Beyond Repair (Deeper Than Desire) Read online

  Beyond Repair

  A Deeper Than Desire Novel

  Charlotte Stein

  Beyond Repair

  Copyright © 2016, Charlotte Stein

  Edited by Chris Allen-Riley

  Cover Art by Sweet and Spicy Designs

  Published by Charlotte Stein

  Released October 2016

  NOTE: This book has been previously published, but has undergone edits prior to re-release.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the author, Charlotte Stein.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Other Books by Charlotte

  Chapter One

  She knew immediately who the body on her living room floor belonged to. She’d seen him on the news a few weeks ago, falling out of a limousine with several girls wrapped around his shoulders. At the time she’d thought, It’s like he’s wearing a necklace made out of ladies, before changing the channel.

  But now that he was sprawled all over her best rug he wasn’t so easy to dismiss. He had a lot more flesh and bone suddenly, and a much thicker, darker presence. His leather jacket looked like an oil slick painted across his broad back. The stubble on that near-pretty face was too coarse, as though someone had painted it with iron filings.

  And she could see the tattoo on the back of his neck.

  The one she hadn’t thought she knew so well.

  The one that made her think of a big, dark maze.

  It was definitely Holden Stark. You simply couldn’t mistake him for anyone else—not even if you really wanted to. She would have loved to find someone much smaller and less important on her rug, just to ease her into human interaction. Maybe that little costar of his in the one about the sharks. That would have been cool. She could have gotten close to him without having a panic attack.

  She couldn’t get close to this guy. He was just too big and too unexpected. She was used to everything running the same way on each particular day, and this was not the same way. This was a massive movie star invading her home just as she finished her nighttime routine—a fact that did not get any easier once she started noticing how little he looked like his image.

  He wasn’t as tanned, for a start. His skin was almost as pale as hers in fact, though that wasn’t any better. If anything it was worse. It made the black of his hair really pop, in a way that almost hurt her eyes. And his hands, his big hands—had he always had hands as big as that? They looked so much rougher than they did onscreen. They looked like the hands of someone who worked hard for a living, right down to his completely butchered nails.

  She’d always somehow imagined that male movie stars got manicures, but he definitely didn’t. The ends of his fingers were worse than hers. He’d bitten them down so ferociously he’d drawn blood in places, and the soft skin around them seemed sore. He really needs to soak them in lanolin, she thought, before realizing she was completely obsessing over the wrong thing.

  Who cared about his nails, for God’s sake?

  He had passed out on her rug.

  Holden Stark, supreme ruler of the movie universe, had passed out on her rug. In fact, she wasn’t even sure if he’d just passed out. He could have been dead, for all she knew. She couldn’t see his back going up and down and he didn’t seem to be moving, which left her in something of a tight spot. She sort of knew she should really get down on her hands and knees and see if she could feel the breath coming out of him, but that panic was still holding her back.

  In the end she had to sort of creep toward him in a half-crouch, ready to spring away at a moment’s notice. If he snorted, or moved those big bear hands, or kicked out with one of his movie-star boots, she was going to launch herself across the room. Or at least, she was going to try. Her legs were near useless and incapable of a slow jog, but she had to believe in them.

  Otherwise, she would never have gotten close enough to see that he was still breathing. Thank God, he was still breathing. His back was going up and down, and when she dared to lean in just a little bit—wincing all the while like a kid who had to poke a dead animal with a stick—she could hear the air rattling in and out of his lungs.

  But this presented its own set of problems, obviously.

  His breath was rattling, like maybe he had something trapped in his throat. And by the smell of him, it wasn’t a little cough that he hadn’t quite cleared. There was a pool of something nasty by his face—on her rug, her beautiful rug, the rug she’d felt so adult getting—and a certain sort of smell she recognized only too well.

  When you spend a lot of time in the hospital, it becomes a faithful friend.

  Holden Stark had not only passed out on her rug. He’d passed out drunkenly, and then vomited. Of course, the drunken part was purely a guess. But she felt it was a good guess. It was the sort of guess that made sense, when applied to a big-time movie star in some little nobody’s house. He’d finished partying, and probably having sex on the beach. Then he’d stumbled into the first house he came to. That lock she’d meant to fix had barely made a sound as it gave under the pressure of his immense body, and here they were.

  Her half-terrified, him about to die because he was choking on his own vomit.

  God, what did people do in situations like this? What was the medical advice? Turn him on his side, she thought, but the idea of actually touching him was so outside the realm of her experience she wasn’t sure she could do it. She put her hands close to his face and then just watched them be there, like two immoveable claws.

  It looked as if she were about to do really weird and amateurish brain surgery on him. If he woke up, he was definitely going to think that was the case—so much so that when he suddenly shifted she almost blurted out an excuse. I promise I wasn’t about to screw open the top of your head, her mind screamed.

  But thankfully she realized before she could say the words aloud.

  He was just stirring in his sleep. He wasn’t about to accuse her of anything. And even better...he had turned into the proper position. His breath was no longer rattling, which meant she didn’t have to go anywhere near his general brain area. She had been excused at the very last second, and could now go on with her normal day.

  Only that was stupid, of course it was stupid. She couldn’t go on with her normal day at all. He was still on her rug and he was still unconscious, and she was starting to suspect it might not be because of excessive partying. There was a bottle by his right hand, and she could read the label from where she was crouching.

  She’d taken a few of those things herself, right after it happened. She’d even contemplated taking a lot of those things—and by the looks of this he might have done that too. He didn’t seem like that sort of guy, but who really knew? Maybe he wasn’t so fun underneath it all. Maybe he had problems, real problems, and if he did she couldn’t just wake him up and let him wander out the door. It was entirely possible he couldn’t be woken up.

  He needed medical attention. He needed stomach pumps and drips full of saline.


  And she had to be the one who got those things for him. She had to, even though she didn’t have the faintest clue where to begin. She couldn’t just call the emergency services. The moment anyone realized who he was a thousand photographers would more than likely descend—and by God she didn’t want that. She didn’t want that for all sorts of reasons, and the biggest was the thought of what it might do to him.

  Everyone would know he was different then.

  He wouldn’t be Holden Stark anymore. He would be some other depressed guy who chugged a bottle of pills and maybe tried to drown himself in the ocean. How could he carry on being Captain Amazing once everyone saw him the way she currently was? No, no, she couldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t be responsible for decimating his career and his image.

  But there were still ways to help him. There were other things she might possibly do. People who’d taken a lot of pills needed to be woken up and walked around, and though she was scared, she was sure she could do that. She even reached out a few tentative fingers again, just to try to shake him awake.

  Then when he didn’t respond, she upped her game.

  She put her whole hand on his shoulder. He was damp and big and she was so afraid of him suddenly speaking she kept imagining ridiculous things he might say—I’ve never beheld such a monstrous visage being chief among them. But she managed it anyway. She succeeded, and came close to celebrating that success. She even smiled a little breathlessly, before it occurred to her.

  He still wasn’t responding. It wasn’t enough—though she wasn’t sure what would be. In movies they bundled the guy who’d overdosed into the shower, but there were two main problems with this option. The first was the lingering suspicion in the back of her mind that this was a silly idea that no one did in real life.

  And the second was just the practicalities of the thing.

  How did you get someone into the shower when they were unconscious? In films they just snipped the part out where the tiny woman maneuvers the giant man into a cubicle the size of a post box. One second he’s on the floor and the next second he’s there, and no one has to explain how it happened.

  But she did.

  She had to explain.

  She had to somehow haul him down the hallway to the bathroom on the right. And before she even got to that part there were all these other impossible things. To begin with, his arms didn’t want to come out from underneath his body. They’d been trapped by his gargantuan weight, and wiggling them free proved pretty awkward and rather painful. She had to touch him a lot to do it, and he kept letting out all these strange and sudden noises just as she’d gotten a good grip.

  It made her think about that horror movie again, only this time she wasn’t trying to scoop out his brain without him noticing. She was trying to steal his entire body and somehow make off with it down the hall. If he woke up he was probably going to press charges, but that wasn’t what made his random sounds so frightening.

  It was the man thing. She knew it was the man thing. She’d never had the chance to get used to any real guys—or at least, not any guys who had hair on their faces and hair on their chests and probably didn’t lisp when asking her out. That sort of creature was practically an alien planet to her, mysterious and full of sudden pitfalls.

  Spend too long near one and you’d end up falling five hundred feet to your death.

  Or at least, that was how she currently felt. As if she were falling, or possibly imagining this. She had to close her eyes and sit very still for a second, until she was absolutely sure that the world around her was real—the four walls of her little living room, patiently waiting for her to paint them in grown-up colors. The furniture she’d tentatively bought, unsure if that chair and this coffee table were the right things for adult house owners to have. The smell of the ocean...the soft soughing of the grass that surrounded her little house on the hill. Everything calm and good and nice.

  Except for the movie star on her rug, of course.

  The one who wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard she pulled.

  She finally managed to get his arms free, but she just couldn’t get the necessary traction. No amount of digging her heels in helped—not even when she strained hard enough to put her body on a diagonal. She started to fear his arms were going to come out of the sockets, and if they did he was definitely going to have grounds for arrest.

  And especially if she explained by saying she just needed to get him to the bathroom. That sounded so completely sinister—like she maybe had some tools in there that would help her with the dismembering. She was going to finish prying his arms off with something metal and rusty from the nineteenth century, then use him in her tableau of the strange.

  Christ. Christ.

  She had to come at this some other way. Maybe get things going, get the rug sliding underneath him...surely that would help? She even tried to get ahold of its fringed edges and yank, but as soon as she had she knew what she really had to do. It was obvious, even though she didn’t want it to be.

  She needed to touch him somewhere else. His wrists and his hands and his shoulders just weren’t enough—the main weight of him was much lower down. And in order to shift him, she was going to have to grab that lower-down place. She was going to have to push from his hips or maybe his upper thigh area, though if she was really being honest those two things were just euphemisms. It was his ass she was really thinking of. His ass was the fulcrum or the point of pivoting or whatever other bullshit physics term she could come up with.

  But even after she’d accepted that fact she couldn’t do it. She’d never touched a guy there, before. She’d never touched anyone there before—not even little Johnny Parker when he’d dared her on the playground. And doing it this way seemed sort of obscene, like maybe she was trying to cop a feel without knowing it or someone might see her through the window and snap a picture. Tomorrow she’d be in the National Enquirer.

  Weird Hermit Fondles Holden’s Unconscious Ass.

  So she went for his hips, instead. She got him by the hips and heaved and wriggled his big body until she felt the rug start to skim the wooden surface of the floor. Then once she’d gotten everything sliding, she tried with the arms. She dug her heels in and yanked really hard.

  And almost went sprawling, for her troubles. The ass-pushing had worked, and now he slid across the floorboards like some enormous thing being birthed. She came close to stumbling into the couch and had to kind of run to keep up with him—but it got easier after that. She actually made it all the way down her hall with him, before she had to take a break.

  Though it was a longer one than she wanted to have. She leaned against the wall, half-crouched, breathing unsteadily—and all the time painfully aware of how much danger he might be in. What if he died because she couldn’t handle a lot of exertion now? She’d never be able to explain that properly, without showing someone the scars all over her or telling him about her weird left lung.

  And she didn’t want to do that.

  She just wanted everything to work again. She’d barely done a single thing and her entire body was trembling. Her breathing was this unsettling wheeze and for what? Five minutes of struggling with a big, heavy body? Why was she sweating like this? She could taste it on her lip, ripe and salty. Could feel it trickling down over her temples and into her hair—and all over so little.

  Well, she wouldn’t let it win this time. She wasn’t trying to drag a bookcase down some stairs here. She was trying to stop someone dying on her floor, and if she failed he’d never be in that Captain Amazing sequel. She’d have to watch someone else being supercool in spandex, and somehow that seemed like the worst crime of all.

  So she ground her teeth together and went for it again—hard enough to strain muscles that she definitely needed and pull things that she’d pay for tomorrow.

  But she’d think about that later, after he wasn’t dead.

  “Okay, buddy,” she said. “It’s shower time.”

  * * * * *


  She somehow didn’t expect him to jerk awake when she blasted him in the face with a sharp stream of cold water. Though she realized how stupid that expectation was, once she’d done it. Of course he jerked awake, of course he did. He wasn’t in the least bit dead, and she was suddenly waterboarding him.

  She was lucky he didn’t immediately get her on human rights violations.

  Instead, he did another thing she hadn’t anticipated—he acted the way five-year-olds generally do when they suddenly realize how sprinklers work. He put two shocked hands up to his face and tried to stop whatever was attacking him, while making the funniest affronted sound she’d ever heard. She wanted to laugh before she remembered exactly what was happening here.

  She was trying to revive Holden Stark.

  Holden Stark, who she would now have to speak to using her actual words and her real mouth. He’d think it was funny if she saved him from an overdose and then didn’t say anything. Unless she could pretend that she was mute, which seemed doubtful. She was already wondering how to explain what she was doing when he spluttered that she should stop.

  And when she did and he sort of slumped against the wall in this too-sleepy way, she wanted to shout. Stay awake, she wanted to yell at him, but fortunately she didn’t have to. Hitting him with the shower spray had the exact same effect. It made him sit bolt upright again, gasping and panting.

  Only this time he opened his eyes.

  Oh God, those eyes.

  She wasn’t in any way prepared for those eyes. It was like someone had found the switch around the back of the sun, and moved it to On. She’d never in all her life seen anything as blue or as bright, and for a long moment it paralyzed her. She clutched the showerhead and tried not to look, and absolutely failed.

  This was why he was a movie star, she realized.

  Normal humans simply didn’t have eyes like that. She’d always thought the effect was faked, but if anything his eyes were better in person. Somehow, they were better in person after he’d just suffered through an overdose. God only knew how good they could get, on his best day.