Breaking All the Rules Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Planes, Trains, and All the Feels, by Livy Hart

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

  Copyright © 2023 by Amy Andrews. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Preview of Planes, Trains, and All the Feels copyright © 2023 by Livy Hart.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  644 Shrewsbury Commons Ave., STE 181

  Shrewsbury, PA 17361

  [email protected]

  Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Edited by Liz Pelletier and Lydia Sharp

  Cover design and illustration by Elizabeth Turner Stokes

  Interior design by Toni Kerr

  ISBN 978-1-68281-563-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-68281-586-1

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition January 2023

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Also by Amy Andrews

  Credence, Colorado Series

  Nothing but Trouble

  The Trouble with Christmas

  Asking For Trouble

  To bunny slippers and breakfast pie.

  At Entangled, we want our readers to be well-informed. If you would like to know if this book contains any elements that might be of concern for you, please check the book’s webpage.

  https://entangledpublishing.com/books/breaking-all-the-rules

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beatrice Archer needed sugar.

  She didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, or what season of Supernatural she was up to, but she knew she needed sugar.

  Now. In the worst kind of way.

  Bea didn’t care in what form it was delivered—soda, cookies, cake, candy. Hell, she’d eat it granulated straight from the packet. When it came to getting sugar right now, she wasn’t fussy. And if there’d been a single grain of it left in her apartment, anywhere, she’d have sniffed it out.

  But there was none to be found.

  Which meant she’d have to venture outside, because there was no such thing as Uber Eats in this little rural pocket of far, far eastern Colorado that she was temporarily calling home. Nope, in Credence, population 2,134, there wasn’t even a taxi service. No way could she do something as fancy as pick up her phone, tap on an app, and have sugar delivered to her in whatever form she wanted.

  Doughnuts. Ice cream. Waffles…

  Bea’s salivary glands and her stomach both made themselves known simultaneously. God, she’d kill for some waffles right now. With maple syrup and sprinkles. And sliced banana. Because she should probably eat some kind of fruit already.

  Right, so…she needed to get her ass out of bed and go outside. Finally. After two weeks holed away in her new apartment—if one could call a cramped studio over a coffee shop with a Murphy bed and a shower the size of a test tube an apartment—it was time to explore. At least to Annie’s and back, anyway. She’d noticed the diner on the way in, and if the sign on top boasting of the best pies in the county was anywhere near accurate, then the route between her apartment and the diner could become well-worn.

  But would it be open? Diners usually opened early, right?

  What time is it, anyway?

  Bea peered at the blinds on the opposite wall, which covered the small window just above the sink that overlooked the main street of Credence. She’d pulled the blinds down the second she’d moved in, and there they’d stayed, keeping everything inside nice and secluded and dark except for the bleed of sunshine around the edges.

  If the sun was up, then Annie’s was open. Now, where the hell was her phone?

  She set aside her laptop and searched, lifting up pillows and looking under her duvet. All she found were a scrunched-up paper towel, an empty soda can, an almost-empty-except-for-a-few-burned-ones-on-the-bottom bag of microwave popcorn, and a couple of gossip magazines.

  Damn. She really needed to clean some of this up.

  Glancing over the side of the bed, she spied her phone on the floor next to an empty bottle of wine and an empty Cheetos packet. When she snatched it up, the screen came to life—nine thirty a.m. And only 3 percent battery left. Great. The charger was only two inches from where the phone had been all night. When had she ever forgotten to charge her phone?

  Bea swung her legs out of bed and slid her feet into a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers. Why was it still so tits-freezingly cold in Eastern Colorado at the end of March? It was practically bikini weather in Southern California. She swayed a little as she stood, probably from how infrequently she’d actually been upright recently.

  Maybe from the can of beer she’d consumed when she’d woken earlier.

  Stretching, she groaned a little at the niggles in her neck and back. All this lying around on a mattress with several springs missing was screwing with her lumbar spine. Then she headed for the kitchen, stepping around the coffee table situated in front of the two-seater couch pushed up against the wall, and dodged multiple articles of clothing strewn about as she made her way to the sink.

  She squinted against the light as she got closer, then located the bottle of Tylenol next to the sink full of dirty dishes, cracked the lid open, and shook two into her hand. Grabbing the closest drinking implement—an empty wineglass that must have had some red it in at one point, given the residue in the bottom and the purple ring on the laminate—she shoved it under the faucet, filled it, and swallowed the pills down with the resultant pink water.

  Bea glanced at the sink as she tried to find a place for it, then shoved it back down on the purple ring when she realized there was nowhere to put it. Adding a glass might upset the delicate balance to the tower of dirty dishes. She really needed to do something about that tower. Because she was pretty sure she’d used the last clean fork last night.

  Well, she’d put that on her cleaning to-do list. Or maybe she’d just buy more forks.

  But first—sugar.

  Turning away from the window, she headed back in the direction of the bed, dodging the clothing again. She needed to do some laundry after she’d taken care of the sugar craving, because she only bought fourteen pairs of underwear. And no, she didn’t know that because she was one
of those people who kept mental inventories of their underwear, but because she’d bought two packs of day-of-the-week underwear specifically for hiding away.

  She’d left all that pretty, frilly, sexy—aka scratchy, prickly, constrictive—crap behind in her LA apartment, with all her stilettos and pencil skirts that men went gaga for, because she wanted to be comfy for once in her damn life and not subject her butt to more flossing than her teeth.

  Bea hadn’t been a total heathen—she had purchased the underwear from Peter Alexander—but for once, she had been prepared to sacrifice exquisite luxury fabrics for soft cotton comfort, even if it did mean walking around with the day of the week stamped across her ass. The added bonus was actually knowing which day of the week it was, given she no longer lived by a strict daily routine.

  Not that she’d been particularly diligent about wearing them in order.

  Looking over her shoulder now, she pulled on the band of her sweats to discover Tuesday emblazoned across her ass. But it could be Thursday for all she knew. Hell…it felt like Wednesday. It probably should be Friday, though, if she’d been here for—

  Bea’s stomach growled loudly.

  Sugar, Bea. Sugar.

  She reached for her dove-gray fleece-lined hoodie that had been discarded in a heap at the end of the bed and shoved her arms into the sleeves. It matched her sweats, which used to matter last month, but not so much now. Glancing down at her white T-shirt with its designer black-paint-splatter pattern, she noticed a stain down the front. Was that coffee, soy sauce, or beer? She pulled it out and gave it a sniff.

  Beer.

  She tried to remember when she’d put it on. Her sweatpants were clean yesterday, but the shirt…? Lifting her right arm, she sniffed at her pit. It seemed odor-free, but she should probably still change it. And also put on a bra. She wasn’t that well-endowed, but her boobs had been roaming free for a couple of weeks, and she was sure they’d already dropped a little.

  Screw being thirty-five.

  No…she took that back. Screw bras, keeping women all constrained and strapped in and…imprisoned. She was never wearing a bra ever again. She’d just let the girls do their thing. From now on, she was going to wear what she wanted, eat what she wanted, and say what she wanted.

  She’d spent fifteen years working hard, dressing the part, keeping her head down, following the rules set by her father and her grandmother—lest she turn out like her mother—then more rules set by various men who sat at the upper echelons of corporate power, and where had that gotten her?

  Well…no more. And screw what anyone else thought.

  She made a mental note to throw her shirt in the wash with the underwear, after she’d eaten all the sugar, and zipped up the hoodie with a vicious yank. Squatting, she delved through her handbag, which was lying discarded on the floor at the foot of the bed, and located her wallet, grabbed a fifty, and stuffed it into the pocket of her sweats. There was a hair band in the same pocket, so she pulled it out. Considering she couldn’t remember the last time she brushed, let alone washed, her hair, putting it up was probably best.

  Bea stood, scraping the layers of brown—like, a truly unremarkable mousy kind of brown—on top of her head and gave them a quick twist before tying the band around. Some of the layers made an immediate escape, which, given how fine Bea’s hair was at the best of times, was unsurprising despite their current state of lankness.

  God…all those useless, wasted years of product and messing around with it to give it body and pizzazz. She’d been such a sap!

  Well, screw hair product, too.

  Her gaze fell on her paused laptop screen and the frozen image of Sam and Dean Winchester deep in conversation, in all their Hottie McTottie hotness.

  “Catch you later, guys,” she said. “Mama’s going to be right back.”

  She sighed. It was a pity to have to leave them even for a short foray, especially when she’d honestly thought she’d brought in enough supplies to last her the entire fifteen seasons. But obviously she’d miscalculated, considering she was only midway through season fourteen.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Then she laughed hysterically, which might have been from the lack of sugar or, more likely, the yawning gulf between what Dean Winchester, Demon Hunter wouldn’t do compared to her, Beatrice Archer, Advertising Executive.

  Former Advertising Executive.

  Or it could be the ridiculousness of talking to somebody not real living in a not real universe… Still—Team Dean forever. And screw the corporate world for depriving her of the delight that was the Winchester brothers for so long.

  Bea wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive Jing-A-Ling (or herself) for that.

  She grabbed the apartment keys out from under more discarded paper towels she’d been using as napkins and several empty boxes of animal crackers littering the coffee table, then tromped down the narrow staircase to the door at the bottom, which opened to the small parking lot behind Déjà Brew. Sunlight flooded all around her, burning her eyes, and she shut them tight and almost hissed like one of those vampires the Winchester boys hunted.

  Keeping her head down and shading her forehead with her hand, she waited for her frying retinas to recover before allowing her eyelids to drift slowly open. The sight that greeted her—two fuzzy bunny slippers—was alarming. Or at least it would have been prior to ditching LA. She wriggled her toes in them, and the bunny ears flopped, and she…laughed.

  She actually laughed.

  Clearly not alarmed at all. In fact, she tried valiantly to summon one single fuck but came up empty.

  There was a certain liberation in being new to town. Apart from Jenny and Wyatt Carter—Jenny had handed her the keys to the apartment, and Wyatt had helped her move her stuff up the stairs—Bea didn’t know another soul in Credence. Which meant she could strip naked and parade down the main street in total anonymity.

  If she wanted to.

  She could certainly walk to the diner and back in her sweats and slippers. It would take her thirty minutes max, and there was still quite a nip in the air despite the bright sunshine, so who cared if she looked like she’d just rolled out of bed? She had just rolled out of bed. And she was done with expensive hair volumizer treatments and bras and egg-white omelets for breakfast. She was over midnight deadlines and getting up at the crack of dawn to work out on the elliptical to stop her ass from sagging. Over the pressure to get Botox and lip fillers.

  She was done trying to conform to seriously screwed-up societal expectations of women in corporate-landia and the insane pressure to be on top of everything all the damn time and never, ever complain lest she came across as a shrill bitch who couldn’t cut it with the big boys.

  Her stomach growled, and Bea swore it actually roared, Sugar!!!

  Obeying as if her life depended on it, Bea and her bunny slippers hurried around to the main street and across the way to Annie’s. A couple of cars passed her, but other than that, the sleepy little town was pretty much dead. Hmm…maybe it was Sunday? But Annie’s was definitely open, and that was all that mattered.

  Bea was inside within a second. A blast of warmth and the aroma of baked carbohydrates hit her at once, making her forget all about her appearance as saliva flooded her mouth, and she practically sleepwalked to the display cases brimming with pie. She pushed her hood back and unzipped the hoodie as her eyes found the selection of flavored ice cream beside the pie cabinet.

  And waffle cones.

  She barely noticed the way everyone in the half-full diner stopped what they were doing to stare or the sudden cessation of all chatter. She didn’t care about the eyes on her slippers or her hair—Bea only had eyes for the array of sweet, sugary goodness at her disposal.

  “Can I help you, doll?”

  Bea dragged her gaze off the impressive selection of plump-looking pies to an older woman with a lined face; graying hair;
gnarled, arthritic fingers; and a crackly, sandpaper voice.

  “You’re Annie,” Bea said.

  Prior to this moment, Bea hadn’t had a clue whether there was an actual, real Annie or not, but one look at this woman and it was obvious from her sheer presence that Bea was standing before the foremost authority on pies in the county.

  Annie beamed. “Yep, that’s me.”

  There was pride in those words. And a whole lot of care, too, and Bea felt ridiculously like bursting into tears. “I need sugar.”

  Those old eyes smiled at her, flashing both understanding and delight. “Well, you’ve come to the right place, hon. Why don’t you take a menu and a seat over there?” She tipped her chin at the tables over Bea’s shoulder. “I’ll come serve you.”

  Bea shook her head, aware suddenly of the silence all around her and the attention of who knew how many pairs of eyes. She wasn’t ready for that kind of scrutiny just yet. Not until after season fifteen, episode twenty, anyway.

  “I’d like to take it to-go, please.” She shoved her hands in the front pockets of her hoodie. “If that’s okay?”

  “Sure is,” Annie said. “Tastes the same at home as it does here. Now”—she picked up an old-fashioned china cake spade—“what’s your poison?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Austin Cooper was in the middle of a vehicle check that the chief had asked him to run when the phone at the front desk rang.

  Despite having grown up in Credence, Austin was the newest and youngest member of the town’s police department. He’d been back home for six months now, after five years in the city, and he fucking loved it. Even though everyone still treated him like he was wet behind the ears. He might be the youngest cop here, but at twenty-five, he was no kid.

  Austin was vaguely aware of the continued ringing of the phone as he copied down more information from the monitor.

  “Answer the goddamn phone, Cooper,” Arlo grouched through the open door of his office.

  The chief was in a bad mood. Full moons always put Arlo Pike in a bad mood and his spidey senses on high alert, owing to the uptick in idiotic deeds around town. A full moon affecting people’s behavior might not be sound scientific fact, but Austin had witnessed it too often to doubt it.