Fall On Me (2 page)

Have you ever felt so much love for another
person–such a pure, raw overwhelming love and connection for
another human being that you would put your heart, soul and body on
the line to stop their pain? Have you ever owed another human
everything you have? Have you ever known a secret about someone
close to you that made you feel sick with guilt and unfairness? I
have and that's the way I felt for Lee. Our bond ran deeper than
bloodlines. She was the other half of me. My sister…My best friend.
I wasn't going to sit back and stay quiet this time.

I would NOT watch her die.

Setting Lee aside, I knelt slowly and tried
some persuasion. "Rachel," I coaxed. "If you go now, if you run
you'll have time. Think of your family. You're twenty two years old
and you're going to ruin your life. And for what, a man?" I cursed
every inch of Kyle Carter's penis in that moment. "Don't be stupid.
The cops will be here any minute. You're never going to get away
with this."

Rachel's hand shot out so fast I didn't have
time to defend myself before she grabbed my ponytail. "Do you think
I care anymore," she screamed, eyes focused on Lee. I tried to free
myself but the girl had trapped me. "I have nothing left to lose.
She took everything from me." Grabbing the back of my neck, Rachel
shoved me forward. I hit the refrigerator so hard I was pretty sure
my nose was printed on the door. Stupid bitch.
I have a photo
shoot in Dublin next week...

"It didn't have to come to this," Rachel
roared. I shook my head to clear my vision. "If you had just left
when I told you to...goodbye, Delia."

"No," I screamed. A surge of desperation
surged though my body causing me to hurl myself towards Lee's limp
body huddled on the floor.

There was noise…pain…silence.

Heat encased my mind...burning though my
body.

Everything stopped.

My heart.

My mind.

My body.

Light and warmth filled my soul. I closed my
blue eyes and thought of his green ones.

Chapter 1

Stuck in
the past

Present Day

Derek

I knew where I was going, and I also knew it
was a really bad idea. It had been months. I needed to move on. I
needed to get a life.

I needed a lobotomy.

Her headstone had been erected. It stood
there in front of me, a constant reminder of who was underneath the
ground.

Rest in Peace

Camryn Louise Frey

10/06/1990 - 06/28/2013

God's mercy shall never falter.

Nor shall the ferocity in which we love

one another. For it is cherished

within the depths of our human hearts,

until we meet again.

It had been one hundred and seventy-seven
days since she left me and one hundred and five since she left this
world. Except she didn't leave. She was stolen–fucking robbed from
me. First by Mike, and then by Rachel.

I leaned forward and stroked her
headstone–something I did every day–as I placed the bouquet of
lilies on her grave. "Happy birthday, babe."

Kyle didn't know I came here every day. I
lived on my own now so it was easier to keep my shit to myself. As
soon as Lee had been released from the hospital he'd taken her and
their daughter to stay at his hotel in Boulder while he sorted out
somewhere permanent for them to live.

He stopped by most days to check on me,
probably because of how freaked out he'd been the morning when he
came into my room as I was taking the meds I'd been prescribed
after the shooting.

I'd been hung over to shit and holding a
bottle of sleeping pills in my hands so I really couldn't blame him
for jumping to conclusions. He'd thought I was going to end it, and
to be perfectly honest, I still wasn't sure what I'd intended to do
that morning.

My head had been all over the place. I'd been
drinking at some crummy bar the night before and had brought home a
girl–the first since she left me. And every second I'd been inside
her I'd thought of Camryn which was wrong and messed up on more
levels than I'd ever dare to think about.

All I remembered from that morning was that
I'd felt like shit and had been thoroughly disgusted with myself
for using that girl. It hadn't stopped me from doing it though. I
couldn't seem to stop myself from living like this.

"Hey you."

The sound of her soft, familiar southern
twang curled around my heart like a blanket of comfort. I turned
and watched as my curly-haired, former-roommate made her way
towards me pushing a stroller. I liked listening to Lee's voice. It
was gentle and sweet. It reminded me of melted butter and
Camryn.

I'd hoped I wouldn't run into her today. I
knew she was worried about me and I didn't want to put her under
any more strain. She had enough going on with her parents.

"Hey, ice," I mumbled, jamming my hands into
my jean pockets. Lee thought I called her 'ice queen' because of
how screwed up and weird she was when she first moved here. But I
actually meant Kyle was the ice–cold and hard as a rock. He'd been
virtually impenetrable until Lee came along and softened him up.
Hell, she'd turned him into a puddle of goo at her feet. Kyle
called her his princess but she was his fucking queen and he
protected her like their lives were a chess game. I'd seen the
change in him the moment he set eyes on her in our kitchen. His
stance changed, his whole body went on high alert and I reckoned if
we were animals, he'd have marched straight over and marked his
territory. Shit, thinking back he did that anyway. Douchebag had
almost taken her virginity in his damn kitchen…

Yeah, I'd been standing right beside Kyle
Carter the night his world altered. He'd been ruined ever since. I
knew the signs because it had happened to me with Cam…

She'd walked into my world when I was
eighteen years old and had taken the air from my lungs and the
earth from under my feet. She'd left a mark on me that could never
be matched or would never fade. Well, she left two marks. One on my
heart and the other on my ass.

Stupid poker game…

When Lee reached my side she was slightly out
of breath. A layer of sweat covered her forehead. My hackles shot
up. "Tell me you didn't walk here."

"Please don't start as well, Derek." Her eyes
dropped to the ground and I felt like a dick. "You're the only
person in my life who doesn't treat me like glass. You're the only
friend I have who treats me like I'm still
Lee
."

No, scratch that, I was a dick. I'd raised my
voice knowing full well how shit like that affected her. But dammit
she was barely out of the hospital three fucking weeks and I
remembered exactly how sick she had been–how close to death. It was
amazing how quickly the human body could recover, but she shouldn't
be walking down the stairs let alone the thirty minutes it took to
get here. The girl had a death wish and Kyle was going to flip.

We stared each other down for a moment as a
silent understanding passed between us.

'Back me up and I'll back you up. No questions,' her
eyes begged me.

I nodded my silent response. 'Got your back,
Ice.'

"Pretty flowers," Lee said in a soft dreamy
tone. "Cam's favorites. She would have been twenty three
today."

'I know'
I wanted to scream. Her
birthday wasn't something I was likely to forget. I'd celebrated
the last four with her, three of them as her fucking boyfriend.

I'd spent my freshman year trying to woo
Camryn Frey, finally winning her over the night of her twentieth
birthday. Well, my ass wooed her more than my face. I lost a poker
bet the night of her birthday and ended up getting a tattoo of a
fucking penguin on my ass cheek. Cam had picked the design, a
stipulation of the bet. I remembered being pissed as hell that I'd
ended up with a goddamn penguin on my butt, however ending up with
Camryn Frey naked in my bed that night had more than sweetened the
deal. I'd been ruined the very first day she walked through Kyle's
front door. Jesus, my stomach still flipped when I thought about
it. I'd never seen legs like hers…so firm and slender and long.
God, she had the most amazing legs.

I'd called dibs on her the minute she'd
slipped down to her room with her pink suitcase to unpack. There
was no way I was letting Kyle have her, though he hadn't really
looked. I still found that crazy. Kyle was a huge player when we
were younger, but he'd never looked at Cam like that. Well, he
checked out her tits the morning she ran out of the bathroom butt
naked, screaming about a spider trying to kill her, but I couldn't
blame him for that. I'd ended up taking a very cold shower after
that floor show myself.

"Did you have any trouble with reporters on
your way here?" I asked changing the subject before my brain
exploded. "They've stopped camping outside the house." It was a
relief to get up in the morning and not have vultures preying on
the front door step looking for a scoop.

I'd been harassed in the weeks following
Rachel's arrest, but Kyle and Lee had been tormented. Lee had been
protected while in hospital, but Kyle couldn't step foot outside
the doors of the hospital or hotel without having a camera or a
microphone shoved in his face. He'd had paid his legal team a small
fortune to keep his daughter's face off the television and out of
the papers, however there wasn't much he could do to protect his
and Lee's privacy. The story was huge and I'd found out more about
my best friend in the past four months than I had in the four and
half years I'd known him.

Every detail of their private lives had been
dragged through the press. Now the whole world knew about Kyle's
relationship with Rachel Grayson and the twisted pact she had
forced him into. Personally I'd called bullshit on her lies years
ago, but Kyle hadn't been able to see straight from guilt. Every
sordid detail of his two year affair with Rachel–and Lee's
miscarriage–was public knowledge. Kyle had been painted as a
troubled orphan teenager who was thrust into power by his secret
millionaire grandfather, targeted by an array of beautiful
gold-diggers, only to lose his heart to a Louisianan bombshell with
an empty bank account.

What fucking bullshit…

No one ever wrote about Kyle's decency
towards his friends or the fact that he was the one who had pursued
Lee. They never highlighted the fact that Lee had worked her butt
off as a cleaner in his hotel for months without ever knowing the
guy was loaded. I had been there. I'd suffered living in the house
with that palpable chemistry buzzing between them. I'd watched
their friendship progress to love. I'd witnessed their struggles
and I knew the goddamn truth. Those two had been through enough
heartache and it pissed me the hell off to read about their
lives–our lives–being picked apart and scrutinized.

One particular newspaper seemed to have one
hell of an informer. Just last month–when shit had finally started
to die down–they had unearthed several details about incidents that
happened during a house party last October. Kyle had been slated
for his temper and accused of being abusive to Lee. More bullshit.
Yeah, he had a temper that rivaled a lion, but the guy would never
physically harm a female. As for hurting Lee? I think Kyle would
tear the whole world apart if so much as a hair on her head was
ruffled.

I banked my money on Dixon Jones being the
rat. He'd never been a fan of Kyle. The fact that he'd shown an
interest in Lee when she first moved here and how she'd turned him
down for Kyle was probably his motivation. Well, that and the cash.
There was a tidy sum of money being offered for information from
the bigger newspapers.

Several foster families Kyle had lived with
had come forward with stories about him and how he'd been a
'difficult' child growing up. Everyone had an opinion on their
relationship and every newspaper covering the shooting had branded
them 'the broken lovers.'

"No, but they still come to the hotel," Lee
growled as she frowned deeply. "Not nearly as often as before, but
some manage to sneak in. It's Kyle they want to speak to most. I
guess he takes good pictures for the front page stories." She shook
her head. "I don't know what they think they're going to find. The
whole nightmare is a matter of public record." That was for sure. A
living breathing nightmare…

"I really don't know why I'm here, Lee," I
admitted raising my shoulders in an awkward shrug. "Or why I keep
coming here."

"I do," she said quietly as she stroked my
arm. "You love her," she whispered. "And just because someone dies,
it doesn't mean that your love for them becomes past tense.
Emotions don't have an integrated app or warning signal to let
people know someone is gone. The heart has its own sat-nav. It
always seems to lead us back to those we love, regardless of
logic."

Shit.

"You should be a psychologist," I muttered as
I used my fingers to brush my hair out of my eyes. I used to keep
my black hair shaved tight, but I hadn't bothered cutting it since
Cam died. Truth was I didn't see much point in carrying out any
grooming rituals besides the mandatory shit, shave and shower.
There was no fucking point and I didn't care.

Fifteen weeks…some days it felt like it
happened yesterday. Other days it felt like years had passed. The
pain was the same. That was the one thing that never changed.

Lee smiled but it was forced. "I don't think
so, Derek. I'm just an experienced woman of heartbreak. The sat-nav
of my heart is all kinds of crazy." Kyle's mini-me started crying
and Lee bent down and picked her out of her stroller.

Hope was gorgeous. Even I had to admit that.
She had a pair of lungs on her that rivaled any varsity football
coach, but damn the kid was cute. I'd been unfortunate enough to
witness her entrance into the world last May–well, her entrance
into the back seat of Kyle's car.