Dubai
I had thought I was prepared for the inevitability of this moment.
I was so wrong.
Breathe, I told myself—not to calm down, but to push oxygen into my lungs before I passed out. Planning on seeing Landon and coming face-to-face with him were two completely different things. One was purely logical, and the other…well, there wasn’t a single nerve in my body that didn’t come alive at his nearness.
Now say something—anything.
“Hey, Landon,” I said quietly, looking up into shocked hazel eyes. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful they were, how the color changed with his mood or what he was wearing.
Which wasn’t a lot at the moment.
Well, he was wearing my margaritas. They were currently dripping down the insanely hard lines of his abdomen, paying no mind to the myriad of tattoos that colored his skin.
Did he cover up the one he got for me? Not that I could see it under all that bright green muck sliding down his body.
I jerked my eyes back to his, but he was still just standing there…staring. Okay, maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as I thought. “Well, it’s good to see you,” I said with a shaky smile, taking in every detail of his Hemsworth-worthy face. He’d lost what little softness he’d had since I’d seen him last, leaving the strong lines of his nose and chin, but those lips still looked as soft as ever and just as practiced at smooth lines and smoother exits.
I tried to block out the barrage of memories, but they assaulted me, pelting me with the low timbre of his voice when we would spend hours locked in conversation, the look in his eyes the first time he’d told me he loved me, the feel of his hands on my skin. No matter how hard I’d tried to keep everything locked up tight, it all came rushing back, overloading me with emotions I couldn’t afford to explore. Ever.
I’d been on board for a week, known he was here—known the incredibly sneaky lengths Paxton had gone to get me here—and avoided him like the plague he was. I was here for Leah, for me, to touch my own history and find my birthplace, for a hundred different reasons that didn’t involve Landon.
“What…how…?” His normally smooth lines were absent.
A thousand times I’d practiced this in my head. How cool I was going to be. How dismissive. How I’d show him that maybe he’d wounded me, but I wasn’t broken. My imagination had nothing on this moment, or my physical reaction to seeing him.
Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving? Why couldn’t you choose me? Why wasn’t I enough for you? Every question eighteen-year-old me had cried into my pillow reared its ugly head, and I beat them all back down, swallowing past my suddenly dry throat that had zero to do with the desert heat.
“Um, do you know each other?” the blonde he had his arm wrapped around asked. I wonder if he even knows her name.
A wry smile twisted my lips. Different year. Different country. Same Landon. “We used to.”
He was still shell-shocked, and I took what little advantage I had. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.” I ripped my gaze away from him, my chest aching like he’d left me yesterday instead of two and a half years ago.
I managed to turn and walk away, dropping our margarita cups in the trash. I’d find Leah and explain later, but right now I had to get the hell out of here. The elevator was ahead, maybe only ten feet away when he caught up with me, no blonde in sight.
“Rachel!” he said, his fingers brushing my upper arm like he’d changed his mind midreach.
So close, I thought as the elevator doors closed ahead of me.
I turned slowly, trying to visualize locking up my emotions with a row of dead bolts. He wasn’t getting through. “What can I do for you?” I asked his pecs. His chest was safer than those soul-melting eyes.
“Rachel,” he whispered.
Inch by inch, I drew my gaze up until I met his over a head above me. Landon’s light brown, finger-tousled hair towered above my five-foot-two frame, but the difference had always made me feel protected, like he was a mountain no one could move. Turned out I couldn’t really move him, either. “What?”
“I…don’t know what to say,” he admitted, a look of awe and fear on his face.
Me, either, eighteen-year-old me called out from where I’d locked her away.
“Wow. I have to admit that I expected some smoother lines from you.”
He shook his head a little and blinked, like he expected me to disappear, like I was some figment of his imagination. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“That’s pretty obvious. Look, we don’t have to see each other. You stay to your classes, and I’ll stay to mine. I’m sure we’ll have some overlap with the whole Leah/Paxton thing, but my plan is to generally ignore you.” I had to in order to survive.
His eyes narrowed. “Leah/Paxton thing?”
I arched an eyebrow and tried to calm the pounding of my heart. It felt like the damn thing had wings, and it was hammering against my ribs to get out of my chest and back to the one person it had always belonged to. Hell, no. “They haven’t told you?”
He stepped forward, and I retreated. “Told me what?”
We continued our dance—I backed up and he followed. Each step took me closer to the elevator, closer to getting the hell away from him.
“Rachel, would you stop? I’m not going to stalk you into the elevator.”
“Yeah, you’re usually a walk-away kind of guy.”
He winced. “Really?”
The horn blew, and the ship launched from the dock. “I have some pretty personal experience with that side of you.” I looked behind him, where the blonde was staring at us with her arms crossed under her breasts. “And from the looks of things, nothing’s changed.”
“Rachel…” He reached for me, and I stepped back, turning slightly to hit the down button on the elevator.
“No. You don’t get to Rachel me. You don’t get to anything me. You get to be all Nova-y, and I get to stay the hell away from you for the next six months.”
“Well, your tactics have worked pretty well, considering this is the first time I’m seeing you and we’re three months into the trip.”
Did he have to look wounded? Like I’d done something dastardly by hiding away from him? “I only got here last week.”
His forehead puckered, and I fought back my urge to smooth those lines with my fingers like I had when we were together. He wasn’t mine to touch. He wasn’t mine in any form of the word.
“Last week? Funny, that’s when Leah’s roommate…” His eyes widened to a nearly impossible size.
“Put that together, did you?” The elevator dinged open behind me, and I shamelessly retreated into it, seeing the camera crew heading our direction. I needed space, and I needed it now.
“Wait.” He lunged forward, stopping the elevator door with his arm. “I don’t understand.”
“Paxton will fill you in,” I said and pushed the close-door button.
“Paxton?” He shook his head again.
I blew out a frustrated sigh, realizing there were other students in the elevator. “Paxton Wilder. Your best friend. Come on, Nova—”
“Landon,” he snapped. “I’ve never been Nova to you. Not in that way.”
You’re like a supernova—an explosion so bright no one can see past you, I’d told him once after he’d won a competition. But like my love, that name had been twisted into something entirely different. Now he was Casanova…and no longer mine.
“What we were to each other sure as hell doesn’t matter anymore,” I countered. “Me being here isn’t some act of fate, or God. It’s an act of Paxton. If you want answers, go to him. Once this door shuts, my plan is never to speak to you again.”
“You think that’s possible? That I’m just going to ignore you?”
“It’s worked pretty damn well for the last two and a half years.”
Someone behind me coughed to hide a laugh.
Landon glared over my shoulder, and then that arrogant Nova smirk appeared, which twisted my insides in opposite directions—one wanting to smack him and the other inconveniently remembering what this man was capable of doing to my body. “Rachel.”
“What?” I shouted. I would pay money to make him stop saying my name like that—like he still knew me, still wanted me, still loved me. Like the last two years had just evaporated and we were still talking about our future in the apartment he’d left me holding the lease for. He didn’t get to say my name like he hadn’t drastically altered the very fabric of my being—I wasn’t that girl anymore.
“We’re at sea for the next four days, so it’s not like you can leave the ship. This isn’t over.” He leaned back, removing his arm from the door.
The doors started to slide shut, and he held my gaze, something heating there. Guess the shock of seeing me had worn off.
“This was over a long time ago,” I said quietly.
He flinched as the doors shut.
I closed the door to our suite and leaned back against it, letting my head thump on the barrier. It hurts. God, it hurts so badly. My hand rested under my heart, praying it would find some semblance of a normal rhythm, but it kept up with my lungs, which worked overtime, bringing giant gasps of air into my chest. Even my throat was on fire from this lump that wouldn’t go the hell away. My face scrunched as I fought back tears. God, I hated crying. What was even worse was that it wasn’t that I was sad. No, my eyes were prickling from anger, from embarrassment, from the pain in my chest from seeing him, from…the myriad of emotions that my body didn’t know how to process.
I drew air into my lungs in a steady stream. You’re stronger than this. You are iron. You are concrete. You are invincible.
All true, but he was my one stupid weakness.
Somehow in the span of those few minutes, he’d managed to slice open my soul and set me back years. How was this fair? He was the one who’d walked out without a word, leaving me collegeless, with a pissed-off family I had to go crawling back to and a lease I couldn’t afford, but from the looks of it, he was fine. More than fine, really, and I was the one trying to get over the newly opened fissure in my heart…again.
“Rachel?” Penna’s voice came from the living room, and my stomach sank. If there was one person on this ship who hated me more than Wilder, it was Penna. She’d despised me for years—since the moment she’d realized that while I was dating Wilder, I was deeply in love with his best friend.
She’d also become my roommate when Leah moved to Pax’s room a couple of days ago. I understood why—Penna needed time to heal out of the public eye, and our suite was off-limits to the rabid camera crew, but man…it was awkward around here at times.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I answered, walking down the hallway of our suite as I composed myself. The marble floors, double bedrooms, and full amenities were way overboard, but I wasn’t complaining. Wilder had gone to a shit ton of trouble to get me here. I just hated that he’d used my best friend to do it.
But he’d fallen in love with her, so I guess it all worked out.
“Hey,” Penna said from her wheelchair. Her leg was casted to her thigh and elevated by one support of the chair, and her superlong blond hair was piled onto her head in a knot. Injured or not, she was ridiculously model-worthy beautiful but still rode a motocross bike better than most of the guys.
“Hey,” I echoed, sinking into the plush leather sofa and stretching my legs out onto the coffee table.
She turned her attention back to her book, settling us into an awkward quiet.
Nervous energy coursed through me, and I sat up, leaning my elbows on my knees to hold my head. God, this was stupid. This was ridiculous. I had six months here with him. Watching him seduce everything in a skirt. How the hell was I going to handle that? Handle him?
“You saw him,” Penna said quietly, putting her book into her lap.
I nodded. “I ran into him. Literally. There were margaritas involved.”
“Did the alcohol help?”
I looked up. “It ended up all over him.”
She snorted, the first laugh I’d heard from her since I got here last week. “Good. Not that he needed it. He’s salty enough as it is.”
I laughed. “That he is.”
“How are you?” Her words were choppy, and I knew how much they cost her.
“Are you honestly asking? Because I’m pretty sure if you weren’t in that wheelchair you’d have no issue throwing me overboard.”
Her head tilted. “I’ve considered it.”
The last thing I could handle right now was Penna’s obvious disgust with my presence, and this was the only place on the ship I was safe from running into Landon. Fantastic.
The door flew open, hitting the wall. “Rach?” Leah yelled down the hall two seconds before she barreled in. “Oh my God! Landon and Pax are going at it right now. What happened?” She plopped on the couch next to me, her legs bare, revealing the parallel scars down the fronts of her legs that she’d kept hidden until this trip—until Paxton had brought out the brave in her. Her whiskey-colored eyes were wide, her brown hair in windblown disarray. Man, I’d missed her every day that she’d been here while I was back in L.A.
“I may have run into Landon.”
“Yeah, I got that part,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
She laughed but stopped when I glared at her. “I’m sorry, but after he saw you today on the slopes, that’s all he kept saying. ‘I’m fine.’”
“He saw you on the slopes?” Penna asked, her book forgotten in her lap. This was the longest I’d seen her engaged in any conversation since the accident—since her sister broke her heart.
“He did,” I answered with an involuntary smile. “He looked up to wave to Leah, and I’d just gotten there. I had no clue he’d actually see me. But he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
“And then he ran into the wall,” Leah said, her laughter rolling through her shoulders.
“No way!” Penna exclaimed, another laugh tumbling out. “Like into the wall wall? The side of the slope?”
“Exactly,” I said. “And then some girl ran over him on the lift.”
I wasn’t even near him, and his luck was already turning to shit.
“Oh my God,” Penna said, her laughter even louder. “Then what did he do?”
“He looked for you,” Leah said to me. “I mean, you were gone by the time he pulled himself out of the lift path, but he looked.”
My laughter died as that kaleidoscope of emotion turned in my chest.
“But what was weirder was that he didn’t ask about you,” Leah continued. “When I saw him, he never asked who was standing next to me.”
“He doesn’t care,” I said out of habit and defense.
“No, it wasn’t that. He was shaken. It was almost as if he thought he’d hallucinated you…like it had happened before.”
I met my best friend’s level stare. “That would imply he ever thought about me to begin with.”
“Rachel—”
“No!” I snapped. “He left me without saying good-bye. Left me standing there like an idiot in that ER with five rejected calls, ten unanswered texts, a shredded acceptance letter to Dartmouth, a fractured wrist from falling off our brand-new kitchen counter, and a broken heart—all while the ink on our lease, that I couldn’t afford on my own, was still wet. I sat in that apartment for days, knowing he’d gone back to the Renegades but just hoping he would still come home to me, too. Hoping Wilder had reneged on his goddamned ultimatum, or that I would at least get an explanation, or a good-bye. Do you have any idea how that feels—to be ghosted? Abandoned? Treated like you aren’t good enough for his love, his time, or even a fucking phone call? Leah, you of all people know what it was like for me to go back to my parents—to grovel and plead for help when I’d thrown my independence in their face. I gave up everything for Landon, and it wasn’t enough. So please don’t imply that he ever gave me a second thought.”
“You should let him explain,” Penna said softly.
“You can’t weigh in on this,” I told her. “Not if you want us to have a quasi friendship.”
She struggled with keeping quiet. I could tell by the set lines of her mouth, the way her hands gripped the sides of her book. “Okay,” she finally said. “But there are two sides to every story.”
Leah glanced between us and clapped her hands. “New subject!” Her eyes lit with excitement. “Pax arranged a trip to Nepal during the optional excursion week in India.”
Penna tensed, and my eyes flickered toward hers, which were pointed at her cast.
“Okay?”
“We’re all going! Well, if you want to. He found a great spa for Penna and me, and I hear there’s some fabulous skiing…”
My eyes narrowed at her. “You’re dangling the carrot. You know how much I love to ski.”
“I do,” she admitted.
“Landon will be there.”
“He will…it’s actually his trip. He’s hung up on boarding some ridgeline up by Everest, and this is his shot. He thinks it would put the documentary over the top.”
He couldn’t mean… I shut down my train of thought. For God’s sake. I’d been in his presence all of one time and I was already concerned about him. I had no business even thinking about him, or wondering if he was actually going to try to hit the Shangri-La spine wall he’d always talked about. It was impossibly high, impossibly steep, and offered a high possibility of death.
“Ugh.” I leaned my head on the back of the couch. “I can’t escape him, can I?”
“Not if you want all the perks that come with traveling with the Renegades,” Penna said. “And if I recall correctly, you were always ready to jump in on anything we were working on. Hell, I think you were more fearless than Landon some days.”
She said it softly, without malice. Maybe this roommate stuff would work after all.
“I do love it,” I admitted.
“Do you think you can handle being around him so much?” Leah asked. “I’m still willing to leave if you need to. I love Paxton, but I hate what he did—tricking us both to get you on board.”
I squeezed her hand. She’d suffered so much in the last few years, and it wasn’t fair to take this from her. I could endure six months of hell for her—for the chance to touch a piece of my history after months of research, digging through my parents’ papers, looking for the location of that orphanage in South Korea, trying to be as covert as possible so I wouldn’t upset Mom… Was I really going to let Landon ruin that?
“I’ll be fine. I can handle being around him.”
A flicker of relief passed through her eyes, and she loosened her grip on my hand. “Okay. Then how do you want to handle things? Pax wants to include you on the trips.”
“Of course he does. He wants me accessible for Landon,” I snapped and then grimaced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You can growl at my boyfriend all you want. He deserves whatever you want to dish at him for this.”
“It’s fine. I’ll only see him on shore excursions. I can duck him the rest of the time.”
“Well…” Leah started.
“What now?”
“This might not be the best time to tell you that you’re also in two of the same classes this term,” Penna answered. “So you’ll be around him for those classes, shore excursions, our trips, and any field studies those classes have.”
“Fuck my life.”
“I figured you would say that,” Leah said, squeezing my hand. “Still okay?”
I nodded slowly. “Just like you, I’m a lot stronger than I used to be. Besides, just because I have to be around him doesn’t mean I have to talk to him.”
“Rachel,” Leah cajoled.
“He can be pretty insistent…and convincing,” Penna said.
“Yeah, well, I can be as stubborn as he is, and I’ve had way more practice at ignoring him than he has at seeking me out. There’s nothing that guy can do to force me to talk to him.”
I didn’t miss the glance Penna and Leah shared.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“I know,” Leah answered. “Your stubbornness has never been up for debate.”
“If I have to be stuck in this thing,” Penna said, nodding toward her cast with a slow smile, “at least I’ll have something entertaining to watch.”
How hard could it be to ignore Landon Rhodes?
I had the feeling I was about to find out.
