Page 1 of Blade

Chapter One

Beck

I’d heard people say you can’t go home again, yet here I was. Back in the town I grew up in, the town I never thought I’d return to, never wanted to come back to. The town where I lost my best friend.

My first love.

My only love.

After I graduated high school, I headed off to college, expecting to never come back. My mother wanted to move away as soon as my heart broke, but I pleaded with her to allow me to complete my last two years of school with the rest of my class.

She relented, and I went through the motions of being a happy, healthy teenager. Then the motions of being a happy, healthy adult. Even now, at twenty-five years old, a decade later, I’m still going through the motions.

Losing your best friend at fifteen is something you never get over.

And yet here I was, back home in Diamond Creek, Nebraska. Population under two thousand.

I came home to help my grandmother, who was getting on in years, and claimed she was too old to take care of that big old house all on her own. My grandmother was just afew years shy of seventy years old, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at her.

Willow Washington was unique. She wasn’t a hippie, but she wasn’t mainstream either. There was balance. She was somewhere in the middle.

She was a free spirit.

She lived by her own rules. Rules that didn’t always make sense, but always seemed to work out for someone’s best interests.

Sometimes I couldn’t imagine how she could have given birth to my mother. The two of them were so different. My mother was the one who couldn’t handle anything on her own. That explained the two ex-husbands.

Neither of whom were my father.

The one she currently had seemed to have stuck it out the longest.

When Grams called and told me she needed me to come home, I dropped everything. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for that woman. Not only was she there for me during the catalyst of my teenage years when my mother wasn’t, but she was the reason I went to college and got my degree in journalism.

I owed her everything, and if everything was what she needed from me right now, then it was the least I could give her.

Today, the least I could do was run errands for her. She had given me a laundry list of things to do. As I looked down, reading through the list, I ran into a wall. At least it felt like a wall, as I bounced off it and landed on my butt on the sidewalk in front of The Diner.

“I am so sorry,” I said as I looked up and saw four sizable men. Four very large, hot tattooed men, and a beautiful woman staring at me.

“Beck?”

I pulled my gaze from the wall of muscle to look at the woman when she called my name. She looked vaguely familiar, and I probably should have known who she was, but I had been gone a long time.

A piece of that wall reached out to lift me back onto my feet and I stared at the bluest eyes I had ever seen.

“Hello, I’m Jack.”

Jack was gentle as he lifted me, despite his size. He must be over six feet because he stood more than a head taller than my five foot six inches.

Struck dumb at the size of the very large, very handsome man, all I could manage was a simple, “Hi.”

“Beck, I can’t believe it’s you.”

Struggling to tear my gaze away from Jack, I looked at the woman once again. “I’m sorry. I feel like I should know you.”

The petite blonde bombshell giggled, showing no signs of offense.

“Beck, it’s me, Rachel. Rachel Masters, from high school.”

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