by Jenna Mills
Maybe I would see a doe or a family of bunnies, like we had that day in April. Maybe I’d see a bear. Maybe I would stumble across the spectacular house again, the one of log and glass that probably cost over a million dollars but sat empty most of the year. It didn’t matter. Only that I was here again. Only that—
I closed my eyes for a long breath, opening them a moment later to the snow-capped mountains lording over the valley.
Austin.
Austin and Lexi.
A lie.
A game.
Don’t think about it I told myself. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Thinking about it was what she wanted. Thinking about it gave her power. Thinking about it made her win.
I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to hurt her so bad—
The shadow stopped me. Like an oil spill against the light green grass, it spread toward me, but stopped abruptly.
Unnaturally.
Which meant whatever caused it was behind me.
And had stopped—deliberately.
An animal was my first thought, but bears or mountain lions didn’t magically stop when approaching prey, and a quick sideways glance confirmed this shadow was long and thin. Human.
Relief flashed hard. Another hiker, I realized, turning—
Too late I realized my mistake.
Chapter 11
He stood there, a few feet behind me, knee deep in a patch of waving yellow wildflowers—watching me.
Our eyes met, just like they had the day before, across the counter at The Java Joint…and then later, across the crowded Boulder street. And this time I knew, knew without a shred of a doubt.
This was no coincidence.
He was here.
For me.
With a knife in one hand.
And a rope in the other.
Like we were going hiking or camping…
Long blond hair whipped against his thin face. “So nice of you to come all the way out here,” he said, smiling as if we were lifelong friends.
Never looking away from him, I took a slow step back. I could run. I could find the house—
“You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to get you alone.”
My heart kicked against my ribs. Breathing hurt.
Alone. I was alone.
In a remote mountain valley.
With no cell reception.
And no weapon.
Because I’d raced off without thinking.
Because I’d been too busy feeling.
Hurting.
And now…
No, I told myself.
No.
It was not going to end like this.
“Who are you?” I asked, with another step back. I could run. I would run. I would fight. “What do you want?”
His eyes, light blue like the sky, glittered. “You should have kept your mouth shut,” he said, tracking me step for step. “That’s all you had to do. But you couldn’t do that, could you? You had to start pointing fingers.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the knife, the blade glinting in the sun. “What are you talking about?”
His smile twisted. “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before getting the cops involved—”
“Tucker,” I whispered.
“I’ve got a message from him,” he said. “Asked me to deliver it in person.”
Oh, God. Oh God oh God oh God. “No.” Horror twisted through me. “No,” I said, more strongly. “You don’t want to do this.”
His smile turned to a leer. “Day after day I’ve waited to get you alone. I thought it was going to be last week, at the park—”
My breath froze as the last horrible piece scraped into place.
I hadn’t been paranoid.
I hadn’t been imagining things.
There was a reason he looked familiar.
He’d been following me all along.
“Or that night at your house,” he said, taking a step closer, “when you were all alone in your room.”
…and suddenly I could see him, in the back corner of the family room, partially obscured by the women draped all over him. But the hair, long…blond.
Just like the day I had lunch with Dr. Rivers at The Hill.
“But there was always someone in the way.”
Austin.
“Not now,” he said with eerie precision. “Now it’s just us. I made sure of that. Don’t fight me, and you might even find you’ll like what I have planned—”
I couldn’t let it happen. That was all I could think. I spun and took off running along the creek, knowing I was only going to have one chance. I tore through the tall grass and broke for the water, but he was bigger, faster, slamming into me from behind and driving me down against a fallen tree trunk. I lay there, stunned, trying to breathe.
“So this is how you want it,” he said, tearing at my shirt—
—and something inside me snapped.
I came alive beneath him, twisting hard and thrusting my index and middle fingers into his eyes with a violence I’d only felt one other time. He reeled back, shouting, giving me the opening I needed to swing my elbow against his windpipe. He fell back, his hands opening and the knife tumbling against the rocky ground, and I was grabbing it, and my name, it was being shouted, over and over and over, but I didn’t look up, didn’t trust what I was hearing, didn’t trust anything but the need to get out of there, to survive.
Staggering to my feet, I started to run, and run, run as the wind shoved against me and the tangled slap of my own hair blinded me, run as my feet stumbled against unseen rocks and fallen tree limbs, run into the freezing water as the whole world blurred and bled, run as I tried to breathe—
“Zoe!”
He caught me before I reached the safety of the pine and aspen on the other side. Thrashing hard, I twisted to thrust the knife—
“Zoe.”
His hand then, catching mine. Stopping me. Holding me.
And his eyes, so utterly unbelievably green. Burning. Burning down on mine.
“It’s me,” he said again, and it was, it was him. “I’m here.” And he was. He was there.
Austin.
“You’re okay,” he said, and then somehow his arms were around me and mine were around him, and I was holding on, holding on so, so tight. And so was he. Holding on. To me.
So, so tight.
“But…” I blinked, convinced I was dreaming—imagining.
But I wasn’t.
He was big and solid, and he was real.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered. “What are you doing here?”
A rough breath shuddered out of him. “Looking for you.”
Looking.
For me.
“But…”
“I had to see you,” he said, lifting a hand to ease the hair from my face. “I couldn’t let you walk away like that.” A quick glance beyond me, and his eyes hardened.
I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw L.T.
L.T. down by the rushing water of the creek.
L.T. slapping cuffs on the guy who’d followed me.
“Did he hurt you?” Austin’s voice was hoarse, ragged. “If he laid a freaking hand on you…if he hurt you—”
I looked at him, looked at him and felt something inside me shift. Soften.
Bleed.
His eyes. They were dark and raw, tortured.
“He didn’t hurt me,” I whispered.
The breath shuddered out of him.
“And Lexi didn’t send you,” I realized.
“No.” The slide of his hand along the side of my face was soft, his kiss softer. “I sent me.”
Epilogue
“He wanted to punish me,” I said. “For putting his buddy in jail.”
I heard myself say the words, knew that they were true, but everything still seemed like some bizarre dream. Less than eighteen hours after I’d come down off the mountain, I sat on the couch in Dr. Rivers’s office, trying to process it all. I’d t
ried to get out of the emergency session he’d called, but he insisted I at least try.
“Go on,” he said in that calm, reassuring way of his. He and Emily had been waiting for me at the hospital, when we got down from the mountain. Even now, it all seemed surreal. “You’re safe now.”
I looked at him, at the concern in his eyes, the strength, and knew he was right. “I wasn’t imagining things,” I said, as much to him as myself. “He was following me all summer.” Jeremy Saizen. He’d been at my mom’s house multiple times. The coffee shop. Followed me to the park—to Chautauqua.
I wrapped my arms around myself, hating the chill that wouldn’t go away. “He wanted me alone.”
To make me pay for what I’d done to his friend.
“And you called me a bitch,” Lexi laughed.
I swung toward her, saw her smirking at me as she twirled a long strand of dark hair around her finger. “Excuse me?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “You called me a bitch. And yet it occurs to me that I saved your life.”
I felt my eyes flare.
“Here it comes,” Emily murmured. “The Lexi spin.”
“I mean,” she went on, “if I hadn’t been looking out for you all along, you never would have met Austin. And if you’d never met Austin, he never would have gone looking for you. And if he’d never looked for you…” She let the words dangle there, her overly dramatic eyes filling in the blanks. “You would have been all alone up on that mountain with the bad guy, which means right now you’d be very dead—or very worse.”
Her self-satisfied words fell there, fell like a vicious rockslide that crumbled to dust before impact.
Once I might have snarked about what could be worse than death.
But not anymore.
Not any of us.
We all knew there were things worse than death.
Lexi knew, too. Despite her superior, condescending smile, she knew living could be far worse than dying.
“So looks like you should be thanking me,” she said, sing-song like, “—not wrapping yourself in this blanket of righteous indignation.”
I thought about pointing out that if not for her twisted game, I never would have driven up the mountain by myself in the first place, but I knew there was no point. She’d find a counter-argument.
She always found a counter-argument.
And she so didn’t matter.
Not anymore.
And maybe she was right about one thing.
About Austin.
She’d maneuvered him into my life, another pawn in another of her games.
But somewhere along the line he’d quit playing her game, and starting playing his own.
No one made him go looking for me.
No one made him call L.T.
No one made him remember what I’d told him about the last place I’d felt happy…
No one but him.
And when session ended, I stood and walked outside, into the warmth of the late morning sunshine, where near a park bench beneath the shade of a beautiful maple tree, Austin waited.
No one made him do that, either.
I still had so much to figure out. I’d turned the internship down, but I needed to figure something out about my mother. I wasn’t going back home, but sooner or later, I had to talk to her. I knew that.
But there was time for all that later. For now, all that mattered stood right in front of me.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
Long, dark gold bangs fell against his forehead. He stood there, all tall and mesmerizing, exactly like the day at the park, when I’d turned around to find him standing among the pine, watching me. There was a warmth in the mossy green gleam of his eyes, but something else, too. Something more. An awareness, an understanding that said more than words ever could.
“You okay?” he asked, reaching for my hand.
I nodded.
Around us, a warm breeze swirled, sending dried leaves into a slow dance. “You want to go somewhere?” he asked.
That was easy. That was so, so easy.
I used to be invisible, but Austin saw me, the real me, not only who I was on the outside, but all the broken pieces I’d tucked away as a little girl, the sharp edges and the empty places. The secrets. Shadows I tried to deny.
But he saw more than that, beyond the darkness to the dreams and the longings, the passion, the hope trapped beneath the surface.
Going up on my toes, I pressed my mouth to his. “As long as it’s with you.”
His mouth curved. “Just try getting rid of me.”
He saw me, all of me. The real me.
Because I let him.
Because I wanted him to.
I wanted to be seen.
The DAMAGED Series
They shouldn’t be friends, and maybe they aren’t. They have little in common. They move in different circles, want different things. Emily the girl next door, Zoe from the wrong side of the tracks, and Lexi the spoiled heiress. But once a week they come together and share their darkest secrets—what they’re afraid of, what they dream…what they want. Their shrink calls them survivors. He says they’re strong, courageous, doing what it takes to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. But not everything is at it seems, and somewhere between the secrets and the lies, a dangerous game has begun. All too quickly they realize there are no rules, and there’s more to surviving than simply being alive.
vol 1: The Good Girl
~on sale now~
Her boyfriend broke her heart. A terrible accident nearly took her life. Now, Emily Bishop wants nothing more than to move on. To forget. To feel…alive. And if that means breaking a few rules, well, following them hasn’t’ gotten her anywhere, so why not try breaking them? So what if she’s always been the good girl? Maybe her friend is right. Maybe a forbidden hook-up is exactly what Emily needs. Or maybe…it’ll only make everything worse.
vol 3: The Wrong Guy
~coming October 30, 2019~
Alexis Abbott is over it. She’s over the whispers, the judging. Okay, yes. She overdosed. She almost died. But that’s her business, no one else’s. And she’s sick of it. The way people look at her, what they think. Especially the one guy she should be able to count on. Instead, the memory of his piercing blue eyes haunts her. So maybe it’s time for a lesson. Maybe it’s time for him to learn he’s not so much better than her. That he’s human, too. That even a man of the law can make mistakes. Her plan seems harmless enough at first, exciting even, hot, but without warning, her rules crumble, leaving her unsure who’s playing whom. Nothing prepares her for the truth—or the dark reality that some games are fun, while others destroy…everything.
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