Marked Men: Nash Part 1

NASH.

Jay Crownover.

Epigraph.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

-Buddha.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-Eleanor Roosevelt.

Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.

-Mahatma Gandhi.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

-Virginia Woolf.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

-Oscar Wilde.

I celebrate myself, and I sing myself.

-Walt Whitman.

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.

-Lucille Ball.

Dedication.

Dedicated to any of you who might just need a little reminder that you are awesome just the way you are!!!.

INTRODUCTION.

I grew up in a pretty small town here in the mountains in Colorado. It was a pretty place, but I stuck out like a sore thumb, which wasn't always the easiest thing to handle. I have always had my own style, marched to the beat of my own drum, wrote my own rule book, and pretty much forged my own path. I developed a thick skin and pretty rock-solid sense of who I was and what I was about early on. I had to, or I would've fallen victim to thinking what others said about me or thought about me held any water. That was years and years ago and still, that time, those feelings, stick with me.

I know this isn't the case for everyone, that some people have never been judged unfairly. But many have and they know that mean words and hateful actions are so much more far-reaching now with the world all being connected by a keyboard and a computer monitor. It gets tougher and tougher to brush off negativity and pessimism.

Trying to love yourself, to know your own value and worth, is something I think a lot of young girls struggle with and that can definitely flow into adulthood. We all have things that set us apart, make us special, make us who we are, and I would love to see those things celebrated and enjoyed across the board. Let that freak flag fly! (Or whatever equivalent you have.) I think on the journey to finding the love we crave, the love we truly deserve, the first stop has to be the love we have for ourselves. That's a love that can never be lost and can only grow and get stronger the more it is fostered and developed. Appreciate who you are. Love what makes you different. Tell your story your way. Embrace the things that make you beautiful inside and out, and know that once you do, no one else can ignore those traits. Revel in the quirks that simply make you you, and do it with pride.

PROLOGUE.

Saint.

High school ... Not the best years of my life.

There's a moment in every person's life, a point in time that will alter the course they are on, the path they are traveling, forever. The night of Ashley Maxwell's birthday party my senior year in high school was mine.

I wasn't the type of teenager that went to wild parties. I didn't drink and didn't mess around with drugs and boys, so really there was no point in me going. I was also painfully shy, overweight, and awkward in my own skin, skin that tended toward ugly breakouts and flushed bright red whenever anyone tried to engage me in conversation. The halls of high school were torture for a girl like me, but I suffered through it mostly unscathed because I knew when to keep my head down and not to set my sights on friends or boys that were out of my league. At least I did until senior year, when my locker ended up right next to Nash Donovan's.

For the first few weeks of school, I kept to myself and ignored him, just like I did with all the popular kids and beautiful people. If I didn't engage, then he couldn't make fun of me or, even worse, look at me with pity shining out of the spectacular purple eyes that glowed out of his handsome face. It worked until the day I dropped a calculus book on his foot and he picked it up to hand it to me. I'll never forget the way I actually felt the way my heart stopped and then started thundering in the next second when those spectacular eyes gleamed at me. I'd never experienced anything quite like it.

Nash smiled at me, quipped something sarcastic and offhand, making my poor, lonely heart turn over. He walked away with a wink ... and I had a crush. A consuming, engulfing crush that built day after day, because after that embarra.s.sing incident Nash went out of his way to say h.e.l.lo when we were by our lockers, and he always walked away with a smile or a nod. Each day I became more entranced, fell a little harder, and built the fantasy that we were meant to be something more than pa.s.sing acquaintances into something grandiose and romantic.

I was a smart girl, so I knew my affection was one-sided, but he seemed nice, charming, and it made me warm on the inside that he never teased me, or made me feel bad about my weight or looks like so many of my peers did on a regular basis. Our simple interaction was good for my self-esteem, good for making me feel more like the rest of the teenage girls prowling the halls that swooned over him and his group of troublemaking friends. I had even worked up enough courage after a month or so to return his h.e.l.los without my fair skin bursting into flames. I didn't stammer or clam up when he spoke to me anymore and occasionally I even managed to eke out a return smile. I was pretty proud of myself, so when he asked me one Friday if I was planning on going to Ashley Maxwell's party, I had been equal parts stunned and thrilled. A shiver of antic.i.p.ation shook me to the core and I couldn't stop myself from tumbling headfirst into a daydream where this was the start of something more than just an exchange of pleasantries in the hallway. It was all I could do to keep from twirling around in a circle of delight and clapping my hands like an overeager fanatic.

It was more than he typically said to me, and he was just so engaging and likable that I replied that I would try to be there. I didn't want to sound overeager. When he smiled at me and said that was awesome and we could hang out, I couldn't stop the feeling that attending a sloppy, unsupervised high school party seemed like the most important thing I had ever done in my short life.

My older sister, Faith, pretty and popular, fit in seamlessly to shark-infested waters that made up a teenage social circle. She questioned me endlessly about my sudden desire to mingle with my peer group, cautioned me that kids who were mean and unfriendly on a normal basis could be cruel and hateful when social status and alcohol were involved-but I decided not to listen. I figured the worst thing that could happen was that I would show up, not see Nash, or he wouldn't see me and I could just turn around and come back home and curl up with a book like I did most weekends. I was turning a blind eye to what I knew was the truth, but my desire for this particular boy to see me as something more than he did was all-consuming. It was making me ignore common sense and my own honed sense of self-protection.

I let Faith fuss over me for hours. She played with my fire-engine-red hair until it was curly and styled pretty and feminine. I let her pick an outfit that would never make me look like a size-four cheerleader but was fashionable and cute, and I even allowed her to slime a bunch of junk on my face that I knew would ultimately make my skin break out even worse. The end results were actually pretty nice. I looked more put together than I normally did. I thought I could just blend into the crowd, and really that was fine as long as those pretty purple eyes found me. I felt more confident and secure than I could ever remember feeling before.

Faith told me not to arrive to the party until after eleven, so I waited anxiously, fiddled with my hair, and played through every scenario my overeager imagination could think of. Maybe he would ask me to dance. Maybe he would lead me outside and give me my first kiss. Maybe he would tell me he could see all the wonderful things that lurked beneath the surface and he wanted me to be his girlfriend. In hindsight, of course, none of that was going to happen and I really didn't know the kind of guy Nash really was, but still a crush is a crush and it can run away from you pretty fast.

And so I showed up at Ashley Maxwell's blowout party, appropriately late, armed with Faith's mini-makeover and a racing heart filled with antic.i.p.ation.

As I walked into the house I was. .h.i.t with a blast of music, and the optimism I'd felt started to waver. A crowd of three guys I recognized from chem crowded past me as they joined the mayhem taking place in the living room. I couldn't find a safe place to rest my eyes, everywhere people seemed to be doing something that made me blush. I did my best to keep myself from gaping, but I felt the telltale heat creeping up my neck as I pushed my way through the sea of bodies. It was disturbing and I was beginning to think a new hairdo and some mascara would never be enough to make me fit in, in a place like this.

The kitchen looked a little less crowded, so I moved in that direction, keeping my eyes peeled for Nash. I was certain that if I could find him, this night would turn around. My stomach fluttered again as I thought about meeting those purple eyes across the room. I imagined them glinting and crinkling at the sides like they did when he smiled, and I pictured myself suddenly at ease by his side as the rest of the chaos faded away. He would make all the discomfort creeping under my skin disappear.

As I rounded a corner someone b.u.mped into me, spilling sticky, red liquid all down the front of my carefully selected shirt. I gasped in surprise and the jerk moved on without even apologizing. I was shaking and officially freaking out on the inside. It was all too clear that I didn't belong here, no matter how cute Nash Donovan was. My hands started to shake and it took every ounce of self-control I had to keep tears at bay.

Turned out, the kitchen was just as bad as the front of the party. Worse really, because the booze was apparently kept there and the crowd in that room seemed to be the drunkest of the drunk. It was like walking across a minefield of ugly remarks and dirty looks to get to the sink to try and clean up. I heard a few snickers, saw a few blurry looks cast my way, and it was enough. I planned to rinse off and go home. This place and these people were not for me and I knew better.

"Who invited you?"

The question was slurred and followed with a heavy hand on my shoulder. The voice-and the hand-belonged to none other than the birthday girl herself, and she was drunk. Really drunk and out for blood. Ashley and I weren't friends, but she had never said or done anything overtly nasty to me in all the years we had gone to school together ... I kind of felt like I was going to throw up.

"What?"

"Who invited you?" There was a sneer on her pretty lips, her big brown eyes gla.s.sy. "Why are you here?"

I wanted to say Nash had asked me to come, that he had told me we were going to hang out tonight, but I couldn't get the words out ... because just then he showed up.

He entered the kitchen followed by the Archer twins and Jet Keller. There was no mistaking it: these boys brought the party with them wherever they went. Nash had on his customarily sloppy look of torn jeans, skate shoes, and a band T-shirt. He also had a baseball hat pulled low over his forehead that did nothing to hide the high flush in his face or the unclear and foggy haze covering his eyes. It was obvious he was already wasted or even high and I felt the first threads of disappointment start to tie up my cracking heart. I saw his gaze skim over the kitchen, land on me, and keep moving. It made me suck in a painful breath and I had to bite the inside of my cheek-hard-to keep from really crying.

It was like he didn't even see me. He didn't smile, didn't wink, and didn't so much as incline his head in my direction. It was like I didn't even exist. I went numb. I felt like my blood turned to ice and everything in the center of my chest ceased to work. I curled my shaking hands into fists and tried to frantically plan an escape route that would save me any further embarra.s.sment or heartache.

Ashley apparently forgot all about my fatness and ugliness marring her party and bounded over to the new additions. If my heart filled with awful feelings at his flagrant dismissal, then it practically burst open when he scooped her up in his arms and let her inhale his face while he grabbed her a.s.s. I wanted to choke on my embarra.s.sment as I scrambled backward out of the kitchen. There was no more thought put to self-preservation, only to escape. I had a frantic, desperate need to put as much s.p.a.ce between me and this party-but more so between me and Nash-as possible.

Mercifully, the tears didn't fall until I was safely at my car. In that moment, slumped in my driver's seat with black streaks on my fingers from the mascara I'd let Faith smear on, I knew the truth: the beautiful people stuck together and it didn't matter what was on the inside. Nash might be nice when it was just him and I by our lockers, but put him in a room full of people, give him a skinny and pretty girl willing to put out, and I was invisible. I'd been so stupid to think it was anything more.

So I did what was instinctive and resurrected the shield around my heart. From then on I ignored him every time he tried to tell me h.e.l.lo. I looked away from him when he smiled at me. I avoided my locker as much as I could when I knew he was going to be there and tried to focus on the fact that graduation was right around the corner and I would be leaving this small mountain town and this clueless boy that had hurt my feelings so deeply behind. I knew logically Nash didn't know how I felt, had no clue that I had thought he was different and special, but that didn't make the burn of his ignorance or my embarra.s.sment any less hot.

In the warmth of early spring, with my college enrollment all lined up for fall and my insecurities carefully compartmentalized-the sting of my failed crush finally beginning to heal-I stumbled upon Nash and his friends outside smoking after school ... My heart lurched, but none of them saw me and I scuttled by, hoping to hurry to my car and planning on ignoring him like I had been doing since the party, when his deep voice a.s.saulted my ears.

"She's a mess. If she ever wants to get laid, she needs to look in the mirror and maybe do some work."

One of the other guys cackled at the nasty statement and I thought I was going to vaporize into a cloud of horrified smoke. He had to be talking about me and I couldn't move once I heard what he was saying.

I heard Nash snort as I tried to sneak by so they wouldn't notice me or my tears. I had never cried so much over any other person and it made me hate him a little-or a lot-as he kept talking.

"I mean I'm not picky, I would take her to bed. I just might need to put a bag over her head first or something."

That sent the rest of the guys rolling in laughter as the ground beneath me fell away and a sob caught in my throat. How could I have been so incredibly wrong about someone? Any hope, any thought that he was different-that any pretty boy could be different-was annihilated with those hateful, harsh words. Words that forever changed the way I looked at the opposite s.e.x.

Nash Donovan was a beautiful, wicked, and hot flame that burned me when I got too close. He was just the first stop in a journey dotted by disappointment, but somewhere along the way I found my footing. My purpose. I just didn't know that as soon as I did, Nash would manage to turn my world upside down all over again, and only a fool gets burned twice by the same fire.

CHAPTER 1.

Nash.

Thanksgiving ... Eight years later.

My fully restored Dodge Charger was eating up the highway as I raced through the cold Colorado night. The ma.s.sive engine was growling angrily in time with my thundering heart and light flurries of snow dotting the windshield, so I could blame the rapid blinking of my eyes on trying to see through the nasty road conditions and not the emotion threatening to overtake me. None of it registered, neither did the fact that I had to be pushing 120 and that terrified holiday traffic was undoubtedly scrambling to get out of my way. I was in such a fog, such a state of disbelief, that I felt numb and barely aware of what was going on around me. I had just found my uncle Phil, the one and only parental figure I had in my life, unconscious on the floor of his hunting cabin. He was cold and still. He looked like a skeleton, skin stretched over bones that appeared far too fragile. I was racing the "Flight for Life" the park rangers had called in to airlift him to the emergency room in Denver.

Just to add to the danger of the speeds I was traveling and the way my mind was on anything but the road in front of me, I put in a panicked call to Cora Lewis, my coworker and close friend. She was all kinds of take care of business and would rally the troops and get everyone else that mattered the information they needed without me having to worry about it. She would help take care of me, she always did.

I made it to the hospital in record time and surged into the emergency room on a tidal wave of anxiety and fear. I was more familiar with these inst.i.tutional and sterile walls than I wanted to be-one of my closest friends, my surrogate big brother Rome Archer, had tangled with a bunch of bikers and a bunch of bullets not too long ago and I had spent hours upon hours nervously pacing these very halls waiting to see if he was going to pull through. But right now this visit felt like it might define the rest of my life. The security guard gave me a concerned look. I was used to it. When you had yellow, orange, and red fire tattooed along each side of your scalp and had ink from your collar to your wrist on each arm, people tended to think you weren't really a very nice guy. Funny thing was that I was typically a lot nicer than most of the guys I loved like brothers, but not right now, and if the nurse who sat behind the desk didn't tell me where my uncle was in the next second I was going to straight up lose my s.h.i.t.

I was just about to breathe fire way hotter than the kind inked all over me when I saw her walking toward me. She looked like an angel, even though her name was Saint. It fit her, Saint Ford, healer of the sick and hater of anything and everything having to do with Nash Donovan. She was beautiful, breathtaking, absolutely despised me, and made no secret about it. I had run into her more than once on my unfortunately frequent trips to this ER, where she seemed to be a permanent fixture as one of the attending nurses.

We had gone to high school together years ago, and while I was all for striking up a reunion of sorts, she was having none of it. She made a big production of avoiding me, or giving me nervous, sideways looks like she didn't trust me or was forced to endure my company. Only right now, in this moment, she was looking at me with equal parts compa.s.sion and seriousness in her soft, dove-gray eyes. It left no doubt whatsoever that things with Phil were really, really bad.

She put a hand on my shoulder and I felt like I was going to shatter under the gentle touch.

"Nash ..." Her voice was light and I could hear the bad news in it. "Come over here and talk to me for just a minute."

I didn't want to. I didn't want to hear whatever horrible words she was going to have to say to me, but because she was so pretty, because she had the loveliest eyes I had ever seen, I just numbly did what she asked. There were worse people to take bad news from.

We took a few steps away from the nurses' desk, and I gazed down at her with trepidation. She was fairly tall for a girl, so we were eye to eye when she leveled it at me in a feather-soft voice speaking rock-hard words.

"Did you know Phil was so sick?"

I felt like she was asking me as a friend, or someone who actually cared about what was happening, and not as a medical professional. I knew logically she was just doing her job, but it made me feel better to pretend otherwise.

I didn't have any words that sounded or felt right to answer her, so I shook my head.

"I recognized the name on the intake paperwork and the two of you look an awful lot alike. I figured I might find you out here."

I gulped down my thundering heartbeat and nodded my head stiffly. "He's my only family." That wasn't entirely true, but he was the only family I had that really mattered to me.

She sighed and I tried not to flinch when she put a hand on my cheek. I knew she didn't like me, and for some reason that made the fact that she was being so considerate, so caring, hit home that whatever she was getting ready to lay out for me was way worse than I had imagined.

"He has lung cancer ... the doctors are thinking stage four. He has an extensive medical chart. He's been receiving treatment for a while. We got him settled, gave him fluids, he might have pneumonia, so that's why he's struggling to breathe, and his oxygen levels are dangerously low. We aren't a hundred percent sure why he was unresponsive just yet, but we're trying to get him awake. The attending doctor called the oncologist that was listed in Phil's chart. It's a serious situation, Nash. I can't believe he didn't let you know how ill he was."

I let my head drop on my neck like it was suddenly just too heavy to hold up and her gentle fingers stroked along my cheek. It was startlingly soothing.

"He's been avoiding me." It sounded pathetic to my own ears.

She was going to say something else when a tiny, pregnant pixie and a hulking giant came thundering into the room where we were standing. I didn't recognize the older guy that entered with them, but he had an intent look on his face that was almost scary. He took one look around the empty waiting room and turned on his heel in a way that made it seem like he was on a hunt for information or someone that had answers. The cavalry had arrived. Saint went to pull away and I instinctively grabbed her wrist. I needed my friends, loved my crew of misfits and rebels, but right now I needed her more. I couldn't explain it. She gave me a wan grin and tugged her arm free.

"I'm gonna go check on him and see if we managed to get him awake so that you can see him. Nash ... you should consider quitting smoking."

The last of her words trailed away as I was steamrolled by a punk-rock pixie and engulfed in a hug I needed like no one's business. I let Cora do her magic and try and make me feel better. I also let the quiet strength and steady a.s.suredness of the guy I considered my older brother try and ground me. Rome Archer was a rock and I needed that kind of stability as my world was shaking around me.

I was pulling it together, getting the emotions that were churning and rolling in check, getting my head around what was going on when they showed up. It was bad enough that my mom was there, but that she had the nerve to bring that a.s.shole she married with her was just pushing the limits of my already tattered control.

She just had to go and call me Nashville ... no one called me Nashville and lived to tell the tale ... well, no one but Cora. I think it was hearing my real name spoken from my mom's lips that had all the questions rolling and the pieces tumbling into place. I went from hovering on the brink of calm to a volatile molten core of fury that was ready to take this ER down in flood of hate and wrath.

Why was she here?

Phil made her his next of kin, his power of attorney ... like she was somehow more important to him than I was.