Finders Keepers
N.R. Walker
Publication date: February 2nd 2018
Genres: Adult, LGBTQ+, Romance
Needing a change of scene, Griffin Burke moves from Brisbane to Coolum Beach to start a new job. The beautiful white sand, aqua-coloured ocean, blue skies, and summer breezes are everything he longs for. What he finds is a mud-covered dog, lost and hungry, with a nametag and a phone number.
Dane Hughes is stuck in Surfers Paradise at a week-long work conference when he gets a phone call from his distraught mother. His dog, his fur baby, Wicket, has run away. Unable to leave and feeling helpless and miserable, he gets a text from a guy. “I think I found your dog…”
Griffin and Dane start talking, and Griffin agrees to look after Wicket until Dane can collect him. With a few days left before his new job starts, Griffin takes Wicket on some coastal adventures and sends Dane photos of their fun, and so the start of something new and kind of wonderful begins.
Griffin might have moved to Coolum in search of a new life, but what he finds is so much more. What he gets to keep just might take some four-legged help.
—
She didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the men straining to get the wooden bedhead up the flight of stairs. Still without looking at me, she hummed. “Nice arse.”
I almost choked on my sip of water. “Uh…”
“Don’t tell me you weren’t looking. I might be a little hard of hearing, but I ain’t blind.”
Right then.
I held out my hand. “Name’s Griffin Burke.”
She shook my hand, and her hard, firm grip surprised me. She looked kind of frail at first, but then I noticed her tattoos. Her entire right arm was now a mottled, wrinkled mass of blue and coloured ink on sun-leathered skin. Given she looked to be in her seventies, she must have had a full sleeve done forty or fifty years ago.
Jesus.
“Bernice Warren.”
She was wearing a sleeveless tank top and a flowing skirt. Upon closer inspection, she looked like a hippy that peace, love, and time forgot. Her face had seen too much sun as well, wrinkled and leathered, though I imagined she would have once been stunningly beautiful. Her blue eyes still had spark, her long once-blonde hair now ash grey.
“Come with me,” she said, turning on her heel and walking toward the roller door. When she turned, I noticed her left arm. Old, mottled blue tattoos went to her elbow, as well as two scars that looked like lightning strikes. They looked surgical and my first thought was shoulder reconstruction, but then I noticed one scar ran underneath her shirt and up her neck. She turned the latch on the roller door, and using her right arm only, lifted the door to review a storage space. Inside was a lawnmower, wheelbarrow, and some gardening tools.
Ah, right. I was the resident mower of lawns.
“I’d do it myself,” she said. “But the old arm doesn’t work like it used to.” She lifted her left arm rigidly. It didn’t hang useless but there was definitely restricted movement.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t mind mowing lawns at all. My weekends will be Monday and Tuesday though, not Saturday and Sunday. If that’s okay?”
“It’s fine. Don’t much care what day you do ’em.” She nodded to herself. “Last tenant was a nice girl. Started out with good intentions, and she was gonna do all sorts of things to help me out, but that didn’t last long.” Bernice looked up at me and stared for a good long minute. “You’re not the churchgoing type, are you?”
“Uh…”
“I don’t mind if you are, I just don’t wanna offer you one of my special brownies and for you to totally hash out on me and start mumbling biblical shit at me every time you see me.”
I fought a smile and lost, and I tried not to laugh but couldn’t help that either. “Not biblical. Not in that sense, anyway. Unless you consider my earlier staring at that guy’s arse a religion. As for the special brownies, I haven’t had any for a while. Not since college, anyway.”
Bernice grinned and nodded slowly. “So you know what I mean when I say special brownie. Not like the last poor girl who thought it was my grandma’s special recipe or some shit.” She shook her head slowly. “Dunno what she was thinking. Do I look like Betty Fucking Crocker to you?”
N.R. Walker is an Australian author, who loves her genre of gay romance.
She loves writing and spends far too much time doing it, but wouldn’t have it any other way.
She is many things: a mother, a wife, a sister, a writer. She has pretty, pretty boys who live in her head, who don’t let her sleep at night unless she gives them life with words. She likes it when they do dirty, dirty things... but likes it even more when they fall in love.
She used to think having people in her head talking to her was weird, until one day she happened across other writers who told her it was normal.
She’s been writing ever since...
