Chapter One
Samantha
Present Day
* * *
“And thus the heart will break,
yet brokenly live on.”
-Lord Byron
* * *
We’re not going to make it.
We’re not going to fucking make it.
I pace back and forth across the flowered carpet in front of Gate 11B, fighting the urge to scream as the minutes tick by and the Croatia based flight crew takes their sweet time getting the doors to the Jetway open. Danny is less than fifty feet away, but he might as well be at ten thousand feet. I can’t get to him, he can’t get out, and we’re about ten minutes from missing our last chance to get out of Maui before it’s too late.
The plane to Auckland, New Zealand leaves in twenty-five minutes. They’ve almost finished boarding. Every time my pacing takes me closer to Gate 7, I can see the line of people shuffling past the flight attendant dwindling.
Twelve people…nine…seven…
I squeeze my fingers into a fist and press it hard to my lips, afraid I might actually scream in the middle of the international terminal if I don’t.
Panic dumps into my bloodstream and for a moment all I can hear is the blood rushing in my ears and the desperate thud thud thud of my heart thrashing in my chest. My ribs contract, my lungs seize up, and the urge to run becomes almost unbearable.
Dad and Penelope think I’m just picking up Danny at the airport, but if Alec calls while I’m gone they might start to suspect something. If they take a second to glance in my closet, they’ll know I’ve packed for an epic journey, not a forty-minute drive to Kahului. They could come looking for me, force me to go home with them tonight, and put me on a plane back to California tomorrow.
My stepbrother’s future hangs in the balance. Penny never believed he was guilty and she’ll do anything to prove it, even feed me to the wolves. Penny loves me, but not as much as she loves her son. Not even seven years of being the best and brightest blended family on the island can change that.
I glance at my watch. It’s three thirty in Los Angeles. Two hours past my one-thirty appointment time with Detective Spanuth. I’m betting Alec knows I’ve missed it by now, and I know he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d tell our parents the truth if I didn’t come clean about the subpoena and everything else.
I don’t think he’s called his mom yet, but it’s only a matter of time. He needed me to keep that meeting, and prove he isn’t responsible for what happened to Deidre Jones. If the police believe my version of events, Alec’s buddies might still go to jail, but Alec believes unveiling my secret is going to make everything all right. He thinks, once the beans are spilled, the lawyers will be able to prove this was all some big misunderstanding, and the boys are blameless.
I’m the one who started the rumor, after all. I’m the one who hurt that girl.
Innocent girl, whose only sin was looking too much like me.
I close my eyes, swallow hard against the nausea making my stomach heave, and force Deidre’s face from my mind. If I could go back in time and take it back, I’d like to believe I would. I’d like to believe I’d do the right thing, but if I look deep into my heart…
My heart….
I’m not sure I have a heart anymore. It feels like there’s nothing at the core of me except fear, pain, and hate. I hate Alec and his friends and I hate myself. And when a person is this full of hate, maybe there’s no room for anything else.
When I booked this trip late last night—hiding under the covers in my room like I was a ten year old reading after lights out—I was certain all I needed was distance to make everything all right. Just distance and Danny, and I could be the person I used to be. I could put the past five months behind me and move on.
I am rotting from the inside, hanging on to my sanity by a fraying thread, and so sad it feels like I’ll never smile a real smile again, but Danny always knows what to say to talk me back from the edge. In his arms, with his love wrapped around me, muffling the chaos of the world, I was sure I’d be able to feel good again.
Or at least okay.
But maybe I was wrong. Maybe this time I’m too broken for anyone to put the pieces back together again.
No sooner is the thought through my head than the door to the Jetway opens. Two businessmen in rumpled suits are the first out, then a family with a little girl asleep in her father’s arms. Danny is right behind them, his familiar overstuffed North Face backpack dangling from one hand.
His long, dark blond hair is pulled back in a tangled ponytail, his green eyes look bruised from lack of sleep, and he has his patchy, golden version of five o’clock shadow, but I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful than he is to me at this moment. The second our eyes meet and he smiles that crooked grin, I know it’s not too late. It’s not too late for me, and it’s not too late for Danny and me to have the fresh start I’ve been praying for since I woke up New Year’s Day.
I still love him. I love him so much that, by the time he crosses the carpet in three long steps and scoops me up in one strong arm, tears of relief are streaming down my face.
“Thank God,” I mumble against his neck. He smells so good. So safe.
“Damn, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve missed you so much,” he whispers into my hair, hugging me so tight my feet leave the floor and my breasts flatten against his thickly muscled chest.
By the time we were seventeen, Danny had five inches on me, but it’s only in the past two years that he’s become the kind of man whose chest turns heads when we walk down the beach. If someone had told me when I was thirteen and still capable of pinning Danny to the sand when we wrestled that one day he would have fifty pounds of pure muscle on me, I would have laughed.
When we first started dating, Danny and I were both five-three and I outweighed him by ten pounds, no matter how vehemently he insisted he weighed in at one forty. He was the runt of our junior high school, even shorter and skinnier than the two genius kids who’d skipped a grade.
But he isn’t a runt anymore. Working as an extreme-sports tour guide has made him strong, strong enough to hold me in one arm and his giant backpack in the other. Hopefully, strong enough to slay the demons that have kept me awake for forty-eight hours as I ran from the nightmare my life in Los Angeles has become. If we can just get on that plane and on our way to the opposite hemisphere, everything might still be all right.
“Come on,” I say, pressing a swift kiss to his scruffy cheek before pushing on his chest. “We’ve got to hurry, or we’ll miss our flight.”
His eyebrows lift as he sets me down. “Where are we going?”
“New Zealand.” I take his hand and pull him toward the gate, feeling like my heart is going to explode with relief when I see the door to the Jetway still open. “I’ve booked rooms for our first four days,” I say over my shoulder. “After that, we’ll see where the adventure takes us.”
“I thought we had to wait until after you graduated,” Danny says, even as he picks up his pace, hurrying toward Gate 7 beside me. “Did your dad change his mind?”