Page 1 of Broken Halo
Prologue
GHOSTS
Ten years ago
Trig
“Don’t make me leave you. Not yet.”
Her words are heavy and labored, cutting through my chest, as painful as a rusty hacksaw. She’s come twice and it doesn’t matter how many times we’re like this, it’s always better than the last. Feeding my addiction. Digging its way into my bones in a way I’ll never shake her. I don’t know how this can keep getting better, but it does. She lets go more every time we’re together—learning her own body and what it can do.
What I can make it do.
How I can make her feel when she gives me everything and I take it like the motherfucking asshole I am.
There are moments I hate myself. For bringing her here when she deserves better. For not saying no to her. For fucking taking her when I have no business being with my boss’s daughter. Hell, no Barrett should be with a Montgomery, let alone take one for their own like I have.
I’m not weak and I never have been. The shit that life has laid at my feet has made me who I am—steeling my bones, my mind, my soul. I knew if I let anything in, it’d chew me up and spit me out, nastier than the Skoal my dad tried to hit me with back in the day ‘cause shit like that was fun for him.
Survival.
I’ve clung to it for twenty-two years. There’s not a memory in my head where I wasn’t barely clawing at life with my grungy, tainted hands.
Unwanted and vile, because I’m a Barrett.
Never should’ve let her get under my skin. I never should’ve touched her and I damn sure never should’ve taken her.
But I did.
Now I’ve gotta find a way to keep her. And that might just be the biggest feat I’ve ever had to conquer.
I press into her one more time, and even though I just came, I could take her again faster than my heart has a chance to skip a beat.
I roll, bringing her with me, off the thick blanket we keep out here, and onto the hard floor of her family’s barn. Her blond hair falls over my chest and her body rests limp on mine.
I run my hands down her bare back, feeling every bone and lean muscle. There’s hardly anything to her—not one curve or swell. When we lie here in the darkness of the night, she tells me how many hours she puts in a day dancing, making her body what it is, but I think it’s because she’s barely a woman. She just turned eighteen last week.
“The sun doesn’t come up for another few hours, Trig. Let me stay.”
I close my eyes and wrap her up tight, not giving a shit how sweaty we are from the hot, Texas night and the even hotter sex we just had. “If we fall asleep and get caught, your daddy’ll skin me alive and move you around the world, baby.”
She pushes up from my chest and her face is shadowed with only the crescent moon filtering in through the open window behind her. Her eyes—which are usually deeper, warmer, and bluer than my icy ones—are black when she looks down at me. “I made a decision.”
I slide my hands down to her ass. “Yeah? This doesn’t surprise me since you’re so sure of everything.”
“I am.” She’s so small, when she pushes up my body to press her pink lips to mine, she has to slide off my cock to reach my mouth. Her hair falls in a mess, caging us in. “I’m not going to New York.”
My fingers press into her skin.
“I’m going to tell my parents tomorrow—or later today. Whichever.”
“What?” The word slips through my lips with an edge to it as tense as my muscles.
She shakes her head and brings a hand up, brushing her thumb across my bottom lip. “I’ll see if I can still get into SMU with Jen. If I have to beg my dad to make a donation to make it happen, I will. People do it all the time. Or I won’t go anywhere, I don’t care. I can’t leave you.”
“You can’t stay because of me.”
Her angelic face puckers. “There’s no other reason I’d stay.”
