Salvaged. Jay Crownover

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