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“It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’ll be worth the wait,” I tell her, and she laughs again, planting a kiss on me.
“Definitely,” she says.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for reading Still Your Protector, if you liked Mack and Brooke’s story then I welcome to join my newsletter. Feel free to shoot me a quick email at [email protected] or you can find me on Facebook at facebook.com/jennsableauthor
Lots of love and happy reading everything HEA,
Jenn
ERIN CAWOOD
WHEN IN VEGAS
Ashleigh
* * *
He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. But I’ll never forgive him for abandoning me when I needed him the most!
Eighteen months ago, Sean Anderson asked me to marry him. After fifteen years of fate keeping us apart, I thought our happily ever after had finally arrived. Oh boy, was I wrong!
I’m an actor. My last big budget movie was filmed in Switzerland where I was involved in a near fatal accident. When I woke up from a coma three months later, Sean wasn’t there. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.
But his sister is my best friend and she’s marrying one of our closest friends. I would have to be dead to miss their Las Vegas wedding.
This weekend I’m out to prove to Sean Anderson that I’m the best thing he’ll never have.
Even if I do get drunk and marry him!
PROLOGUE
The pungent aroma of impending death squeezed the recycled hospital air as Angela Matthews held her daughter’s hand. How did they expect her to let her go after thirty-three years?
“It’s...” Her throat closed. The ball of emotions was too big to swallow, too large to breathe around. “It’s not fair, William.” Her gaze met her ex-husband’s. His wide emerald irises glistened the same way as they had when their marriage broke down twenty-eight years ago. “She was too busy being the big star. She never got to achieve the dreams she had as a child. No Prince Charming, no fairy-tale castle, no little prince or princess to read bedtime stories to.”
“She only had one dream,” William reminded her.
No, Krystal Valentina had never been who her daughter truly was. Krystal was a public persona, a character, a personality so far removed from the real and private person Ashleigh Jordan had always been. Even Angela had known little about her daughter’s dreams fifteen years ago when Ashleigh had gone to her father to escape La La Land.
The betrayal by father and daughter had driven a wedge so far between mother and daughter that Angela had never been able to shift it. But she’d been right. Ashleigh wasn’t happy as a nobody in New York. She was an actress to her core, and she’d proven it by the number of awards she had won, the racks of front covers that lined the newsstands with her image, her screen name was one of the top fifty USA search terms on the internet. Krystal Valentina was a movie star and Ashleigh had shot straight to the stars when she returned to LA seven years ago. She’d have come home a lot sooner if it wasn’t for that married man she’d wasted her time and heart on. She’d always insisted there was nothing between them, but Angela knew he was the reason she stayed in New York. Training to be a lawyer was nonsense.
“She gave it up all for Mimi.” William added as though he’d read her mind.
Angela’s eyes snapped toward her daughter’s sleeping face. Of course, Ashleigh wasn’t asleep. The tube down her throat filled her lungs with air, and the monitors filling the otherwise silent room with their incessant beeping kept the medical team aware of her condition. It hadn’t changed in three months. Not since she’d been admitted after a stunt went wrong. She’d suffered a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage.
An unknown allergy to the anesthesia had complicated the surgery to place the titanium clips that would prevent further bleeds, and there was no family at the hospital to confirm the allergy, not that they could. Angela had never heard of malignant hypothermia. Ashleigh was thousands of miles away from LA filming a big budget action-comedy on the ski slopes of Switzerland in the freezing January temperatures when it happened.
“Is that why you quit being a lawyer after just one year?” As Angela spoke to Ashleigh, she sent a silent prayer for a reply. “You declared war on those who hurt Mimi, didn’t you? Why didn’t you just tell Mimi that’s what you were doing instead of fighting with her?”
The seven-year long war between her daughters had been hard to bear.
“They’re twins with a birthright to tear each other a new one, but God help the outsider who does it to either one of them.”
It was true. One was the fuel that fed the other’s fire, but the heat they threw at one another was nothing compared to the wall of flames they put in the way of another adversary. Even now, Mimi had stepped out of her out sheltered domain and into the role of Krystal to protect Ashleigh’s privacy.
William stepped toward the bed and wrapped both his hands around Ashleigh’s other fingers. “I think you’d have kicked each and every one of their asses like you did as a kid—if you’d have gotten away with it, that is.”
