Carter's Undoing (To Marry a Madden Book 4) Read online

  Carter’s #Undoing

  To Marry a Madden

  Sherelle Green

  Copyright © 2020 Sherelle Green

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, incidents and characters are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to business establishments and events is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, no part of this book may be reproduced or copied without written permission of the author Sherelle Green.

  Editor: There for You Editing

  Cover Design: Sherelle Green

  Manufactured and Printed in the United States of America

  Wow, book #30!

  To my amazing readers! Each of you support this series in ways I never imagined. I am truly touched by how hard you ride for Carter and the rest of the Madden brothers. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU so much!

  To my sis, Kelsey, and my hubby for being a constant stream of support when it came to Carter’s story. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t know what I would do without your love, support, and encouragement. Sis, I can’t thank you enough for going on Carter and Serenity’s journey with me. And bae, you already know…

  To my critique partners Angie and Leslie, ladies thank you so much for encouraging me to write this story however my heart told me to.

  Dear Carter and Serenity

  With you, I couldn’t help but hurt. Your story evoking so many emotions that I cried after every smile.

  With your unspoken permission, I dived into every part of your history.

  And in the end, I fell in love with your story and your pain.

  All my love for this beautiful journey.

  ~Sherelle~

  Carter’s #Undoing

  For Carter Madden, his time in the military isn’t the only thing that haunts him.

  For Serenity Taylor, unanswered questions can drive a sane mind mad with speculation.

  But a Madden man may not be for every woman. Especially when broken promises cut deep and unknown secrets whisper loudly in the dark.

  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

  Epilogue

  Coming in 2020

  Would Love To Hear From You!

  Caden’s #Situationship

  Excerpt: Caden’s #Situationship

  About the Author

  Also by Sherelle Green

  One

  SERENITY

  Carter fucking Madden.

  He’s the truest heartbreak I’ve ever known. The cause of the rawest pain I’ve ever felt. A reminder that some may look like they have the perfect life, but beneath the surface lie a series of messed up layers too thick for anyone to take a chance to unpeel.

  To still have a hold on my heart while also introducing me to a hate unlike any I’ve experienced before was something even I didn’t understand. He was my kryptonite. My drug of choice. An incurable disease that I caught the minute I first laid eyes on him when we were kids. And for even more torture, for the better part of my life I’d surrounded myself with his closest family. Brothers that looked just like the man who ripped out my heart and stomped all over that shit. A man who proved that my love meant nothing more to him than dog crap stuck at the bottom of a ten-thousand-dollar pair of Louis Vuitton dress shoes.

  First love could be a beautiful thing, and although I liked to think I always kept a more optimistic mindset, I felt like I was damaged goods. He made me feel that way. He was the reason I knew I would never let another man love me so completely ever again.

  I had my life together for the most part, but it wasn’t healthy to have my world revolve around a man I didn’t even know anymore. A man who promised me the world, just to turn around and walk out of my life without a backwards glance.

  “Serenity, are you okay?” Avery asked. I wanted to respond to her, but I couldn’t. I was a proud woman and had spent over a decade focused on becoming a better version of myself. Yet, staring across the room into the unaffected eyes of a man I thought I would never see again was almost enough to break me.

  But I wouldn’t break. Not in front of him. Not in front of my friends. We’d been enjoying Crayson and Jordyn’s wedding reception when Avery told me that Caden had planned to propose to Cordelia tonight. When we made our way back to our table at the reception, Tyler distracted Cordelia so that Avery and I could meet Caden at his house to see if he needed any assistance to make sure our girl had the best proposal.

  The last person I expected to see was him. He didn’t move from the corner where he stood in Caden’s bedroom, and if Caden and Avery weren’t watching me to see my reaction, I’d be questioning why a ghost would haunt my sanity and play such cruel and twisted joke.

  He hadn’t said a word, and I could barely make out any physical features in the dim lighting, but I knew it was him. I felt it in every bone in my body and muscle in my clenched jaw. I could also see part of his face. Part of those eyes that might as well belong to a stranger because I didn’t know who he was anymore. The Carter I’d known wouldn’t have done what he did to me. He would have been a man about it when he broke up with me and done it face-to-face. Hell, my Carter wouldn’t have broken up with me at all because we’d been with each other for what felt like every second of every day since we met.

  “Want to head downstairs?” Avery suggested.

  “Hell no.” My words were chipped. Quick. Took little thought because I wasn’t going anywhere until I knew why he was here. So I asked him.

  “Why now?” My voice was firm, yet kind of low. Like I didn’t really want to know the answer. That was so unlike the new me. Young Serenity had been kind of shy and closed off. But grown woman Serenity didn’t let shit shake her.

  Take a deep breath, I reminded myself when I felt my hands shaking. And then it hit me. Today marked the exact day when I’d met the Madden triplets. Coincidently, six years to the day after that, had been the last time I laid eyes on Carter Madden. Until now …

  “Why now?” I asked again, louder this time. “Why the fuck have you returned home after abandoning everyone and everything you love?” I was yelling, but I didn’t care, and Caden nor Avery made any move to quiet me.

  He clenched his jaw and slightly adjusted his stance, the only movement I’d seen him make since Avery and I had happily entered the room. But of course, he’d sucked that joy right out and slapped me across the cheek with it.

  Fuck him.

  Fuck him for staying gone for more than fifteen years, and fuck me for still loving him with every part of my soul. The bridesmaid dress that I wore was suddenly itchy as hell, and the garment on my shoulders felt like a heavy, weighted robe of anger disguised as a beautiful chiffon shawl of perfection.

  But I was far from perfect right now. Losing what little patience I had left, I walked farther into the room and kept going until I was a couple inches from his face, my steps faltering when he moved a little more into the light.

  I don’t know why I expected him to back away from me, but he hadn’t. And what I saw before me made my breath catch. He looked so … different. I couldn’t even formulate the words to describe the feeling I had laying my eyes on
him after all this time. It only took seconds to conclude that I had no idea how hard life had been for him. There was a point in time when I would have known everything.

  I thought it would have been liberating to finally lay eyes on a man who had haunted every dream I’d ever had for over a decade, but it wasn’t. Instead, I felt confused, torn by my unwanted desire to hug him and never let go or curse him out for ever throwing our love away as if it meant nothing.

  Just as quickly as he’d stepped into the light, he moved back into the shadows and something about him backing away now, even though I’d prepared myself for it moments before, really pissed me off.

  “I came for you, Serenity,” he finally said. “I came for you.”

  He’d told me those exact words before. Voiced them in the same order and evoked similar emotions in me that I was currently feeling. Unlike the first time I heard them, I shot back a firm, “I don’t need you.” And I meant every word of it.

  “You will always need me.” His words were cocky and too bold for someone who exited my life without giving me so much as a proper good-bye.

  I felt my feet move quickly and my hand travel to smack his face, the next few seconds a blur of years’ worth of agony. I slapped him and I slapped him hard, his rough skin unmoving beneath my palm. I didn’t make it a habit of smacking people, and call me crazy, but I thought he would at least move his head when he saw my hand rise. Instead, I felt like my palm had encountered a wall of steel, causing me to hit him again out of pure frustration.

  This time, he grabbed my wrist before a third slap incurred and stepped back into the dim light, his stance even more powerful than before. He let my wrist go immediately, but I felt Caden by my side anyway, the energy in the room even more tense. No wonder he’d stayed in the corner of the room. He was intimidating.

  Looking at him now more closely, I had so many questions that I knew he’d never answer. Carter’s height had always been impressive, but now he sported thick muscles and a solid build visible beneath his shirt. His brothers, Crayson and Micah, were the ones who were often mistaken for being NFL players. But Carter? He’d always had more of an NBA player type build like his brothers, Malik, Malakai, and Caden.

  His face wasn’t the same either. All his features seemed hardened, so unlike the Carter I remembered. And on the right side of his face was a deep scar that ran from above his eye to his jaw. It looked years old, but still painful to the touch. My fingers ached to ease the pain, but I didn’t move to touch the scar like I wanted to. I bet that scar could tell me secrets that Carter himself wouldn’t even dare to whisper when he thought I was in a deep sleep.

  Carter had always been the golden boy. The all-American favorite who’d helped our local high school see the first basketball victories they’d had in decades. We’d been homecoming and prom king and queen, and I always knew the only reason I ever won was because our school and entire town had been obsessed with all things Carter. I hadn’t blamed a soul because Lord knew I had been the president of his fan club. Cranberry Heights townsfolk still spoke of him with high regard and constantly talked about how proud they were that he’d gone into the military even though none of us had heard from him since he enlisted. That was the thing about small towns. Memories went deep and certain people would never be knocked off the pedestal they were placed on.

  Yet, the Carter standing before me had snatched any words from my mouth that I was about to say. Standing before me, he wasn’t just the asshole who broke my heart or the son who hadn’t made an effort to see his parents in years. He was an imposter. A fraud. A fucked-up replacement of the man I’d loved for most my life because I could see in his eyes that my Carter was gone. My sweet, kind, would never do anything to hurt the people he loved Carter had been replaced with the man whose eyes were cold and unnerving. A man who looked like he didn’t know the meaning of good or noble.

  Yet, the main problem I had as I stood there in a stand-off with the first man who’d ever kissed me so passionately my soul had wept in satisfaction, was that I still felt it. Whether it be anger or attraction or downright irritation over the fact that I still didn’t understand why he was here, the point was, he was still making me feel everything.

  Even more upsetting, I hadn’t felt this strongly about anyone or anything in my life, except for one other time. The summer of 1998. That revelation was almost as unsettling as the dark eyes staring back at me.

  Twenty-two years ago …

  I could hear them running down my block before I even saw them. The Madden triplets, loud and rowdy as usual.

  When I’d initially seen them through my bedroom window I hadn’t known who they were. Although we’d lived in Cranberry Heights, Arkansas when I was little, I didn’t have too many memories of it from back then. Now that we were back, I’d assumed that not much had changed since Cranberry Heights still seemed the same to me.

  However, last month, I heard from a girl I knew, Kat, that the only new people who had moved here since we moved away was the Madden family. I hadn’t known who she was talking about at first, until a couple weeks ago, my mom was bringing in groceries and I’d heard them from inside of my house offering to help.

  She declined, and when she came into the house, she warned me that twelve was too young to be talking to boys. I’d told her I hadn’t even met them, but she punished me for no reason other than the fact that she felt like it. She said if she was punishing me for nothing, imagine what she would do if she caught me talking to one of those boys. That was my mother. I was sure if she had her way, I’d never leave the confines of our front yard. Yet, my stepfather didn’t want me around when my mom was at work and always told me to go play in the front yard. Surprisingly, that is exactly where the Madden triplets found me today.

  “Hey,” one of them said, followed by similar sentiments from one of the others.

  “Hi.” I waved back, surprised they even stopped to talk to me.

  “I’m Caden,” the first one who’d said hi introduced himself as.

  “I’m Crayson, and this is Carter.”

  Carter. My eyes went to Carter, the only brother who hadn’t introduced himself to me yet. It was kind of weird since the others had, but then again, I knew who they were. When I watched them from my window when they passed by sometimes, Carter always seemed so friendly. Like if I were to meet the triplets and get to know them, he’d probably be my favorite. I wasn’t really sure why I always felt that way, but I just had this feeling about him. I’d never even had a crush on a boy before, but after they passed my house a few times, I knew I was crushing hard.

  It was how he walked and talked. The fact that I swear I would catch him searching our yard sometimes, and I always wanted him to be searching for me. Although he’d probably just been looking at my chalk drawings since I usually covered as much sidewalk as I could.

  Sometimes, when I opened my bedroom window, I could hear him and his brothers talking. It didn’t matter what the topic was, Crayson always had a crazy spin on the subject. Caden constantly took a safer, more realistic approach. But it was Carter’s words that I hung on to. His point of view was always positive and optimistic. It wasn’t black and white for Carter, but grey depending on what they were talking about.

  I never felt like I thought about life the same way other kids did, and Carter didn’t sound like he did either. And he was clearly a leader. When Caden and Crayson would argue about a topic, Carter always diffused the situation. He seemed like the glue of the triplets to me.

  Realizing they were all staring, I remembered I hadn’t introduced myself. “I’m Serenity.”

  “We know,” Carter said, catching me off guard. He looked to his brothers before returning his attention to me. “I mean, Caden’s friend, Kat, told me who you were. I mean, told us who you were. Not that we were asking. We were just glad we weren’t the new kids anymore.”

  “I lived here before,” I explained. “We just moved away for a little bit, but now we’re back.” With my stepdad
who I hate, but I didn’t add that last part.

  Carter nodded. “Kat told us that, too.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you didn’t ask her about me?”

  “I did,” he confessed before his eyes widened. “I mean, I didn’t. You know Kat. She’s a talker.” He laughed all awkwardly and I got the impression that he had indeed been asking about me.

  I shrugged. “If you say so.” I was trying my best to remain cool, but I wanted to squeal in excitement that he knew who I was, too. Caden and Crayson started laughing while Carter sheepishly looked anywhere else but at me.

  “Did you guys want to draw on the sidewalk with me?” I asked, breaking the awkwardness.

  Crayson shook his head. “I suck at drawing. Our older brother, Malakai, is great at it and has tried to teach me, but I still suck.”

  “We’d just mess up the nice drawings you already have here,” Caden said, before slapping Carter on the shoulder. “But our brother here is pretty good at art. I’m sure he’d love to draw with you.”

  I looked expectantly at Carter, waiting for him to confirm or deny what Caden was saying, but instead, he just stood there staring at me. His eyes pinning me in place in a way that made the palms of my hands sweaty, which was terrible considering I still had chalk in one hand.

  “I’ll stay and draw with you,” he finally said.