought you were perfect. I never thought that you would hurt Mom the way that you did, and with a woman that she hated. I think it would hurt much less if it had been a random. You always preached to me and Jaylah about the type of men we don’t need to date, and you go out and became the man that you preached to us about. It just seemed hypocritical and it just made me look at you different. I just feel weird. I don’t hate Jr., and he’s actually a good little brother. I just… Mom was right. Everything changed when you got in the accident. Our family has changed a lot, and Mom has turned her crazy up as high as it could go,” JoJo finally admitted her feelings to her father after two years.

  Joe-Lee respected that his eldest child finally expressed her feelings to him because it was something she rarely did, with anyone. JoJo had never been confrontational, and he always wondered how his baby would protect herself from the people in the world. He knew that his baby daughter Jaylah would have no problem in that area because she was every bit of her mother and would come to blows over something simple.

  “Jholee, I love you and I don’t think I’ve ever apologized to you for stepping out on your mother and what that did to you, and our family. I also don’t think I’ve ever told you how much I appreciate you, and one day, Daddy is going to be back on top, so you can get all of your things back.”

  “I’d do anything for our family,” Jholee whispered.

  “You shouldn’t have to focus on this at twenty-two years old. I promise I’m going to make it up to you.”

  Jholee nodded her head subtlety, but that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted her dad to speak on being a hypocrite. Joe-Lee stopped massaging her feet and stood up from the bed. He leaned over and kissed his daughter on her forehead and hobbled out of her room. The ‘things’ that her father was referring to, was the fact that she gave up everything to help cut down on the costs around the house. Courtesy of her father, Jholee had gotten her own apartment and Beamer once she graduated from high school. She was attending Jacksonville University full-time to get a business degree and a degree in dancing. She wanted to open up her own dance studio one day. She worked in this dance studio downtown as a part time choreographer, and that gave her little money to be able to catch Uber most places when her friends couldn’t take her.


  After the accident, the money came to a complete halt. Joe-Lee was a drug dealer, and everyone knew it and respected him, but the streets didn’t stop after he got hurt. Since he was down, someone else had taken over and Joe-Lee Marshall wasn’t about to work under no one. So, to cut down on the money leaving the house, Jholee sold her Beamer and broke her lease with her apartment. She was no longer full-time at Jacksonville University, and that was the reason it was taking her longer to graduate. She looked at the time and saw that it was almost time for her to get ready to head to the dance studio.

  Dancing had been a passion of Jholee’s ever since she was a little girl. Her mother had put her in all of the gymnastic classes up until she had aged out of the programs. In junior high school, Jholee was the dancing captain of the Dancing Divas, and in high school she was the captain of the majorettes, and she danced outside of high school for a squad called the Jax Trendsetters, and she loved it. She even got to choregraph dances for them when the season came around. Some of Jholee’s dances had won them first place in competitions.

  After her classes were over, she had lost track of time coming up with a new routine and it was now past eleven at night. Joe-Lee hated when Jholee would be downtown late at night because the people in Jacksonville were crazy. She called her best friend from grade school, Octavia, but she didn’t answer. She had a man, so she barely answered after hours. She called her friend Riley, whom she met her first year of college, and she picked up on the first ring.