Salvaged

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2017

Copyright © Jennifer M Voorhees 2017

Cover design by Studio Takoma/Zoe Norvell © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photograph © Deborah Kolb/ImageBrief

Woman’s hair © NULL / Alamy Stock Photo

Jennifer M Voorhees asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008116309

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008116316

Version: 2017-07-10

Dedication

This one is for the survivors. The fierce and the fighters, the ones who refused to break. This book is for anyone who needs to know it can and will get better … Those who need some reassurance that there are good guys out there. Believe that there are hot, sweet, special nice guys who don’t mind finishing last. *wink wink

I saved the best hearts for last

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Epilogue

Bonus (Because my Readers are Rad) Epilogue

Salvaged Playlist

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Jay Crownover

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

When I introduced Poppy in Rowdy and Salem’s book, I had no idea she was going to become the character who readers asked me about the most. Every day someone asked me if she was going to get a book, asked when her story was coming, but more than that, they really really wanted her to get a happy-ever-after. They demanded that she love and be loved better than any of my other characters. She’d been through hell and back, and without a doubt, my readers felt she deserved someone who would treat her right and be good to her.

I think that speaks to why we all love to read romance so much. It’s the idea that the heart can heal from anything and that there really, truly is someone out there who can make all the bad things that may have happened to harden a heart disappear. That there is someone who can find us and guide us to a better place no matter how lost and alone we might feel. Readers didn’t want her to be afraid anymore. They wanted her to be romanced and won over.

Make no mistake, I can give some good romance;) … but it’s not the norm for me. I have never considered myself a romantic at heart. I love love, and I adore all the sexy, sweaty things that go with it. But hearts and flowers, wooing and soft persuasion … yeah … I ain’t got no time for that. I like my romance a little ugly, a little dangerous, and a whole lot messy. So that made getting into the groove for this book—the one that was about hearts healing and real romance—challenging. It required soft and I am much more comfortable with hard.

It’s not very often I sit down and put two people with pure hearts together. It’s a rare case when I’m writing two people who are genuinely kind and caring, who are simply looking for something better out of each other and out of themselves. I tend to drift toward making at least one of my main characters all kinds of twisted and torn, but that isn’t the case here. Yes, they both have demons to slay and mountains to climb, but Poppy and Wheeler are simply good people who have had more than their fair share of bad thrown their way … they are so much more than what they have experienced. More than any other characters I have ever written, when they stumble they get right back up and keep going. I’m going to be honest, I had a rough end of 2016. Things with family, my dog, things changing professionally … it made the task of writing about perseverance and unwavering optimism, writing about hope and courage, a bit of a challenge. But that’s why I write, why I tell the stories I do. It’s an escape, a way to live in a place that has all the things reality might be missing at the moment.

In order to do these two justice, it took some digging deep, some honest self-evaluation and self-examination, on my part to get to the soft center of myself that I usually keep hidden from the world. Really, I like to pretend it doesn’t exist at all. I desperately wanted to get it right—for Poppy and Wheeler, but more for the readers who were rooting for the girl who had been ruined to be Salvaged and returned to her former glory. For the tenderhearted who wanted the nice guy to finally catch some kind of break.

I think I ended up exactly where I was supposed to with all of it … I mean at the end of it all I was emotionally spent and exhausted in the best way. I think I took a hundred naps! It’s been a journey, the best adventure I could have ever asked for, one shared with my readers through these eleven books set in my favorite place. I couldn’t be any happier with where we (and all of our friends caught between the pages) ended up.

This is where we belong

~Love & Ink

Jay

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

—Joseph Joubert

I was the kind of guy that thought I had it all figured out. It came from having spent my entire childhood caught up in chaos and upheaval. When I was old enough to call my own shots and make my own way, I did it with a single-minded determination and unwavering dedication. I knew what I wanted. Every move I made, every step I took, moved me toward that perfectly planned future I had been dreaming of from the minute I realized I was all on my own. A realization that came far too early and was brutally reinforced every single time I was forced to bounce from one temporary home to the next.

I clung to the idea that I would do everything differently. I would make decisions which would lead to a life that was easy, smooth, and as steady as a car with a new alignment and high-end shocks. I found the girl that was meant to be mine and clutched her in a death grip. I went out of my way to be whoever she needed me to be, to never give her any kind of reason to go. I made her the center of my entire world, not realizing she might feel trapped there as time went on. I was holding on so tight I never felt her trying to wiggle her way free.

I started a business, bought a house, and made plans … so many plans. Plans that would be considered simple and boring to some, but they covered everything I wanted since the time I was four years old. They were the plans that would give me the life I’d been longing for since the minute I was left on my own.

I had my eyes on the prize, the promise of what could be if I worked hard, took care of my woman, and did everything that the person who was supposed to love me and care for me didn’t do. I would have held on until the bitter, burning end, but there was nothing I could do when the rope was cut.

At that point all I could do was fall.

I felt my grip on everything I was trying so hard to hold on to slip the day she walked into my garage, hiding behind one of my friends. Rowdy St. James worked at the tattoo shop where I got the majority of my ink done. He called and asked me to empty out my shop of employees and other customers one Saturday afternoon so that he could bring his girlfriend’s sister in to look at a car. He didn’t need to explain why the garage needed to be cleared out, not that I would have asked. The girl had been all over the news months before. You couldn’t get away from her terrified face and shaking body as her horrifying ordeal was splashed all over the news. Her husband had abducted her at gunpoint. Salem, her sister and Rowdy’s lady, had been a victim of the attack as well. Poppy Cruz only went with the lunatic she was married to, in order to keep her sibling safe. It had resulted in a nightmare that I couldn’t imagine anyone coming back from. Without question I cleared out the shop so she wouldn’t have to worry about being surrounded by a bunch of dirty, boisterous men that wouldn’t know how to behave around someone as fragile and delicate as she appeared to be.

I didn’t want her to be scared of anything ever again. It made no sense, but it resonated inside of me.

Things at home had been rocky, rougher than class-five rapids in spring, but I was paddling for my life and prepared to ride it out. I couldn’t let go. I wouldn’t let go. I saw Poppy the day she walked through my shop and I started to feel how sore my hands and my heart were from holding on.

Her head was down, eyes focused on the tips of her shoes. Her shoulders were hunched over and her long hair hid her face. She was skinny, so skinny, nothing but skin and bones. She was nothing that I should have noticed, not because she was clearly doing everything in her power to be invisible, but because I was supposed to have my eyes locked on my future and doing whatever I could to salvage it. But I did notice her and I couldn’t look away once I did.

She was obviously terrified, clearly out of her element and uncomfortable, but it wasn’t her unease that called to me … it was her loneliness. I could feel it filling up the space that separated us. Stretching, growing, expanding until it was all I was breathing in and exhaling back out. It was bitter on my tongue and heavy across my skin because I knew the feeling well. I lived with it pressing me down and pushing me forward every minute of every day. The reason I was so set on the way things had to be, the reason I was singlemindedly set on settling down and building a life with the girl that was slipping through my fingers was because I never again wanted to be as alone as this girl was. I didn’t want to be left and forgotten. I’d barely survived it the first time.

I did my best to sell her a car that was as beautiful as she was … a classic with clean lines and a flawless finish. She picked something practical and boring but that was ultimately safe and reliable. I understood her choice but her reasons behind it grated and annoyed me long after she left the shop. When she wasn’t standing in front of me, she should have been easy to forget; after all, everything in front of me, everything I had been working for and toward, was falling down in front of my eyes. My world was collapsing in on itself and everything I thought I was so goddamn sure of turned out to be nothing more than lies and illusions. In the middle of all of it, I couldn’t forget her sad eyes and shivering, shaking form. Her loneliness clung to me, unshakable and unforgettable. I didn’t think I would see her again and against my better judgment I often found myself wondering how she was doing and if she had gotten a handle on all the things that seemed to be crushing her under their inescapable weight.

I was wrong about seeing her again, just like I was wrong about doing everything in my life differently from how my mother had lived hers would ensure my happiness. I was wrong about hard work and sacrifice being enough. I was wrong about holding on when what I was holding on to desperately wanted me to let go. I was left with bleeding palms, rope burns around my heart, and scars on my soul.

The next time I saw Poppy Cruz it was my loneliness that was filling up the space, suffocating me, choking me, making me forget to handle her with care. I was nothing more than a searing, open wound. One that was raw, aching, throbbing, and leaking my broken heart and shattered emotions out everywhere. I felt like I’d lost everything, like my entire life had been nothing but a waste of time, nothing more than building blocks knocked over with the swipe of a careless hand. The girl I loved didn’t love me back, my future was ultimately nothing more than a fuzzy, fractured blur. I couldn’t see anything clearly other than the waste and ruin of all my best laid plans.

But I saw her. And I saw that I scared her.

It was the last thing I wanted to do but my loneliness was just as big and just and consuming as hers was. It spread out, hungry and angry, looking to consume anyone that might try and challenge its reign.

I tried to pull myself together, apologized because I knew our paths would cross again now that she lived next door to my best friend. I didn’t want to be another man that she was terrified of. I locked the loneliness down, wrestled it into submission, and tried to quiet down the wild inside of me that was howling, screaming at the loss of its mate. I wanted to be nothing more than gnashing teeth and tearing claws but I swallowed those instincts and allowed myself to act like a kicked puppy that just wanted to whimper and cry.

Poppy had been through more than I could imagine. She was the one I couldn’t look away from, but even then, she managed to slip past me and disappear. She looked like honey but she moved like a ghost. I memorized everything about her even though she hardly let me see her face.

I wasn’t supposed to be looking at anything other than how to salvage the mess my life was in, but she was all I could see.

Poppy

I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

I was pretty sure sometime over the last week my body and brain had been taken over by an alien life force that was making me act the opposite of how I normally acted.

Even before I was scared of my own shadow, I wasn’t the type that went out of my way to seek attention from the opposite sex. Making boys drool and collecting broken hearts was more up my older sister’s alley. I tended to be the girl that only spoke when spoken to. I was always shy and hesitant, especially when I was around someone I found attractive. I’d had more than one man tell me that it was endearing … little did I know my obvious uncertainty about my own appeal and allure clearly marked me as prey to those same men. I was an easy target. Something I swore to myself I would never be again. Which was why there was no logical explanation for why I found myself currently parked in front of a very industrial-looking building as I tried to work up the courage to go inside.

The garage was on the outskirts of downtown Denver. Tucked away among factories and buildings that were now gentrified and redeveloped into upscale apartments and trendy eateries near Coors Field. The garage looked like it had escaped every dime of big money sunk into making LoDo prime real estate. It was a throwback to when this part of the city was still rough and unsafe for people to be out walking their little dogs on designer leashes after dark. The bricks on the outside had faded paint from when the garage was some kind of shipping warehouse. The old paint blended in with newer graffiti that the owner hadn’t bothered to power-wash away. There was also a mural, a beautiful depiction of the Rocky Mountains, that stood off in the distance; it covered all three of the massive metal doors that allowed the cars access in and out of the building. It was a statement piece. One that was impossible to miss. It softened the entire feel of the building and the tall metal fence with its wide gate that surrounded it.

I knew that one of the guys who owned the tattoo shop where both my sister and her boyfriend worked had painted the mural in trade. Wheeler, the guy I was here to see, if I ever got up the nerve, worked on Nash Donovan’s muscle car and in turn Nash had turned the garage doors into something that even the most dedicated taggers and graffiti artists appreciated too much to deface. Salem, my sister, mentioned that Wheeler was never opposed to a solid trade. Which explained why the majority of the mechanic’s skin was inked in colorful images courtesy of Nash and the rest of the artists who worked at the Saints of Denver.

I was used to being surrounded by heavily tattooed individuals—heck, my sister started marking her flawless golden skin before she was legally old enough to get a tattoo in order to annoy my father. However, Hudson Wheeler was by far the most decorated human I had ever come across. The designs swirled up each side of his neck and across his throat. They dropped down over his wrists and splayed wide across the back of his hands. He had artwork across his chest and it crawled from the base of his hairline all the way to the top of his jeans across his back and abdomen. He was a walking art installation. And while all that ink and color might have been overwhelming on someone else, with the graceful, thoughtful way he moved and the quiet, measured way he spoke, all the color and noise that covered his body worked for the man that was known as Wheeler. I figured out after the first time I met him that his skin was telling the world his story because he didn’t want to be bothered with repeating it over and over again.

My father would be appalled by the way Hudson Wheeler looked. He would hate everything about him. That meant I allowed the trickle of attraction that had worked its way through the fear and doubt that suffocated me on a daily basis to take root and grow. Anything that my dad disapproved of was something that I was more than willing to embrace with open arms. I was late to defiance, but did it ever feel good.

Taking a deep breath and tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, I looked over at the little box that was on the seat next to me. A small grin tugged at my mouth when my eyes landed on the contents. I had no idea if Wheeler was in the market for this particular kind of gift but I figured if he didn’t want it I would take it home until I figured something else out. It was a bold move, bringing a man I hardly knew this kind of gift, but as soon as I saw it I knew Wheeler had to have it.

I scolded myself for being foolish and impulsive, silently telling myself that I was setting myself up for the kind of embarrassment and ridicule that would cripple me. It had taken me endless hours of therapy and unwavering amounts of tough love from my family and friends to get to the point where I could leave the house without having a full-on panic attack. Taking a step so far out of my comfort zone felt like I was jumping off a cliff without knowing if there was anything down below to cushion my fall. If Wheeler rejected the gift, if he made me feel stupid for trying to do something nice, it very well might undo all the hard work I’d put into getting back some semblance of a normal life. Trying to cheer up a man that I had no ties to or no investment in seemed like a foolish risk to take, but I still packed up the box and drove down here. I tried to talk myself out of going inside, my mind screaming that this was a mistake. It didn’t work. Even though I was a nervous wreck I still ended up grabbing the box, muttering under my breath at the contents like they could reassure me this wasn’t going to blow up in my face. I was shaking from head to toe as I exited the car.

The box shifted in my hold, making me gasp and mutter a few choice words. My father would hate that I was swearing, so I made it a point to do so at least once a day. I had to shut the car door with my hip and I jumped when it slammed shut. I watched wide-eyed as one of the painted metal doors started to roll up. I squinted behind the dark lenses of my sunglasses as a lone figure walked to the edge of a bay and deftly jumped down, ignoring the ramp that led up into the building. I gulped a little bit because there was no mistaking the tall, lean figure that was making his way toward me. The late-afternoon sun made his already burnished hair glow like autumn fire, and highlighted the dips and valleys in his arms and across his broad chest as he wiped his hands on a red rag that he pulled from his back pocket. He had the top half of his coveralls unfastened and hanging around his waist, leaving him and all that artwork that covered him on display in nothing more than a black tank top that had a hole on the side. He looked dirty and a little rough. Both things totally worked for him … and for me. I’d almost forgotten what lust felt like. I was attracted to him and that terrified me because in my world attraction led to nothing but heartache and hurt. Still, here I was, standing in front of him even though everything inside of me was screaming to run as far away from him as possible.

I moved as the box shifted again and stopped as he lifted his chin up in the direction where I had parked my very nondescript sedan. “Something wrong with the Camry?” Wheeler’s voice was warm and smooth, like expensive liquor sipped on summer nights, but his eyes were cold. They were the palest blue I had ever seen, a blue so washed out and light that they had a silvery shimmer to them. They were also sharp and intent, not missing much, including the box I was having a hard time keeping a hold on as he got closer.

“Um … no. The Camry is fine, thank you.” Rowdy, my sister’s boyfriend and the father of my soon-to-make-an-appearance niece or nephew, had strong-armed me into buying a car from Wheeler when I finally decided I was emotionally well enough to live on my own after I fell apart at the hands of the last man that was supposed to love me. Wheeler tried to sell me a 1957 Bonneville that was hands down the coolest car I had ever seen, but I balked at the idea of riding around in something that was guaranteed to attract unwanted attention. Especially attention of the male variety. Rowdy cringed when I handed over the cash for the Camry but Wheeler just smiled like he understood why I made the choice even if he didn’t think it was the right one.

I nervously shifted my feet and watched as that icy gaze of his landed on the box clutched to my side. Right on time the contents let out a little half bark, half yelp that had Wheeler’s rust colored eyebrows lifting up almost to his hairline and made his tattooed hands pause where they were still wringing the red rag tightly between them.