Back To The Start Box Set: Five Full-Length Novels

by Aly Martinez

He stopped at the edge of the bed and shoved his hand into his pocket. “Paragraphs, babe. I gotta get back to it.”

  I rolled my eyes at the premature return of Mr. Serious and Professional. “I own a beach house in LA. And kinda-sorta have a personal plane. Or did. But, now, I have one we can use. Anyway…I was thinking, maybe in a few weeks…when we’ve adjusted to this new working relationship, we could um…take a trip to see your girl?”

  His face softened as he tipped his head ever so slightly. “You wanna go with me to see Val?”

  “Of course. She was awesome.”

  He grinned wide, his face lighting as it traveled to his eyes. “Yeah, Rhion. The minute you feel comfortable with that new working relationship, let me know and I’ll talk to Leo about taking a vacation. Me. You. Val. A beach house. Sounds spectacular.”

  It sounded pretty damn spectacular to me too. I bit my lip and smiled.

  His grin stretched as he bent over, his mouth aimed at mine.

  Then, with an, “I’ll see you at five, Butterfly,” and an all-too-brief kiss, I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him walk out my bedroom to get back to work.

  And then I had the absolute pleasure of counting the minutes down until five, because I knew he’d be coming back to me.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jude

  Three weeks later…

  “Try it!” Devon demanded, sliding a mug of beer across the table.

  Rhion caught it and sent it right back to him. “No way. You can keep your nasty factory-produced beer to yourself. I’ll stick with the little guys who make it with love.”

  “Beer is beer, Rhion. Microbrew or not,” Johnson added, a mug of Bud sitting proudly in front of him.

  “Yes, if you have no palate or taste buds, you are absolutely right.”

  I draped my arm around her shoulders, but my gaze constantly moved around the bar.

  Surveying the room.

  Searching for a threat.

  My body eager to neutralize it, and if it was her brother, I’d shatter him.

  For the first week, Johnson had gone with us any time we’d left her apartment. It’d bothered me that she didn’t completely trust me to take care of her. Though, if I really thought about it, the other time I’d attempted to save her, she’d only narrowly made it out alive. When I’d brought this theory up to her, she’d dismissed it immediately, stating that I was becoming the crazy one. However, from the way my chest ached each time she attempted to touch the back of my head, I knew I was right.

  When she finally took the plunge and went out with me alone, Apollo made an appearance. We were at dinner when I tagged him sitting at the bar. He didn’t approach, and we didn’t hang around long enough to see if he was going to. Thankfully, I was able to distract Rhion so she didn’t notice him.

  The following week, he brazenly walked right past us as I guided Rhion into her new favorite place: the Neiman Marcus shoe department. He made sure she couldn’t miss him that time. We walked in one door and he walked out the other, a smug grin decorating his face. Rhion reacted so viscerally that it was only the need to take care of her that kept me from hunting him down. I didn’t care that he wasn’t making contact; he was torturing her all the same.

  She didn’t leave her apartment for a week after that, and it damn near broke me when her clothes started being delivered again. While I hated shopping something fierce, I loved watching Rhion come out of her cocoon and spread her wings. In those moments, I felt like I’d had a hand in bringing her back to life. And that feeling did some amazing things in my chest, because that was exactly what she had done for me.

  Rhion Park had ignited my life in unimaginable ways.

  The nightmares were gone, and each passing day, I felt lighter than I had in years. She’d done that. And there was nothing I wouldn’t do to return the favor.

  Rhion was beautiful inside and out. She could be quirky and funny, but she was also complex and ridiculously intelligent. She could debate the meaning of life just as easily as she could wax poetic about the relationship between Marshall and Lily from her favorite sitcom. Romantic by nature, she tried to claim she’d calloused through the years and now considered herself to be more of a realist. However, the way her face had lit the night I’d brought her flowers, told me romance still ran thick in her veins. While she was kind and gentle, melting into me the moment the clock struck five every afternoon, she had no qualms about putting me in my place over the practicality of coasters.

  There were many brilliant colors to Rhion’s personality, and each one I’d discovered was more vibrant and awe-inspiring than the last. It wasn’t until Rhion that I’d truly realized how bland the first twenty-nine years of my life had been. I’d never experienced the color blue like I did when she stared up at me post-orgasm, her eyes shining and soft with trust. And white. White was one of those colors that used to just blend into the background, that I never really noticed. But white was also the color of the stars she’d hand-painted on the navy-blue ceiling in her ocean room. Because, to quote that crazy woman, “One couldn’t fully appreciate the sun at the beach without the contrast of the night’s sky.”

  I never could have anticipated just how deeply Rhion Park would ingrain herself in my life.

  But she had. Wholly. Completely. And, as the days passed, I’d begun to hope that maybe it would be permanently.

  Rhion curled into my side, snapping me out of my thoughts.

  “Don’t get me started on Jude drinking a bottle. They must have been out of cans,” she smarted.

  I chuckled and then tipped up the same beer I’d been nursing all night to polish it off.

  “You ready to go?” Rhion asked, peering up at me through her lashes.

  “Whenever you are.”

  “I’m tired. I might not even make you put out tonight.”

  Rhion had spent the day furiously decorating for Halloween. Leo had given her approximately five hours’ notice that he’d arranged for all the guys to bring their kids over to do a little early trick-or-treating at her place.

  She’d promptly written a mile-long list of candy for me to get and then lost herself in a sea of black and orange.

  I respected the fuck out of Leo James for being a strong leader and a savvy business owner, but it was moments like that, when he’d go out of his way to do something for Rhion, that made me respect him as a man. He’d been full of shit the day he’d told me that she was his number-one client. Leo had accounts much bigger than hers. However, he’d hit the nail on the head when he’d called her family. That was exactly how all of the men at Guardian took care of her. Not a single guy had bitched when Leo’d made the announcement about trick-or-treating at Rhion’s. Hell, a few of them went so far as to jump on the phone to borrow nieces and nephews to make sure her candy didn’t go to waste.

  I still stood my ground that Guardian was filled with some of the craziest people I’d ever met, but I’d never been prouder to be part of such an incredible group of men.

  My lips twitched as I arched an eyebrow at her. “Trick-or-treating take it out of you?”

  “No. Accosting you in the ocean room when the kids left took it out of me,” she replied, nudging me on the shoulder before yawning.

  I laughed and dug my wallet out to throw some cash on the table. “Say your goodbyes. Let’s get you home.”

  “Quitters!” Devon exclaimed, lifting his beer in the air as I slid out of the booth, pulling Rhion up with me.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she mocked, giving him a hug.

  I extended a hand Johnson’s way for a shake. We’d come leaps and bounds in the nearly two months I’d been working at Guardian. I wasn’t sure the two of us would ever be best friends, but with Rhion, we’d come together to accomplish a common goal—her safety.

  He tolerated me. I tolerated him. She adored us both.

  “You gonna stay for a while?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he replied, getting to his feet, but his gaze never left Rhion.
“She doing okay?” he asked under his breath so only I could hear.

  We both watched as she laughed wildly, swatting at Devon as he tried to force her to taste his beer.

  “She is,” I confirmed.

  “And what about you?” he asked.

  I visually swept through the room one more time before I cut my gaze his way. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, she wasn’t the only one who walked away with scars from that fire.”

  I widened my stance and crossed my arms over my chest, not liking where it sounded like he was going with this. “You want to elaborate on that?”

  He finally turned, his hollow eyes staring through me. “Doesn’t take much for one brutally broken soul to recognize another. Your head is fucked, Levitt, but it’s the same reason I know you’ll take care of her.”

  A sense of uneasiness took up root in my stomach. “And what about you?” I asked. “You okay?”

  His face broke into an uncomfortable grin. “Nope. Don’t forget my head is fucked, too.”

  I followed his gaze as it drifted back across the table. Though, this time, it wasn’t Rhion who captivated his attention as she wrapped her arms around Alex’s thick neck.

  Alex looked anywhere but at Johnson as he awkwardly patted Rhion on the back with one hand before setting her away.

  Puzzled, I flicked my gaze back and forth between the two men until Rhion appeared at my side and looped her arm around my hips.

  “You ready?”

  “Yeah,” I replied absently.

  We both started past Johnson when she pulled up short to ask, “I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning, right?”

  He shot her a wink and a smile that resembled something more like a grimace. “You know it.”

  I didn’t figure she’d buy it. Rhion was astute, especially when it came to Johnson. But, less than a minute later, she was on my arm as we strolled across the street, back to her apartment.

  * * *

  It was well past midnight when my phone vibrated on the nightstand.

  “Hello,” I whispered while inching out from under Rhion’s sleeping body.

  “You sleeping?” Val asked.

  “Nope. But you should be.”

  She let out a long-suffering sigh. “I know. But I can’t sleep. I thought maybe we could have a talk. You know. Like old times.”

  Stealthily, I made my way to the door.

  “Jude? You there?”

  “Hang on,” I whispered, slipping out the bedroom door and silently closing it behind me. “Okay. Now, what’s up, sweetheart?”

  “You at Rhion’s?” she asked.

  “Yeah. She’s asleep, like someone else I know should be.”

  She giggled. “You already said that.”

  “But you’re still awake, so I figured it could stand to be repeated.”

  Bypassing the ocean room next door for fear Rhion would hear me talking through the wall, I walked to the room at the end of the hall and flipped the light on.

  It was the one room in Rhion’s house we didn’t spend time in. In addition to using it for her tattoos, it was where she stored her vast collection of paperbacks. I’d occasionally found her in there, flipping through the pages of her favorite novels, but besides that, the door always remained shut.

  “Does this mean things are getting serious with you two?” Val asked.

  Wasn’t that the million-dollar question? Things had been serious with Rhion since I’d first laid eyes on her. What we needed now was light, easy, and painless.

  Or maybe that was just me, because while the sucker-punch of guilt still found me on occasion, Rhion seemed to have forgotten there was ever a fire in the first place.

  “I think so. Would that be cool with you?” I asked as I removed a book from one of her shelves.

  My woman liked her smut, so not surprisingly, there was an image full of abs on the front. With a chuckle, I slid it back into place.

  “No. I hate her.”

  “Val!” I scolded.

  She laughed. “I’m kidding! Of course. I love Rhion. She’s awesome. She surprised me with a giant box of clothes today.”

  “No. I surprised you with a giant box of clothes today. She just helped me pick them out. Good to know you got them though, brat,” I teased.

  “Thank you, Jude. I love them.”

  I smiled and moved to the other shelf. I knew exactly two things Rhion liked: expensive shoes and books. Dating a woman with money had its difficulties. With Christmas coming and no fucking way to afford a pair of twelve-hundred-dollar heels, books were on the menu. If I could figure out her favorite authors, I could probably do some serious damage at a bookstore for her.

  “You’re welcome,” I told Val. “I’m really proud of you for going down a size. Personally, I think it was unnecessary, but I love that, when you decided to lose some weight, you went about doing it the right way.”

  “And when you say the ‘right way,’ you mean by ignoring Mom?”

  “Yes. Exactly that,” I laughed, a huge grin pulling at my lips when I caught sight of a row of books with Rhion Park written on the spine. I tilted my head to the side and read every letter.

  I knew she didn’t sell them, so I’d never considered that she’d actually have physical copies. The one time I’d read over her shoulder while she was working, she’d lost her mind. Her eyes had become as wide as saucers and her face had turned redder than I’d thought the human skin was capable. Laughing, I’d attempted to snag her computer. I didn’t make it very far, because not a second later, she took my cock in her hand and told me that I was never, not even if Hell froze over, allowed to read her books. She then wrapped her warm mouth around me and issued the most incredible blowjob of my life, not allowing me to come until I’d confirmed that I understood. In that moment, I would have agreed to be waterboarded by the federal government, so of course I’d said yes.

  I grinned at the memory and fanned the pages of her book with my thumb.

  The damn thing was thick, and my woman had written every single word of it. Pride swelled in my chest. I’d gotten to know Rhion pretty well over the last few weeks, but I could only imagine the pieces of herself she’d left on those pages.

  My curiosity had been piqued.

  Surely, she couldn’t hold me to that silly promise I’d made on the verge of sexual insanity.

  I glanced up and found the door still closed. Then I traced my fingers over the words on the front.

  Burning Love was the title, and it had a simple but stunning design on the cover. It was the same fiery butterfly that graced her chest.

  “So, how you been sleeping?” Val asked.

  “Good, actually,” I replied as I flipped the book open to a random page in the middle.

  I was vaguely aware that Val kept talking, but my attention was stolen by the sight of my name on the page.

  Not just once. Multiple times.

  And on the next page.

  And the next one.

  But it wasn’t until I saw her name on there too that the vile sense of unease slithered over my skin.

  I immediately pulled another of her books off the shelf.

  Different cover. Different title.

  Same. Fucking. Names.

  “Val, I need to go,” I said, wedging my phone between my shoulder and my ear as I went to work removing all of her books from the shelf.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  Judging by the sinking feeling in my gut? No fucking way.

  “Yeah. I’ll call you tomorrow. Love you, and get some sleep.”

  “I love you too,” she whispered.

  After I’d ended the call, I sat on the floor and plucked a different one of Rhion’s books from the mountain of at least fifteen titles and opened it to the first page.

  It took approximately three sentences for her words to sear through me—bone-deep.

  She’d written about the fire.

  It didn’t feel like I was moving, but somehow, I k
new I was falling. The world became a blur as terror faded into acceptance. I was going to die.

  But the further I read, the more I realized that it was no fire I’d ever been a part of.

  I frantically turned the page, unable to process the words so clearly printed in front of me.

  Until his strong hand landed on mine, snatching me back from the grips of death.

  “Hang on!” he barked, dragging me clear of the flames.

  It was the fictional version. Filled with beauty but not a single fact. My stomach churned, but I continued reading, unable to look away.

  “Oh God, are you real?” I cried, my body trembling in fear of the truth.

  His forehead crinkled. “I’m real,” he swore before sucking in a shaky breath. “I just don’t know if you are, Butterfly.”

  My throat closed and my lungs failed. “What the fuck?” I choked out as though the smoke were suffocating me all over again.

  My breath hitched as I raked my eyes over his muscular frame. The outline of his chiseled chest showed through the straining fabric of his plain, black T-shirt, while a pair of dark washed denim hugged his tapered waist. His dark-blond hair had been shaved and large, rectangular bandages covered the back of his head and his neck, but he was still gorgeous.

  I continued reading, bile clawing its way higher up my throat with every sentence. With a blast, oxygen filled my aching lungs just seconds before someone dropped a lit match and ignited my entire body into a wildfire, destroying me from the inside out.

  “You’re real,” I whispered.

  His eyes flashed wide, but a sexy grin pulled at the corners of his full lips. “So are you, my beautiful Butterfly.”

  “Oh God,” I breathed, dropping the book to the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Rhion

  Rolling over in bed, I stretched my arm out and found Jude’s side cool and empty. I pried my eyes open, and the room was still pitch-black. So I rolled back to check the clock on my nightstand, the stubby, red lines connecting to form 3:53.