Conquering Love

by Willow Summers

  She ran through the trees, far enough away that she couldn’t be found.

  Chapter 12

  In a haze of sex and desire, Greg felt Paige’s opening, slick and ready. His cock throbbed. Then it vibrated, making him moan.

  “That’s right, baby, you like that?” Paige asked, gyrating against his fingers.

  His cock vibrated again, then went dead. One more time.

  His phone.

  “Wait,” he said, shaking his head to clear it. The fuzz persisted, making his fingers feel thick and clumsy.

  “Don’t worry about that. C’mon, baby.” Paige worked herself with her fingers.

  Sweat stood out on his forehead as he stared at the phone with bleary, lust soaked eyes.

  Mike: “Where the fuck r u? Christie asked about you. Food is almost gone.”

  He wiped his forearm across his eyes. Christie.

  A shock of panic cleared away some of the lusty fog. He tore his eyes away from his phone and looked down at the beauty with the sinful smile lying in front of him.

  This wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t why he had come. He’d made his choice, and this woman, and her offer, wasn’t it. As much as he hated to walk away from the money and power that would come with her daddy’s ranch, it would be a soulless way to live. For him at least.

  “No.” Greg sat back onto his butt and scooted away, looking anywhere but at what was between those toned and spread thighs. “Paige, I’m sorry. This—I lost myself. I apologize. I wanted to let you know that I won’t be accepting your offer. Thank you, it was very generous, but I’ll be staying in Montana.”

  Greg stood on shaky legs. His dick still pounded, aching to dig so far into the naked woman he forgot his own name. And while it would only be sensation and had no root emotionally, if Christie found out it would hurt her, and he couldn’t lie to her. It might even shut her down again, just when she was so close to trusting him, and opening up. He wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.

  He’d chosen his path. He’d chosen Christie. He would follow her to the ends of the earth if he had to, despite what Jake or anyone else said, because without her, nothing seemed important. Not money, not the job—nothing. Without her to hug and tell him she was proud of him, his accomplishments seemed shallow.

  “I’m sorry to leave you like this, but I have to go.” He backed toward the door.

  “To her?” Paige sat up, all the sensuousness gone. Her face transformed into a cold mask of rage. “You’re serious? You’re leaving me, for an uneducated slut that screws around?”

  Greg froze at the barn door, so many emotions running through his body he didn’t know which to focus on.

  “Didn’t know that, did you?” Paige stood in silky movements, a look of triumph on her face. She brushed off her garment so her nakedness showed perfectly through the sheer fabric. “Yeah. Noah, Pete—why do you think that kid Richard loves her so much? She gives it up to whoever can get her something.”

  Rage fired through Greg as his phone vibrated in his pocket again.

  He took a deep breath and faced Paige. “I have to leave. If I stay, I’m liable to lose my temper, and I don’t hit women. But if you talk any of that shit to anyone else, I’m going to tell Sara, and while she doesn’t fight, she can find reasons to fire people. Watch yourself, Paige.”

  Paige’s eyes widened, and in the next moment, her lip started to tremble. Her face melted into desperation. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  Greg walked through the door. He didn’t like circuses and he had no desire to stay for this one.

  Jogging down the path, wanting to kick himself for losing his head in there, he yanked out his phone and checked the screen. A missed call from Mike.

  Just as he was about to call back, a message came in.

  Mike: 911! About Christie. Call me!

  Another message came in right after.

  Jake: SOS

  Fear engulfed Greg, speeding him up. Jake didn’t text, as a rule. He hated calling, too. For him to use his phone at all meant something was seriously wrong.

  He ran into the fire pit area with his heart in his throat.

  Mike and Sara were standing off to the side. Mike raised his phone to his ear. Greg’s phone started vibrating as he ran toward them.

  “What’s up?” Greg asked, out of breath. “Where’s Christie?”

  “Where the hell were you?” Sara asked with rage and hurt in her eyes.

  “I got distracted. Thanks for the text, bro.” Greg slapped Mike’s back. “Saved me. Wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Well, when you were trying to fuck anything pretty you could find—”

  “Sara, you aren’t helping,” Mike said softly. “Christie took off. Jake is worried, man. I’ve never seen him so tense. He took off at a jog. He’s trying to find her. I get the feeling…” Mike’s lips thinned and he looked off to the side.

  “She has some serious demons,” Sara said, her voice still loaded with violence, “I know exactly where she is coming from. If I didn’t have Mike, I’d be lost. And you left her Greg—”

  “Sara, damn it, we can have it out later, okay?” Greg held out his hand to put a physical barrier between them. “But right now I need to find her. She’s not been…in her right mind.”

  “Don’t say that to her, man.” Mike grimaced. “That won’t go over well.”

  “You know what I mean. Which way did Jake go?”

  “He went off north.” Mike pointed.

  “Thanks.” Greg took off at a jog, fear and panic pumping through him. Jogging around a tree, he smacked into a shorter man, knocking the other guy backwards.

  “Greg.” Noah’s throat sounded tight. “Christie took off toward the cliff. I tried to stop her, but she’s fast. I lost her in the trees.”

  Adrenaline spiking, Greg could barely breathe as he pushed Noah in front of him. “Lead the way.”

  Christie leaned against a tree, and let the pain come and take her over. The hollowness of the life she lived, and the ever-present fear that any new man would treat her as the last ad done, trapping her in a prison. She couldn’t see her way clear. She couldn’t escape the worry that she’d admit what had happened to her and be judged as she always had been. That her first time had hurt so much, both body and soul, and her next would be worse.

  She couldn’t live through that again. But living alone with her ghosts and fear was becoming equally as desperate. Greg had kicked out the last leg that had been holding her up. He’d knocked the breath out of her, and knocked the world out from under her. Before that, she’d seen a future, if somewhat bleak. Now, all she saw was black. Nothingness.

  She looked down at the ledge. Dirt crunched as she moved her foot forward. Her chest burned and her face was slick with tears as she balanced right on the edge. Jagged rocks and the occasional tree jutted out before the steep fall beneath her became a slide.

  Moonlight covered the valley far below. The river sparkled as it moved, rushing to the lake.

  Christie took a deep breath. The harsh past collided with the blank, fruitless future, taunting her. There was nothing waiting for her, no light or hope. No love.

  The river blurred until it became nothing but a glow through her tear filled eyes.

  Would jumping hurt less than living?

  Chapter 13

  “Oh my God, go get help!” Greg shoved Noah away from him as he caught sight of Christie standing on the bluff, looking down. Her toes hung over the edge.

  Terror flared from deep in his core and then blasted out, pumping adrenaline into his body. She was going to jump!

  He was running before he knew it, everything he cared about was standing there, on that ledge. Rocks caught his feet and threw him off-balance. He staggered like a drunk man, unable to see but not letting it stop him. His ankle twisted and sent a sharp bite of pain up through his leg. Limping now, his ankle unable to take much weight without buckling, he kept on. The pain was nothing compared to how he felt for Christie, or what sh
e must be going through if she was trying to end the pain by dying.

  “Please, no,” he said in a grunt as he burst onto the precipice and grabbed for her.

  Crashing and stomping rocked Christie’s world. She turned around and flinched at the same time.

  “Oh, no! No, no!” She reached for the nearest tree as her foot slipped. Gravity grabbed her and pulled her down, intent on taking her choice away from her. “Help!”

  Strong hands closed around her waist as she slipped, her feet falling. Toes slid against the steep incline and hard ground scraped her legs, but she clutched onto two huge shoulders and screamed.

  The world spun right before her breath whooshed out of her. She landed on a hard chest, dizzy with falling and then being swung. Toes and fingers tingling, the image of the edge rushing up to her as Christie scrambled up and away from him, slapping at the hands trying to contain her.

  “It’s okay, Christie. I have you. We’ll fix this, okay? We’ll fix this together. I won’t leave you alone in this. I’m here for you—stop trying to get away—”

  “Greg Gibson, what in the holy fuck are you doing?” Christie sucked air into her lungs and crouched down to feel solid land.

  “It’s okay. God, Christie, please. It’s okay.” Greg wrapped his arms around her shoulders.

  “Would you—” She struggled up and ran her hands down her thighs, her jeans were dry but the skin beneath feeling raw and achy. What had nearly just happened lodged a painful knot in her throat.

  “No.” Greg stood between her and the ledge, his body large and forbidding. “I will not let you do this, Christie. I know it hurts, but I can help. Let me help.”

  “You nearly killed me,” she yelled, the adrenaline making her shake. She hugged her middle. “Holy moly, I thought you were going to push me over. I nearly fell.”

  “You wouldn’t just be hurting yourself, you’d be hurting your friends. The people that care about you. Let’s get you help. Let’s work on this.”

  “Damn it!” She felt like pushing him, but under the circumstances that would be a terrible idea. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself you dumbass. I was afraid you’d kill me!”

  His hands, held out to the side as a barrier, dropped a little. She couldn’t see his face for the shadow of the trees, but she read the uncertainty in his quickly tensed shoulders. After a moment, in which he must have blinked a hundred times, he came out with, “Huh?”

  The breath whooshed out of her, sucking all her energy with it. She sagged. He was there in a moment, wrapping her up in his comforting smell and his strong body. The world, pulsing and throbbing a moment before, stilled and then smoothed.

  His arms closed around her, squeezing her so tightly she could barely breathe. She closed her eyes and leaned her head on his chest gratefully.

  “In what world would you think I’d let you…do this, Christie?”

  “Greg, I wasn’t going to jump.” Hot tears came to her eyes. A sob rocked her body. “I thought about it. When I have what I call an episode, I go to an extreme place and I think about it. I look down, and I wonder if I’d rather feel the pain of dying, or the pain of living. I get to choose my fate. This time the future is looking black, but there is always that glimmer of hope. Small though it usually is, it’s there. There is no hope in dying. Sometimes, hope is all I have.”

  “Please stop saying that word.” Greg rested his cheek on the top of her head.

  “I always choose life, Greg,” she said quietly. “I would’ve stepped away in a couple moments. I won’t quit. I’ll always struggle back to life. I’ll never stop hoping that I find happiness.”

  “Greg?” Mike’s voice reverberated through the trees.

  “We’re good,” Greg called back in a husky voice. “I have her.”

  “Should we come?” Mike asked.

  Greg leaned away until he was looking down on her. He shifted her until the soft light fell on her face. “Do you want company?”

  “Not just yet. I’m not…” She swallowed. “I don’t like people seeing me like this.”

  “No,” Greg barked. His arms didn’t release her. In a quieter voice, he said, “I’m not leaving.”

  More tears overflowed, making thick tracks down her cheeks. Her body shook with sobs.

  “I won’t ever leave you, Christie.” He crushed her to his chest. “When you need someone, you come to me. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and I’ll help. Anytime.”

  She dug her face into his chest and let the sobs come, thick and needy. She curled up into his protective embrace and, for the first time since it happened, she shared her pain with another. “I was fifteen. A freshman in high-school. We were poor and silently pitied by all our family friends. My mom tried to pretend she didn’t notice, or maybe didn’t care, but she did. I could see the devastation in her eyes, and the struggle to make us look like we still had money. We had to move to the poorer side of town, and rarely had full stomachs. She always had designer labels, though. We had a nice car—anything people might see, she spent money on. Racked up debt.” Christie swallowed. “She hated me back then. She hated herself. My dad. Her life. Everything. She was so full of hate about my dad leaving us. The need to get back on top consumed her. She pushed me to keep hanging out with the popular group in school—the kids of her friends. They looked down on me, were condescending, but I was too weak to walk away. Reputation is everything in school, and hanging with them, even as the equivalent of a stray dog, was better than hanging with a less popular group. Or so I thought.

  “I stole everything in sight. After a while I was so good at it, you have no idea. I got caught once, early on, and my mom wasn’t phased. In private she told me we had to do what we had to do—it was survival. Breaking rules was fine as long as it gained me admittance to that group. I had the best clothes, plenty of crap everyone needed—I fit in, basically. And then I caught the attention of a senior.”

  Christie paused for a moment, squeezing herself into as tight a ball as she could, relishing Greg squeezing her a little tighter. “He was handsome and rich and looked up to by everyone. He was probably the most popular guy in the whole school. And he was interested in me.” Christie clutched Greg’s shirt. “He was a jerk—I didn’t really like him that much, but it was the first time people started to treat me like an equal. My mom wanted to talk to me again. He was a means to feeling good about myself and my situation. We hung out at parties, sat next to each other at lunch and I basked in the popularity he gave me.” The familiar pain filled Christie, as well as the worry about Greg’s reaction to what was going to come next. She took a deep breath. “He took me out one night. And it was fine at first. He was a jerk as usual, but he bought me dinner, and he held doors open and all that. He thought that granted him access to me—” A sob cut her off. “He took me back to his house, even though I wanted to go home. We started kissing, which was fine. We’d done that a lot. And I was prepared to give him a hand job, which I’d done every time we made out. But this time…”

  Sobs consumed her and made talking impossible. She wanted to stop. To run. To find a way to extract the horrible agony welled inside of her through movement. Greg was quiet, his hold on her unwavering. It was his strength that had her continuing, saying it out loud so she could finally be judged. Knowing that if he walked away, it would kill her.

  “I asked him to stop when he unbuttoned my pants. And then I pushed at him. The harder I pushed, the harder his touch became. He kept shushing me. I screamed at him to stop. He rose up and then slapped me. So hard. Right across my face. I was stunned. My vision was blurry. I didn’t mean that to be assent. I didn’t mean that as a yes, Greg, I swear I didn’t. I just had to process the pain for that one moment. But it was the one moment when I stopped moving that he forced himself between my legs—” Sobs overcame her, drowning her in the pain and humiliation from that night. “It hurt so bad, but he wouldn’t stop.”

  She felt Greg’s soft touch on her hair, stroking slowly. “When it was over, t
here was blood all over his bed. He got pissed at me. Threw me out. I told my mom what had happened, and how much it hurt…she told me the same thing about this that she had said about shoplifting. I had to do what I had to do. She forbade me from breaking up with him. When I wouldn’t do as she said, she withheld food then she locked me out of the house and made me sleep outside. But it hurt for a week.

  “I wouldn’t go out with him again when he asked. So then he told everyone at school I was a bad lay. I went from being the most envied girl to the most disgusting one. They wrote slut all over my stuff, and spat at me, and…” She struggled her hand up to wipe her face. “They wouldn’t believe me that I didn’t want it. He said I’d just laid there, begging for it. I didn’t Greg, I swear.”

  “Christie, shhh, I know. I know that. God, baby, I know.” He rocked her from side to side, petting her head and holding her.

  “He hadn’t used protection, either. And a month later, I was throwing up. I took a test. It came up positive. I was freaking out—I didn’t know what to do. So even though my mother wasn’t speaking to me, I told her. I will never forget the look of triumph on her face. She saw a way for more income. She’d leverage the baby and demand child support. He was rich—he’d be a deep well. So she told me not to say anything just yet. She planned to wait until I had it before demanding a DNA test and then sticking it to him.

  “About three months in, a little less, I woke up with the most horrible pains. I peeled the sheets away to a pool of blood.” Her body shuddered as she sucked in air. “My mom found me in the bathroom, then rushed me to the emergency room. She wanted to make sure the baby was okay. But I had miscarried. The doctor said I was fine, and that it was the body’s natural response to something wrong, but it was the death of my mom’s dreams. It was the end of her plans for a better life.”

  Christie stopped talking, the tears flowing but her sobs receding. “I moved in with my grandmother for a few years after that. She was in a different town, so I went to a different school. She didn’t have much—my mom was embarrassed of her because it reminded her of a poor upbringing—but what my grandma did have, she celebrated. She loved me and taught me to be thankful for the good things in life, even if other things were a wreck. She saved me. When my grandma got sick, I moved back in with my mom for a while during my failed attempt at college. Well, with her, and then stints with roommates. We don’t have any kind of relationship, though. Even if I could totally forgive her, she would never forgive me.”