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was no mistaking it: these boys brought the party with them wherever they went. Nash had on his customarily sloppy look of torn jeans, skate shoes, and a band T-shirt. He also had a baseball hat pulled low over his forehead that did nothing to hide the high flush in his face or the unclear and foggy haze covering his eyes. It was obvious he was already wasted or even high and I felt the first threads of disappointment start to tie up my cracking heart. I saw his gaze skim over the kitchen, land on me, and keep moving. It made me suck in a painful breath and I had to bite the inside of my cheek—hard—to keep from really crying.
It was like he didn’t even see me. He didn’t smile, didn’t wink, and didn’t so much as incline his head in my direction. It was like I didn’t even exist. I went numb. I felt like my blood turned to ice and everything in the center of my chest ceased to work. I curled my shaking hands into fists and tried to frantically plan an escape route that would save me any further embarrassment or heartache.
Ashley apparently forgot all about my fatness and ugliness marring her party and bounded over to the new additions. If my heart filled with awful feelings at his flagrant dismissal, then it practically burst open when he scooped her up in his arms and let her inhale his face while he grabbed her ass. I wanted to choke on my embarrassment as I scrambled backward out of the kitchen. There was no more thought put to self-preservation, only to escape. I had a frantic, desperate need to put as much space between me and this party—but more so between me and Nash—as possible.
Mercifully, the tears didn’t fall until I was safely at my car. In that moment, slumped in my driver’s seat with black streaks on my fingers from the mascara I’d let Faith smear on, I knew the truth: the beautiful people stuck together and it didn’t matter what was on the inside. Nash might be nice when it was just him and I by our lockers, but put him in a room full of people, give him a skinny and pretty girl willing to put out, and I was invisible. I’d been so stupid to think it was anything more.
So I did what was instinctive and resurrected the shield around my heart. From then on I ignored him every time he tried to tell me hello. I looked away from him when he smiled at me. I avoided my locker as much as I could when I knew he was going to be there and tried to focus on the fact that graduation was right around the corner and I would be leaving this small mountain town and this clueless boy that had hurt my feelings so deeply behind. I knew logically Nash didn’t know how I felt, had no clue that I had thought he was different and special, but that didn’t make the burn of his ignorance or my embarrassment any less hot.
In the warmth of early spring, with my college enrollment all lined up for fall and my insecurities carefully compartmentalized—the sting of my failed crush finally beginning to heal—I stumbled upon Nash and his friends outside smoking after school … My heart lurched, but none of them saw me and I scuttled by, hoping to hurry to my car and planning on ignoring him like I had been doing since the party, when his deep voice assaulted my ears.
“She’s a mess. If she ever wants to get laid, she needs to look in the mirror and maybe do some work.”
One of the other guys cackled at the nasty statement and I thought I was going to vaporize into a cloud of horrified smoke. He had to be talking about me and I couldn’t move once I heard what he was saying.
I heard Nash snort as I tried to sneak by so they wouldn’t notice me or my tears. I had never cried so much over any other person and it made me hate him a little—or a lot—as he kept talking.
“I mean I’m not picky, I would take her to bed. I just might need to put a bag over her head first or something.”
That sent the rest of the guys rolling in laughter as the ground beneath me fell away and a sob caught in my throat. How could I have been so incredibly wrong about someone? Any hope, any thought that he was different—that any pretty boy could be different—was annihilated with those hateful, harsh words. Words that forever changed the way I looked at the opposite sex.
Nash Donovan was a beautiful, wicked, and hot flame that burned me when I got too close. He was just the first stop in a journey dotted by disappointment, but somewhere along the way I found my footing. My purpose. I just didn’t know that as soon as I did, Nash would manage to turn my world upside down all over again, and only a fool gets burned twice by the same fire.
Thanksgiving … Eight years later
My fully restored Dodge Charger was eating up the highway as I raced through the cold Colorado night. The massive engine was growling angrily in time with my thundering heart and light flurries of snow dotting the windshield, so I could blame the rapid blinking of my eyes on trying to see through the nasty road conditions and not the emotion threatening to overtake me. None of it registered, neither did the fact that I had to be pushing 120 and that terrified holiday traffic was undoubtedly scrambling to get out of my way. I was in such a fog, such a state of disbelief, that I felt numb and barely aware of what was going on around me. I had just found my uncle Phil, the one and only parental figure I had in my life, unconscious on the floor of his hunting cabin. He was cold and still. He looked like a skeleton, skin stretched over bones that appeared far too fragile. I was racing the “Flight for Life” the park rangers had called in to airlift him to the emergency room in Denver.
Just to add to the danger of the speeds I was traveling and the way my mind was on anything but the road in front of me, I put in a panicked call to Cora Lewis, my coworker and close friend. She was all kinds of take care of business and would rally the troops and get everyone else that mattered the information they needed without me having to worry about it. She would help take care of me, she always did.
I made it to the hospital in record time and surged into the emergency room on a tidal wave of anxiety and fear. I was more familiar with these institutional and sterile walls than I wanted to be—one of my closest friends, my surrogate big brother Rome Archer, had tangled with a bunch of bikers and a bunch of bullets not too long ago and I had spent hours upon hours nervously pacing these very halls waiting to see if he was going to pull through. But right now this visit felt like it might define the rest of my life. The security guard gave me a concerned look. I was used to it. When you had yellow, orange, and red fire tattooed along each side of your scalp and had ink from your collar to your wrist on each arm, people tended to think you weren’t really a very nice guy. Funny thing was that I was typically a lot nicer than most of the guys I loved like brothers, but not right now, and if the nurse who sat behind the desk didn’t tell me where my uncle was in the next second I was going to straight up lose my shit.
I was just about to breathe fire way hotter than the kind inked all over me when I saw her walking toward me. She looked like an angel, even though her name was Saint. It fit her, Saint Ford, healer of the sick and hater of anything and everything having to do with Nash Donovan. She was beautiful, breathtaking, absolutely despised me, and made no secret about it. I had run into her more than once on my unfortunately frequent trips to this ER, where she seemed to be a permanent fixture as one of the attending nurses.
We had gone to high school together years ago, and while I was all for striking up a reunion of sorts, she was having none of it. She made a big production of avoiding me, or giving me nervous, sideways looks like she didn’t trust me or was forced to endure my company. Only right now, in this moment, she was looking at me with equal parts compassion and seriousness in her soft, dove-gray eyes. It left no doubt whatsoever that things with Phil were really, really bad.
She put a hand on my shoulder and I felt like I was going to shatter under the gentle touch.
“Nash …” Her voice was light and I could hear the bad news in it. “Come over here and talk to me for just a minute.”
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hear whatever horrible words she was going to have to say to me, but because she was so pretty, because she had the loveliest eyes