Page 31 of Wild Highway (Runaway 2)

He gave me his famous silent, brooding stare.

“I’m not leaving.” Yet.

“Because you have nowhere else to go, so you’ll just leach off us here until you’re ready.”

“I’m not leaching.” What a jerk. “But no, I don’t have anywhere else to go at the moment, so it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

He arched an eyebrow and headed straight for the stairs. Conversation over. I’d been dismissed.

I didn’t let myself watch him walk away.

Grr. No one had ever climbed under my skin as quickly as Easton. One of these days, I was going to do something to shock that hard, unwavering scowl off his handsome face.

I’d once been so desperate for eye contact from that man. I’d been the nineteen-year-old girl trying not to be affected when he walked into the room. The one trying not to look at him because it stung deep when he’d never looked back. Easton had always had better things to do than bother with me.

Not much had changed.

Except me.

I no longer had anything to prove. I’d shown the world I was more than where I’d come from. I’d made my mark, my fortune and fame.

And I’d learned the hard way it was just as hollow as the home where I’d been born.

This journey was about searching for a real life. The life money couldn’t buy.

I wanted the things I’d never had.

Family. Love. Peace.

Chasing down riches was easy. I could do that—I had done that.

There was no easy way to find the safety and security that came with love and family. People were either born with it, or they weren’t. For those of us who weren’t, letting others in meant exposing your weaknesses. It meant trusting others not to break your heart.

The concept was easy enough to grasp. Dr. Brewer and I had talked for years about my talent for maintaining emotional distance from others, even my friends. The problem was me. The solution was me too.

But letting someone share your life . . . they could turn it all upside down.

Because trust was something often betrayed, and innocence could be taken when the person you trusted didn’t protect you.

Like a mother.

A mother who allowed a man to drag her fifteen-year-old daughter out of her bedroom simply because the guy wanted an audience while he got a blow job.

The chains wrapped around my heart were courtesy of her betrayals.

I blinked the memory away, refusing to think of my mother’s face. It greeted me in the mirror each morning, and that was bad enough without letting myself revisit the past.

Hurrying upstairs to my room, I refreshed my makeup and brushed my hair. I touched up my lip gloss—three times—and changed my clothes twice. It was the fact that Easton would be at dinner that had me pacing my room, waiting for Katherine’s knock. It came at precisely fifteen minutes to six.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Sure,” I lied. I’d tamed cutthroat attorneys and ruthless fashion designers, so why was I so nervous about a family dinner?

“Easton just stopped by,” she said as we walked down the hallway. “He told me to fire you.”

“Stubborn ass,” I muttered.

“Don’t worry. I told him to mind his own side of the business.”