http://rachelhannaromance.com/sign-up Chapter 1 My whole life has been about pulling back. At least, that's how it has seemed. Standing in the hallway outside the production room of the DCTV offices, all I can think is how the last four years have been about anything but living, and now suddenly I've been thrust into life so hard it's like being shoved out of a moving vehicle. Or into the path of one. The crazy thing is, it's made me happy. Just a couple months ago I was still feeling lost. I'd pretty much determined that happiness was something meant for anyone but me. I'd walked away from happiness, from friends, parties, boyfriends, anything to do with living a normal life. Because when I was 15, I did something irreversible, something I didn't think I could ever be forgiven for, and I'd gotten to walk away. Free. Better than free. After everything that happened, my mother remarried and we moved across the country, from wet and rainy Seattle where everyone knew what I had done, to Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly we were living in a huge house right off the Atlantic Ocean and I had the opportunity to take a year off before starting college and then at the small, private Deaton University, a tiny beachside college where nobody knew who I was. I got to start over, and how many people get to do that? I didn't feel like I deserved that second chance. But life kept going. My mother's new husband, my stepfather Bruce Avery, is a real estate tycoon. He had the money, the lifestyle, the position in the community. Even if I'd wanted to tell him at the time about everything that had happened – everything I had done when I was 15 – that wasn't my call to make. It was my mother's, and ultimately, neither of us thought telling him was a good idea. Which meant I had to go on living a lie and turning it into some kind of life, because not doing so would have looked strange. Bruce knew some of our history, mine and my mother's, so the fact that I was recovering from something didn't seem that strange to him. He just didn't know what I was recovering from. So after the year was up, the year I spent taking long walks on the beach and letting the ocean fill me with as much solace as I could gather, I started school, going forward but not living. Keeping myself to myself as if somehow that was going to change the past. It took three people to drag me out of me and make me understand that snuffing out my own light wouldn't do anything to make up for what I'd done. It just compounded the loss. The first of those people was Reed Miller. My first day of school he sat beside me in a required math class (there's no other reason I'd take a math class!) and because he wanted to get to know me and couldn't think of any other way, he stole my keys out of my bag and when I found myself stranded and went looking for my keys, returned them to me and struck up a conversation. Lame? Kind of. Only that was the only thing lame about Reed Miller. He's tall, deeply tanned, with sun-streaked brown hair, piercing blue eyes and dimples. He's got a great body and musician's hands and, it turned out, he was the operations manager of the college television station, DCTV. Which mattered a lot to me, since my major is journalism. All of which led to me standing in the hallway outside the production room at DCTV, my heart in my throat, my stomach churning, my hands wet with terrified sweat. Because stepping back into life, with Reed as the first of my three inadvertent coaches? That meant finding myself working with him at the station. And that led to a project that had helped me a lot to start living instead of just moving forward. But it also led to Reed leaving the station to me when he left Charleston for a job in Boston. And inside that production room, the rest of the team was waiting for me. This was my first meeting with them post Reed. I was terrified. They can't eat you, I told myself. But I didn't believe it. I've been the pariah before. After what I did when I was 15, I had friends and neighbors and classmates from my old high school turn on me. Now I was facing the people who would be my team but I'd only been at the college part of a semester. Just because Reed had faith in me didn't mean the TV station crew did. Didn't mean I did, either. I cracked my knuckles, a horrible habit I've been trying to break ever since junior high school. I hate suspense. I've never been any good at anticipating, either, and this was definitely both at once. Being operations manager of a television station my first year of college was a wonderful opportunity. Walking through the door into my first meeting was turning out to be more than I thought I could do. Which is weird. Because in the last couple months I'd done a lot of things I'd never though I could do. First I'd gotten close to Reed, almost “couples”
