UNBROKEN
PROLOGUE
My mind fed me images of his hard, muscled body. I remembered him pressed against me. His arms were draped around me as he crushed my lips with his, and my breasts were flattened by his weight.
I eagerly drank the images. Him pushing inside of me. His hard cock filling me, satisfying me.
“Where did he go?” I asked my reflection, since there was no one else in the room to ask.
Big brown eyes, red lips, straight nose. I looked way more confident than I felt.
My reflection was assured and strong. I snorted. She’s on magazine covers and centerfolds? What does she have to fear? If only the girl in the mirror could share my confusion and pain.
Nope. She was refined and polished. That was my job, after all. I modeled makeup for the breakaway brand Petals. Not for the first time, I wished my confident appearance matched up with the real me. In magazines and in my portfolio, I looked aloof, confident, stylish. Inside, I was the total opposite: the insecure, shy girl from a strict home. The girl who stuttered in interviews and whose legs went wobbly in front of an audience.
No one knows about that.
My crippling fear of people was my weak spot. Only the people I really trusted knew about it. That was only two people: my brother Lance, and him. The guy who I had loved and lost. Lost, as in really lost. I didn’t know where he was.
I sighed, blowing a strand of dark hair away from my lips and reaching for my hairbrush. I had a shoot this morning. No wonder I was getting a bit nervous. As it usually did, being nervous led to thinking about him and the electricity he coursed through my body. He was the only person who could replicate my fears and make them into something good. Now, there were only nerves and no electricity, no fire.
I turned my back on my reflection. I needed to get dressed and ready for my shoot at ten this morning.
For some reason, even as I dressed, I couldn’t shift him from my thoughts. I remembered the way his mouth pressed on mine, sweet and strong and tantalizing. The way he touched my body. The way he was so passionate and strong, but also gentle and tender. More than ever, I remembered that last day I saw him. When the mystery happened.
I had been at home, trying to forget it was Jay’s big game. You see, he was a football player. Big deal stuff. You wouldn’t think we were that similar, him being an NFL football player and me being a cover girl. But they were.
I never attended his games—we both promised each other we wouldn’t risk bringing bad luck. It was silly. One of those superstitions like not saying “Macbeth” in theaters. But we stuck to it. He never accompanied me to shoots, I never went to games.
I wished I had been at the one that changed his life.
My brother told me he’d been injured, and, sure enough, there had been news about it. I recalled the game. I hadn’t seen it, of course, just on TV, later.
He’d been running for a touchdown and someone tackled him from behind. He’d fallen but I could see from the footage that something was wrong. He’d been in real pain. He’d rested there motionless on the turf, his handsome face wrinkled with agony. Then the camera panned off and the referee came up. He’d been shouting something. The field had cleared soon after that, the game curtailed.
I had no idea what had happened.
The press, uncharacteristically, had been quiet. Commonly, they never shut up about him, but this time there had been silence, which would have been good for him, I was sure.
We both felt way too much pressure sometimes, which was why it was nice to be able to slip away together and take time alone. I had been starting my career then, a hectic schedule of small shoots for smaller companies, each demanding a lot of work but not too willing to pay for it. He had been at the height of his career as a football hero.
Where are you, Jay?
The tabloids had been even more silent after that. There had been a tiny article to state he was recovering from his injuries, but no more information. And he’d never contacted me or my brother, or anyone we knew.
As far as I was concerned, he had vanished.
That was three and a half years ago now. I had moved on. I’d even dated someone after him—Dean, a sweet guy who was studying media and photography. But he’d never really clicked like Jay had with me.
He understood the shy me as well as the confident me. In that way we were so alike.
Well, now he’d gone too.
I checked my watch, feeling sad, and ran my fingertips down my tired, clean face. I stood and headed to the door. I didn’t want to be late for this shoot—it was important.
Nothing else really mattered, did it? After all, my heart had been broken by Jay. I wasn’t about to go searching for anything more after that.