by S. L. Naeole
Undeniable Series: Book One
S.L. Naeole
© 2018 by S.L. Naeole
All rights reserved.
Published by Crystal Quill Publishing
All of the situations and characters in this novel are fictional. Any similarities to actual people or situations are completely coincidental and wholly unintentional.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
S.L. Naeole
Visit my website at www.slnaeole.com
Cover by DaisyFly Designs
Cover image by Eugene Partyzan
Formatting by DaisyFly Designs
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, all of the kittens in the world will suffer a horrible fate and it shall be entirely on your head.
For my favorite.
Thank you for being so many wonderful things to me, but mostly for being you. I love you love you, forever and always.
Note from S.L. Naeole
When I wrote this book, I did so knowing that there would be some scenes that would be difficult to read for some of you. Some of the subject matter in this book is dark, and there are sexually explicit scenes within these pages that are unlike what I've written in my YA novels. If neither of these appeal to you, or if you believe that they could trigger some painful memories, please do not go any further.
For those that do choose to read Untouchable, thank you for taking a chance on me and on a young art restorer who’s about to find out that sometimes you don’t crash headfirst into a new life but, rather, it rear ends you instead.
Traffic sucked. I was sitting in the Clam, an older Toyota with torn seats and a cracked dash, the air conditioning whirring loudly over the sound of the news on the radio. All around me people were shouting or staring glumly at the lack of movement ahead of us. I caught bits and pieces about an accident at the intersection of Lorde and Palmer and spat out a curse because that’s exactly where I needed to be in—I checked the digital clock on the portable radio that sits next to me between the driver and passenger seat—fifteen minutes.
“Shit!” I shouted before slamming my hand on the steering wheel, barely missing the horn. Sweat beaded on my forehead, melting the makeup that I had spent almost an hour perfecting. I took a quick glance in the rearview mirror and then groaned because my carefully filled-in eyebrows were now half gone and one false eyelash was hanging precariously off my left eye.
I realized that I could either go to this interview bare faced or go looking like the top end of a lit candle. I sighed and ripped off the lash before pinching around my right eye and tugging the falsie off there, too. I leaned over and reached into my purse for the small packet of wet wipes in there. My fingers found the cellophane package easily and pulled it out, never taking my eyes off the car in front of me as it inched slowly forward.
Maybe it’s just a minor accident and we’ll speed up in the next five minutes. I’m less than five minutes away on a normal day. This can happen. This will happen.
My thoughts floated around my head as I sightlessly peeled back the cover tab on my wipes and tugged out a sheet from the package. Over the radio a description of the severity of the accident ahead of me blared tonelessly. I brought the wipe up to my face and began to methodically swipe away the make-up on my right side, maintaining my grip on the steering with my left hand. Immediately my skin felt cooler and lighter—why did I let Holly do my face this morning?—and I moved my hand to begin the same thing to the other side of my face when a sudden and sharp jolt from behind my car sent the Clam careening into the car in front of me.
I was thrown forward onto the steering wheel violently, my head smashing down on the top curve while my chest crushed my arm as I made contact against the broad center of the wheel. The horn barked out loudly for a second and then quieted as I slammed backward and then forward once again in a whiplash. All I could hear after that were muffled shouts. My nose hurt and as I tried to inhale, warm, clumpy liquid slid down my throat, choking me. I leaned back, coughing, blinking, and then spied streaks of red slashed across my arm.
My now visibly broken and swelling arm.
“Shit,” I gurgled, my throat full and bubbly.
Loud tapping erupted at my left and I turned too quickly to see who was making that sound. I groaned, blinking again at the shadow that was peering in through the glass, the afternoon sun shining behind him and throwing his features into darkness. My left hand reached for the crank on the window. I hissed as slowly, inch by painful inch, I lowered the glass panel. A rich yet concerned voice floated into my car.
“Are you okay, ma’am? Oh, no! You’re bleeding! Can you put the car in park? Let me help you while the ambulance is on its way.”
I pulled my right arm closer to me, clutching it to my body with my left and tried to shake my head but couldn’t, cringing as a trickle of hot and sticky blood fell past my lips. “C-can’t. Arm…broken.”
The shadow man turned his head away from me and mumbled something—to someone else? A throbbing pain announced itself in my arm while its twin made house in my head, jackhammering its way through my skull. Dizzy and disoriented, my eyes struggled to remain open. I spotted movement around me, the man at my driver’s side door bigger somehow, almost double in size, his shadow casting a greater reach across me. Suddenly my passenger side door opened and someone slid in. A hand reached across the center to grab the gear shift. “Are you pressing on the brake?”
Frowning at the familiar voice and why it was there when it had just been…on the other side of me, I whispered in the affirmative. “Weren’t you on the other side?” I mumbled as that hand pushed the gear shift up, putting my car in park.
He said nothing to me, and instead spoke across me as if I didn’t even exist. “It’s in park, sir.”
Sir?
“Thank you, Lyle,” the shadow to my left said in a voice that was weighted and scratchy like gravel, yet so velvety thick that it coated me like honey. I tried to focus on the face as it spoke but my vision, already doubling, refused to let me take in any details. My head was clouding up as pain continued to flood through me, muffling everything occurring around me as though the fog of pain touched my ability to sense everything but hurt. Suddenly, as if I was being gifted a moment of blissful clarity, a heavy weight fell on my thigh.
A roar of panic moved through me and I moaned, my body unable to flee. “Don’t touch me,” I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t find their way to my lips.
“Go see about the asshole that hit us. I’ll stay with the girl. Get his name and license number. Get whatever you can for Hennessey.”
There was such authority in his voice that a shiver ran through me in the span of a single breath, something that was impossible to ignore despite the haze of pain and the stranglehold of fear that was clamped around my throat. Thoughtful, quiet moments passed and then, “Are you cold, sweetheart? You’ve lost a lot of blood but the bleeding’s already stopped.”
The weight on my thigh lifted and another moan, one of relief, left me before a blanket of warmth greeted me and that weight returned, dampened by whatever it is that now rested on my body. I tried to look down, my lids heavy—everything heavy—but a firm and unyielding force pressed up beneath m
y chin, holding my head upright. I flinched but could do nothing else. I was weak, tired.
So tired.
“Uh-uh, sweetheart. Stay awake for me. If you have a concussion you need to stay awake.” That voice, I noticed, had a slight rasp to it, both soothing and infuriating in its power.
“You’re not the boss of me.” The words spilled out in a slurred mumble. I wanted to see the face connected to that textured voice but I knew that even without the sun turning him into nothing but a specter, my eyes would deceive me in every way possible. Pain did that. Fear did that. Loss of blood did that.
All around me I could hear murmurs and chatter, gasps and whistles, but whatever they were saying was lost because that voice continued to speak to me, a warm, steady hum in my ear. “Your car is totaled, I think you should know that. I have excellent insurance if yours doesn’t take care of replacing this vehicle. I’m also going to make damn sure that the asshole that hit my car and triggered this entire mess pays as well.”
“Clam,” I mumble, too lethargic to care about anything but that source of heat and heaviness on my thigh. Its presence made me want to jump out of my skin, yet an unknown and slightly unwelcome part of me wanted that heaviness to fuse with me. Because obviously, I’m a masochist.
A warm chuckle sounded near my ear and I turned my head slowly. Shadow Man was so close and still so invisible. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Ria.” At least, I hope that’s what I told him. My tongue felt stuck in my mouth and my jaw ached as though I’d chewed through an entire pack of bubblegum. For all I know I could’ve told him my name was Jangles McButtcrack.
Sirens blared in the distance but even in my foggy mind I knew that traffic was so deep and so bad that no ambulance was going to reach me soon. Shadow Man next to me stilled at the sound. And then, with no warning at all, I felt steel bands slip behind my back and beneath my knees before air sifted beneath me and behind me as I was lifted from my seat. Every muscle in my body wanted to tense, every instinct that I’d cultivated and listened to for years told me to fight, to run, that I was in more danger than I’d ever known before. But I couldn’t move. Sunshine hit my face and I shut my eyes before my head lolled to the side against what felt like a silk covered wall of iron.
“I’ve got you. Traffic is too thick and the ambulance can’t get to us so I’m going to take you to it. Just hang on, sweetheart.”
My tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth as I tried to lick my lips. The taste of blood coated my mouth and I fought to hold back the gag that threatened. “Hurts,” I rasped.
His movements quickened, my body clutched so securely against him that I barely rocked even as I felt the whoosh of air move against my skirt and over my bare arms. When I felt his body tense with concentration I opened my eyes to peek up. Slashes of sunlight revealed a full, strong, smooth jaw and I lowered my eyes to see a cord of muscle in a thick neck pulling tightly beneath it. That neck was framed by a stiff, white collared shirt bracketed by a navy-blue jacket. He’s clean shaven, but I could see the faint shadow of dark hair threatening to peek out from beneath his copper skin.
Childhood habits returned to me as I begin to hum, a song about sailing the seven seas and seamen. I giggled and felt him start. Just before he turned his head to look at me I closed my eyes. Not because I didn’t want to see what his face looked like, but because I didn’t want to see his reaction to what my face looked like. I could feel the swelling in my skin, the tightness of it.
Clicking sounds and the rush of feet filled my ears as I felt him slow down. Strange voices followed as the man holding me began to speak firmly to whoever had approached him. “This young woman was in a vehicle that was rear-ended. She’s got a broken arm and hit her head pretty hard on the steering wheel. It’s an older model vehicle—no airbags. Her seatbelt was loose so I don’t think it provided much help. I think she has a concussion as well.”
A flurry of activity followed and in it, the strange Shadow Man who’d comforted me, carried me, was lost. I rode in an ambulance with strangers who couldn’t pry my name past my lips, their unwanted touches searing me into panic-induced silence before I arrived at the hospital alone, unknown and hurting. Doctors and nurses x-rayed me, took my blood, set and cast my arm, and then stuck me in a bed between curtains to monitor me.
Two hours later, after a quick interrogation by a doctor, two nurses, a police officer, an old lady who was in the bed next to me after falling and fracturing her hip, and a lot of arguing about being released into someone’s care, I was given a follow-up appointment date, instructions on how to treat and care for my cast, warning signs to hand over to whomever it was I chose to monitor me for signs of a concussion, and a bottle of pain medication for my arm. A cab was called and I was sent home, the ride paid for by the emergency room staff. Slow, careful steps took me up the single flight of stairs to my apartment. I paused, struggling for breath and strength before I rang the doorbell since my keys were still in the ignition of the Clam when I was scooped out of my car.
The door flew open and my roommates all screamed and cried in unison at seeing me before yanking me into the roomy apartment the five of us share.
“Ohmigod, Ria!”
“We’ve been calling everywhere for you!”
“No one would tell us where you were!”
“Why didn’t you call us?”
“How did you get home?”
“Are you okay?”
The last question was asked by all four of my roommates at once, and as they led me to the couch in the comfy living room filled with books and framed pictures of my friends I tried to tell them everything that I could remember.
“So he, like, totally white-knighted you and you didn’t freak out. That’s a sign, Ria,” Kara Delgado, my oldest friend and co-owner of the apartment sighed dreamily when I finished.
Lara, Kara’s twin sister and my second-oldest friend—though only by minutes—handed me a glass of water before taking a seat on the floor beside me, the only space left near me. “He could have done more damage to you by moving you without securing your neck first. Total amateur move.”
Laughing through a grimace of pain, I grabbed the glass and took a sip of the water, sighing as it trickled down my throat in a cool caress of moisture. “I think he was more worried that his car rear-ended mine and that I’d make him pay for the damage. Shit! My car!”
The glass in my hand slipped and fell onto Lara, who laughed as she caught it expertly, the water barely sprinkling her bare legs. “It’ll be fine. It’s probably been towed somewhere and you’ll get a call in the morning about where to pick it up. That’s what happened to me when I wrecked the Blue Betty.”
Groaning, I looked at my friends, the women who’d stood by my side since high school. Kara and Lara, their identical dark brown eyes staring at me intently, each had supportive smiles on their wide mouths. Kara’s blonde hair was pulled up onto the top of her head in a messy bun, while Lara’s was twisted at the nape. Holly Chang, the girl we’d all sworn never to be friends with in high school because of her boy craziness, but who had become one of our dearest friends, offered me a sad frown, her plump, rosy lips almost exaggerating the pout as she sat beside me in her signature raven pigtails and rose patterned pajamas.
“Is it as bad as the Blue Betty? Did you get a chance to look?” she asked, my reply joining a shake of my head.
“The guy who helped me said it was a total loss. I didn’t look but if it is then it’s worse than the Blue Betty because at least with Betty the damage could be repaired. The Clam isn’t a classic. It’s a throwaway car that no one carries parts for anymore, remember?”
Everyone nodded, remembering how difficult it was the last time I had to have any work done on my little two-door beater. It had been mine through high school and college, the first thing I had ever truly bought with my own money. It had carried most of us across the country as we started our adult lives in a New York. It had moved boxes and even a few piec
es of furniture when Kara, Lara and I had gone in and bought this apartment. Besides the Blue Betty, no other vehicle had ever meant as much to us.
And now it was gone.
Vonne, the oldest woman among us, my former piano teacher, and the woman I considered more a mother to me than my own patted my hand and said reassuringly, “Whatever happens we’re all here for you. You’ll catch a ride to work with me in the morning and Holly can pick you up when you’re done. I’ve already called Delmonico to let him know you’re not going in for the next few days so don’t worry about work.”
Holly nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Until you get better and we get the car situation all figured out, don’t you worry about a thing.”
I smiled, my face hurting from the slight movement before my body jolted with panic. “My purse! My phone! They’re still in the car!”
Kara rubbed my shoulders, her dark eyes full of patience and understanding. “Tomorrow. We’ll call around tomorrow and find the Clam and then your purse. Don’t worry.”
But I couldn’t stop worrying. My phone was my lifeline. It was the only real piece of luxury I own and the idea that it might be missing filled me with an overwhelming sense of panic. All of my contacts for work, my calendar, my work photos. Those photos… My hands began to tremble violently and I tried to hide them beneath my legs but Vonne’s eyes were too quick. She reached over and took my hands into hers, caressing and patting them in the same way she had since I was a teen. “Don’t, Ria. It’ll be fine. Everything will be okay. Breathe.”
I nod, but calm refused to come to me. The girls talked, trying to distract me for the next few hours until the shaking stopped—a pattern they had all become quite used to. Kara and Lara told me about canceling their double date after learning of my accident and then laughed at how both guys showed up later with take-out. Kara’s boyfriend Roy even brought a slice of her favorite cake—a sign he wanted to spend the night. Lara laughed and relayed to me the part where she told him that until I was feeling better, no one was having sex under our roof.