by Lili Valente
“I am naked,” I say, laughing softly.
“Naked where I can see you.”
“Oh, well then…” I lift my arm, casting off one side of the towel and then the other, my nipples tightening instantly in the chilly air.
The fact that Garrett’s gaze drops instantly to my breasts and lingers there helps things along, too. Just feeling his eyes on me is enough to make me ache all over again.
“I want you,” I whisper. “Just you, no game.”
“Me, too,” he says, his eyes glittering in the flames he has summoned with the excellence and efficiency he brings to all things. “So much.”
I open my arms, and he comes to me, his bare skin first warm against mine and then hot. Hotter. Hottest, as he settles between my legs and pushes inside me with a gentleness that threatens to shatter me all over again.
We make love slow and sweet in front of the fire, with the smell of pine needles lush and spicy in the air and the lights from the tree dancing overhead, and for the first time in my life I understand what all the Christmas fuss is about. I finally grasp the reason for the season.
It’s love—profound, unselfish, life-changing love that lifts you up, holds you tight, and never lets you go.
Until, of course, it does.
And then you fall, hard and fast, like the boy who flew too close to the sun. Because some things are never meant to be held close.
Things like stars, wild horses, and Garrett Dawson Lawler the Third.
Chapter 1
Dakota
Four years later…
They say hell is other people.
More accurately, Sarte is famously misquoted as having said “Hell is other people.” In French, the phrase more accurately translates to “Hell is the Other.”
The Other—the person who is so different from you, so alien and unfamiliar, so stuck in their ways that they will never see you for what you are. Instead, they reflect back to you a twisted version of your Self, very different from what you would see if you looked in the mirror.
But there are no mirrors in Hell, there is only the gaze of the Other, who decides who you are, what you’re worth, and how far you’ll have to run to keep from fulfilling their depressing prophecies for your future.
Needless to say, I’m not excited to be going home…
The moment I cross the border into West Virginia, my shoulders tense and my grip on the steering wheel tightens. My pulse speeds, and a soft voice in my head chants urgently, Turn around, run away, turn around, run away. Not safe, not safe, not safe…
But I can’t turn around—Carl assigned me this story, and he isn’t the type of editor who takes no for an answer—and there’s no reason to run away. Harry, West Virginia isn’t a dangerous place for me anymore. All the monsters that haunted my childhood and adolescence are gone, vanquished by black lung disease and drug overdoses, car accidents and dark nights of the soul they couldn’t see through until morning.
Now, as I guide my ancient, but still chugging, first generation Civic hybrid down the snow-covered road dropping steeply into the valley, praying my tires are up for winter weather in Appalachia, Harry is just a ghost town.
There’s the dead-eyed ghost of the abandoned high school, where my friends and I would camp out when life at home got so bad it made sleeping in a rat-infested ruin straight out of a zombie movie seem like a good idea. There’s a ghost at the corner of Camp Road and Main Street where my cousin was hit by a drunk driver when we were four years old, far too young to be out on our bikes alone after dark. There are ghost children scrawling with chalk in the streets because they know better than to go inside where the grownups are getting high, ghost stepfathers swaggering into the bar downtown, and a ghost woman chain-smoking cigarettes outside the post office, tapping her foot impatiently as she waits for it to open so she can collect the crazy check she was so proud to have tricked the government into giving her.
Though, anyone who met my mother could tell she was legitimately out of her mind. Out of her heart, too.
Heart, body, mind…they’re all connected. When one starts to go, the others all too often follow. But her sick, cruel, sad self swirled down the drain years ago. There’s nothing left of Marian Fleming but bones in a cedar box tucked away in a hillside graveyard.
Still, I feel her watching me as I pull into a parking space outside Dottie’s Five and Dime. I hear her voice mocking me as I tug on my sock cap and mittens for the short walk through the snow to the store, and I catch the bitter smoke curling from her cigarette on the cool wind that gusts down Main Street.
I huddle deeper into my coat, keeping my chin down and my gaze fixed on my heavy winter boots in the snow. Every step I take without the cold stabbing through my too small, too thin tennis shoes reminds me I’m not Dee Fleming anymore.
I’m Dakota Joy Fleming, reporter for the Washington Review, one of the most respected papers in the nation, and ghosts have no power over me.
Not the ghosts in this town, and not the ghost of the man I suspect of sticking his perfectly sloped nose into my business, getting his hands dirty trying to clean up a town in a coal-ravaged place that would be better off left to recover from the wicked things humans have done to the land and each other in this sad wrinkle between mountains.
“If it’s you, Garrett, I swear to God…” I mutter as I swing into the store, grateful for the heat blasting from the unit over the door.
But I don’t finish the threat. I circle around a seasonal display of snow shovels and rock salt and head for the coffee pot at the back of the store.
I honestly have no idea what I’ll do if Garrett is the Good Samaritan investing millions of dollars in Harry, West Virginia, creating such a stir that news of the “Hope of Harry” reached Washington D.C. and my editor—also a coal miner’s child, though he hails from Kentucky.
On one hand, I’m happy for the people still hanging on here, grateful for a reason to believe that things might finally get better for families who have suffered under the crushing weight of poverty for too long. On the other hand, a part of me suspects that ugliness is in the water here, in the soil, in the blood of people so intolerant of outsiders, even little girls who ask too many questions.
And on the other, other hand—if only I had three or four hands, maybe I wouldn’t constantly be running behind on a deadline without a single clean bra left in my lingerie drawer—I can’t stop thinking about what this could mean to me.
If Garrett is the one behind this—if Garrett is here, in my hometown, building one of his big, beautiful hotels in the middle of nowhere—what the hell does it mean?
It wouldn’t be a coincidence.
It could be some twisted, albeit generous, form of revenge, I suppose. But bitterness was never Garrett’s style, and I’m not vain enough to think he’s still angry about something that happened years ago.
Or didn’t happen. I never wrote the tell-all I’d pitched to my old editor after realizing the man who had asked me out for drinks while I was covering a charity auction was a billionaire bachelor with a scandalous reputation. I never kissed and told. I kissed, fell in love, and refused to write the story, even when it got me fired. Though, that hadn’t mattered to Garrett in the end.
It could be a lesson, perhaps—Garrett enjoyed teaching me things, in the bedroom and out of it—but if that’s the case, he’s going to be out of luck.
The sting of his last lesson is still too fresh for me to be up for learning anything new from Mr. Lawler. Yes, it’s been four years, and I’ve had my share of lovers since he locked me out of his heart, but there’s never been another Sir. Garrett was the one and only. He will always be the one and only because as much as I lived for those nights when he made me His, I almost died when he pushed me away.
It wasn’t just a breakup. It was a breakdown, a crack a mile wide through the center of my heart that has never fully healed, teaching me in a visceral way how dangerous it is to give yourself into another’s keeping.
&nb
sp; These days, I keep myself, I serve myself, and I will never kneel for a man again. Certainly not Garrett. So if this is about something more than a lesson, if by some insane stretch of the imagination he’s decided he wants to pick up where we left off…
“Dee?” A husky smoker’s voice calls my name from over my shoulder, cutting into my thoughts before they can get any more dangerous. “Is that you, honey?”
I turn, forcing a smile. “Hey, Dot. How’s it going?”
Dottie laughs, clapping her gnarled hands with apparent delight. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it! I never thought I’d see your face again, girl. You tore out of this town like a bullet from a gun.” She reaches out, pulling me in for a hug that crushes my face into a nest of fiercely hair-sprayed blonde and gray curls. “Merry Christmas Eve, baby.”
“You, too,” I grunt, trying not to inhale too deeply.
“How are you? How’s Pittsburgh?” She rocks me back and forth, patting my back. “Oh, your mama was always talking about you and your big college scholarship. She was so proud.”
“I’m in Washington now, actually.” I squirm free with a laugh and suck in a deeper breath, reaching for my freshly poured cup of coffee. “I’m working for a newspaper there.”
“But you came home for the holidays,” she says, beaming up at me. “That’s wonderful. It’s so good to see your pretty face.”
“Good to see you, too, Dot,” I lie, smile glued stiffly onto my rapidly numbing lips.
It’s not Dottie’s fault that she reminds me so much of my mother, or that she never saw the uglier side of Mama. She kept that hidden until the door was closed and the shades were drawn. Until my brother and I were huddled in our bedroom, hoping Stepdaddy Number Whatever would come home with something to make Mama happy before it was too late to escape punishment for not being her salvation, what she thought children would be back when she married my much-older father and started having his babies.
Maybe if Dad had lived longer, if black lung hadn’t claimed his life a few years into mine, things would have been different. But he didn’t, and they weren’t, and the smell of Aqua Net and Camel Lights brings back memories I would rather keep buried.
Flashbacks is a better word, I guess—psychic scraps of trauma that rush up inside me so fast that I’m afraid I’ll be swept away by the ugliness I fought so hard to escape.
“So how are things around here?” I ask, the only clue to my swelling panic a slight tremor in my hand as I stir non-dairy creamer into my coffee. Like most children raised by violent, unpredictable parental figures, I’m an expert at concealment. “I heard big changes are in the works.”
“Oh my, yes.” Dottie pauses to hack discreetly into her fist. Even her smoker’s cough is a near pitch-perfect replica of my mom’s. “That new coding school opened last summer, and already some of them people are getting real good jobs. Some over twenty dollars an hour. Both of the Sullys are managers now for a team of people. Tim and his wife, you know. You remember the Sullys? Live up on the ridge in one of the old camp houses?”
I nod that I do remember the Sullys—Rebecca Sully was a friend in High School—and Dottie continues her enthusiastic run down of all the amazing changes underway. There’s a medical billing class, an adult literacy club, a co-op style childcare center with all the latest toys and learning tools, a new community center, and a detox program with a full-time doctor and nurses on staff.
“And all for free,” Dottie adds in a scandalized whisper, her pale-green eyes going wide in her thin face. “Can you imagine, honey? Free. Every last thing. It’s felt like Christmas for months around here. And we’re getting new roads in the spring, too. Along with a free paint job for every store on Main Street!”
“That’s amazing,” I murmur, feigning what I hope is suitable awe for this miracle. “I wonder who’s behind it all?”
“Well, everybody has a theory, of course.” Dottie’s lips purse as she skims a hand over her immovable hair. “I personally think it’s someone who grew up here, left, and made good for themselves. Now they’re paying back the town that raised ’em.”
I nod, even as I think, traumatized them is more like it. I’m not the only refugee from Harry who thinks the town would be better off buried under an avalanche. I’ve only stayed in touch with a few old friends, but every last one is as determined as I am to stay far away from this place. Yes, there were some good times growing up, but they were grossly outnumbered by the bad, the sad, and the ugly.
“And what about the developer building the hotel on Hawk Mountain?” I press a lid onto my coffee. “You think he or she might have something to do with it? Maybe wanting to fix up the town before guests start driving through next summer? Keep them from getting scared away?”
Dottie huffs. “Oh, I don’t know that we’re all that scary.”
I arch a brow, and she sighs.
“Well, yes, I guess there are times when—” Dot cuts off, glancing over her shoulder as the door swings open, letting in a tall man in an orange coat and a puff of cold air.
“You got any propane, Dottie?” the man asks.
“In the hallway behind the pop coolers, Bill,” Dottie calls back. “Moved ’em inside when the temperature started dropping. Supposed to get down to fifteen degrees tonight.”
“Heard that. Thanks.” Bill trudges toward the coolers, but not before casting some curious side-eye in my direction. Little does Bill know that he’s the outsider around here. For better or worse, my family ties in Harry go back to 1904.
Dottie turns to me, her paper-thin skin furrowed between her penciled brows. “What were we talking about, honey?”
“The developer building the resort and spa,” I remind her. “I’ve done some research, but as far as I can tell, Warren Industries is a shell company. It popped up out of nowhere late this summer, not long after your Good Samaritan started making changes around here.”
Her brow furrow deepens. “I don’t see it as making changes. It’s just giving folks choices. We’re independent people around here, Dee. You know that. No one could ever tell your mama what to do, or who to do it with, that’s for damn sure.” She laughs and sets off another coughing fit, giving me the chance to pat her back and make soft, concerned noises instead of forming a more complicated response.
Yes, my mother got around, and I guess she made it look fun to people like Dottie, who has been married to the same man since she was sixteen. But it wasn’t fun growing up with a wild, beautiful mother every man in town panted after like she was a bitch in heat. It wasn’t fun getting kicked out of the house on winter nights by Stepdaddy Three so he could have his private time with mom, or sent to the cheapest summer Bible camp in the world by Stepdaddy Four, or cornered in my bedroom by Stepdaddy Six after Bo left for basic training and Mom overdosed for the first time.
It was the first and only time an overdose triggered a stay in a rehab facility. I spent the entire three weeks couch surfing or camping with the rats in the abandoned school, whatever it took to stay away from Daddy Mick until Mom got home.
And I managed, but just barely. Just by the skin of my fucking teeth…
“Here, have some water.” I fetch Dot a cup from the fountain machine and press it gently into her hand. She drinks, coughs, and drinks again, finally bringing her lungs back under her control.
“Thank you, doll.” Dottie pats my arm with a shaking hand, breathing heavily in the wake of her fit. “You’ve got a good heart, girl. Always did. I was so sorry to hear about your brother.”
I nod, my throat tight. “Me, too. He was the best.”
The absolute best, and then he took one wrong step beside a dusty road in Afghanistan and was gone, while two out of five of Mom’s ex-husbands lived to get out of Harry and find good jobs, proving there is no justice in the world.
Dottie makes a sympathetic sound. “The Lord seems to take the good ones young, doesn’t he? And then your mama so soon after. Doesn’t seem right.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I shoul
d probably get going.” I motion toward the front of the store, needing to get out of here before the weight on my chest gets any heavier. “I’ve still got twenty miles to go, and that’s going to take an hour with the roads like this.”
“Where’re you headed?” Dot asks. “Up to your granddaddy’s old place? I thought Marian sold that a long time ago.”
“No, I’m going to check out the building site for the new hotel.” I start toward the checkout counter, pulling my wallet from my coat pocket.
“Oh, you don’t want to do that, baby! Not in this weather. You’ll get stuck, either on the way up or the way down. Mark my words, those roads get bad when it storms like this. And I heard they had security up there, with electrified fences and cameras and everything.”
I smile as I lay a five on the counter. “That’s all right. I’m just going to take a look through the gate, not try to get onto the property.”
Lies. Of course I’m going to try to get onto the property, but I know better than to share my criminal intentions with anyone who enjoys gossip as much as Dottie.
“And I’ve got new snow tires,” I add before she can fuss at me anymore. “I’ll be fine and back in town before dark. I’m staying at the new bed and breakfast in the old bank building. It looked really cute on the website.”
“Oh dear Lord, it’s just darling,” Dottie says with a theatrical gasp and a hand pressed to her heart. “Just too adorable for words. You’re going to love it, girl. The rooms are so cozy, and their biscuits and gravy are to die for.”
“Awesome. I can’t wait. Thanks for the coffee, Dot.”
“You’re welcome, hon, but you come back here and take this money.” She holds up the five, wagging it at me as I start toward the door. “Your money is no good here! Not on your first day back in town anyway. At least get your change.”
“Keep it. I insist. In exchange for all that free candy growing up.” I reach for the door handle, momentarily caught in a web of déjà vu.
How many times did I back through this door with a peppermint clutched in my hand as a kid? Or as a teenager nursing a fifty-cent coffee for the walk to school? Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. And almost every time, at least for that moment, I was happy, grateful to have something sweet or caffeinated in my hand and Dottie waving from behind the counter.
