Chapter One
She knew immediately who the body on her living room floor belonged to. She’d seen him on the news a few weeks ago, falling out of a limousine with several girls wrapped around his shoulders. At the time she’d thought,It’s like he’s wearing a necklace made out of ladies, before changing the channel.
But now that he was sprawled all over her best rug he wasn’t so easy to dismiss. He had a lot more flesh and bone suddenly, and a much thicker, darker presence. His leather jacket looked like an oil slick painted across his broad back. The stubble on that near-pretty face was too coarse, as though someone had painted it with iron filings.
And she could see the tattoo on the back of his neck.
The one she hadn’t thought she knew so well.
The one that made her think of a big, dark maze.
It was definitely Holden Stark. You simply couldn’t mistake him for anyone else—not even if you really wanted to. She would have loved to find someone much smaller and less important on her rug, just to ease her into human interaction. Maybe that little costar of his in the one about the sharks. That would have been cool. She could have gotten close to him without having a panic attack.
She couldn’t get close to this guy. He was just too big and too unexpected. She was used to everything running the same way on each particular day, and this was not the same way. This was a massive movie star invading her home just as she finished her nighttime routine—a fact that did not get any easier once she started noticing how little he looked like his image.
He wasn’t as tanned, for a start. His skin was almost as pale as hers in fact, though that wasn’t any better. If anything it was worse. It made the black of his hair really pop, in a way that almost hurt her eyes. And his hands, his big hands—had he always had hands as big as that? They looked so much rougher than they did onscreen. They looked like the hands of someone who worked hard for a living, right down to his completely butchered nails.
She’d always somehow imagined that male movie stars got manicures, but he definitely didn’t. The ends of his fingers were worse than hers. He’d bitten them down so ferociously he’d drawn blood in places, and the soft skin around them seemed sore.He really needs to soak them in lanolin, she thought, before realizing she was completely obsessing over the wrong thing.
Who cared about his nails, for God’s sake?
He had passed out on her rug.
Holden Stark, supreme ruler of the movie universe, had passed out on her rug. In fact, she wasn’t even sure if he’d just passed out. He could have been dead, for all she knew. She couldn’t see his back going up and down and he didn’t seem to be moving, which left her in something of a tight spot. She sort of knew she should really get down on her hands and knees and see if she could feel the breath coming out of him, but that panic was still holding her back.
In the end she had to sort of creep toward him in a half-crouch, ready to spring away at a moment’s notice. If he snorted, or moved those big bear hands, or kicked out with one of his movie-star boots, she was going to launch herself across the room. Or at least, she was going to try. Her legs were near useless and incapable of a slow jog, but she had to believe in them.
Otherwise, she would never have gotten close enough to see that he was still breathing. Thank God, he was still breathing. His back was going up and down, and when she dared to lean in just a little bit—wincing all the while like a kid who had to poke a dead animal with a stick—she could hear the air rattling in and out of his lungs.
But this presented its own set of problems, obviously.
His breath wasrattling, like maybe he had something trapped in his throat. And by the smell of him, it wasn’t a little cough that he hadn’t quite cleared. There was a pool of something nasty by his face—on her rug, her beautiful rug, the rug she’d felt so adult getting—and a certain sort of smell she recognized only too well.
When you spend a lot of time in the hospital, it becomes a faithful friend.
Holden Stark had not only passed out on her rug. He’d passed out drunkenly, and then vomited. Of course, the drunken part was purely a guess. But she felt it was a good guess. It was the sort of guess that made sense, when applied to a big-time movie star in some little nobody’s house. He’d finished partying, and probably having sex on the beach. Then he’d stumbled into the first house he came to. That lock she’d meant to fix had barely made a sound as it gave under the pressure of his immense body, and here they were.
Her half-terrified, him about to die because he was choking on his own vomit.
God, what did people do in situations like this? What was the medical advice?Turn him on his side, she thought, but the idea of actually touching him was so outside the realm of her experience she wasn’t sure she could do it. She put her hands close to his face and then just watched them be there, like two immoveable claws.
It looked as if she were about to do really weird and amateurish brain surgery on him. If he woke up, he was definitely going to think that was the case—so much so that when he suddenly shifted she almost blurted out an excuse.I promise I wasn’t about to screw open the top of your head, her mind screamed.
But thankfully she realized before she could say the words aloud.
He was just stirring in his sleep. He wasn’t about to accuse her of anything. And even better...he had turned into the proper position. His breath was no longer rattling, which meant she didn’t have to go anywhere near his general brain area. She had been excused at the very last second, and could now go on with her normal day.
Only that was stupid, of course it was stupid. She couldn’t go on with her normal day at all. He was still on her rug and he was still unconscious, and she was starting to suspect it might not be because of excessive partying. There was a bottle by his right hand, and she could read the label from where she was crouching.
She’d taken a few of those things herself, right after it happened. She’d even contemplated taking alotof those things—and by the looks of this he might have done that too. He didn’t seem like that sort of guy, but who really knew? Maybe he wasn’t so fun underneath it all. Maybe he had problems, real problems, and if he did she couldn’t just wake him up and let him wander out the door. It was entirely possible he couldn’tbewoken up.
He needed medical attention. He needed stomach pumps and drips full of saline.
And she had to be the one who got those things for him. She had to, even though she didn’t have the faintest clue where to begin. She couldn’t just call the emergency services. The moment anyone realized who he was a thousand photographers would more than likely descend—and by God she didn’t want that. She didn’t want that for all sorts of reasons, and the biggest was the thought of what it might do to him.
Everyone would know he was different then.
He wouldn’t be Holden Stark anymore. He would be some other depressed guy who chugged a bottle of pills and maybe tried to drown himself in the ocean. How could he carry on being Captain Amazing once everyone saw him the way she currently was? No, no, she couldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t be responsible for decimating his career and his image.
