Prologue
PIPER
When your earliestmemory is a full-blown shit show starring your drunk mother, who decided that beating the hell out of you was an appropriate response to washing your dolls in a bathtub she’d forgotten existed, you know you’re going to grow up a little messed up. She was too wasted to remember how to get in the tub on her own, but somehow, she never forgot how to backhand a five-year-old clean across the face.
I was this tiny blonde thing with scraped knees and wide eyes, and that day shattered every bit of innocence I had left. Her nail raked across my cheek, and I watched my own blood stain my fair hair crimson. I remember standing there, too small to understand, thinking, Why did Mommy get so mad at me?
Years later, she had the audacity to tell me I should cut her some slack. Because, you know, we were so broke that fresh water was a luxury, and she didn’t feel like “swimming around in a tub full of doll hair,” as if that somehow justified hitting me hard enough to draw blood. Yellow and black strands floating in cold water apparently triggered her so badly that she forgot how to be a fucking human being.
If I could go back now, I’d wrap my arms around that little girl and hold her until the shaking stopped. I’d smooth down her messy blondehair, wipe the tears from her bruised cheeks, and whisper that none of this was her fault. I’d tell her she wasn’t hard to love, wasn’t a burden, and sure as hell wasn’t a mistake who should’ve never taken her first breath. I’d look into her eyes and remind her over and over that she was just a lost little girl suffering at the hands of a monster who never deserved her in the first place.
I knew I’d spend the rest of my life trying to wash that particular memory off my skin, and the second I turned sixteen, I marched into a drugstore and bought the blackest box of hair dye I could find.
Anything but red.
Red was officially banned forever.
Lorraine Nightengale was nothing but an abusive, bitter drunk with a bottle in one hand and a fist in the other. She was mean, spiteful, and had no business being anyone’s mother.
I lost count of how many times I found her passed out in corners, soaked in her piss, or slurring about how she wished she’d never had us. She told Violet and me more than once that our deadbeat father, the same asshole who disappeared before I was old enough to remember his face, forced her to keep us and how she’d wanted to “take care of the problem” both times he got her pregnant, but he wouldn’t let her.
He walked out one day and never came back, and she was stuck with us and a life she didn’t ask for or know what to do with.
And she never let us forget it.
Violet kept me breathing when everything else tried to suffocate me. She put food in my stomach when I hadn’t eaten in two days, gave me a place to sleep when the yelling got too loud, and never once asked for anything in return.
Meanwhile, Lorraine—because calling her Mom would be an insult to actual mothers—just kept killing brain cells and blaming the universe for why she was such a waste of perfectly good oxygen.
Thank God for college. That was my lifeline. A shitty dorm with peeling paint and a squeaky bed? Heaven. Instant noodles five nights a week? Bliss. I’d take all of it ten times over if it meant I never had to hear my name slurred from across the room again.
I recently graduated, and the real world hit me like a brick to the face. I had nowhere to go but back home to the alcoholic who’d barelyremembered to keep me fed, let alone raise me. Except now it was just me and her—two broken people trying to survive in the same broken space.
I should’ve moved to Rosewood Falls the second I left college, but I needed time to figure out what the hell I was gonna do. Turns out that the only thing I care about is living a quiet, happy life with my favorite people… and that starts with my sister.
Chapter 1
Piper
SIX MONTHS AGO
“Two beers, please,”one of the giggling women in front of me says, her eyes sweeping across the bar like she’s hunting down something she fully intends to regret by morning.
I grab a couple of bottles, pop the caps off, and slide them across the counter. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where they’re headed when I follow their perfectly manicured, glitter-tipped fingernails. They point toward the back table where five guys, all cut from the same gene pool, are packed around one table like God’s gift to ovaries.
Moving here has been like stepping straight into the hometown of every thirst trap that’s ever existed. Rosewood Falls isn’t just full of hot cowboys—it breeds them. Tall, broad-shouldered men poured into tight denim, all swagger and sweat, walking around like they invented sex and damn well know it, and since this is the best bar in town, I get a front-row seat most nights.
The Velvet Stag has been my sanctuary these past four weeks. When I showed up in town a month ago with nothing but fifty buckscrumpled in my pocket, Callan Crawford gave me a job as a favor to my sister. He didn’t owe me a damn thing, but he gave me a shot anyway, and for that, I’m grateful.
Despite Violet’s constant claims that he’s an ass who makes her want to rip her hair out strand by strand, Callan is everything you’d want in a boss. He’s all sunshine, smiles, and golden retriever energy wrapped in muscle and a man bun. He’s charming as hell, and I liked him the second I met him. Nothing like the sleazeball I worked for back in my hometown, who used to undress me with his beady, rat-like eyes every time I clocked in, believing a paycheck gave him the right to leer and make comments about my chest.
“Gonna need you in a bigger shirt—those nipples are practically saying hello.”
Or my personal favorite:
“Maybe lay off the bread, pumpkin. That ass is distracting my guys from actually drinking.”
Like, somehow my existence was the problem, not the fact that his sleazy rodeo bar was nothing but an excuse for drunk cowboys to ogle women while pretending to care about bull-riding scores.
