I find myself standing in front of the locked door, in a place I remember like the back of my hand.

With my arms folded, the toe of my scuffed and dirty cowboy boot taps against the cement floor in irritation.

I know I saw her head down this hallway a half hour ago, and it’s the only place she could have gone. I didn’t even know there was a room hidden here in the back of the stables, until I caught her strawberry blond hair disappearing around the corner when I was pretending like I hadn’t been keeping an eye out for her ever since I heard she was back in town.

I’ve been working these stables since I was sixteen years old and thought I knew every nook and cranny of the sprawling barn, multiple tack rooms, practice arenas, and offices. I don’t like finding a door I can’t get into any more than I like how my heart started beating faster when I caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye.

Shelby Eubanks has been a thorn in my side since she was twelve years old, following me around like a puppy dog, batting her eyelashes and staring up at me with those big green eyes. Flirting with me every chance she got, probably thinking it would be fun to fool around with the hired help and a way to piss off her bitchy mother. I laughed her off and shot her down up until the day she turned eighteen and left for college. The little bird finally flew the coop and here I am, standing around in front of a fucking locked door just to get a glimpse at her for the first time in four years.

“Why are you standing here staring at a door? Jasmine and Belle need to be cooled down.”

I ignore my friend and coworker Rylan and try the door handle once more, stupidly thinking it will magically open this time.

“Why is this door locked?” I mutter.

“Who cares? Get your ass back to work so I don’t have to pick up your slack,” he complains.

“Did you know this room was down here?” I question, looking at him over my shoulder.

He removes the dusty cowboy hat from his head to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his arm.

“I don’t know, probably,” he shrugs, slapping the hat back on his head. “It’s probably just an unused tack room.”

Why in the hell would Shelby have locked herself in an empty tack room? And why the fuck do I care?

“Jesus, she’s in there, isn’t she? One of the guys said he saw her come into the stables a little while ago and we should keep our swearing to a minimum since the princess was in the building,” Rylan laughs. “She’s off limits, and above your pay grade, even if she is legal and hot as fuck now that she’s all grown up.”

I turn my body and glare at him. Rylan has been busting my balls for two weeks, ever since he got a glimpse of her stepping out of the black limo her mother had sent to the airport to fetch her after her college graduation when she moved back home. For fourteen days I’ve had to listen to him talk about her tits and ass and make tactless comments about her long legs wrapped around his waist.

No, I’m not jealous he got to see her and I didn’t. I’m not green with envy that she came out to the stables on my day off and talked to him. She used to race out here every day after school just to annoy the shit out of me. She used to follow me around, asking a million questions about my life and my job. She used to spend every minute of her free time out in these stables whenever she knew I was working, and now I don’t even get so much as a wave or a “screw you.” I get her sneaking into the barn without a word and locking herself behind this damn door. I don’t even know why the hell any of this bothers me. Maybe it’s because I thought we were friends. Sort of. In a weird, “I know she has a crush on me, but she’s too young and too damn out of my league to even go there” type of way, before I screwed everything up the night of her high school graduation. It’s been four damn years, for God’s sakes. There’s no way she’s still holding a grudge because of that one stupid night.

“All right, well, good luck with that. I’m going back to work.”

Rylan gives me a pat on the back and disappears down the hallway, whistling as he goes. When his whistles fade into the distance, I curse under my breath and pull the small rasp out of my back pocket that I’d been using to file Ariel’s hooves earlier, jamming the sharp, pointed end into the hole in the middle of the door handle. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I can’t stop myself from doing it. I tell myself I’m only breaking into this damn room to make sure she’s okay, but I know that’s a lie. I want to see her. I want to talk to her. I want to know everything about the last four years and I’m pissed off she’s been ignoring me. If breaking into this room is the only way to get her to acknowledge me, then so be it.

Ten seconds later, the lock pops and I smile to myself as I shove the tool back into my pocket and open the door. My ears are immediately assaulted with the thumping bass of loud music as I step inside and into another long hallway. Closing the door behind me, I wonder why the hell I couldn’t hear the music from outside. Glancing around as I move down the dark hallway to where the music is coming from, I notice soundproof padding attached to the walls and the back of the door I just walked through.

The music gets louder as I move, not having any idea what the fuck this place is or why no one seems to know it was here in the back of the stables. I come to an abrupt halt when I get to an open doorway, my eyes widening and my jaw dropping open when I see what’s inside.

The room at the end of the hallway is roughly 1,000 square feet in size, with shiny hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors all along one wall, and no windows. The pristine condition of the room that is nothing like any of the other dusty, shit-smelling rooms in the stables isn’t what keeps my feet glued to the floor in the doorway and my eyes bugging out of my head. It’s also not the reason my dick is stirring to life in my pants and my palms are starting to sweat.

Right smack in the middle of the room, with her back to me and bent at the waist with her perfect ass in the air, is Shelby. Her body flies back upright and she twirls around the room, her hips moving erotically to the beat of the music while she spins, leaps, and dances like a goddamn angel. A hot, sexy angel in a pair of the smallest black shorts I’ve ever seen, a white sports bra, and bare feet, her body glistening with a thin sheen of sweat and pieces of her long, wavy hair sticking to her cheeks and her chest as she whips her head around to the music. She combines moves that would make a stripper proud with steps that would make a ballerina bow at her feet, her left leg extending above her head as smooth and easily as one would throw their arm up to wave at someone.

She’s beautiful.

She’s breathtaking.

And she sure as shit isn’t a little girl anymore.

The music comes to a stop and so does Shelby, poised with her arms draped over the top of her head, breathing heavily. Her chin comes up and her eyes meet mine in the mirror before I can back out of the room and pretend like I was never here.

“What the hell are you doing in here?”

Her green eyes are filled with fire as she whirls her body around and presses her hands to her hips.

“How did you get in here? That door was locked.”

Forcefully moving my eyes up from her tits straining against the thin cotton material of her top, I give her a smirk and lean casually against the doorjamb, pretending like I see shit like her standing in front of me half-dressed every day and it has no effect on me at all. She doesn’t need to know that I’m suddenly feeling the four-year absence of her from my life like a punch to the gut, because I feel like I missed out on so much. She also doesn’t need to know the memory of that kiss she gave me the night of her high school graduation is suddenly flashing through my mind, wreaking all sorts of havoc in my head. Soft lips, bold tongue, the smell of peaches filling my nose as I fought the war raging inside me to push her away when all I wanted to do was strip her naked and fuck some sense into her.

“Shelby Eubanks, all grown up, a fancy college graduate and a dancer to boot. How ’bout that?”

She rolls her eyes at me, her bare feet moving her across the room toward me. Right when I think she’s going to hug me in greeting, she turns and grabs a towel from the small wooden table right inside the door.

“You’re not supposed to be in here. No one is allowed in here,” she tells me irritably, dabbing the fluffy white towel against her cheeks.

“Nice to see you, too, Legs.”

She presses the towel to her chest and raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow.

“Really?”

“I’m sure all those college boys you hung around for four years showered you with plenty of compliments on those long legs of yours,” I tell her with another sarcastic smirk, ignoring the jealousy coursing through my body at the idea that any guy got close enough to those gorgeous fucking legs and the hot body attached to them. “How come I never knew this room existed? Or that you could dance like that?”

Shelby tosses the towel onto the table and mirrors my casual pose, crossing her arms in front of her.

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Eli James. I’m not a stupid little girl anymore and I’m not going to fall at your feet, so you can go ahead and wipe that smirk off your face.”

Four years in New York City didn’t diminish the Southern twang in her voice, and if anything, her annoyance with me brings it out even more. At least one thing is still the same in this fucked-up scenario where the tables have turned and she seems to want nothing to do with me.

I open my mouth to ask about the room again, when suddenly, I feel something drip down the side of my face. Bringing my hand up, I swipe my fingers against my cheek, holding them in front of me to find them covered in blood. Pain explodes through my head and I cry out, my hands clutching on to handfuls of hair.

Shelby calls to me, but her soft Southern voice speaks in a foreign language. One that churns my stomach with nausea and fear and hate. I cry out again when my stomach explodes with pain, like someone just punched me right in the gut. Bending at the waist, I drop my body forward and feel my mouth filling with the salty, bitter taste of blood. I spit it out onto the floor, noticing I’m no longer standing on shiny hardwood, but roughly packed dirt. My head whips up when a burst of searing pain explodes through my ribs, catching my reflection in the mirror across the room. My face is filled with bruises and cuts, the blood dripping down from my head making bright red rivers trickle through the mud and dirt caked on my face.

I open my mouth and scream at the man in the mirror. The broken, dirty, ruined man staring back at me with so much pain on his face that it hurts to look at him.

“Eli, wake up!”

I close my eyes, refusing to look at the ugliness in the mirror and scream louder.

“ELI! WAKE UP!”

My eyes fly open and I jerk myself upright, my arms and my fists swinging as I go.

“ELI! IT’S ME! IT’S ME, IT’S OKAY!”

My fist pauses in midair when I realize where I am, and that it’s been three months since I was rescued. I’m holding my hand an inch away from the woman sitting on the edge of the bed next to me, her eyes the same chocolate brown as mine, her tangled mess of hair from being woken up in the middle of the night, once the same shade of dark brown as mine, but now filled with fancy blond streaks, her face as white as the sheet tangled around my sweaty body, and probably the same hue as my own face after that fucking dream.

I pull my knees up under the sheet and rest my elbows on them, dropping my head in my hands.

“Jesus, Kat, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whisper softly, trying to get my heart rate back to normal and slow my breathing as the pain in my heart and the guilt swarming through my head amplify, hating myself for what I’m putting my family through.

My younger sister scoots closer to me on the edge of the bed, wrapping one arm around my shoulder. I immediately flinch when she touches me, looking up from my hands to see tears pooling in her eyes when she nervously jerks her arm away and clenches her hands together in her lap. My baby sister. The one I used to take care of and provide for after our parents died when we were teenagers and the responsibility fell on my shoulders, is all grown up. She’s a wife and a mother and now she has to take care of me. She has to listen to my screams in the middle of the night, deal with my shitty attitude and my refusal to talk about what happened. I want to scream and rage at the unfairness of it all, but that would make things worse. It would just make Kat sadder and want to do even more than she already is trying to help me.

Three months since I was pulled out of that hellhole. Three months of interviews and debriefing and countless sessions with enough military headshrinkers that if I wasn’t crazy already, they sure as shit would have pushed me right over the edge with their endless questions and need to know everything I went through for five years. I used to love going to sleep at night. It was the only time Shelby and I were ever left alone and I could dream about her without the memories being tarnished. The dream I just had was one of my favorites. The day she came back into my life with an attitude and a backbone that made me finally wake up and see her for who she really was. She burrowed her way under my skin and never left. And now that’s ruined, too. I can’t even dream about her anymore without the hell I lived through coming back to haunt me and taint the only good thing I still have inside me.

“I thought the dreams were getting better,” Kat says softly.

They’ve never gotten better; I’ve just gotten better at keeping my screams to a minimum when they wake me up in the dead of night.

“They have. They are,” I lie, giving her a tight-lipped smile. “I’m fine now, Kitty Kat, go on back to bed.”

Kat smiles when I use the nickname I gave her when we were kids. She leans forward, probably to kiss me on the cheek, but quickly thinks better of it and pulls herself away from me and slides off the bed.

“Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

I nod, even though we both know that talk will never happen. I’ve been back in Charleston for two weeks, staying with my sister and her family until I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with my life. I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t keep putting her through this night after night. I only came back here for one thing. The only thing I know that will help me heal and keep the nightmares away. I know she’s probably long gone, living her dream far away from this town, and I know it’s shitty of me to burst back into her life after what I did to her, but I have to try. All my shrinks have told me I need to find a hobby. Something to focus on other than the torture and the pain, something to keep me grounded to the here and now and not stuck in the past, reliving every moment of hell. It’s probably not healthy that I’ve decided finding Shelby and convincing her to love me again is the perfect hobby for me, but that’s too damn bad.

I’m broken and scarred and half the man I used to be, but if she’ll let me explain, I hope to God she can put me back together again.