Beyond Repair

Charlotte
Stein

When Alice Evans finds a bona fide
movie star on the floor of her living room, she has no idea what to do.
Ordinary men are frightening enough, never mind someone as famous and frankly
gorgeous as Holden Stark.

However, once she realizes that
Holden is suffering behind that famous facade, she knows she has to help. He
needs someone like her to give him a taste of sweetness and desire and love. He
needs
normality
. The only problem—Alice is hiding a secret that is far
from normal. In fact, her name isn’t even Alice at all.

And once Holden finds out, the
intense connection they are just beginning to build may well be torn apart.

A Romantica®
contemporary erotic romance
from
Ellora’s Cave

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.