Wrecked by Shiloh
Walker
Release Date
4.2.13
Whatever happened to Abigale Applegate?
She’s been
wondering the same thing.
With her Hollywood dreams long gone, Abigale now has a nice, neat, uncomplicated life—until the day her
perfect fiancé needs to talk. Dumped, a little more than shattered, and totally
confused, Abigale turns to Zach, her best friend since forever, to help her
pick up the pieces. He does it with a gift—a copy of Wreck This
Journal. She can vent her
frustrations, and sketch out a new plan. Zach just hopes he’s part of it.
Because he’s been in love with Abigale his entire life.
When the journal falls into Zach’s hands, he
discovers Abigale wants a new man. And fast. Nothing more than a hot
distraction. Zach has a
strategy, too. He’s going to be that man. It’s his last
chance. Abigale might be out to shake up her life, but Zach’s out to
reinvent it. Now, all he has to do is convince Abigale that life can go as planned.
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******** EXCERPT *********
Wine would have been a good idea, Abby
thought.
Stretched out on her belly, she closed her eyes and tried to
think about anything but the pain. Digging
her nails into her palms, she tried to zone out.
“You
okay?”
Zach’s hands on her weren’t helping her zone out, she
decided. It was one hell of a distraction, but it wasn’t helping her zone
out.
Swallowing the knot in
her throat, she croaked out, “I’m as good as I think I can expect to
be.”
“And how good is
that?”
“Lousy.”
He laughed a little.
“Why don’t you talk to me? We’re halfway done,” he said. “If you talk, you’ll
get distracted and it will be done before you know it.”
“Okay.” She scrunched
her eyes tightly closed and tried to think of something to say. Her mind was
blank. “Shit. I don’t know what to talk about.”
“You always have
something to talk about,” he teased, his voice low and easy and she knew even
without looking at him that he was smiling.
“Not right now I don’t.” Well, she could think of a thing or two. But those things
were really things she could say. Were they? No. She’d thought this through.
She wasn’t going down that road with Zach.
“Okay. I’ll help. What is this new life plan you’ve got
laid out? Besides the
tattoo here?”
I plan on
flipping my life upside down–
She bit her lip to keep from blurting that out. That would
make him worry. She loved him dearly and she didn’t need him worrying about her
right now. “It’s not a life plan exactly. It’s just a for-now plan,” she said slowly. “Some things to keep me distracted
until I figure out what I’m going to do with myself. There’s the tattoo thing,
which you’re obviously helping with. I’m going to try to stop worrying so much.
One of them, though…I plan on calling up Roger and telling him
off.”
He grunted. “Good
plan.” Something soft brushed against her lower back and she hissed a
little.
Damn it, that hurt.
It felt like something was slicing right through her skin.
Distraction. Talk,
damn it. About
anything.
“I don’t get it,” she said softly, some of the confusion and
pain breaking free. “I mean… I thought he loved me. How could he love me and
walk away like that? Over the life I used to have? That’s what it’s all about. I used
to be an actress. I’m not anymore—I haven’t been for years and I’m happy with
that. How can he not see that? If he loved me, wouldn’t he be able to see that
I don’t want to act anymore?”
Zach didn’t
answer.
Turning her head, she
peered over her shoulder at him.
He had his head bowed,
the gold-streaked strands falling down and hiding his features from
her.
“Zach?”
He sighed. “Do you
really want to hear what I have to say about this right now,
sugar?”
“I always want to hear
what you have to say.”
“Okay.” He used the
cloth again on her back and then bent down, staring at her skin like there was
nothing else in the world but her back and the design he was inking onto her
flesh. “He never loved you.”
It was a strike,
square to her heart.
She closed her
eyes.
“If he loved you, he wouldn’t treat you the way he did. When
you walked into a room, it would have showed on his face…if he really loved
you. Either he’d been so busy staring at you because he just had to see you, or
he would have been looking away so nobody could see it. Except he was
going to marry you–you were his and he had every right to let the world see how
he felt.” Zach dabbed at her back again, still focused on the
work.
She was almost glad of the pain now, because it was easier to
think about how much it hurt than to think about what he had to
say.
“But when you walked into a room, that f’ing prick was too busy either messing with his damned gadgets or
looking at everybody else to see what they thought about you. He was in love with the
idea of having Kate the cutie on his arm. But he never loved
you.”
He paused what he doing and for a brief second, the world fell away as
he looked up and met her eyes. “He never loved you, and the son of a bitch sure
as hell didn’t deserve you, sugar.”
Her heart slammed
against her ribs as his blue gaze held hers.
And then, as it felt
like all the oxygen in the room had dwindled away, he turned his attention back
to the task at hand.
It felt like he was flaying the flesh from her bones. And
she decided that was just fine, because now she needed thatdistraction.
Was he right, she
wondered? Had Roger ever loved her at all?
And more importantly…had she loved him?
“Okay, here are the important things,” Zach said as he
studied the design. It was cute, sexy as hell and if he found out another guy
was the one who got to press his lips to that dragonfly as where it curved low over the flare of her
left hip, he
thought he just might go insane. “I’ll send you home with some instructions on
how to care for it, but you need to make sure you keep it clean. No scrubbing
at it or anything–you need to be gentle when you wash it, but keep it clean.
I’ve got some ointment I’ll send home with you and I’ll go into detail about
using that, too.”
She was still staring
at it over her shoulder in the mirror. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth
and eying the dragonfly like she expected it to take flight or
something.
“I need to get the
bandage on,” he said softly.
“What?
Oh.”
She continued to stand
there and he reached up, pressed his hand between her shoulder blades. “Lean
forward a little.”
Hunger screamed, jerking on the leash inside him as he eased
the waistband of her skirt just a little lower so he could get the bandage in
place. Bent over the table like that, he could so easily imagine pulling the
hem of the skirt up. Slipping his hand between her thighs. Would she sigh?
Moan?
No. This was Abby and
she’d freak the hell out and then she’d run away and he’d lose
her–
A soft, shaky sigh
caught his attention as he smoothed the bandage down. Keeping his head bowed, he
checked the mirror from under his lashes and his knees almost
buckled.
Abby was staring at
their reflection and her face was flushed.
What. The. Hell.
Abruptly, he stepped back and moved away. If he didn’t move
away immediately, he was
going to grab her and do things he never should do to his best friend. The
woman he loved. That was the problem. He’d loved her for too long and he was
misreading the signals and–
“Do you really think all that’s true? About Roger?”
Hearing that shithead’s name on her lips snapped his temper.
He turned around and glared at her. “If I didn’t think that was the case, Abs,
I wouldn’t have said it. He’s an egotistical, arrogant piece of work and he never loved you.
You deserved a hell of a lot better and I knew it all along. But he was what
you wanted so who in the hell was I to say any
different?”
“You’re my best
friend,” she said quietly.
“Shit.” He went to pass a hand over his face and stopped. He
still had his gloves on. Stripping them off, he tossed them into the red trash
can near the door and headed over start cleaning up. “Yes. I am. You asked me
what I thought and I told you. But I can’t tell you what is in that fucker’s
head. You can always ask him when you call him to tell him off, although I
doubt he’ll tell you the truth. He doesn’t even see the truth
anyway.”
“Have you ever been in
love?”
In the middle of gathering up his supplies, he paused. Zach
closed his eyes and started to mouth every single foul, nasty curse he could
think of. He had four brothers. He could think of a lot of cuss words. Half
way through one that involved anatomical improbabilities and a goat, a hand
touched his shoulder.
“Zach?”
Damn it, he couldn’t do this. Moving away, he started
grabbing shit at random. Dumping trash, slamming the tools here,
there. Being careless
with them, but he couldn’t look at her yet. If he did, she might
see–
He went to dump the
trash and turned around.
Abby was right there,
dark brown eyes locked on his face, her shirt still knotted just under her
breasts, leaving her belly bare.
“What is this?” she
teased. “You make me play twenty questions all the time.”
Edging around her, he
focused on cleaning up. “I’m thirty-two years old, Abby. Yeah. I’ve been in
love,” he said, keeping his voice flat and his eyes on the task at hand. “It
didn’t work out.”
“Why
not?”
“She never seemed to
notice that I was staring at her when she walked into the
room.”
(used with permission from Shiloh Walker ©ShilohWalker)
A little about
Shiloh:
Shiloh Walker has been writing since she was a kid. She fell
in love with vampires with the book Bunnicula and has worked her way up to the more…ah…serious works of
fiction. She loves reading and writing just about every kind of romance. Once
upon a time she worked as a nurse, but now she writes full time and lives with
her family in theMidwest. She writes romantic suspense and paranormal
romance, and urban fantasy under the name J.C.
Daniels.
Learn more about Shiloh here
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