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  RINGSIDE

  A North Star Novel

  By Tracey Ward

  RINGSIDE

  A North Star Novel

  By Tracey Ward

  Text Copyright © 2015 Tracey Ward

  All Rights Reserved

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Prologue

  JENNA

  I loved Kellen Coulter from the moment I met him. From the time I was a thirteen-year-old girl staring at a gorgeous guy with battered hands; hands that had just earned him a night in jail. He was beautiful and dangerous. Brilliant and brutal. Four years older than me and brought up so far on the wrong side of the tracks that he couldn’t even hear the train, we were separated by a cavernous divide. We never should have been friends. We never should have met, but fate is strange. It’s bigger than bank accounts and boxing gyms. It’s bigger than ocean-view addresses. It’s bigger than our heads and our hearts and the hurt we land on each other simply by walking through the world.

  And so is love.

  I loved him through it all. As I grew up, as we grew into friends, as he dated a string of other women - my sister Laney included - and never once stopped to look at me the way he looked at them. Not until I was seventeen and I couldn’t take it anymore. That was the night when my lips finally found his, his hands burned me alive, and he very nearly made every fantasy I had come true.

  But then he ran. He ran and he hid and it hurt so bad I could barely breathe, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. Just days after I dreamed he would finally be mine, he tied himself so tightly to Laney that I couldn’t ever see them separating again.

  And still I loved him. Still I refused to quit on him, even now as I stood in the airport watching planes ascend into the sky, waiting and wondering if he’d advance or retreat. I waited because I promised him, just as he promised me so many years ago.

  Because fighting isn’t always about winning.

  It’s about not giving up.

  KELLEN

  I’m not scared of much in this world. I’ve walked the seedy streets of south L.A. after dark, unarmed and underage. I’ve hit the hot dirt of a brittle, dead lawn as gunfire tore down the street, bullets peppering the buildings around me. I held my mother’s hand as she died - a kid in an unfamiliar city without a soul to turn to watching his only family slip through his fingers and disappear in a cloud of cancer and memories. I’ve faced violence, abuse, neglect, and I’ve barely flinched. I’ve buried it all inside, tucked it all away in the dark corners of my mind, locked the doors, and thrown away the keys. I’ve used those burning, buried embers as fuel to fight in the ring. To feed the animal inside me, and it never mattered. I never cared that I was an empty shell of a boy growing into a man. Into a monster. None of the girls I dated minded either. Not even Laney. They wanted the body and the bad boy, not what was underneath. And that was fine by me because there was nothing. I had nothing to give anyone.

  Not until Jenna Monroe. Not until I fell into her round gray eyes and knew what it was to feel.

  And that scares the ever-loving shit out of me.

  The day my love for my friend turned to lust I felt sick with myself. Sick with the kind of man I was. With the fact that I couldn’t keep anything pure, not even the one person on the planet who I’d ever fully trusted. So what did I do? I ran like a fucking coward. I hid behind every empty emotion I could find. Behind different girls, different lies, different farces – all to bury myself so deep beneath the endless longing for the one thing, the one person that I knew I could never have.

  Jenna.

  I hurt her in every way possible. Not because I wanted to but because I’m an idiot and I didn’t know any other way to keep her safe from me. But life isn’t what you make it – it’s what you make of it, and if I corrected any of my million mistakes would it still get me to where I am today? Would I have had the courage to listen to my heart instead of my head for the first time in my life? Would I have walked away from Laney finally and forever, tossed every toxic relationship aside, and pulled Jenna into my arms where she belonged?

  Would I be sitting here in this airport now, shaking scared with a rock in my pocket, a warm stone in my gut, and the entire night sky exploding behind my eyes?

  Chapter One

  JENNA – FOUR MONTHS AGO

  “Fuck my ducks,” I muttered under my breath.

  Kellen craned his neck to look back at me from his spot on the couch. “What’s up?”

  I glared at the computer screen. “Nothing. Nothing is up. Everything is down.”

  “The shop?” he asked knowingly.

  “Always.”

  He nodded slowly, turning back to the TV and lifting his beer to his lips. “You’re not supposed to sweat it, remember? Your dad’s accountant warned you that businesses take time to start earning instead of losing. Callum and his dad went through the same thing when they opened the restaurant.”

  “It’s so easy to tell someone who’s hemorrhaging money that they shouldn’t sweat it. Try being the hemorrhager.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “It is now.”

  “You’re not hemorrhaging.”

  “I’m drowning,” I argued morosely. “I’m drowning in a pool of my own blood, sweat, and tears. And money. It’s flooding around me and killing me slowly.”

  “All work and no play makes Jenna a dull girl,” he droned. “Come sit down and forget about it. You get very Shining when you’re tired.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Really? You’re working twelve hour shifts at the tattoo parlor six days a week. It makes me tired thinking about it.”

  I ran my hand across my burning eyes, the blurry numbers on the screen dancing up and down across my vision before finally settling. Unfortunately they didn’t change. I was still in the red.

  “I have to,” I reminded him. “My free labor is the only thing keeping me remotely afloat.”

  “Sam said she’d work for free.”

  “I’m not taking advantage of my friend.”

  “Give her a stake in the shop. Three percent or something.”

  I chewed on my lower lip, feeling stupid and childish. “But it’s mine.”

  Kellen chuckled but he nodded in agreement. “That’s a good point.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’
t started paying you back yet,” I blurted out. “I will as soon as I can. With interest.”

  The room went silent, the air instantly thickening around us. The only sound was the TV turned down low and the faint tick of a clock in the kitchen.

  “I’ve told you, Jenna,” he started to explain quietly.

  I stood up and rounded the couch, coming to sit down next to him. He watched me warily and I knew why. We had had this argument so many times before. Part of me wished he had been honest with me from the start and told me the money buying the building where North Star Ink - my North Star Ink - now sat was coming from his deep pockets and not my dad’s. I would never have let him pay for it and that’s exactly why he didn’t tell me.

  He had kept it a secret, along with the small fortune his absent father had built for him. It was money he hated almost as much as the ghost of a man who had given it to him, and paying for my dream of owning my own tattoo parlor had been a sort of cleansing for Kellen. He wasn’t good at spending money on himself. He’d rather earn it honestly, he said. He went to Law School on his dad’s dime and the fact that he’d spent all of that money only to find out he hated being a lawyer had been a sort of sweet revenge for him.

  Having grown up in pure poverty he wasn’t comfortable with the two plus million dollars in his bank account. He liked the simple way he lived and I liked being a part of it in ways my mom and sister could never understand. There in his small apartment with Ikea furniture and sheets from Target I felt good. I’d grown up with the best of everything, a silver spoon in my mouth before my first breath of air, and being with Kellen surrounded by little more than what we needed felt safe somehow.

  Or maybe that feeling wasn’t the apartment or the things inside it. Maybe it was the man.

  I reached out and touched his arm, the corded muscles of his bicep slightly straining the gray fabric. “I know. I heard you. Every time. You don’t want me to pay you back because it was a present and giving a present back is an insult.”

  He grinned, his midnight blue eyes dancing darkly. “What would your mom say if she saw you trying to hand a gift back to me? She’d be ashamed.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s ashamed of me either way.”

  “She’s coming around about the shop.”

  “I know. She still hates it though.”

  “She doesn’t understand it. The tattooing or the shop. It scares her.”

  I nodded, my eyes on my hand on his arm. “She’s still coming around about us too,” I said gently.

  I felt him sigh. I felt the push of his chest against his arm as it filled with annoyance and air, expanding and pressing his arm harder into my waiting palm. He let the breath out slowly but his body didn’t relax.

  “She just needs time,” he reasoned. “Everyone needs time to deal with it.”

  His voice was empty in that way it got when it was full of everything. Every piece of the world that weighed down on him. It was a heavy load, one I’d only caught glimpses of, but I knew this one. I felt it too. It was everything that had happened between him and my sister over the last decade. The on-agains and the off-agains. The empty engagement, the cheating, the lying, the hiding. Kellen’s only indiscretion in the entire relationship had been one kiss. One fire-fueled moment with me that had been a long time coming. One that detonated the end of him and Laney for good, but he still felt bad about it. A lot of that had to do with the incredible guilt I had over it, and the fact that I was adding to his already heavy load hurt my heart, but I couldn’t help it. We’d been wrong. That kiss was everything I’d wanted for years, the only truth he lived for months, but it was still wrong. And everyone knew it.

  “Jenna.”

  I looked up, meeting his eyes. I hadn’t realized I’d spaced out until he said my name. I hadn’t realized I was frowning.

  He reached up and ran his thumb gently up and down between my brows, smoothing the scowl away until I grinned at him faintly. “It took time to make that mess,” he reminded me. “It’ll take time to clear it. I promise you I’ll make it right.”

  “Laney and I are doing better,” I told him hopefully, not feeling it at all. “She’s working now. She’s happy.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Maybe it’ll help her forgive us.”

  Kellen chuckled. “No, it won’t.”

  “Come on! You can’t even pretend to think that’s true? String me along here a little, I need it.”

  “Fine,” he relented with a wry smile. “I’m sure this new job will change her world. She’ll find a purpose in her life, realize what she and I had was pure shit, and she’ll move on because she’ll grow as a person and let go of the past. She’ll find a guy, get married, we’ll all live and die together in the same neighborhood playing pinochle well into our eighties, and the last words she’ll whisper to us with her dying breath is, ‘I forgive you.’”

  I sank back into the couch feeling deflated. “Well you don’t have to be an ass about it.”

  “I’m not good at lying to you, Jenna. Tag it in the win box.”

  “Our win box is pretty empty lately.”

  Kellen looked over at me with concern. “You are uncharacteristically morose tonight, you know that?”

  I nodded heavily. “I do. I feel it.”

  He looked away, licking his lips and shifting slightly in his seat. I felt a little bad for him right then. He wasn’t good at talking, not about feelings. Even little ones and here I sat with some pretty fucking big ones on my mind and he knew it. And he probably wanted to bolt.

  “I’ll take care of the stuff with your family,” he promised me deeply, his voice strained with hesitation. “I’ll clean up my mess.”

  “It’s not only up to you.”

  “No, but I was the coward and I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’re not a coward. You’re the bravest person I know.”

  He looked at me then, intent and earnest with those dark, dangerous eyes that destroyed me every time. Then he smiled and my world went upside down. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  I sat up slowly and kissed him. He watched me move toward him. He waited for me, his smile growing the closer I came until I wiped it away with my own.

  His breath smelled like beer. Like hops and honey. I fell forward to take another taste and his hand found its way into my hair. It tangled in the messy bun I had wound on top of my head and as I slid my tongue along his lower lip he tugged at my hair, deftly freeing it from its confines. It tumbled cold and loose around my shoulders, heavy against my skin as his hands moved lightly alongside it. I sighed when his fingers found the long column of my neck. As they drifted down, dancing and tripping over my skin until my heart was racing and his breath was coming hard against my face.

  His other hand touched my hip and I took the hint, immediately swinging my leg over his lap and straddling him. My tank top was gone before I could blink, his mouth disappearing only long enough for me to miss it and then it was back with a mission. He took control with his lips and his hands and I gave it to him gladly. The slightest pressure from his hand had me grinding against him, both of us moaning at the feel of the friction. I was burning up inside, already set to blow at the slightest spark because that’s what Kellen did to me. His big, gentle hands, his broad shoulders full of fight – they wrecked me and rebuilt me. They made my tall, long body feel small in the most amazing way because everything Kellen did was magic. It was breathtaking, soul crushing, and so intensely beautiful.

  He undressed me slowly, taking his time the way he did when he was trying. When he wanted to stay with me as long as he could and give me everything he had. I adored him for that. For trying. For never needing me to ask. But an unavoidable moment was coming and we both knew it. As heart wrenching as it was, neither of us could stop it.

  He pushed me to the brink. He touched me, kissed me, stroked me until I was breathless and nearly out of my mind with feeling and fire. Until I was staring down into his eyes with my lips
parted, my throat hoarse and full of desperation, and he was looking back with so much love and lust that I thought he’d stay. That this would be the time.

  But then he lifted me up, positioned me over him, and he left me. His eyes closed for the briefest moment, just long enough for me to sink down and take him in, and when they opened they were empty. He was gone. Buried away in a dark corner of his mind where the memories couldn’t touch him and the feel of this pleasure, this body of mine that he now clung to, couldn’t hurt him. Not again. Not the way she had so many years before.

  He moved with me. He breathed with me. He kissed me and held me tenderly, his voice so familiar as it grunted my name. He finished with me, both of us crying out and clinging to each other as we went rigid and soft and so warm. He even held me for a moment afterward with his hands in my hair, my forehead against his, and his eyes on the floor.

  To the casual observer nothing was wrong. We were fine. We were in love and we’d just made love to prove it, but what the world didn’t know, what only I was allowed to understand, was that Kellen was empty in that moment. He was on autopilot. He let his body and his brain take over and his soul checked out.

  I would love to say it didn’t bother me. That I got it because I knew his reasons, and they were great, terrible reasons. He had every right to be the way he was. To do this the way he did.

  But that didn’t mean I had to like it. It didn’t mean that it didn’t make me feel like every other girl he’d had meaningless sex with, dead eyed and empty hearted time after time.

  It didn’t mean it didn’t cut like a knife.

  Chapter Two

  KELLEN

  It hurt like a hangover. The fuzzy feeling of waking up and you’re not entirely sure what happened but you know you ache because of it. You had flashes, memories and moments that were crystal clear, but most of it was a blur that you witnessed underwater where you lay safe and secure from the world. Hiding like a coward. Like a kid.