Always with You

One night changed everything…

Cassidy Kimbell killed a man when she was only nineteen.

Torque Baxter took the blame, serving ten years for her crime.

He told her to flee the scene of the accident. He told her to run. He told her to keep her mouth shut, so that’s what she’d done. She’d let a boy with a crush become an innocent man behind bars.

Today, that man is being released.

Cassidy expects Torque to hate her. She knows nothing she has done to atone all these years can compare to what he’s lost. But she hopes becoming his sponsor on the outside, especially since she’s a lawyer now, might help.

Little does she know, Torque doesn’t want her to owe him.

He wants her to love him.

But to do that Cassidy would have to give up the life she’s built for the last ten years. She'd have to sacrifice it all, just like he did.

SNUGGLE up with SWEET romance that will WARM your heart and CURL your toes.

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

Cassidy Kimball stood on the cement sidewalk and faced the red brick Pennsylvania state penitentiary building. Hot July sunlight glinted off the razor wire that looped in circles at the top and beside the chain-link fence.  Off to the right, the circular guard house, with its tinted windows, glared down at the parched brown and empty exercise yard.

         Her stomach twisted like mangled metal in a car accident.

         It could have been her on the inside. Not here, of course. But somewhere.

         She glanced at her watch before dragging her clammy hands down her skirt. Please, God, don’t let my makeup melt before he walks out. A simple request; she shouldn’t care what her makeup looked like, although right now, it felt like much-needed armor. Plus, she’d learned the hard way to be thankful for little things.

And big things. Like not serving the ten-year prison sentence for vehicular homicide that should have been hers after she T-boned a car with Torque Baxter’s pickup when she was nineteen. Nope, she didn’t serve it. Because Torque was serving, had served, it for her.

Hot and turbulent doubt swirled in her stomach. Would he see what she had become and think his sacrifice had been worth it?

Part of her wanted to announce her sacrifices to him, to tell him of her charity work and the people she helped. That he had played the gallant knight in shining armor to her Cowardly Lion, but that it had not been in vain. Part of her wanted him to see it for himself. All of her craved his approval. Or maybe just his forgiveness.

Swallowing the nerves that clenched her throat, Cassidy twisted the delicate linked gold of her wristwatch. Any minute now. Would she still recognize him? Of course, she would. The question was, would he recognize all that she had done as a tiny down payment on the huge debt she owed him?

She reached the same conclusion she had every day for the last ten years. There was nothing she could do to pay back her monstrous obligation. There was no way to atone for the cowardice that she had shown. How could she have been so yellow?

When he’d seen the passengers in the other car, when he’d known what the consequences were going to be, he’d never wavered. His brown eyes had been steady and level as he said, “Get out of here and don’t look back. You don’t know anything about this.” She hadn’t understood at first what he was going to do. Still shaken from the accident, she’d not really been thinking straight. But she hadn’t needed her brain to be fully functioning to know that she was in deep trouble. She’d already been fighting the urge to run. His command had prompted her to do what she subconsciously wanted to. “Hurry, before anyone comes.”

Then, he hadn’t accepted her calls, hadn’t graced her visits with his presence, hadn’t used the money she deposited in his account. Her letters returned unopened, and her emails disappeared into the prison of cyberspace. She didn’t know, couldn’t know, what he thought or felt.

She assumed he hated her.

A bead of sweat trickled down her temple. Her watch chain snapped under her shaking fingers. She shoved the broken links into her clutch.

Her hands stilled as the prison door opened. The jaws of a monster spitting out its prey. Prey she had fed it.

A man, tall and straight, strode out into the sunlight. Her eyes devoured him. Same casual arrogance dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. Same confident walk, with only a slight limp. The limp was her fault, too. With his slim build, Torque would never be bulky, but she could see the t-shirt that probably fit him when he first walked into this building as an almost-eighteen-year-old now stretched tight over shoulders that had widened and filled out.

Cassidy bit her lip and lifted her chin, taking a deep breath to calm the cramping of her stomach and disguise the curl of heat that came to life in her chest. Torque had always had that effect on her. She pushed the feeling aside and channeled her inner upper-crust snob—the only defense that had ever come close to working against the elemental pull that Torque exerted on her.

The last words that man had said to her were, “Shut up, Cassidy.” Now, she intended to get one question answered. Then she had to figure out how to pay him back. What did ten years of a man’s life cost?