To the Stars

  “Shit,” they said at the same time.

  Even though the only light in the room was coming in from the hallway, I could tell Graham’s eyes were fixated behind me. After a moment he said, “You can tell that it’s not just today, or even just this week, or this month. It’s like you said: she looks sick. Even if she didn’t show up covered in blood tonight, it would’ve been obvious.”

  “She looks haunted,” Deacon finished for him. “Knox, man, we know what she means to you. During all this time, that has never been something we’ve questioned. But, if you ever get past all this with her husband, what are you going to do? With what she’s been through, she might not be the girl you fell in love with.”

  I twisted to look at her, and something in my chest tightened painfully. My eyes never left her face as I admitted, “She’s not. The Harlow I knew was full of life, and never stopped laughing or smiling. But she had to build hundreds of walls to protect herself from him because he’s been trying to break her for years.” Cracked, my earlier assessment floated through my mind, and my lips twitched. “She’s there, though. Somewhere. I’ll find her, no matter how long it takes.”

  “Well, we’ve decided that from now on, we won’t try to stand between you two,” Graham said. Deacon snorted.

  “Yeah, because there’s already enough doing that for us.” When Graham shot him another look, Deacon rolled his eyes. “Best-friend code, dude. We’ll stop. Promise. We know it won’t make up for everything before, but we can be supportive now. And whatever you need with Psycho, just let us know.”

  A genuine smile crossed my face, and I nodded once in thanks.

  “On that note,” Deacon mumbled, then walked out of the room.

  Graham just stood there with a withdrawn smile when I gave him a questioning look.

  When Deacon came back, he was carrying two takeout boxes and a plastic bag. “We got you both dinner, and we made Grey take us shopping to get Harlow a new outfit. But no one knew what sizes to get her, because your girl is fucking skin and bones. So if it doesn’t fit . . . we’ll just blame Grey. And should you be letting her sleep? She bled out in our entryway earlier.”

  My grateful expression fell, and I glared at Deacon. “She didn’t bleed out in the entryway, and are you really questioning me about whether she should sleep? I’m the firefighter.” When they continued to look at me expectantly, I sighed. “Her pupils were fine, she didn’t throw up, and she was walking fine at the end. Besides, I was planning on waking her up every few hours.”

  Neither spoke; they just continued to stare.

  “This is where you leave,” I hinted.

  “Well, have you done it yet?” Deacon asked.

  I’d planned on waking her up once I got off the phone with her dad, but I figured telling them that would make them want to stay, so I avoided answering the question directly. “I’m thankful you’ve both had a change of heart, or whatever, but it was weirding her out in the bathroom earlier, so I know if she wakes up and finds you here, you’re going to scare the shit out of her.”

  They looked like they were about to argue to stay, but after a hard glare in their direction, they looked dejectedly at the floor.

  “Well, we brought food,” Deacon said lamely. “I guess we’ll just go.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured when they turned. From the nods they gave in return, they knew I wasn’t thanking them for leaving.

  Once the door was shut and I was sure they weren’t going to walk back in, I rolled onto the bed and rested my hand lightly on Harlow’s cheek. Even in sleep, her full lips moved into a pout before falling open again, and her face tried to move closer to my palm.

  I gently brushed my thumb over her cheekbone and leaned close to whisper against her forehead, “Wake up, Low. I need you to wake up.”

  Though I wasn’t looking at her, I knew the second she woke. Her entire body stilled and her soft breaths halted for long seconds before they started up again as her rigid frame slowly relaxed.

  Moving down so I was directly in front of her face, her eyes widened minimally, and she stopped breathing again.

  “Low?” I asked uneasily, and my stomach dropped when her eyes filled with tears. “Harlow, what’s wrong?” I said louder, as something close to panic gripped at my chest.

  “Is this a dream?” she asked softly, and the panicked feeling immediately subsided.

  “Dream? No, why?”

  One of her hands moved from where mine was still resting on her cheek. She slid it up my arm and then clung to my shoulder. “Knox?” she mouthed.

  “Yeah,” I responded, clueless as to what was happening.

  Her breathing hitched and her eyes shut, but I didn’t have to wait to know what was happening. She started rambling soft words before I could ask. “You’re here, you’re not a dream. I’m with you. I left. I left Collin—oh God. It was all real. You’re here. I always dream of you, I thought I still was—but you’re here. Oh, Hadley.”

  I gently wrapped her body in my arms, and held her as she tried to come to terms with the fact that everything from that day had happened. When her words stopped, I said, “Your family is on their way to Seattle; they’re catching a flight tonight. They’ll keep us updated. They haven’t seen or heard from Collin, and your dad said he’d been watching for cars following them, he thought they were fine.”

  Harlow nodded against my chest, and her body relaxed a little more.

  When a couple more minutes passed, I pulled away and sat up, then waited while she did the same—but I studied her every move. “How do you feel?”

  “Sore,” she murmured, but her eyes flashed away. I knew she was holding back.

  “So how do you really feel?”

  Harlow chewed on her lower lip and shrugged—even that movement seemed hard to do—but she wouldn’t hold my eyes. “My head is throbbing all over. The back of my body hurts from where I fell and was dropped, but I don’t feel as weak as I did earlier.”

  “Good.” I pressed two fingers to her chin and turned her head until she was looking at me. “Don’t hold back with me. I need to know, or I can’t help you. Okay?”

  Instead of answering, her eyes went to something past me and widened.

  “Can we help you?” I asked before I turned to find the guys in the room again. One was holding a bottle of water; one was holding a bottle of Tylenol. I leaned over and held an arm out so they could put both bottles in my hand; my glare never left them. “You’re acting like a bunch of old fussing women,” I grumbled, and then sat back up.

  “You okay?”

  “Deacon,” I hissed, and shook my head.

  Harlow didn’t answer him, but I don’t think she knew how to. She was still staring at them like she didn’t understand why they were being so nice.

  “Thank you, Graham,” I grumbled when he unnecessarily took the to-go boxes and bag of clothes from my nightstand, and then put them on the bed near Harlow’s legs. “Goodbye, Graham and Deacon,” I hinted, and waited until they were gone to say, “They’ve had a change of heart when it comes to you, and I don’t think they know what to do with themselves now that they know what you went through tonight. They bought you a new outfit, and brought us dinner.”

  “Oh,” Harlow whispered, still in shock.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Her eyes darted down to the boxes, and her face twisted. “Not really. Um, I don’t—I don’t eat . . . much.”

  “Low, that’s not hard to figure,” I said, and looked pointedly at her.

  “It’s hard to with him . . .” She trailed off.

  “You don’t have to explain that right now, or ever, if you don’t want. But I need you to eat if you can. You need to put weight back on. You need to have energy, especially after what happened today. So if you think you can eat, then it’s here for you. Okay?”

  She nodded, and slowly picked at the food in her box while I ate mine. I only counted five bites small enough for a toddler before she stopped tearing her food into pi
eces and pretending to eat it.

  After I was done, I pulled her into my arms and leaned back against the headboard. The relieved sigh and way her body seemed to melt into me made me smile, but I didn’t comment on it. Mostly because we hadn’t talked since we’d started eating. I knew if we talked, we’d have to talk about what to do with Collin, and it was obvious she wasn’t ready to figure that out yet. So I would give her the night if that was what she needed.

  Not long after, her mouth parted and her breathing evened out, and minutes later, I followed her into sleep.

  Chapter 20

  Harlow

  Present Day—Thatch

  I WOKE SLOWLY. Something about the action felt foreign; normally when I woke, I woke with a start. Though warning bells were going off in my head, my body knew differently. Knew whose arms I was in. Knew I wasn’t in any danger from him. Knew that I didn’t need to be on the defensive from the moment I woke to the moment I fell into a fitful sleep.

  Even though it was still dark in Knox’s room, my body was reveling from the best sleep I’d gotten in more than two years. I hadn’t felt this alert or energized in . . . I couldn’t remember how long it had been. I hadn’t felt this relaxed since before I’d married Collin—and that was including the tension in my shoulders and back from worrying over my family and deranged husband.

  Sometime in the unknown hours we’d been sleeping, I’d twisted in Knox’s arms so I was partially on my side, partially chest to chest with him. And despite the fear that was slowly moving through my body at what we were up against, I felt myself smile. For years I’d wondered what it would be like to wake up next to this man, and though I knew it could be a thousand times better than it was in this moment, this moment still felt something like bliss.

  Hoping not to wake him, I traced the line of his jaw with the tips of my fingers and let my eyes follow the movement. I faintly brushed over his cheekbones then back down his jaw, and finally over his lips. When my fingers got there, I glanced up to find his dark eyes piercing mine.

  Without a word, and without releasing me from his intense stare, he unwrapped one of his arms from my body and grabbed my hand in his. Before he pulled it away from his mouth, he pressed the tips of my fingers closer to kiss them and then intertwined our fingers.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered. My throat hurt worse than it had last night, but even so, lying like this with Knox, in his bed in the dark, anything above a whisper would have felt wrong.

  His head shook once, the movement nearly unnoticeable. “I’ve been checking on you throughout the night. Every move and every noise had me worried something was happening.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Knox smirked, and I watched as his eyes drifted to the door. “Your new mother hens woke me a lot more than you did.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t understand. There had to be a hidden agenda . . . they had to be playing at something. That possibility had me more wary of them than I ever had been before.

  When Knox saw the confusion on my face, his lips curved up in the faintest of smiles. “Let me worry about them. You don’t need that added on top of everything.” He sighed, and gave me a worried look as he said cautiously, “We need to talk about Collin.”

  “I know. There’s no way he doesn’t know by now.” I let out a laugh, but there was no humor behind it. “I still don’t know how he didn’t know before . . .” I let the words trail off.

  “How did you get away?”

  “He must have gone to his parents’ anniversary party. It doesn’t make sense—none of it makes sense. I kept waiting for him to be there, watching me, but he was gone. Collin’s never been so careless in what he’s done. The only way I can make sense of it is that he snapped last night, he wasn’t himself at all; I told you, he wasn’t my monster. He had to have thought he’d actually killed me.” My voice dropped low on the last two words, and Knox’s eyes tightened in pain.

  He nodded absentmindedly for a few seconds, then mumbled, “I don’t know who to go to. I don’t know who is on his side, I don’t know who will believe you—or even if they do, if he’s paying to keep them quiet. But I swear to you, we will find something.”

  “I know,” I replied, and then softer, “I didn’t want you brought into this.”

  “I didn’t exactly give you a choice, Low,” he reminded me, but that didn’t change anything. Knox was still in danger; he was already risking his life to save me. “Harlow,” he said, and waited until he had my attention again. “You told me yesterday that you couldn’t leave Collin, but you came here last night.”

  I nodded. He hadn’t asked a question, but I didn’t need him to in order to answer. “Yesterday I was sure I was going to die soon. Last night I knew I was going to die then. When that knowledge hit me I realized how many mistakes I’d made by not letting you take me away. So when I woke up in the bathtub with somehow another chance in life, I left.”

  “You left him?” he asked, trying to clarify what I was saying by putting the slightest emphasis on his last word.

  I pulled myself up until I was on my knees, straddling his hips. Bringing my hands together, I grabbed my engagement ring and wedding band. “If I never see him again it will still be too soon.”

  My eyes filled with tears as I slowly slid the rings off my finger. It wasn’t physically hard to remove them, they were too large for my bony finger, but emotionally, it was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I was letting go of a life filled with hate and fear. I was saying goodbye to a man who had ruined me. And I was leaving behind a part of myself I felt like I didn’t even know—a part I wish I’d never had to embrace.

  With each centimeter my rings slid on my finger, I felt more weight lifting off my body. My shoulders, my chest, my back . . . my heart. “Yesterday wasn’t fair to you,” I mumbled when I was finally holding the rings in my palm. Glancing up at Knox’s intense eyes, I said, “I should’ve never given myself to you when he still had his sick hold on me—when I was so sure I would never be able to get away from him. I will never regret any time that is with you, Knox Alexander, but after how long we waited, you deserved all of me the way I got all of you.”

  His dark eyes remained on my face, his features unreadable even when he asked in a low voice, “And now?”

  Cupping my hand holding the rings, I tossed them over the side of the bed. “As much as your kisses healed me, after last night I feel like I’m still broken,” I confessed, and my cheeks heated from embarrassment.

  “Cracked,” he corrected.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to find myself again,” I admitted, and hated that it was the truth.

  But Knox’s lips twitched in amusement, like there was something I didn’t know. “I’ll find you.”

  I smiled shakily and cradled his face in my hands. “Then if you want me, you can have me. All of me.”

  Knox sat up and crushed his mouth to mine in a kiss unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. We’d shared a kiss that had been a deliberate claim on each other, but this . . . this kiss was his soul claiming my own.

  He moved his legs so he could roll onto his knees, and slowly lowered me onto the bed without ever breaking the kiss. Once I was lying down, he moved his mouth down my throat and pressed the tips of his fingers to my hips, just underneath the shirt I was wearing. With a soft dragging motion, he lifted the shirt higher and higher up my body as his fingers trailed along my skin. Then he broke away from where he was kissing behind my ear to pull the shirt off me and toss it away.

  My hands moved over the tightening muscles in his back when he covered my body again, and I shivered when his teeth grazed my throat. His hips rocked against mine, eliciting a moan from me. With one last searing kiss, he moved down my body, and pressed openmouthed kisses all the way down, causing me to tremble when he slowly—so slowly—pulled the boxers down my legs while his mouth followed the cloth.

  I felt the faint brush of his lips as they raced back up my leg, and stoppe
d near my hip long enough for a soft kiss, then continued until his face was directly above mine again. His dark eyes captured mine and conveyed all of his need, all the words that he wasn’t saying, when his fingers began gently teasing me.

  I was his, and he was never letting me go.

  My back arched away from the bed, and my eyes fluttered shut as he brought me closer to an orgasm—but his touches were just light enough that it felt like I wouldn’t get there. It was driving me crazy in the most amazing way. From the soft laugh in my ear when Knox bent over me again, he knew it. I had been so focused on trying to get closer to his touch that I hadn’t noticed when he’d pulled down his boxer briefs, and Knox had to cover my mouth with his own when I cried out in surprise and pleasure when he quickly filled me—forcing me over the edge I’d been barely hanging on to.

  Every inch of my body felt like it was buzzing, tingling, floating as my orgasm surged through me. A deep growl rumbled through Knox’s chest and passed from his mouth to mine when my fingernails dug into his back as he moved inside me and my second one started before I could even be sure that my first one had ended.

  Just like the day before, our bodies moved in a way I’d never known they could—like they knew they’d been made for each other. Every move from him was met with one of my own. It was perfect, harmonized . . . beautiful. But I should’ve known it would’ve been perfect with Knox, whereas everything with Collin had been tainted, even from the beginning.

  I tilted my head away from him, exposing more of my neck as his lips ghosted down it and his movements quickened. It was all I could do at that point just to hold on to him—my body was spent and still trembling, but I wrapped my legs around his back and held on to his shoulders as tight as I could. The soft lips on my neck were replaced with his teeth, and my eyes rolled back at the erotic combination of the bite, the vibration and sound of his groan, and the way his fingers dug into the bed—just barely gripping my arms—as his body stilled above mine.